Another kind of folly

Today, I did something ridiculous. Under a banner ad from some astro-turf group wanting to support the development, distribution, and everlasting expansion of the burning of Methane (CH4, "Natural Gas"), when they wrote, "Natural gas isn't greenwashing -- it's historical accuracy under attack": I laughed. The term may be old but in the current "information-battlespace" "natural gas" is certainly trying to make us feel better about burning more fossil fuels. So I responded, thus:

nope, it's greenwashing. it's cleaner than coal but it's still burning, adding to the CO2 load that's leading to sequential heat domes in Europe this year.

Silly, foolish, I know. And I got two "haha" emojis and the terse reply from someone -- neighbour, troll or agent provocateur? I have no way of knowing: "You have physical evidence of that or do you lie?"

Although I did not mark that with a "haha" of its own, I nearly fell off my chair laughing mixed with pity on the inside: that someone should be slave to such a stark binary? It must be a troll, I thought, but just in case not, I waited until later and then answered:

Huh. that's a stark binary... here's the spectrum I see between your poles

• people who have paper records of long term observations that aren't, individually things that anyone could touch
• people who have no physical evidence may still have a memorial record of details that demonstrate the fact
• "argumentum ad vericundiam" is only an informal fallacy. if the "authority" you appeal to includes the physical evidence
• people who are speaking what is false may be ignorant or misinformed ("do you lie?" --> "yes" demands motivation not just a fact deficit)

I put myself somewhere between the second and third of those two points. I find the International Panel on Climate Change to be a competent and truthful source of a broad range of facts about the climate, several of which are simple enough that I remember them.

As long ago as 100 years, it was known that the more CO2 there was in the atmosphere, the more heat from the sun would be retained in the atmosphere. From the Industrial Revolution forward, humanity has been burning ever more and more quantities of fossil hydrocarbons. We abandoned wood for cooking and horses for moving and started using coal, oil and refined-oil fuels and CH4 instead, for both, in ever greater and greater quantities. The record is there for anyone to read in the Columbia Icefields between Banff and Jasper, Alberta. The record in numbers has been there for anyone with instruments at a purpose-built observatory at one of the highest points of Hawai'i. "350 dot org" took its name from the pre-industrial revolution proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere 350 parts per million isn't much but we've increased it by a significant fraction, to about 430 (between 20 and 25%). This is all a game of millimetres and not inches or miles, and such a small fraction is enough to have retained more heat in the atmosphere than we used to, progressively increasing over time, like a large ship turning in an arc with a radius of miles.

So much for science. Someone has those physical records, but I do not "have them".

Yet, my own experience has been a decided warming trend over two decades in the 90s and the 00s and evolution of year-over-year weather patterns since then where I live, from distinct spring-summer-fall-winter cycles to one more closely resembling a square wave, where chilly temperatures last into late springs and then tend to spike up to hot summer temperatures in a matter of days, to remain there until what used to be fall, when they crash back down again to chilly winter highs and lows -- and this in an environment of far less rain than I remember we got when I was a child. (This is supposed to be a rainfores. I start to wonder.)

And the oil companies' own scientists told them this was going to happen -- and so did scientists from the US Military -- seven or eight decades ago. And they buried it. And they continue to pour mountains of cash into sowing doubt that these things are so.

So, no. I don't "have the physical evidence" as you might insist that if I do not have it, I must be lying. But I am certainly not lying. Yet, I do not resent your accusation. I grieve that this systematic disinformation campaign has succeeded thus far with you and I pity your situation as victim of that campaign. I do not suppose this little discourse will convince you but I hope that it might convince some others of those who may overhear what we say.

And should you answer this with another "Haha!" response, I will take it as a badge of honour, not a sign that it is time for rage to awaken for my part. It will only deepen my pity, if indeed I pay it any heed at all. I hope we may meet in a happier hour to compare notes at where each of us are still deluded in some way and laugh at ourselves about it.

and again later:

also... yes, burning methane is MUCH cleaner than burning coal, except in very rare situations, such as the power station at Shearness Lake in Alberta. Again: I don't have physical evidence of that either but I know it to be true from seeing how clear the emission from its stack was against a clear blue prairie summer sky.

As for the heat domes in Europe... here in BC we had such a heat dome in this decade, for the first time since weather began to be recorded here -- a scant 100 years ago. Still, as a child, I remember summer after summer after summer when Lytton was "the hot spot in Canada", at usually no more than 40C degrees. For several days we had daytime highs here in Vancouver at a degree or two more than that and Lytton got pretty close to 50C (has since burned to the ground in the wildfires that have been having longer, more intense seasons than before -- when individuals weren't starting the fires through neglect or malice). Here in Greater Vancouver, over that heat-dome event, our overnight lows didn't drop anywhere near to the extent it is usual, and things were pretty oppressive until the dome passed and dissipated. I was there. I remember how things typically were 50 years before. I know this was nothing like that. Temperatures in India this May have been near the unusually high of 50C for more than a week. Take a look at the atlases I studied when I was a child -- their summer weather was never like that back in the day.

I'm just paying attention.

If any of this helps you to respond to someone in your closer circles, similarly ignorant or mis-informed about the state of these things, feel free to use the foregoing -- only, if you can tinge it with some gentleness, that would probably be well. I can be a trifle too mater-of-fact about these things and relationships are FAR more important even than being "right" about this kind of topic.