Guest Post: When the disinformation busters spread disinformation

A guest post by Sean Rush:

I was interested in Bryson C Clark’s piece in The Spinoff (“A disinformation campaign, the 2023 election and new government policy” 12 March 2024).  Mr Clark, a history major with ties to the left-wing fringe group “The Workers Party of New Zealand”, has resurfaced from Christchurch mayoralty aspirations to lead the charge against alt-right extreme misinformation here in New Zealand.

Without any climate qualifications, he makes the case that more CO2 is not good for plant life, ignoring that NASA reports the global leaf area index, a satellite measure of how much the planet has been greening, has increased significantly over the last few decades. His referenced authority Ask the Experts: Does Rising CO2 Benefit Plants? | Scientific American is not from a peer reviewed paper and needs to be considered carefully amongst the wider evidence.  The reference, in part, supports the benefits some have spoken of, for example, “for most of the other plants humans eat—including wheat, rice and soybeans—having higher CO2 will help them directly.”

The reference to nitrogen as a constraint is indeed true (although more recent studies show that this limitation may be overstated).  But so too is a lack of water or other necessities for plant growth, which is why crop growers add fertiliser and water.  Supplying extra CO2 is a frequently used method to increase the yield of greenhouse horticultural crop which seems to contradict Mr Clark’s research.

On the suggestion that “food crops will lose enough nutrients to cause protein deficiency in 150 million people” Mr Clark’s referenced (non-peer reviewed) article includes an important qualification that is very common in the climate change space when predictions of great calamity are made.  The actual language was that “food crops could lose enough nutrients” not that they “will” – a small but important gloss by our intrepid disinformation buster.

Looking at the actual study, it comments that the “total of 1.4 billion women of child-bearing age and young children who live in countries with a high prevalence of anaemia would lose more than 3.8 percent of their dietary iron at such CO2 levels.”

Let’s unpack that a wee bit. According to the Lancet those at-risk nations are Western sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central sub-Saharan Africa.  But what these people are crying out for is access to affordable and reliable electricity that most Western nations source from coal and gas.  The scarcity of access to affordable and reliable electricity is without doubt the greatest cause of early mortality, inequality, and poverty in these countries – not iron deficiency.

The regions with the lowest anaemia are Australasia (despite NZ soils being deficient in iron and zinc), Western Europe, and North America – the wealthy West.  This is not due to enriched soil. I think the folks of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia would take a 3% shortfall in iron in their current diet if it meant their future diet could be diversified to Western standards and supplemented by access to an electric fridge, clean, reticulated water, enhanced crop growing techniques, mechanisation, not to mention the dietary supplements we in NZ obtain to manage our own shortfall in zinc, iron and selenium.

Despite CO2 increases, the Lancet notes the global picture around anaemia has improved and that treating underlying causes of anaemia (e.g., malaria, chronic kidney disease, tropical diseases) is a critical first step.  As with all things ‘climate’ the problems are much more complex and climate is rarely the root cause of the problems or the solution. We deserve more than superficial coverage.

Mr Clark rightly asks if NZ farmers are being sold a ‘pup’ by James Shaw.  To answer that, one need only look at email traffic sourced under the Official Information Act from Professor Dave Frame, a NZ expert on methane and IPCC Lead Author, and former Minister Shaw.  Professor Frame knows that methane is a short-lived gas so there is no scientific need to reduce emissions if the objective is for NZ farmers to not add to global warming.  Stabilising methane emissions suffices.

Reducing farm emissions means farmers are doing more than their share.  But James Shaw made international commitments to reduce NZ’s impact as a whole but without any viable replacement for the Indonesian coal being burned at Huntly to keep Auckland lights on.  Because of coal burnt due to his own anti-gas policy, he’s put the burden on farmers who have no option but to reduce the size of their herds.  NZ is wholly dependent on its farmers so this is economic suicide on a national scale.

Frame gave Shaw both barrels in an email sent 25 October 2022.  Describing Shaw as “disingenuous” which he clarified as “not candid or sincere” and being “misleading.”  He commented that “you already know that GWP100 [an outdated metric Shaw has embraced for comparing CO2 warming with methane across 100 years] does indeed overestimate the centennial effects of methane emissions by a factor of 3-4, while underestimating the 20 year effects by a factor of 4-5. Myles Allen [an Oxford scientist] and I both explained this to you in 2019, if not before” and “you appear wedded to an emissions metric that only works at all (and then not very well since it depends on the rate of increase) when emissions are increasing. I thought the point of your policies was to decrease emissions?”

Meanwhile Mr Clark has a few words to say about visiting American physicist, Tom Sheahan, but not about the emerging science he talked about whilst here. It was published by Will Happer, a highly distinguished atmospheric physicist from Princeton, who has been involved in climate change science since the mid-1970s.  Happer’s work, with colleague W.A. Wijngaarden, is complicated quantum mechanics applying to energy and its interaction with molecules.  The upshot is a model of energy flows under various greenhouse gas concentrations that matches satellite observations and shows what scientists have known since the early 1970s: that greenhouse gas warming is largely ‘saturated’ meaning the addition of later volumes has smaller and smaller effects on warming.  There’s no chance of a runaway hothouse.  Hallelujah!

Mr Clark reserves some focus on Sheahan’s indifference to being labelled a climate ‘sceptic.’ Ultimately, as the above shows, there are several angles to a story on climate change and the technically available solutions. Superficial coverage does a disservice to those wanting an informed and balanced analysis. From my own perspective, the human effect on climate is well established – land clearance, creation of artificial oases, and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, all affect the climate.  But the suggestion that these human activities are an ‘existential’ threat is not a view held widely by climate scientists. We must stop thinking climate is everything and start addressing it in a sensible and measured manner.

*Sean Rush holds a Masters in Climate Change Science and Policy and was an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC sixth assessment, working group 1.  From 2019 to 2022 he was a Wellington City Councillor.

An earlier version of this article was sent to The Spinoff as an op-ed but was declined on the basis that it was not ‘accessible’ for readers.