Chris Martz Has Questions

Chris Martz became somewhat of a celebrity in contrarian circles while he was still in college. He generated a fairly large following on social media despite lacking any expertise in climate. His following was large enough that when he graduated from college with a BS in meteorology, he was hired by CFACT to continue being an influencer for their political agenda. Martz's job appears to be just to rehash the same old talking points used by other contrarians that have been debunked for decades, but he makes his own graphs and charts, so they look more up-to-date. Zeke Hausfather has a wonderful take down of one of Martz's most shared graphs here.

Recently, Martz decided to compile ten questions he has for "climate alarmists," by which he apparently means people who try to be informed in climate science. The questions appear to be designed to stump the people he thinks of as alarmists, but they reveal more about Martz than they do about those who are trying to inform themselves on climate science. You can read the entirety of his questions with context here, but in this post I'll quote only the questions themselves, without reproducing all of his text.

1. What exactly is the correct globally averaged surface air temperature supposed to be and why? I want an exact value to the nearest tenth of a degree Celsius.
From the context of this question, it's clear that Martz is assuming that science-advocates believe there is a specific temperature that would prevent us from "dangerous overheating" (and presumably "dangerous cooling"). But that's a false assumption. What is "dangerous" about current warming is the rate at which climate is warming. It's warming at rates that make it impossible to assume near stationarity with climate. Global warming has occurred at 0.25 ± 0.05°C/decade (2σ) for the last 30 years, meaning that over the course of 30 years, GMST increases by ~0.75°C. This means that 30-year climate normals are essentially meaningless. What is "normal" at the beginning of any 30-year span is not "normal" by the end of it. 

This is important for assessing risks for extreme weather, including extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, droughts, etc. When stationarity can be assumed (as it largely could before 1970 or so), then we can adapt civilization to the risks of extreme events, since their frequency can be roughly known. Events exceeding 1:1000 (technically, 3.09σ, but I'll call this roughly 3σ) are extremely rare for any location, even though 0.1% of the globe may experience these events on any given year. Residents of these communities can know that they are likely to experience >1σ events (1:3) frequently. There's a 1 in 3 chance of the event happening each year. Residents are likely to experience >2σ events much less frequently (1 in 44 chance every year). Collecting the data to establish 30-year normals allows us to provide risk assessments that can be relied upon, when stationarity can be assumed. We can expect 1σ events frequently, 2σ events perhaps a couple times in people's life spans, and 3σ events very rarely. But when stationarity can't be assumed, risks associated with these events can change dramatically. Extreme heat is perhaps the most significant example of this. James Hanson plotted the distribution of summer temperatures for 1951-1980 to show the 3σ summer temperature (about ~0.1%) for that distribution. Then he plotted the distribution for 2010-2020 and found that during that decade summer temperatures that were 3σ in 1951-1980 occurred 22.1% of the time, meaning that what used to be extreme summer heat in 1951-1980 is now 220x more common (see here). The problem is not that these temperatures exist. The problem is that we're not prepared for these conditions, and they are getting worse rapidly.

This is not an indication that any particular GMST value (within a reasonable range) is dangerous. If Holocene temperatures had stabilized at 2°C cooler than preindustrial levels, civilization would have developed in a way that was adapted to those conditions, with lower sea levels, colder polar regions, a different hydrological cycle, etc. Likewise, if Holocene temperatures had stabilized at 2°C warmer than preindustrial levels, civilization would develop to be adapted to those conditions, with higher sea levels, warmer polar regions, different patterns of droughts vs flooding, etc. We'd be able to establish climate normals for these regions and plan accordingly. There is no "exact" global temperature that the Earth is "supposed to be." What science-advocates primarily want to accomplish is returning to conditions where stationarity can be assumed, and those extreme 3σ continue to be 3σ events. Martz incorrectly assumes that science-advocates believe there is an ideal temperature for planet Earth that would avoid dangerous consequences; he doesn't seem to understand what science-advocates mean by "dangerous overheating."

2. What is the correct atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) level to optimize life on Earth? Give me your answer as an exact value in mole fraction or volume percentage, then explain why in detail. A range would suffice too, but you still need to explain.

This question reflects essentially the same bad assumption of an ideal or "correct" condition that the Earth should be at. There is no single CO₂ concentration to "optimize life on Earth." What he's confused about is that over generations of time, life adapts to CO₂ concentrations. When CO₂ levels were low during the glacial maxima, life adapted to those levels. When CO₂ were comparably high during interglacial periods, life adapted those conditions. I spent a fair amount of time in another post showing that rapid changes in CO₂ is disruptive for plant life, but during the glacial cycles, CO₂ and temperature changes (while rapid) were slow enough that life could adapt. There is little evidence of mass extinctions for plant life when CO₂ was ~170 ppm during glacial maxima. In fact during the early Permian, the planet spent 1-2 million years at CO2 concentrations at ~100 ppm CO₂, and plants survived. Given enough time, plants can and do adapt to high and low CO₂ levels. What scientists are pointing out is that CO₂ levels are increasing too rapidly for plants, and the ecological changes involved with changes in CO₂ and temperature are likely to disrupt biodiversity and lead to an increase in extinction rates. This is an added stress on top of high extinction rates from human activity having little or nothing to do with climate - that is, from land use change or invasive species. What's dangerous is the rate of increase in CO₂, not its absolute value.

3. What makes CO₂ “air pollution”?

Technically, CO₂ itself isn't pollution; our carbon emissions are the pollution. You can think of this in the same way that we think of noise pollution or light pollution. It's not that light and sound are bad in and of themselves, but excessive amounts in the wrong places cause problems. We don't object to using the term "pollution" for things that are just fine in and of themselves, when they exist at quantities where they cause harm. However, we've dumped 750 GtC into the atmosphere, mostly as the waste product of industrial activity (about 500 GtC comes from the combustion of fossil fuels), and that waste product is causing harm, so that fits any rational definition of "pollution."

Martz goes on to complain that labeling CO₂ a pollutant while not assigning the same label to H₂O is a double standard, since it also is a "GHG and is a byproduct of combustion. But we don't classify it as pollution because, well, H₂O is necessary for life on Earth. But so is CO₂. Without it, we would all die."
Of course both CO₂ and H₂O are both GHGs and both are the biproducts of industrial activity. But the fact is that H₂O does not build up in the atmosphere through human emissions, while  CO₂ does. CO₂ is a noncondensing greenhouse gas, and a large fraction of our emissions stays in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. H₂O concentrations are temperature-dependent. No matter how much we emit to the atmosphere, excess H₂O just precipitates out as rain, snow, etc. Without any human H₂O emissions, H₂O concentrations would be unchanged, since H₂O will evaporate from the oceans to the amount supported by temperatures. Keep in mind that Martz earned a BS in meteorology and still appears to be confused on this point.

4. Why are global average temperatures measured in reference to the 1850–1900 baseline? 

Because1850-1900 is a good baseline that comes close to representing preindustrial levels. The choice of baseline doesn't matter. It's a simple mathematical conversion to change from any one baseline to any other. 

This question appears to be motivated by a misguided and unsupported belief that "we know that climate conditions pre-1900 were much harsher than they are today as we were coming out of the Little Ice Age." Winters may have been harsher, but summers weren't. Droughts and floods were not more common relative today, and Martz provided no evidence that they were. There is good evidence that we have grown in our ability to adapt and prepare for harsh conditions (a point I discuss here), but since stationarity can no longer be assumed, harsh winters are in decline and harsh summers are increasing in frequency. This means we need to spend additional dollars adapting to conditions that we didn't experience 50 or 100 years ago.

And we're not coming out of the Little Ice Age. As I show here, we exited the LIA in 1850, and GMST trends were essentially flat from 1850 to 1900. Of the nearly 1.4°C warming above the 1850-1900 mean, fully 1.1°C has occurred since 1970. It's a common contrarian trope that we're still existing the LIA, but it's a very stupid conclusion to draw from available data. GMST anomalies are increasing rapidly in response to our carbon emissions, and that has nothing to do with coming out of an event that ended 175 years ago.

5. The estimated cost of net zero in the U.S. by the year 2050 is ~$6 trillion (though estimates I have seen widely vary). And with ~165 million taxpayers in the nation, using that $6T figure, it would cost each of us a little more than $36,000 to achieve. That's a lot of money per individual. How many of you activists are willing to shell out that kind of money just to see what happens?

This appears to be pure scaremongering. Martz didn't cite his source, so we can only guess at it. It sounds like he's suggesting this is an annual cost, and if so, this estimate of ~$6T annually probably comes from here. It's a global number, not a US number. Martz is assuming that this ~$6T number means ~$6T increase in the financial burden paid by Americans annually, such that Americans will have to pay $36K annually for the cost of net zero. But that monetary value refers to investments, not to an increase in a financial burden that has to be divided up among all taxpayers. The article also says of that $6T, that "that’s clearly a very substantial increase from the $3.2 trillion per year invested from 2016 to 2020." By Martz's logic, that means that every year from 2016 to 2020 Americans have already been paying $19,400 annually to achieve net zero. If you're a tax-paying US citizen, go look in your checking accounts and see where you spent $19.4K annually on net zero. If you can't find this expense, perhaps you can agree with me that Martz is just scaremongering here.

6. If we spent that $6T to decarbonize the economy by 2050, by how much will such measures reduce the global mean surface temperature by the year 2100? 

If we achieve net zero by 2050, we'll be saving ~12 GtC annually from 2050 to 2100, so that's a 600 GtC warming influence that doesn't happen, so we don't have to spend money adapting to it, mitigating it, and even removing the CO₂ in the atmosphere. As I show here, multiple studies show that GMST increases linearly with cumulative carbon emissions. AGW has been occurring at a rate of about 0.018 C per 10 GtC, so that saving 600 GtC emissions also saves us from about ~1°C additional warming.

Martz wants the math (to the nearest tenth of a degree) that he claims to know, but I strongly suspect he doesn't. Above I plotted HadCRUT5 with cumulative carbon emissions and found a slope of 0.0177°C per 10 GtC emissions. If we assume an average of 12 GtC/yr through 2050 and 0 GtC/yr following, that's a total of 12*50 = 600 GtC, and 0.0177*60 = 1.1°C. Since in reality, achieving net zero would require a reduction in carbon emissions over the next 25 years, my number of 1.1°C is an underestimate of the savings. I did a little more math with a little more nuance here, for those interested.

7. What does the perfect climate look like? Just how much extreme weather should there be? How many floods? Tornadoes? Category two hurricane landfalls in Florida? What should temperatures be? How many droughts should occur per century in Cambodia? How will we get there and how do we know when / if we get there? By what scientific measure will we know?

I'm guessing Martz needed to find 10 questions, so he invented this one, even though it's essentially a different way of asking the first two questions he asked. There is no "perfect" climate. The issue has to do with our ability to adapt to extremes, and the additional costs acquired when we need to adapt to a moving target. Martz doesn't understand the concept of stationarity and the value that being able to make that assumption has. There's no "should" here. Floods, hurricanes, droughts, and tornadoes are going to happen. We can prepare for these events better and spend less money doing so if we're adapting to a stable target rather than a moving target. See my answers to 1 and 2 above. When near stationarity can be assumed, then the distribution of temperature, rainfall, and storm data gives us quality data that we can use to prepare for the extremes that are inevitably going to happen. When climate is warming, those all become moving targets that require more money to adapt to and cost more lives as we are forced to adapt.

8. If “combating climate change” is really a global concerted effort, then why do you always give China and India a free pass to continue emitting without bound?

Nobody gets a free pass. Each nation has national sovereignty to generate their own path forward to combat climate change. You can criticize China and India all you want. It changes nothing about what we need to do if we to do our part in combating climate change.

9. Why do most of (not all) you vehemently oppose nuclear power? It's the best alternative to coal and natural gas, and statistically it is the cleanest and one of the safest forms of “carbon-free” energy.

Some do oppose nuclear, but I'm not one of them. There are definite issues related to nuclear, especially over whether it will be able to compete with renewables in providing cheap, reliable energy. But I suspect nuclear will continue to play a roll in providing dispatchable power as we decarbonize.

10. If you truly believe that climate change is an urgent problem, then why do you continue to use social media? 

This is a dumb question. Maybe Martz is tired of responding to those on social media that constantly prove him wrong and correct his terrible math? Maybe this is a ploy to make them feel like hypocrites for going online? Whatever we do to lower our own individual carbon footprints can be good, but the climate problem is systemic and structural to society. Every American has a large carbon footprint because of the country we live in, even if we drive only solar-powered EVs, eat a completely vegan diet, stay off airplanes, have no children, and remove ourselves from social media. Our economy is set up so that we emit carbon. What science-advocates are saying here is that we can transition our economies to rely on clean energy while still using technology. 

To summarize, I think Martz's questions reveal more about the agenda that Martz is paid to promote than about the science advocates he's trying to stump with these questions. These are not hard questions for informed people to answer, and the faulty assumptions in many of them are not hard to detect. But Martz is promoting himself as a climate expert on the basis of his recently acquired bachelor's degree in meteorology, meaning that he is essentially claiming that he could answer these questions himself, and he should be able to see the faulty assumptions inherent in his own questions.

As best I can tell Martz is either 1) being disingenuous - he could have answered all of these questions himself without asking help from science-advocates, with the tools he learned at college - or 2) he's incompetent - perhaps he got his degree despite not knowing to answer his own questions. I don't know or care which (perhaps it's a mixture of both), but he's certainly not offering intelligent insights into the climate problem. Rather than asking science-advocates to help him learn what he won't/can't learn for himself. If he really has the expertise he claims to have, he should be showing where there are flaws in the answers he's already been given. But I don't think that's his plan here. I think his agenda here is to support the political goals of CFACT, his employer, and that means having to be an influencer, get clicks and views, so that people will vote the way CFACT wants. I don't think he's trying to win an argument against science; I think he's trying to look smart to his social media followers.