JAMES BURKE THE SCIENCE GUY

Posted by: chaamjamal on: October 4, 2020

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THIS POST IS A CRITICAL REVIEW OF A LECTURE BY JAMES BURKE ON CLIMATE CHANGE WITH THE TITLE AFTER THE WARMING MADE A FEW YEARS AGO.

“AFTER THE WARMING” IS THE FIRST PART OF THIS VIDEO

WHAT HE SAYS IN THE VIDEO

HUMANS ARE MANAGERS OF THE PLANET: In the first video he says that he is in a future world in 2050 where Western civilization has collapsed because of climate change and the Japanese have taken over. He then takes us on a historical tour to explain what had happened using “Planetary Management” simulations. The story begins “when technology first began to change the planet – when what we did started to change the weather instead of the other way around because of “the Greenhouse Effect“. He then says that in the year 2050, Western Civilization has something called a “Planetary Management Authority that manages the planet and has a “Virtual Reality Generator” that he will use to take us through history when the Greenhouse Effect forced humans to make decisions that would radically alter the way we run the world.

PART-1: THE CLIMATE CHANGES HUMAN ACIVITY: The lecture is in two parts. In the first part he takes us through some of the warming and cooling cycles of the Holocene starting with the glaciated state but ignoring the Younger Dryas to demonstrate that in the old pre-fossil fuel days, the climate changed human activity. He says that the extreme cold of glaciation taught our caveman ancestors to talk and cites the Neolithic Revolution, rise and fall of Mycenae due to drought, the rise and fall of the Nabateans and their city of Petra, the importance of the Nile River in Egyptian civilization which he says was a creation of drought because it forced the Egyptians to become good managers of the Nile River’s water supply. He then takes us through a few more Holocene rise and fall scenarios of human civilization caused by climate change including the rise and fall of the settlement of Greenland by Norsemen in the Medieval Warm Period and the rise and the fall of the Roman Empire in the Little Ice Age. This section of the lecture appears to be a long winded way of saying that before the age of fossil fuels, the climate determined human activity so as to then present its dramatic reversal in the Industrial Age when human activity determines the climate. Oddly, the greatest climate change catastrophe of the Bronze Age, the Late Bronze Age Collapse, is missing in his lecture. It is presented in a post on this site. The link to that post appears below along with a link to a post on the warming and cooling cycles of the Holocene and three of its most cited features, the Holocene Climate Optimum(HCO), the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and the Little Ice Age (LIA).

LATE BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/16/collapse/

HOLOCENE https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/06/11/chaoticholocene/

HCO: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/20/the-holocene-optimum-period-a-bibliography/

MWP: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/04/02/mwp/

LIA: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/07/19/liaclimatologybibliography/

PART-2: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION:

HUMAN ACTIVITY CHANGES THE CLIMATE.

Here, James Burke the Science Guy turns into an excellent history guy and provides an interesting and detailed Englishman’s view of the Industrial Revolution from his vantage point in England where it all began. This part of the video is worth watching but sadly it is sandwiched in between weird and meaningless climate rants. Here are some details: By 1750, the LIA was going away and England started to warm up when the man made greenhouse effect began in the 18th century. THIS WAS WHEN THE FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE HAD OCCURRED FROM THE CLIMATE CHANGING HUMAN ACTIVITY TO HUMAN ACTIVITY CHANGING THE CLIMATE. Global average temperatures went up by 4F. Agricultural production exploded with England experiencing the best harvest in a thousand years. There was lots of bread to go around. This explosion in agricultural yield changed human civilization from farming to manufacturing and factories giving us the power to change the climate. England enjoyed hot moist summers and mild winters in the post LIA warming world. Agriculture boomed. Crop yields quadrupled. Food prices fell and food became affordable even to the poor. Also there were more jobs. All of these changes together created an economic boom and a contraction of economic disparity between rich and poor. It was the good times. People started marrying earlier and having more children and the children had a better chance of survival in this new economy. This created a population explosion. These changes created a bigger market for home construction and for household goods. There was an economic boom and a manufacturing boom for which there was not enough wood to burn and so they dug up coal. And that gave rise to the fossil fueled industrial economy. Refined coal as coke was used to make iron (he means steel). High quality iron (steel?) from the iron industry in turn gave rise to the invention of the steam engine. The steam engine then led to steam trains and steam ships for transportation of both people and goods. The economy exploded yet again from the economic gains from manufacturing now available to entrepreneurs.

HERE THE CRIME SCENE SHIFTS FROM ENGLAND TO AMERICA AND CAPITALISM: And then along came Thomas Alva Edison in America, an all round inventor of everything from electric power generation to mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures – who could never pick something up without coming up with ideas on how to improve it. But he was not just an inventor. His real genius was his business strategy to profit from his inventions. R&D in the manufacturing business now the norm was yet another of his inventions. He is thought to have invented inventing and to be the father of the invention culture in America. His greatest contribution was electricity from generation to distribution to the electrical devices that made electricity useful. The connection between Edison and climate change is that the energy for electricity generation comes from burning coal and that also generates fossil fuel emissions. His inventions caused an explosive expansion of the industrial economy and its fossil fuel emissions. The other big user of coal at was coal fired steam engine trains for transportation and for moving goods both raw materials and manufactured products. The main drivers of the industrial economy were coal and iron. This cycle feeds on itself and goes into exponential growth. This is the Industrial Revolution that is the origin of the fossil fuel emissions and the climate change crisis of our time described by Burke as “up the chimney of our industrial revolution went greenhouse gases in the form of carbon dioxide released from the combustion of coal. The greenhouse gases went up these twentieth century chimneys into our 21st century atmosphere.

Two more Western innovations followed that caused explosive growth in fossil fuel emissions referred to by Burke as “International Greenhouse Lunacy”. The first was mass production and consumerism of products facilitated by standardized interchangeable parts. The problem of limits to raw to the amount of materials and fossil fuels available in the West was solved with invasion and colonization of the vast undeveloped regions of the world that also eventually served as markets for the things that the West manufactured. The access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets for goods in the colonies greatly accelerated and expanded the West’s industrial economy and fossil fuel emissions and its ability to interfere with the planetary carbon cycle. This relationship between the West and the Colonies began to spread the West’s greenhouse gas industrial economy to the colonies within a century.

PART-3: THE SCIENCE THAT RELATES THE CLIMATE TO THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Burke then describes “the planetary carbon cycle at work” in a colorful video of plants, flowers, animals, flowing rivers, birds, greenery of various kinds, insects, which he says is the carbon cycle at work. Every living organism is part of the carbon cycle. The whole world is full of carbon – most of it locked up in rocks forever. But several hundred billion tons of it is free to move around in the form of a gas. Carbon Dioxide – a greenhouse gas.

Every spring plants breathe it in to help with their growth and every autumn they drop it in the form of dead leaves that rot and release the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. The key to the whole process is the ocean. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is regulated by the ocean. When atmospheric CO2 gets too high the ocean absorbs it to keep the planetary carbon cycle in balance. That’s how it worked until the Industrial Revolution and the new lifestyle for humans that it created.

{The video shows a woman at home using a vacuum cleaner, an electric oven, a dishwasher, toaster. and other electric appliances}. In the 1950s there was explosive growth in the Industrial Economy. Natural resources seemed inexhaustible. So these people went on using them as if they were inexhaustible. By 1957 this lifestyle was dumping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, CFCs, and methane into the atmosphere at a rate of over 5 gigatons/year. And nobody knew it was happening until they started measuring atmospheric CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa in 1958.

MAUNA LOA CO2,CH4,CFC DATA: These data showed that mean annual atmospheric CO2 concentration was going up since 1958. Data for methane and CFCs available since 1976 also showed an upward trend. Also, over this same period, we find global temperature rise over the previous 100 years. What these data are telling us is so obvious that you don’t need a PhD to figure it out. At the same time, fossil fuel emissions were also going up and so was the extent of deforestation. None of these variables was going down. They were all going up. In 1970, these data caused scientists to become concerned enough to set up some conferences.

1970: Climate Change. 1972: Environment. 1974: The ozone layer: 1976: Greenhouse gas. 1980: The UN. 1981: The White House. 1983: The National Academy of Sciences. 1985: The UN again. 1986: Ozone again. 1987: Environment. 1988: A call for action. 1989: A call for action. 1990: A call for action. 1991: Another call for action. 1992: Another call for action.

While all this talking was going on, the data people were producing amazing climate change computer models. What they were trying to figure out is how soon the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will double and when we would get global average temperature rises between 10F and 15F (4.7C & 7.1C). The answer varied from climate model to climate model – 2030, 2050, or 2075. A lot of uncertainty.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

1. Climate sensitivity is quoted as 4.7C to 7.1C. This work by Burke is dated. I am guessing 1990 or thereabouts but still well after the presentation by Jule Charney in 1979 when the sensitivity range of 1.5C to 4.5C was standardized by climate science and adopted by the IPCC. A large uncertainty in sensitivity is found in the literature where estimates as large and larger are found along with estimates much smaller. Historically, in climate science papers going back to the 1960s and older, we find sensitivities that are smaller and close to a mean of ECS=2C. The first climate science paper published was the paper by Guy Callendar in 1938 where he also proposed ECS=2 and used that in his work. The large values of ECS cited by James Burke the Science Guy appears mysterious in this light.
2. Deforestation is presented as an impact of the industrial economy but deforestation actually got started in the Neolithic Revolution and greatly accelerated in medieval times and in the Little Ice Age. The use of coal in the industrial era destroyed the demand for wood fuel. The production of wood in the industrial economy by timber companies does not involve deforestation because these are managed forests where wood that is removed is replanted. That climate science does not appreciate the difference between the timber business and deforestation is evident in the carbon credits market where timber companies can sell carbon credits when they re-plant. Deforestation cannot be understood as an impact of the industrial economy. Climate science is a theory about the impact of the industrial economy that caused a warming trend from “pre-industrial times” and it cannot be arbitrarily modified to suit eco activism of all colors.
3. An important issue in climate science, that measures its claimed anthropogenic global warming as “since pre-industrial” is the determination of the calendar year that should serve as the reference temperature for the measurement of “warming since pre-industrial. Here, James Burke the science guy says that this reference pre-industrial year is 1750. And in fact, he is in good company because we find that the initial IPCC report in 2001 also cites 1750 as the reference pre-industrial year when anthropogenic global warming began. However, in subsequent reports the year was changed to 1850 without an explanation for the change. It should also be mentioned that the world’s first research paper on the climate change impact of he industrial revolution in terms of coal burning was published in England by the Royal Society in 1938. The author was Guy Callendar and he wrote that his data shows that the climate effect of the industrial economy in terms of fossil fuel emissions, rising atmospheric CO2 concentration, and rising temperature got started in a measurable way in the year 1900 and warmed steadily until 1938 and that so therefore, the reference pre-industrial year is 1900. More recently, since 1988, NASA climate scientist James Hansen studied the data on this issue and determined that the reference pre-industrial year is 1950 “because in the 30-year period 1950-1980 there is a strong measurable warming rate with 99% probability for human cause. This reference year as the beginning of anthropogenic global warming by the industrial economy is also used by NASA..
4. Yet another mystery in the clarity of the science of human caused global warming found in the CO2 and methane charts by James Burke the Science Guy is the mystery of what is known in climate science as ETCW (Early Twentieth Century Warming), a reference to global warming in the period 1900-1940 prior to the 1970s cooling period. Climate science now says that the warming from 1900-1930 attributed to fossil fuel emissions of the industrial economy by Guy Callendar in the world’s first paper on global warming is a mysterious event that cannot be explained by climate science anthropogenic global warming by the industrial economy. And in fact a recent presentation in England by climate scientist Professor Peter Cox finds that if you take a close look at the data you can find the human cause of the industrial economy on warming since the 1970s, LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/24/climate-scientist-proves-human-cause/
5. It is claimed that the Mauna Loa CO2 data caused climate scientists to become so alarmed that they immediately set up series of conferences. These conferences are described one at a time as scientific investigations that revealed the alarming nature of climate change that required human intervention to “manage the planet’. This section of the Burke presentation is a falsehood. It is a weird reference to the series of COP meetings of the United Nations (Conference of Parties) to fulfill the assumption that they could forge a Climate Protocol in the image of their Montreal Protocol to eliminate fossil fuel emissions and solve the climate crisis. These meetings failed – but the point here is that the UN COPs are not what Burke the Science Man thinks they are.
6. The claim is made repeatedly in the video in various ways that though humans were subject to the whims of nature prior to the industrial revolution, this relationship between humans and nature has been reversed by the industrial economy of the humans that installed humans as the managers of the planet such that human activity and human management decisions will determine the fate of the planet.
7. This idea is the creation of the theory of the Anthropocene that describes the Industrial age of humans as a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene where humans and not the natural geological forces of nature will determine the planet’s evolution in time including the safety and destiny of the “beasts” and life on earth.
8. There is no scientific basis for this assessment as explained in the related posts below. The origin for this idea is likely to be religion. In the biblical religions for example, God is the Lord of all creation with humans closest to God such that he is given dominion over “the beasts” with the word “beasts” best understood as nature itself.
9. Although we now attribute this power to the Industrial Economy, this idea is much older, as old as the oldest written words we can find. The ecological environmentalism contained in these biblical ideas is the source of man’s self image as caretaker and manager of nature and of the planet itself as for example in the “Planetary Management Authority” mentioned in the Burke video.
10. What we see here in terms of human caused climate change and human caused this and human caused that and the care and mercy that humans must show toward nature is this Biblical self image that is so deeply ingrained that we don’t even know its there or how to separate that from objective scientific analysis.
11. The planet was given to us by God to take care of and things like the egotism of the Anthropocene and in the idea that man is in charge of the weather derives from this image. We are superstitious creatures and the Anthropocene idea is a creation of superstition. More on superstition: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/03/confirmationbias/

1. RELATED POSTS ON THE ANTHROPOCENE.

LINK#1: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/30/the-humans-must-save-the-planet/

LINK#2: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/04/12/desperation-eco-wacko-ism/

LINK#3: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/05/03/the-co2-theory-of-everything/

LINK#4: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/05/20/praise-the-climate-science-and-save-the-planet/

LINK#5: https://tambonthongchai.com/2010/05/16/171/

LINK#6: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/07/13/the-anthropocene-fallacy/

LINK#7: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/07/31/planetary-environmentalism-in-the-anthropocene/

LINK#8: https://tambonthongchai.com/?s=ANTHROPOCENE

7. That over the 31-year period 1958-2009, atmospheric CO2, methane, and CFCs were found to be rising during a time of fossil fuel emissions is presented as evidence of causation. This interpretation of the data is not peculiar to James Burke. It turns out to be a fundamental basis of climate science. The statistical error in this evaluation is that a comparison of overall trends in time series data over a sample period with the time scale equal to the full span of the data does not serve as evidence of causation. This statistical principle is demonstrated graphically in the many humorous examples found in Tyler Vigen’s book on this topic as shown in the example below taken from his website: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Details of this statistical error found in the work of James Burke the Science Guy and in the work of climate scientists are provided in related posts on this site. The links appear below.

LINK#1: Detrended Correlation analysis does not show that atmospheric composition is responsive to fossil fuel emissions at an annual time scale. https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/12/19/co2responsiveness/

LINK#2: Monte Carlo Simulation does not show that the relatively small flows of fossil fuel emissions can be detected in the context of uncertainties in much larger carbon cycle flows: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/06/10/a-monte-carlo-simulation-of-the-carbon-cycle/

LINK#3: A study of the effect of lower emissions during a Covid Lockdown period. https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/09/23/emission-reduction-atmospheric-co2/

LINK#4: The correlation between cumulative emissions and temperature used proposed climate science and used in the construction of carbon budgets also contains a fatal statistical error as explained here: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/05/06/tcre/

CONCLUSION: WE ARE NEITHER MANAGERS OF NATURE NOR AN UNNATURAL ABOMINATION THAT THREATENS NATURE. WE ARE PART OF NATURE WITHOUT THE GODLIKE POWERS WE IMAGINE IN CLAIMING OUR ROLE AS THE MANAGERS AND KEEPERS OF THE PLANET. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION DID NOT MAKE US MANAGERS OF NATURE BUT IT DID GIVE US AN EGO THAT APPEARS TO BE OUT OF CONTROL.