Michigan A.G. threats to sue oil and gas industry are more bureaucracy than biosphere

I had a chance to discuss the recent news that Dana Nessel, Michigan’s Attorney General, plans to initiate litigation against the state’s oil and gas companies. I joined Michael Patrick Shiels on Michigan’s Big Show to explain why the A.G.’s plans appear to be more political posturing than a serious concern for the well-being of the natural environment.

The Detroit News’ explanation of Nessel’s plans offers the following.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Thursday her intention to sue the fossil fuel industry for its role in changing Michigan's climate and threatening the state's environment, infrastructure, health and economy.

The oil and gas industry profited while knowingly selling products that cause climate change, Nessel’s office said in a document disclosing the coming lawsuits. The industry also deceived the public about climate change, Nessel alleged, leaving the state with the expenses of adapting to and recovering from the effects of warming.

"I don't know that there's a bigger issue facing the state of Michigan than climate change," Nessel said in an interview with The Detroit News. "We are talking about billions and billions of dollars in damages and we're already starting to see that on a day to day basis. We know this is only going to get worse."

I argued that Nessel’s threatened litigation appears more bureaucratic than biosphere for a few key reasons.

First, any reasonable person can see that the state of Michigan has approved of and profited from the development of these resources. State government agencies have approved the permits the industry needs to operate.

To the extent that Nessel is seriously convinced that the oil and gas industry should be held culpable for environmental harms caused by climate changes, she (and her cohorts in the Whitmer Administration) are equally culpable. Anyone who takes Nessel’s threats seriously must also realize that the Whitmer administration has been effectively aiding and abetting the industry in causing the (non-existent) damage she claims to have occurred as a result of the use of oil and gas. Therefore, she should start off her litigation by suing the state Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy for its role in permitting oil and gas development or the Department of the Treasury for profiting handsomely every time a gallon of gasoline or diesel is sold. (To the tune of $1.44 billion annually according to Michigan’s House Fiscal Agency.)

As another example, the State of MI has also profited from the sale of oil and gas through the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund. The state has spent over $1.3 billion in oil and gas royalties since 1976 on the maintenance and development of state parks and recreation areas.

Secondly, the warming being described as a justification for this litigation are based on the most extreme modeling runs.

Average temperatures in the Great Lakes region have increased by 2.3 degrees since 1951, and are expected to increase another 3-6 degrees by 2050 and 6-11 degrees by 2100, according to GLISA, a collaboration between the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But these modeling runs are no longer considered credible or realistic representations of current energy policy or potential warming. Roger Pielke’s work has repeatedly explained the problem with climate scientists clinging to RCP 8.5/SSP5-based modeling runs.

In 2000 the IPCC used 40 baseline emissions scenarios to project futures with a wide range of possible climate outcomes, with the lowest having a radiative forcing of about 4.5 Watts per meter-squared (W/m²) and the highest >8 W/m². By 2014, with the publication of the AR5 the IPCC had focused on a single baseline scenario — RCP8.5.

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Across these many models was a shared assumption of global “renaissance in coal” through the 21st century. You can see the implications of that shared assumption in the figure below from the work of Justin Ritchie who has meticulously and quantitatively documented the flawed assumptions underlying the IPCC AR5.⁴

In the upper right of the figure above you can see the extreme RCP8.5 and SSP5 scenarios that the IPCC identified as baselines. As you can see, these scenarios assume a 7-8x increase in coal consumption by 2100, implying the building of >30,000 new coal power plants this century — a rate of more than one per day coming online every day until 2100. Implausible.

Even climate change true believers admit that RCP 8.5 is “increasingly implausible.” From another one of Pielke’s posts on the issue.

In a widely cited 2020 commentary that builds on Ritchie’s work, Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters wrote in Nature that RCP8.5 “becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year.” That will continue to be true — forever.

More skeptical scientists like Willie Soon have also demonstrated that a significant portion of the warming being touted by climate change activists and government officials is actually due to the urban heat island effect. Additionally, Soon’s research critiques the poor understanding of the sun’s role in climate.

It is well-known that cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside. While urban areas only account for less than 4% of the global land surface, many of the weather stations used for calculating global temperatures are located in urban areas. For this reason, some scientists have been concerned that the current global warming estimates may have been contaminated by urban heat island effects. In their latest report, the IPCC estimated that urban warming accounted for less than 10% of global warming. However, this new study suggests that urban warming might account for up to 40% of the warming since 1850.

The study also found that the IPCC’s chosen estimate of solar activity appeared to have prematurely ruled out a substantial role for the Sun in the observed warming.

Additionally, research published by John Christy from the University of Alabama at Huntsville and econometrician Ross McKitrick from the University of Toronto proved that climate models tend to run very hot (or to overestimate the potential warming associated with climate change).

“So, what drives the interest here is the incessant drumbeat of climate doom and gloom based on model forecasts, and the corresponding political reactions that create for us challenges like $100 per fill-up and attendant price increases – and some scarcity – for everything else,” says Dr. John Christy, who is also a distinguished professor of atmospheric science, Alabama’s state climatologist and the director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System. “When an issue hits people squarely in the pocketbook, it becomes important.”

“Pervasive Warming Bias in CMIP6 Tropospheric Layers” was co-authored by Dr. Ross McKitrick, an econometrician at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

“With the ubiquitous and dramatic claims regarding the climate change issue all around us, it was a simple idea that Ross and I had: let’s test some of those claims that are based on models,” Dr. Christy says. “In particular was this simple scientific question: How well do the climate models on which these scary claims are based actually perform in the real world?”

The scientists examined and updated historical data focusing on 1979-2014 from the newest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Version 6 (CMIP6) climate model and found that what previously were excessive warming rates modeled only in the tropical troposphere are now being excessively modeled globally. All of their model runs warmed faster than observations in the lower troposphere and mid-troposphere, both in the tropics and globally.

So the science on which A.G. Nessel is basing her proposed litigation is increasingly shakey. And, to the extent that she actually believes her claims, she is (or should be) equally implicated in any alleged crime for the state actions having played a direct role in supporting (even encouraging) the alleged harm.

All of this leads to the simple, but obvious, conclusion that the A.G.’s proposed litigation is more bureaucracy than biosphere. And Michael Patrick Shiels’ suggestion that Ms. Nessel is carrying out this threatened litigation as a prepartory stunt in her forthcoming run for the Governor’s mansion is far more believable than Nessel’s claimed concern for the global climate.