The Climate Journeys of Thomas and Larry

This blog is focused on Leonbergers but every now and then I post about something else, typically a book I want to promote. This post is different. I have many hobbies and one of them is volunteering for a climate change organization called Citizens Climate Lobby

This post is about my journey towards becoming an advocate for a livable planet for future generations as well as the climate journey of my friend Larry Howe, who is a lifelong Texas Republican who became a climate activist (and he is still a Republican). Larry’s three-part article is focused mostly on solutions, and my post is focused mostly on how I got here. We both started out as “skeptical” of global warming and we both support the same solutions, so the two posts complement each other. CCL talks to both sides of the political spectrum, and we try to foster good relations with everyone. Below is a photo of us with Senator Ted Cruz.

Citizens Climate Lobby is a volunteer driven non-partisan organization focused on educating the public and lobbying/talking to politicians, industries and organizations. We are not professional lobbyists. We don’t bring a billion dollars to political offices, in fact not even one dollar. We just bring ourselves as voters and constituents, and a friendly and positive attitude. We present well researched proposals for solutions and ideas. We require that the proposals are effective in reducing emissions, good for the economy, market oriented, non-partisan and acceptable to both Democrats and Republicans. In addition, we listen to the concerns of the lawmakers. One of my volunteer positions within CCL is to be the CCL liaison to Senator Ted Cruz office. Climate Change may not be Senator Ted Cruz’ cup of tea, but he voted for one climate bill that we supported, the Growing Climate Solutions Act.

In June of 1988 I embarked on a journey with a friend and with my brother around the United States in an old Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme 1976. I had just earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering and applied Physics from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, as well as a degree in engineering physics from the University of Uppsala in Sweden (well they were really the same degree). It was an unusually hot summer. June 23, 1988 was the first time I heard the word “global warming”. I was watching some of Dr. James Hansen’s testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. I thought it made sense what he said. After all, I knew that greenhouse gases would increase the temperature of the atmosphere. It is hundreds of years old simple basic science and I had certainly not slept through my physics classes. It is why Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system and not Mercury.

As time went by (about 10-15 years ago), I became increasingly skeptical and doubtful of global warming or climate change as it was more commonly called later on. The reason was that I almost exclusively read and watched rightwing news media such as world-net-daily (tended to push conspiracy theories), Newsmax and Fox News. I believed in the concept of global warming, it is basic science after all, but I thought that it was exaggerated and that it was promoted and distorted by left-wing agendas, and I incorrectly believed that there was no scientific consensus on the issue. I also bought into the false narrative that this was about environmentalist ideology, politics, or even a sort of environmentalist religion, and not a real and serious problem. My disdain for environmentalists, my ideology, and my gut feelings certainly aided the propaganda in misleading me. In addition, I read a lot by Björn Lomborg and Patrick J. Michaels and I believed them. To clarify, I did not know it at the time, but I was wrong, very wrong. Below is a video from NASA showing the annual shrinkage of the arctic sea ice.

I should say that I had some lingering doubts about my own “climate skepticism”. During my travels to national parks, the great barrier reef, and other places, I encountered guides who were scientists, as well as others, and they told me about coral bleaching, ocean acidification, receding and disappearing glaciers, the pine beetle problem, white pine blister rust, the destruction of forests due to global warming, and I could see some of the effects with my own eyes in northern Sweden, which is close to the arctic and therefore the effects of global warming are more visible.

It also bothered me that my physics hero Stephen Hawking was a global warming alarmist and that other leading physicists and astrophysicists whom I admired, such as Michio Kaku, promoted and warned us about human caused global warming. Add that popular science magazines I subscribed to, such as Discover and Scientific American frequently wrote about global warming. I should say that I tended to skip those articles and I believed those magazines had a left leaning bias.

However, there were too many red flags regarding my “climate skepticism”. It seemed like a lot of people knew and understood something I didn’t. This prompted me to take a deep dive into the matter. I had a decent scientific background. I had a master’s degree in engineering physics and a PhD in electrical engineering / computer science/ robotics and I was used to reading and writing research papers, and I had been on both sides of the peer review process, and I love mathematics. Electrical engineering and robotics is certainly not atmospheric physics but I wasn’t going to judge or review papers, I just wanted to know what scientists in the field actually were saying, and due to my background I was able to understand the papers.

I read peer-reviewed research articles on the topic, I read several dozens of books on the topic, including climate skeptic books, I subscribed to Nature, a very respected science journal publishing peer reviewed articles, I conversed with or listened to climate scientists online. I found out that my cousin Per Wikman-Svahn was a physicist who worked as an expert on the ethics surrounding climate change, and I extracted information from him.

I learned that the evidence that climate change is happening is undeniable and overwhelming including these few examples. I learned that the current global warming is mainly caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. I learned that global warming is not caused by natural cycles, something the experts on natural climate cycles repeatedly stressed. It is not the sun, or volcanoes and as you can see in the hockey stick graph above, it isn’t a normal cycle, and the recent increase in temperature is disturbingly quick.

I also learned that warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions have a certain fingerprint; the arctic will warm faster, nights will warm faster, the tropopause would be pushing up the boundary with the stratosphere, the mesosphere would be cooling and contracting (think the troposphere as being a blanket). All of that has been observed. It was greenhouse gases, not something else. I learned that scientists had used spectral analysis to verify that most of the warming came from increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, and they had even used carbon isotopes (C-12, C-13, C-14) in corals and the atmosphere to verify that the new CO2 added to the atmosphere and oceans come from hundreds of millions of years old underground carbon.

I learned that satellite measurements agree with surface thermometers, contrary to what the rightwing media I had read claimed. I learned that nearly all actively publishing climate scientists say humans are causing climate change (~99%). I learned that no national or international scientific body in the world rejects the findings of human-induced effects on climate change. I learned that Rachel Carson was not a fraud and that she had not killed 500 million people. I learned that Dr. Michael Mann was not a fraud and that he was right about his hockey stick curve. I learned that the so-called climate gate scandal was manufactured.

I would later learn that among tens of thousands of climate change related papers only 38 are skeptical of the consensus and they all contain errors that if corrected for they ended up agreeing with consensus. I learned that the vast majority of climate skeptic papers originated with rightwing think tanks. I had foolheartedly donated to one of these organizations, the Heartland Institute. I realized that rightwing media engaged in defamation, harassment and attacks on climate scientists.

Above all I learned that I had been bamboozled and misled and that I had believed maybe hundreds of false claims. I learned that there is a very powerful industry consisting of fossil fuel advocates and rightwing think tanks that are trying to confuse and mislead the public, attack and harass scientists, and that if you want the truth you need to trust the scientific evidence and the data, not arguments based on ideology and second guessing the motives of climate scientists is just nonsense.

Long story short, we know with certainty that global warming / climate change is real and that we are causing it, chiefly with our greenhouse emissions, and we have known this for several decades. The scientific debate is over, but the public is still confused due to propaganda. Again, I had been bamboozled by rightwing think tanks, like so many others, so I understand.

I do not think I was a “dismissive” but I was “doubtful” due to all the misinformation I had allowed myself to be fed. Again, we know with certainty that global warming / climate change is real and that we are causing it, chiefly with our greenhouse gas emissions, and we have known this for several decades. If you pay attention, there is no good reason to be doubtful, and certainly not dismissive. After reading a book by James Hansen (Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity) in 2013 I decided it was time for me to get involved.

At first, I tried to argue with those who were dismissive, either by inserting myself into a discussion or after they approached me, typically because of something I said either on-line or personally. This was a surreal experience. I remember trying to explain to an acquaintance who claimed to be an expert in science (he wasn’t) about the measurements made on the age of the added carbon using isotopes. He resolutely stated that isotopes did not exist, all atoms of the same element are identical, and the peer reviewed research article I provided was fake. He claimed to be an expert on science based on reading biased media (he had no degree) and he had not even heard of isotopes, neutrons, and radiometric dating. I sent him a link to Wikipedia explaining isotopes, just as a help, but that was a mistake. He thought that since Wikipedia is sometimes wrong it proved that I was making up the entire concept of isotopes.

I came across so many dismissive people who thought they understood climate change much better than the scientists themselves or believed that most or all climate scientists in every country on earth were liars. I came across a lot of conspiracy theories and many very strange arguments focusing on speculative assessments of the character of climate scientists or activists rather than focusing on the data and evidence. Many invoked Al Gore, as if it was him, who invented climate science, or the UN. It is nuttier to believe that Al Gore invented climate science than that he invented the internet. However, the worst part was the insults, the mockery, the rage, and the trolls. It became clear to me that dismissives tended not to be reasonable people and that they are louder than most. Considering that they tended to be older angry guys who were unable to convince anyone, especially not the younger and educated, I came to realize that arguing with them was a waste of time. You could not have good-faith arguments with them, and after all they did not matter. There are more productive ways to engage.

I felt I needed to do something for future generations, especially since I had been on the “wrong side” of the issue and also considering that I understood something many people did not, that climate change was a real and serious issue that we could do something about. In James Hansen’s book Storms of My Grandchildren, I had learned about solutions that seemed effective and doable, one of them being the carbon fee and dividend. I googled carbon fee and dividend and I stumbled upon Citizens Climate Lobby. I decided to join them and as it turns out so did James Hansen, as a board member. My first CCL volunteer position was as the CCL liaison to Congressman Pete Sessions office. He is one of the most conservative congressmen from Texas. In a meeting with the congressman, we asked him whom he trusted the most on the issue, and he answered Trammel Crow (the younger), one of the six children in the Trammel Crow Dallas real estate businesses (billionaires) who was also his biggest donor. Well, after talking to Trammel Crow we got the endorsement from Trammell Crow Company, which we handed to Pete Sessions.

Next is the climate journey of my friend Larry Howe, a lifelong Texas Republican and native Texan, and climate activist. We, 90 Texas CCL members to be specific, recently came back from Austin, Texas, where we lobbied (talked to) 67 Texas lawmakers for the first time in history. This was Larry Howe’s brainchild and doing. Larry is very active and a great leader. His post (in three parts) is more focused on solutions, whereas mine was about the how and why regarding my turn around on the issue.