Andrew Dessler’s Strange Optimism (post-election groping)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 12, 2024

“If you’re pushing fossil fuels at this point, you’re anti-human.” – Andrew Dessler (2022)

“Fossil fuels are shredding our democracy.” Andrew Dessler (2024)

The recent election should have thrown climate scientist/alarmist/activist Andrew Dessler into a funk, even toward self-doubt and need to check his anti-CO2 premises. His all-out exaggeration about a climate emergency was resoundingly rejected by the winning party and abandoned as an important talking point by the losing party. [1]

Dessler will not shout (as before) that Americans are dumb and suicidal by rejecting his wise counsel. [2] He will not engage in some flagrant act of defiance like James Hansen getting arrested at a coal mine or Peter Kalmus disrupting a professional meeting of climate scientists. And, of course, he will not light himself on fire like a few climate crazies.

Instead, Andrew Dessler will lighten his pre-election hyperbole and grasp at a few fibers of optimism. Consider his messaging now versus prior to the election.

Recent Alarm

Desser posted two months ago:

A few days ago, a recent Washington Post article highlighted the growing chorus of scientists who increasingly view climate change as an emergency. I count myself among them. What has shifted my perspective?

The short answer was the anomalous warming of the last two years, which, by the way, was not predicted by Dessler, climate models, or other scientists in its specifics. (So much for settled science with the control knob being CO2, not nature.) And wait for things to cool down, which will not receive the headlines if the mainstream media continues its bias.

New Take

Here is the latest from Dessler’s The Climate Brink: The Choice is Ours: Climate Disaster or a Sustainable Future.

In “Stop emissions, stop warming: A climate reality check” (December 2, 2024), Dessler looks to a finding of IPCC #6 for hope.

Stable atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would lead to continued warming, but if carbon dioxide emissions could be eliminated entirely, temperatures would quickly stabilize or even decrease over time.

“This is very good news,” Dessler states (emphasis his), concluding:

The sooner we can get emissions to (net) zero, the sooner we stabilize our climate system. And, as I said in this post, we have the technology to largely do that today. Whether we do so or not is a political decision, not a technical or scientific decision.

Net Zero? Baby steps toward that are resulting in the failure of the Paris Climate Accord of 2015, what James Hansen himself called a ‘fraud’ and ‘fake’.

And “we have the technology to largely do that today”? Sorry, but economics–and elections based on economics–matter, despite Dessler’s pronouncement several years ago that “in order to solve the climate problem, the first thing we need to do is ignore the economists.” How’s that from a professor who seems to be more driven by his activism than scholarship and true teaching.

Carbon Debt?

Dessler’s tick of optimism seems counter to the analysis of his colleague Zeke Hausfather, who wrote last summer:

We’ve long talked about carbon budgets – how much emissions are allowable before the world passes various temperature targets. But given that the world is on track to pass the 1.5C target in the coming decade and will pass 2C later this century unless we start reducing global emissions soon, the idea of a “carbon budget” is becoming increasingly outdated.

Rather, its time to start talking about the carbon debt, the amount of carbon that will have to be removed by our children and future generations if we ever want to return to the climate of our past.

In other words, negative emissions are necessary now and will be increasingly so in the future with strong growth in oil, natural gas, and coal emissions. And “if we ever want to return to the climate of our past”? That strange Garden of Eden is the stuff of Deep Ecology, of a romantic past that was hardly safe or prosperous. I am reminded of this insight from Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, pp. 126–127):

The popular climate discussion … looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability … because we use fossil fuels. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livability.

Conclusion

Dr. Dessler’s tired decades of exaggeration and alarm have been rightfully ignored. Carbon dioxide (CO2) has positive properties that green Planet Earth. It is not a pollutant. High-sensitivity climate models are not demonstrative. Incremental warming biased toward night, winter, and high latitude has plusses and might even be net beneficial. [3] The saturation effect makes anti-CO2 strategies increasingly costly and impotent. And meanwhile, the world adjusts to weather events, normal and extreme, with indispensable, affordable, reliable energies. That is, if climate policy does not get into the way.

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[1] Dessler wrote on the eve of the election: “… your vote will help decide the planet’s temperature in 2100…. Our climate trajectory is, in the end, largely a political choice — one shaped directly by voting.” And voters voted for less climate exaggeration and more affordable energy.

[2] Here is what Angry Andrew posted in a dark moment:

Hey assholes. We’ve been telling you for decades that this was going to happen if we didn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You didn’t listen and now it’s all happening. We hope you’re happy. Enjoy the heatwaves, intense rainfall, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other things, you fucking morons.

[3] In Dessler’s words (in response to my challenge to him on this point): “Global warming tends to reduce gradients, so you do get more warming at night, during winter, and at high latitudes.”