Global Warming - a review and a Conference Conclusion
Posted by Heading Out on February 12, 2007 - 1:39pm
Normally after a conference this is where I would give you my opinions in a little summary, and I would still like to do that, but the way things have worked out, I would like to preface that discussion with a little story. I had thought to post what immediately follows as a post on Friday, during the first day of the conference, but there were other pieces, and I was not sure how much on-topic this was. So I sent it around to our contributors for comment. And it developed into a little story on its own. So, since what then happened has some relevance to the conclusions I drew from the meeting, I thought I would combine both tasks. So let me begin with the original post as I wrote it.
.................
I remember walking along the coast of Sardinia, and visiting the ruins of the Roman port at Nora, that stretch out, under the water and into the Mediterranean, and thinking that there must have been a land subsidence between then and now to carry the land down and underwater. Somehow, until reading my book on the plane traveling here, I could not get my mind around the fact that the sea levels had risen so much since the port was built that it now lies underwater. And the cause of the sea level rising around the world, as it must have, has been that some of the ice that lies around the poles has melted, as the overall climate and temperature of the Earth has changed.
The book I was reading is called “Unstoppable Global Warming – Every 1,500 years,” by Singer and Avery, and it is written in rebuttal of some of the issues that are being brought up over Global Warming. And, since I am not that au fait with the other sides of the argument (when did you last see a detailed article that looks at the issue from other than ex-Vice President Gore’s perspective), and in keeping with the philosophy that leads me to read CERA articles, I thought it would be informative to see what the other side of the argument is all about.(Added comment – I was sent a note from Amazon, because of all the books that I buy on that site about peak oil, that this book might be of interest, and I thought why not?)
It is, in fact, an interesting, and I thought, worthwhile exercise. In a comment some posts ago, someone had written that Singer and Avery’s arguments had been considered, and were either not valid or non-persuasive. Which is odd, because the book is not actually as much their work, as it is a compilation of the reported results from the work of several hundred scientists worldwide, who have published in quite reputable peer-reviewed journals.
The main thesis of the book's authors is that, because of changes in solar activity, the Earth goes through periods of heating and cooling. Since there is considerable evidence for the existence of Ice Ages, this is not something that is likely refutable. But over and above the very large climate changes there are smaller temperature cycles, which, over the past million years have averaged a frequency of about 1,500 years. Most recently (as in the last 3,000 years) there have been two such cycles. Depending on where you choose to start the cycle, the cold period before the first was from 705 BC to 200 BC, this was followed by a warm phase (referred to as the Roman Warming) between 200 BC and 600 AD; then a cold phase, known as the Dark Ages, from AD 440 to AD 900; then a second warming phase, from 900 to 1300 AD (The Medieval Warming); followed by the most recent cold phase, 1300 to 1850 AD (the little Ice Age); which has since been followed by the current warming trend, and which, from that cycle, is likely to continue to get warmer for another 50 years or so, before the temperature crests and starts to decline and we start back into the next cold phase.
The evidence can be quite persuasive, for example the river Thames froze over in winter until 1814, and has not frozen since, and there is the evidence that I started with about sea levels. And so the fundamental discussion that I can relate to in the book is this cycle, and what is interesting relates to the variety of different pieces of evidence that they use to illustrate that it happened. I did not know, for example, that you could tell climate from the condition of stalactites, and until I read the book I thought that when a coral bleached it was irretrievably dead.
What is troublesome, I gather, to those that espouse the carbon dioxide cause of global warming, is that if the cycle has happened before, and if the world survived (and the authors suggest – along the lines of “Minnesotans for Global Warming” – that in fact the world was, in general, a better place during the warm periods than the cold ones) then perhaps the current concerns are much ado about nothing. And, in addition, if the world got warmer, in those periods, than it is now, and all the species survived, and mankind flourished, why are we currently worried? This perhaps explains why one sees, for example, in papers that Dr Hansen has given, comments that the Medieval period was not as warm as it has been projected to be. It also explains recent comments that have cropped up in comments on some posts here on the irrelevance of the presence of vineyards in the UK during Roman times, and in Greenland.
Certainly, since these cycles would appear to be historically valid, one can learn from what did occur (the weather was nowhere near as catastrophic as some would suggest that it will be as the temperature continues to rise), and where problem areas arose (changes in drought patterns, and the problems in some cases of dealing with excess rainfall).
However, that being said, part of the concern that has arisen over the influence of carbon dioxide on the climate relates to the rate of change, and to the accelerating effect on climate change that the increased concentrations of CO2 are having. And here the book is not very persuasive nor argumentative. It does point out a controversy over the “hockey stick” plots that both a core part of the IPCC 2001 report (which segment was apparently written by the generator of the hockey stick plot), and the consequent basis for the (pdf) National Academy review of the problem. But it implies that the debate on that issue is settled, which does not, at least as the Wikipedia article suggests, reflect the actual situation. Further it does not consider the most recent changes in climate over the last couple of years.
But the book was well written, easy to read, and I learned a lot from it, so, while I don’t necessarily agree with some of the conclusions, it is worth reading to understand some of the aspects of the current debate that are not always, otherwise, made clear.
. . . . . . . .
Well that was the post, I thought it (the post that is) fairly innocuous, and, as I note it does explain that there is another side of the story to that which is currently getting maximum exposure. However a couple of responses that I got were somewhat startling. I got one note back saying that if I posted it there would be a lengthy rebuttal. Well that is fine, and good debate is what educates us all. What I was not expecting was to get was a second, more disturbing e-mail and, while it serves no purpose to repeat it, it did cause me to do a relatively quick review of a few facts. And yes, I still think that it is relevant, so please read on.
So what is all the fuss about – well I thought I’d have a bit more of a look. So here is what I did (the layman’s validation at its more open) – I went to the internet and got a look at the International Panel on Climate Control’s 2001 report (the third assessment report or TAR). (You just type IPCC on Google and it is on the first site that is listed). And I read through the first bit (clicking on the Scientific basis button) until I got to the figure that is now known as the hockey stick, because of the way that the temperature abruptly turns upwards. Along the way I noted that the graphs showed that the world had been getting warmer since 1860.
Figures 2.1 a and b from the TAR
And then there was this one, since I had read somewhere that as the permafrost heats up there is a risk that it will release more methane – a GHG. You will note that it suggests that the ground temperature has been going up for the past 400 years.
Figure 2.19 TAR report of the IPCC
Hmm, and so then I looked at the hockey stick curve again and it did not have any of that. The results (as I noted above) that have got the most attention, and on which a number of reports have been made are those by Mann, and those are the ones with the heavy black line. They show that the world got steadily colder from 1000 AD, to just after 1900.
Figure 2.21 TAR report.
Now all the consequent fuss has been about the bit after 1900 and the accelerating upward trend of the last decade. I was (vide the book topic) a little more interested in the bit before 1900, and it does not show any of the warming that has occurred according to the two graphs from the report that I posted above it. Now that is a bit more odd, since, as I had noted above, the Thames used to freeze over (no not from personal memory, from having to read set books while I was in school), and a check on Wikipedia for the River Thames gives:
In the 17th and 18th centuries, during the period now referred to as the Little Ice Age, the Thames often froze over in the winter. This led to the first Frost Fair in 1607, complete with a tent city set up on the river itself and offering a number of amusements, including ice bowling. After temperatures began to rise again, starting in 1814, the river has never frozen over completely So it looks as though the IPCC report itself is not self-consistent. So let’s call this a zero for the Mann group.
So, how about Singer, can I do a quick check to see whether he is similarly challenged?
And so, since it had been stated in that critical e-mail that the authors cherry picked their data I thought I would try another unscientific experiment. So I picked a reference (open at page 25, first reference down (number 12 of the 35 scientific references quoted from articles in journals such as Science, Global and Planetary Change, Nature, Paleooceanography etc in that chapter). It related to a study by Lloyd Keigwin and reported in Science in 1996. Well in a hotel I can’t likely get into Science without bucks, so I went back to good old Google and typed in Keigwin Sargasso (the paper related to the oxygen isotopes in organisms in seabed core from the Sargasso). And as it happened Google gave this site which had a bit of discussion on how the data was obtained, and gave
a clear indication of a medieval warming period before the little ice age – just as the book predicted. So lets give the book authors a one.
So in my little check on the two sides, the book authors win by a score of one to zero. And, I have explained how I did this in detail, so that you can check me out that I didn't cheat.
But what does that have to do with the Conference?
Well I think it became very clear, as the conference wore on that the future energy supply (for at least the next few decades) will rely on coal, whether as a primary fuel for electricity, or as a feed stock for liquid fuels. The little that renewables will be able to contribute is not going to be that significant in overall supply terms. And the public will be unwilling to pay the costs to ensure that the coal is burned cleanly and the CO2 sequestered. Quick audience check, would you pay double your current electric bill for no visible benefit, but to pump carbon dioxide underground for no change in the global warming progress? Didn’t think you would.
Because that is the other side of the problem, no matter what is done locally, the energy needs of the rest of the world are such that coal will be burned, and gas will be generated, and if that is the cause of Global Warming, then what we are going to do is not going to make a difference because it will be too little, too late. And if the GHG are not causing Global Warming, then as the graphs show, the world is heating up anyway under the next cycle. And we certainly won’t be able to change that.
And so, as one of the speakers said, and as an editorial in Newsweek this week notes, all we can do is adapt.
And that was the other thing I brought back from the conference. There is an increasing interest in Energy Productivity, in saving through conservation. There are many ways this can be done, and some of the better companies are already learning this lesson and implementing them, to large cost savings. I suspect this will become one of the larger themes of the next decade. But while that may be project profitable, the inertia of the system is such that, globally, it won’t make much difference. Note that, in California, despite universal agreement almost in the room that we had a problem, no-one in the entire conference, that I heard, talked about mandating speed limits again, as was done in the 70’s.
So that’s my opinion, I don’t really think that most of the audience grasped the immediacy of the problem, nor did some of the speakers. It was as though it was a nice intellectual exercise, without the reality of the physical impact that is going to happen.
Oddly, having also carried out this little exercise on global warming, I am not sure if the audience really fully realized what this might mean. If, as Dr Hansen’s data suggests, change can be very rapid (and I apologize if I missed a zero) then we need to start planning for the coming changes. (And a clarification of my understanding - I thought that when the Labrador field collapsed we got a tsunami with a height of 8 m and so I may have misunderstood). Now here I differ with many, because I think that the debate of this issue can cause a lot of delays, when we need to learn what we are going to have to do to adapt. We need to have more studies of what happened the last time since as his example showed, there is physical evidence out there. Happily there is a greater public awareness, but, as one speaker noted, when the costs of a possible ameliorant are mentioned, the discussion stops. So it is important now to start looking at what has happened in the past and seeing what those changes will mean. (Jeepers an engineer is urging funding for historical research, who’d a thunkit) and how we can learn to adapt.
We need to implement more of the energy saving technologies, and develop more of them, and while I would prefer that the Federal Agencies got more involved in this, I accept that much of this will be market driven, as the benefits become more obvious.
Not a very encouraging message, I’m afraid, despite some of the very neat technologies that we heard about.
Now I have been asked to make clear that all this reflects my own personal activities and should be considered to have anything to do with any other contributors to the site. (I thought you all knew that, but never mind, they want the statement, they got it.)
Unfortunately there is also, occasionally, in rebuttal posts, the occasional ad-hominem attack when a disputed opinion is put forward. (That means that if you kill the messenger then hopefully no-one will notice or give credence to the message).
This is a real and serious crisis. The reports I gave from the conference (and there were readers there who can correct my mistakes) tried to reflect, outside my opinions, what was said. The community that reads this site is better served by that approach, and by open discussion. You now have my opinions, I would prefer we discuss the issues.
Well I said my piece, thank you for reading. I think I’ll post about what the Saudi’s are doing with water pumping next time, it might get us back to something we know a lot more about. (joke).
And there are these really neat LED's that I have to go and buy . . . . . .
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I'm confused. What is controversial? With all this high drama, I feel really left behind because I can't figure that out.
cfm in Gray, ME
Both the IPCC and the US National Academy studies that provide the most well publicized theory of Global Warming are, to a significant degree (as I skipped over, perhaps too quickly) based on the validity of the Mann plots (the hockey stick curve). The cause of the warming that is given all the attention (and which it seemed no-one at the conference doubted) is that the upturn in the global average temperature is due to the increased volume of Greenhouse gases (GHG). The book, to the contrary, suggests that there is a more significant component due to the natural cycle I cited in the post than has been recognized.
Simplified, the world has been told that the temperatures are going up because we are burning too much coal and fossil fuels, and generating vaste quantities of carbon dioxide. The book says that the temperature was going up anyway, and the GHG may not have than much importance, relative to the natural cycle.
You'll be interested to know that the latest IPCC report looks at *8* different ways of modelling historic temperature, and they all come up with the same conclusion as the Mann 'hockey stick', ie an abrupt and sustained background rise in temperature, only explainable by invoking anthropogenic forcings.
As far as we know, solar radiation has been quite constant for a long period of time-- we have accurate measurements back to 1938. The estimate now is it accounts for less than 20% of temperature change.
Cosmic rays we don't know. $10m is being spent on that bit of research.
The impression I got from the IPPC study was that they recognize the normal cycles of warming and cooling over the last millenia or so, but that the addition of higher GWG levels from human use (not in dispute as far as I can see)over the last 150 years is not only adding to what may indeed been a "normal" warming cycle, but may also be destablizing weather cycles worldwide. And it is this destablization (consisting of "tipping points"?)that is what is so dangerous because of their ability to swing worldwide weather patterns into "chaotic" instabilities that permanantly alter global weather patterns for the worse. (Slowing/stopping the Atlantic convection currents, for example.) Am I wrong in this?
I've sure been hearing a lot of "the worst(take your pick-wildfires, heatwave, hurricanes, typhoons, snow storm, icestorm)in local history" in the news these days, both in the US and from around the world. My worry about mankind adapting is, that it would be extremely difficult to adapt to such chaotic and destablized weather.
Where I live, we've been in drought (our average yearly rainfall was 45 inches) for the last 6 years. And in the last 6 months we've had the hottest summer, warmest December, longest January coldsnap and worst icestorm since records have been kept.
If this keeps up, it's going to make it mighty hard to plan my peak oil edible landscape and garden. And that may be the biggest problem from global warming worldwide, rather than just increasing "warmth".
Linda
No.
The balance of your post refers to conditions becoming more "chaotic and destablized." You have really hit the nail on the head with your last sentance:
One of the startling aspects to the some of the more recent pronouncements by the NAS (or atleast by the President of the NAS)are the constraints placed by isotopic carbon (and other stable isotopes). The ratio of C12/C13 in "new carbon" is much much different from the C12/C13 of "old carbon" associated with fossil fuels (fossil fuels are very, very rich in C12 compared to C13). According to the NAS, this ratio has been changing substantially and is the "smoking gun" of fossil fuels increasing atmospheric CO2 levels.
According to the conference I attended this summer, that range is constrained to a minimum of about 65% and a maximum of about 90% with a mean of somewhere around 75% of the increase in CO2 originating with combustion of fossil fuels. I have seen suggested that it's "the oceans" causing this but other isotopes of dissolved gases would be showing up also. They aren't.
But the problem in suggesting that these physical processes of GHGs in the atmosphere are not significant or have little effect is the same as telling me that the NDIR analyzers we use to fine tune combustion operations or the FDIR monitors that we use work in ways that are inconsistent with and different from the physics of GHGs. It requires a special pleading of physics, one that I don't think physics yields up.
Lets go back to the Mass Faunal Extinction of the Permian.
Around the Permo-Triassic boundary, a MFE took place, knocking out about 95% of the fauna and flora.
Prior to this, a massive Extrusive Basalt flow occurred. (aka The Siberian Traps). Initially, this probably caused global dimming and cooling as particulates were released by these incredibly extensive flows. However at the same time, these flows generated a large pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere.
As global dimming reduced, it is likely that the CO2 pulse gained primacy, heating up the atmosphere by 4-5 degrees C. This alone would account for some of the land based MFE.
As the planet warmed, the Oceans also warmed. The Marine MFE probably began then. It is possible that Ocean Waters became weakly acid, affecting exoskeletal marine organisms in the food chain, and that deep Ocean layers warmed up resulting in a release of Methane Clathrates. CH4 (with a high preponderance of C12 ) is a significant GHG.
This further pulse of GHG did for the rest of the land animals. It may have raised the global average temperature by a further 4-5 degrees C.
It did not help that at the time, the land masses of the Earth were conjoined (into more or less) supercontinent acting as a massive heat sink in the continental interior.
The Therapsids got it in the neck, allowing the Dinosaurs a chance to evolve and dominate. Along with one mammal-like creature…. The significance of which requires the extinction of the Dinosaurs in turn.
Ironically, this thermal pulse that lead to this mass faunal extinction probably created the huge algal blooms that were buried, later to be cooked into oil.
Key words from the above?
Probably
Likely
Maybe
May
Possible
No one can be quite sure what the current CO2 pulse will bring, or, if Solar fluctuations play a greater or lesser part. Or Chandler Wobbles, or Milankovitch Cycles, or Stellar bursts, or periods of vulcanicity.
But: Since the Hockey stick occurs within the same time frame as the increase in CO2 with the Industrial Revolution, then the precautionary principle may well be worth a considering.
The alternative could be another Methane pulse some time after the current CO2 pulse takes effect.
So far this is pretty frustrating reading. Although the hockey Stick temperature profile is supported by multiple lines of evidence and is the consensus view of scientists who understand the caveats, the counter arguments become close to silly given the rate the rate at which the north pole is disappearing.
On other comment, no one disputes the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and warms the planet. A typical number mentioned is that the earth would be 70 degrees colder if not for the presence of this gas.
History always repeats itself.
Neither history, nor pre-history, which is where your link leads, can repeat itself if the Second law of thermodynamics is valid.
History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. ;)
Huh? According to this Wikipedia article, the earth's carbon is 98.9% C-12, and 1.1% C-13. How could the ratio of C-12 to C-13 be anything like 75%? I thought the only thing that changed over time was the concentration of C-14 (which is present in minute quantities)? Am I missing something here?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon
I imagine you know this already, but 75% of carbon being C-14 was not what was said. Only a very tiny percentage of carbon is C-14. C-14 has a half life of about 5730 yrs consequently all of the C-14 in fossil fuels has decayed, i.e. there is no C-14. Consequently as the burning of fossil fuels has added C-14 free carbon to the air, the proportion of carbon that is C-14 has dropped considerably. If you were carbon dated today using the standard curves developed for the past, they would announce you had died several thousand years ago. The 75% number is the estimate of the fraction of increased carbon that is from fossil fuels. I was surprised by this number as it implies 25% of increased CO2 is from natural carbon sinks – not good.
The whole debate about global warming shows that you should always look at the numbers first. Saying that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing the Earth to heat rapidly is just false. First of all the most important GHG is water vapor and not CO2. Water warms the Earth when it's vapor, but it can cool it when forming clouds (clouds are little droplets forming around aerosols and that means that coal alongside CO2 emissions, emits a lot of ashes and aerosols that help form clouds and thus block the sun. Natural gas is "clean" and emits mostly CO2, causing warming effects ONLY ).
Secondly the total world natural emissions from various sources (forest fires, volcanoes, oceans etc.) are much greater than human caused emissions. There are about 1900 GT of CO2 in the atmosphere and a one year cycle is equal to 210 GT. Burning fossil fuels ads 6 GT of carbon dioxide each year, being less than 3% of the total emissions of CO2 and less than 0.3% of the total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. About one third of those 6GT stays in the atmosphere, the rest is sequestered naturally. CO2 is "responsible" for 9% of the GH effect. So anthropogenic CO2 emissions are strengthening the GH effect by 0,09% each year. This is still a LOT if you take into account that the process will be, at best, constant (0.09% for 100 years gives 9.5% rise! and the natural sequestration will probably slow down).
So YES, we are causing climate change, but many people, like Gore aren't telling the whole truth. It's not only CO2 and not only humans and most of all, not only fossil fuels!.
Another inconvenient truth is the fact that a trivial phenomenon called breathing is responsible for the biggest part of anthropogenic GHG emissions. An average person "emits" 300 kg of CO2/a. That multiplied by 6.5 billion people gives you about 2GT of CO2 per year! That's almost one third of what we are producing with all of our cars, jet planes, coal fire power plants etc. Up to late 40s humans were producing more carbon dioxide by breathing than fossil fuels burning. What about agriculture? What about 3 billions cows, pigs and chickens? Don't they breath as well? I was not able to find any data about the amount of CO2 "produced" by livestock, but if you just simply multiply the human "emissions" of 300 kg by the factor of 7 (cattle body mass is more or less 7 times higher than human body) and the number of cattle - 1.3 bln, you will get 2.7GT of CO2. That's just cottle! That means that if you sum up just the exhaled CO2 from humans and life stock you will get more CO2 than fossil fuels create. Livestock and agriculture also produce a lot of methane (over 20 times stronger GHG than CO2) and other strong greenhouse gases. Instead of pumping CO2 into oceans, how about cutting our meat consumption by a factor of 2?
By studying different aspects of PO I learned to dig really deep to find the right data. I see that a lot of you don't check the facts about global warming and you just BELIVE it.
My three cents.
http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/environmental/200611CO2globalwarm...
Your figures for the amount of CO2 emitted by the human population are roughly correct. These emissions are roughly balanced by plants coverting that CO2 to sugars and fibre.
The climate change problem occurs as humans are taking carbon sequestered in the earth as coal and oil and re-introducing this sequestered carbon to the atmosphere. This additional carbon is greater then the amount that can be recycled by plant respiration. This additional CO2 has been identified as a key factor in climate forcing.
In brief, the biosphere has had a well functioning carbon cycle which is now being overloaded by additional releases of previously sequestered CO2.
No, you merely skimmed a lot of contrarian blogs and swallowed the lot. The tale about water vapour has been dredged up and rebutted so many times that you clearly have not even began to read the literature if you do not address these rebuttals. See for example here
If you cannot even see the difference between exhalation of carbon dioxide by animals that must have absorbed by plants in equal amounts mostly weeks or months ahead and thus contributing no net carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and the burning of fossil fuel and releasing into the air carbon that had been locked in the ground to remain there with a mean life time of about 100 years, not only have you not read the literature, you do not have the scientific reasoning power you would hope for in a 16 year old school science student.
The arrogance that it takes for someone with so little scientific reading or ability to imagine that they can spot mistakes that have not been spotted by over 2000 of the planet's most talented and learned climatologists in over three years of detailed study building on decades of experience, checked and double checked line by line by each other, is quite bewildering.
There have been examples where the scientific consensus has been wrong and those that have first opposed this consensus have been scorned but I cannot think of a single example of where such a consensus has been overthrown by someone who did not understand fully and deeply the work of those that formed that consensus
You are not about to be the first exception to that rule.
The only true part of post is the problem of ruminants converting carbon dioxide to methane and that is included in the report and, although not negligible, will be a small part of the problem when carbon dioxide levels build up in the next decades as they will under any practically realisable way that does not involve the death of hundreds of millions of humans .
I agree that the breathing argument was stupid and I feel ashamed I missed the whole carbon cycle in that process. I wouldn't call it arrogance ... ignorance maybe ;)
As for the impact of the CO2 on the greenhouse effect, I didn't read ANY blogs, I read this: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
I'm not an expert, but the numbers seem right (checked them in other, unreliable sources, like Wikipedia) and I just don't understand why some people are saying "it's all carbon dioxide" without showing the whole picture.
Water vapor IS a greenhouse gas and the fact that H20 in the atmosphere is, to quote Sir David King, "complicated" doesn't change that. If CO2 is contributing to the GH effect 9-26% (from the article you gave as an example) and human emissions are adding about 1%/year of CO2 in the atmosphere (~7 blnT/750) why everybody is talking about carbon dioxide all the time? I know the reports include it, but NO BODY READS THEM. Usually, at best journalist read the summary and that's all you get in the media (and on TOD as well, by the way) - CO2! We emit and it gets hot. Simple as that. If I was ignorant how would you call this? Humankind, over the last ~250 years, emitted in to the atmosphere 320 billion Tons of CO2! That’s important. This is the magnitude that makes difference in the global scale and I would love to see arguments like that instead of showing Katrina victims and linking them directly to fossil fuels burning.
Also there are some negative feedbacks that don’t “sound right” and are “politically incorrect”. Like the variation in albedo caused by land use changes, or the cooling effect of the aerosols. To use your source again:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/efficacy_fig28.gif
The tasks of the climate modeler are quite different from that of public policy. We can change those things under our direct control, perhaps a little about those things under our indirect control and nothing about the rest.
The climate modeler needs to be concerned about ALL factors, the public policy makers (i.e. the rest of us) need only be concerned about CO2, fluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxides and carbon capture and, perhaps, albedo ($50 to $100 tax for any car other than white, roof color requirments ?).
Best Hopes,
Alan
HO: My understanding is that the IPCC does not dispute the fact that there exists a periodic solar forcing. My understanding is that they have "factored out" this solar forcing and determined that in addition to any solar forcing there is a second forcing and this second forcing is due to human actvity.
This leaves us with the prospect that the globe is getting warmer due to inherent "natural" cycles and these cycles are being reinforced by human activity. To me this is a strong further argument for a reduction in human activites which contribute to anthropogenic forcing.
Hello HO,
This will be my last post on climate variation. I see the whole discussion as revealing more about the limits in human reasoning ability than anything else. People seem to be hard wired to believe in a single cause for every effect. Even many professional scientists think in this black and white way. Yet nature is all about the complex interactions of many factors. As climate is the integration of many factors, logical reasoning about climate is impossible for most people.
Is climate influenced by:
water vapor?
albedo?
solar activity?
cosmic rays?
methane?
carbon dioxide?
astronomical cycles?
ocean currents?
Yes it is.
Having said that, over a million year time frame, all of the variables except one are constrained within a band that includes the present day values. Current carbon dioxide levels are well above any time since the Miocene. That is why the debate is focused on carbon dioxide, it is the extreme outlier.
Re MH: Is climate influenced by:
water vapor?
albedo?
solar activity?
cosmic rays?
methane?
carbon dioxide?
astronomical cycles?
ocean currents?
Yes it is!
Climate forcing effects are all working, and the IPCC has been putting numbers on them. Some quite certain and some more speculative.
See here http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/goals/img/climate2.jpg
and the latest IPCC report summary also has a nice set of updated climate forcing effects.
see here figure spm 4 page 4. http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf
Basically the human effects are leapfrogging on top of the natural variations.
Kind regards/And1
That is very much my view (adding other once rare GHG that are likely above last million+ years due to human activity like freon (fluorocarbons) that are unknown in nature, methane, nitrous oxides).
That other natural factors may be trending towards GW (and perhaps others towards Global Cooling) IN NO WAY INVALIDATES THE CO2 LINK TO GLOBAL WARMING !! #
The existance of "other factors" complicates analysis and prediction but does not negate the simple truth; Burn Fossil Fuels > Increase CO2 > Global Warming
Please look at the Mauna Loa CO2 measurements and tell me that this human experiment will have no effect on climate (given our knowledge of infrared absorption of CO2).
http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.php
Note: This famous graph is harder to find under Bush Administration
Sawtooth is annual Northern Hemisphere spring/summer & fall/winter vegetation cycle (larger than offsetting Southern Hemisphere cycle).
BTW, there is complexity in this simple graph. The trend is clear but there is not a 1:1 ratio of carbon burned and CO2 rise. Some complex buffering or time delay is going on. However, does this mean that volcanos are the source of increased CO2 ? Of course not.
Best Hopes for Sanity & IQ higher than yeast in humanity,
Alan
# If +0.1 C (or even +0.2 C) of the observed roughly 0.6 C rise in global temperatures is ascribed to natural effects, does this mean that human activity that results in GW is less of a policy concern ?
NO ! This means it is even MORE important to reduce human caused GW if we are adding to a natural trend !
If nature was cooling -0.2 C and we were heating +0.4 C for a net +0.2 C this would "buy us some time" and magnify the impact of future CO2 reductions. However, we may be doing our best to bring "a simmer to a boil".
Don't agree with you on the causes of global warming, but I do agree with your conclusions. Coal, wood, empty 2-liter soda bottles - it's all going to be burned eventually. Even if we don't do it, other countries will.
I've been saying this for awhile. We need to prepare for a managed retreat from the coasts. I'm not saying we should abandon San Francisco or Manhattan tomorrow. But we should consider rising sea levels when building expensive new infrastructure like nuclear power plants or railroads.
And you are not a doomer? How about building asteroid shelters? We know for sure that one day there will be one we won't be able to stop! And please, let's make a lead brick wall around the planet... just in case we get hit by a gamma ray "burster" near to us.
Leanan is correct.
60% of the worlds population lives within 30 miles of coast. Almost all of which is between 0 and 25 feet of current Mean Sea Level.
If We are not talking about a managed retreat;
Then the alternative will be a rout.
Although Leanan is correct, I dont hold out much hope for a managed retreat.
I am not at odds with Lenean about the impact. I am at odds with doomerism as a lifestyle. It is politically VERY unwise to go at this necessary project with a no-can-do-attitude. We need to mobilize people and we need to give them the information of what can be done, not the gutt-wrenching headline that nothing can be done.
Sorry if that came out wrong. My examples are along those lines: there is absolutely nothing that could be done about the doomsday asteroid and a GRB would give very little warning before it would sterilize one half of the planet and set the whole planet on fire. Yet, we are not telling our kids that they don't have to learn in high school because they are doomed anyway. It is the same here. we know that some effects can not be mitigated any more. We also know that some other, much more grave effects have to be mitigated and that it is not too late to do that.
We are not talking about a managed retreat, indeed. We are talking about a controlled de-escallation with nature. If we don't manage that, nature will whoop our ass. Literally. If you think terrorists are the enemy, wait until you meet physics.
Seems to be a theme.
I have had quite a few requests to remove your account of late...I wonder why that is.
Never be sorry.
The point about the future average global temperature is highly complex. Frankly, PO is simple compared with GW.
We may have already passed some critical tipping points even before we knew it. Equally , we dont know for sure what the outcome will be.
IMO:
Precautionary principle and, like the boy scouts, (be prepared) for managed retreats from a coastal position.
re: Managed Retreat
The UK government is already making such plans. Informing householders (and whole villages) where the money will *not* be spent to preserve their homes and coastline.
Is the US government not making such plans also?
I must, in mischief, quietly point out, that in neither the original post nor this one, did I actually state my own opinion on the cause of Global Warming - I just did a book review, and a quick "honesty" check. My concern is that all the debate over which is right can soak up the oxygen at a time when it is really almost irrelevant as to what is causing it, because whatever it is will not be significantly changed in the next 50 yeas.
Well, I think the scientific evidence as to the causes of global warming is overwhelming. It was my impression that you still think there is room for doubt. If I am mistaken about that, then nevermind.
I will also add that many geologists are pushing for a "managed retreat" from the coasts, even aside from peak oil/global warming concerns, so it's not like it's a radical idea or anything.
Well I had never actually looked at much of the evidence before, and, as I noted, I cannot remember when I last saw an article that did anything but accept the GHG position. As I sort of noted, this book has a lot of, what appear to me to be reputable references, and the one that I checked, and which is in Science, bore out the book position. If you are going to make a valid judgement it seeems to me that you have to look at the evidence presented by both sides. If all we hear is the one side and their evidence, and don't even know there is a contrasting opinion and what it is, and what the evidence for it is, how can we make an honest judgement?
So, in the sense that having not expressed an opinion is in itself an opinion (if you aren't for us your agin us) then I suppose yes I have given an opinion. But I will comment, from personal experience, that just because the Powers that Be and all the scientific leaders of a field suggest that the evidence says that something is so, doesn't mean they are right. (Oh hi, Galileo what are you dong here - no I wasn't talking about you)
But you see this is part of the problem, the real issue, and we agree here, is that this is going to happen, whatever is going to cause it, and we had much better find out what is likely to be the consequences of the termperature rise and start getting ready for it. And so, yes, that's my opinion too.
Well, I think there are limits to that. I suppose we should keep an eye on "creation science," abiotic oil research, and "smoking doesn't cause cancer" claims, if only to be aware of what they are up to. But in science, you eventually reach a point where you don't give equal weight to the other side. I think we've reached that point with global warming. You do not. That is your right, of course. That's what I meant when I said we disagree about global warming.
Um, I might think that abiotic oil research is a bunch of rubbish, but that doesn't mean that I won't bring it up on the site, and explain what the proponents are talking about. And since I had not actually heard that there was any opposition from the scientists in the field to the GHG position until I read the book I thought that it might be interesting to everyone else in the same boat. And from reading the book I certainly didn't get the impression that the issue is as cut and dried as many people accept.
I agree that abiotic oil is a worthy subject for this site...but it would be covered in a far different manner than you did here with GW. It would be debunked, plain and simple.
And this is the key issue with HOs post. It introduces a topic which has already been investigated and incorporated into IPCC reviews (from as far back as the second assesment, if memory serves).
The manner of introduction makes it appear that this is valid alternate science when the scientific consensus is very different.
This post is far below the expected TOD standard. Personal anecdotes of discovery are not of great value.
The prior posts on the conference were very informative and I thank you for that reporting.
This is actually quite interesting to follow. Because it seems that not very many people actually read what I wrote, only what they wanted (or didn't want) to read. You might go back and look at what I said in para 6 under the fold - the one that starts "However, that being said. . . . . ."
And please note, that I put two IPCC plots together from the same report, and found them inconsistent. The plots are given for you to look at and make your own judgement.
I read this:
And I felt that this statement served to clarify any confusion I may have had over what you were attempting in your main post. You admit you are not familiar with the science (and there is over ten years of debate on these issues). You found a book with a novel theory and introduced it to the TOD community.
In doing so I feel you did a dis-service to TOD. When Yergin and CERA operate in this opportunistic manner we raise strident complaint over the fact that their "contribution" serves only to mask a serious issue. I feel that you have done much the same here and my initial reading of your post has been coloured by what you have claimed in your defense of it.
No DIGGS here. Sorry.
Let the arguments roll, all of us have areas of ignorance. Shouldn’t we have to address each GW issue with facts and physics just as peak oil issues are addressed on TOD. The problem I had with HO’s comments was the minimal introduction of physics. Instead the piece focused primarily on identifying patterns in weather with only a nod to a mechanism perhaps linked to cosmic radiation.
This type of argument, for example oil has peaked 5 times before and the current peak is no different, is frustrating.
There is a mountain of physics behind the consensus scientific belief that humans are increasing planetary temperatures through release of greenhouse gases. It is going to take some time to explore it. Start with the established fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that the world would be about 70 degrees cooler if it was not in the atmosphere.
I am looking forward to your review of Michael Behe's next book on "intelligent design". I am sure you will give us a reality check in form of a Bayesian statistics estimate on just how impossible it is that a protein sequence with just 150 amino acids can form spontaneously, which indeed proves that God, specifically the God Abraham's (this becomes clear from the subtext, even if it is not mentioned in the text itself), must have magically arranged the building materials.
How about it?
I thought there was only 20 amino acids. Would that not make it impossible for God or chance to make a protein from 150 (assuming JC doesn't make another 130)?
I don't get the intelligent design argument....no matter how improbable something is if it is possible given infinity isn't it bound to happen? Our sentience gives us the ability to ask the question instead of proving the question false.
I don't get the intelligent design argument....no matter how improbable something is if it is possible given infinity isn't it bound to happen?
I have made that exact argument many times. Creationists never seem to get it.
Ironically my own view is that Intelligent Design diminishes the role of God in the Creation.
It's much more impressive to imagine a God who creates the preconditions for creation, and who creates the fabric of a universe in which Darwinian evolution can take place, than to imagine he simply tampers with a bunch of molecules.
If God literally created us in his own image, then that would be a very good reason to not worship him/her/it.
Somehow, the idea of a God who looks like Don King frightens me :-)
It is interesting that in Semitic religions, God is an external entity; he is a cosmic ruler who sits on a throne in a remote galaxy and makes an entry in his ledger every time a sparrow dies (so to speak). Periodically, he sends prophets and messengers who convey his message via commandments & revelations.
In Indian philosophies like Vedanta and Buddhism, "God" is the very ground of reality; the very ground of existence. God is not an experience but that which makes experiencing possible. It is not a perception, but that which makes perception possible. It is not awareness, but the source of awareness. Crudely speaking, it is awareness of being or the source of every individual's sense of "self".
So if the world is a movie, then the film is the destiny of individual characters in the movie and God is the projector, light and the screen. God doesn't take part in the movie, but he makes it possible for the movie to exist.
In popular Hinduism, people pray to various deities for various boons; the deities are considered to be different aspects of the same God.
I am looking forward to your review of Michael Behe's next book on "intelligent design".
Make no mistake, those who understand Behe's position are those who will put forward the arguments to rebut them when Creationists try to legislate ID in the schools. In fact, that is just what happened in Dover. People who knew Behe inside and out tore him up on the stand.
> But I will comment, from personal experience, that just because the
> Powers that Be and all the scientific leaders of a field suggest
> that the evidence says that something is so, doesn't mean they are
> right
As is often the case, Carl Sagan put it best:
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
____
Actually, we do NOT agree on the DEGREE of global warming likely to happen-- nobody knows. But the vast majority of the scientific community DOES agree that continuing to burn coal will make Global Warming much, much worse.
To understand how much worse, In the IPCC Summary compare the likely effects (pg 14) of different scenarios of fossil fuel usage(pg 18) with the likely impacts of various temperatures.
chapterwon
PS Despite my rather low regard for this particular post, I did find Heading Out's first two post of this series very informative and interesting, and thank him for those.
But, but... Bozo the Clown was a genius!
Lots of other evidence for warming before the present. I like this one. During the last glaciation, rapid warming periods called Dansgaard-Oeschger events occurred several times. The air temperature over Greenland rose by 8-16 degrees C over a few decades, with a gradual collapse to lower temperatures. Summer sea surface temperatures off Greenland rose to 8 degrees C , compared to the normal values of 2-4 degrees, and surface salinity dropped, suggesting a rapid increase in meltwater. There was, of course, no accompanying anthropogenic CO2 increase.
Do I think this means that fossil-fueled global warming is bunk? Nope. This time around, things are different.
It's not just geologists.
The Cobra Committee of the UK government is tasked with planning for, and briefing the Cabinet, on disasters like:
- avian flu
- nuclear terrorism
- biological or chemical attack
- oil crises
*and* global warming
The head of the committee (one of those Oxford educated Rear Admirals you get) was on Radio 4 talking about the British government plans to abandon vulnerable areas of sea coast.
Andrew Marshall, Donald Rumsfeld's top strategist, a guy who is so respected that at 82 he still has a desk at the Pentagon and has been advising them on strategy since the 1960s, wrote a paper in 2003 on preparing US strategy for global warming, mass migration, disease etc.
So if the Pentagon, and the Cobra Committee, think it's real, you can bet that the powers that be are preparing for it.
What you call "honesty check" is acknowledged FUD. Repeating the same stale arguments over and over again does not make them any more true.
Let's do a quick "reality check" on what Dr. Singer likes to say in interviews:
"But since 1979, our best measurements show that the climate has been cooling just slightly. Certainly, it has not been warming. "
This came from:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/debate/singer.html
Now... PBS is not known to pressure their guests into saying things they don't want to say.
And this is the well known curve:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png
Can everyone see that there has been a slight cooling since 1979? Me neither. Needless to say, Dr. Singer then goes on to throw out every measurement that does not fit into his pet idea that the earth is cooling. He then proves his "idea" right by relying only data from the now "clean" data set.
He then continues with this:
"I personally believe that there should be some slight warming. But I think the warming will be much less than the current models predict. Much less. And I think it will be barely detectable. Perhaps it will be detectable, perhaps not. And it certainly will not be consequential. That is, it won't make any difference to people. After all, we get climate changes by 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places on the earth. So what difference does a 1-degree change make over 100 years? "
He might want to talk to the villagers in the Swiss Alps who get most of their income from ski season. They lost most of it this year because there was almost no snow and retreating glaciers are not safe places to ski on. So that throws out his claim that nobody will be affected.
But, I guess, as long as Dr. Singer is not affected (he has AC in his office), we can gladly forget about consequences for the rest of mankind.
Now, if we all buy his book, he will get a lot of positive feedback and surely continue with his good work! After all, we need to be told that none of us are affected, even those of us who are losing their source of income.
PBS does in fact have a record of bias, Noam Chomsky and other have spoken about this. Stories get simply not run if they offend the sponsors. They'll run something about Wal-Mart after the cat's out of the bag about Wal-Mart being evil, maybe, because Wally's isn't a sponsor. And the PBS-watching demographic doesn't shop there. PBS / NPR have become "corpgov" organs aimed at the top quintile in the US, that's what they consider the "public".
I like PBS/NPR but I won't send them $ because (a) they've got enough and (b) they send this awful striving-upper-middle-class capitalist waste of trees to people who do contribute, and even if you ask them not to send it, they still do.
Isn't it possible that your local public broadcasting stations, both radio and television, wouldn't need to expose themselves to the supposed bias introduced by corporate sponsors, or even the national CPB, if you and folks like you would support them more often?
Are you saying that when the Chinese run out of coal that the US will sell what we have to them? Paraphrasing Karl Marx will this be the rope we sell to those who will hang us?
I suspect that in the short term China has enough of its own, and long before this becomes an issue the impacts of Peak Oil and Gas and possibly GW on the world community will make matters much more complicated.
China has plenty of their own. A lot of it is really dirty - contaminated with arsenic, selenium, and other heavy metals. People burn it anyway, even though it's killing them.
Will we sell our coal to them? Probably not, but people here will burn it if it's accessible, whether it's legal or not.
And countries that are still burning fossil fuels will probably have an advantage over those who are not, if it comes to resource wars. Trade isn't the only way resources can fall into other hands.
China's probably better set up to be self-sufficient in coal than we are, and they know how to live using much less energy.
Imagine Americans forced to waddle everywhere because they have to park their beloved SUVs!
and as always Leanan is right, people will burn old tires, plastic pop bottles, nasty microwave oven guts, and the atmosphere be damned.
Building levees is about 1 million times as economical. And at worst they have to be only 2 metres high, while probably a lot less than that.
Adaptation is inevitable.
I disagree that levees are only 2 metres high, though.
The London storm surge is over 10 metres, that is why we have a £3bn barrier on the Thames. Its replacement, forecast by 2050, will be nearer £30bn.
Similar conditions apply to cities like New York.
Another problem with levees is that they break: see Katrina and New Orleans.
In addition, the IPCC report deliberately excludes data from the British Antarctic Survey and scientists in Greenland, both of which suggest that temperatures are higher than expected, and that the corresponding ice melt could be much greater.
Sea rises of 20 to 30 feet this century are not impossible. Not likely, but the story of global warming science is the story, to date, of the 'not likely' becoming the central case.
I'm actually not too worried about rising sea levels, at least in the developed world. We'll cope and we have been warned: people in Mississippi and Louisiana and Norfolk can make their own choices.
Species extinction, mass migration of Third Worlders, war, ecological collapse (see war), drought (Australia is currently having the 'one in 100 year drought' making fools of the government assertion that there is no global warming-- an equivalent drought in California might make Southern California uninhabitable), unstoppable methane release
*these*
are the things I worry about.
Human civilisation has risen and flourished in an unprecedentedly stable time for the world's climate. It appears that time is now about to end.
Sorry the London Storm surge is over 10 feet.
Parliament was nearly flooded in 1952, that's why we have the Thames Barrier.
http://www.seeingscience.cclrc.ac.uk/Activities/SeeingScience/Materials/...
Just to clarify this point for those unfamiliar with the IPCC working protocols.
The IPCC has a cutoff date for inclusion in the report and this cutoff was back in 2005. It was not until 2006 that new data from Greenland and Antartica indicated a faster rate of glacial ablation than had been previously forecast.
This book received a rather chilly reception over at Real Climate: Avery and Singer: Unstoppable hot air.
You've got it Sam, they guys at RC are pretty reliable. Where's Warf Rat when you need him?
A few years ago, when my parents were finally learning about email, I had to drill into them the following maxim:
"Every time you get a chain email informing you of Nigerian investment opportunities, the impending shut-down of NPR, or an offer from Bill Gates to donate one cent for everyone who reads the email to saving baby seals, please do a Google search on the text of the message before forwarding it to me. You will probably find it has been debunked. Your message may be for real, but please go read the debunking-- and think about it-- before passing it on"
Now that global warming is very much in the news, I'd like to offer a modification to this:
"Every time you read somewhere that global warming is caused by the sun (e.g., cosmic rays/observed on Venus/cyclical), search the archives of Realclimate.org for their debunking. Your information may be for real but please go read-- and think about-- the debunking before passing it on."
The first one is free! Here's the most relevant hit:
Avery and Singer: Unstoppable hot air
But there are other relevant pages there.. many, many relevant pages. Please read (and think about) some of the most relevant.
chapterwon
PS Global warming deniers like to mention the Medieval Warming period, and you do so twice.
> a cold phase, known as the Dark Ages, from AD 440 to AD 900; then a
> second warming phase, from 900 to 1300 AD (The Medieval Warming)
Then, in your graph of Sargasso surface temperatures, you show it as occurring from ~500 to ~1200AD.
So I guess the Medieval Warming Period peaked during the Dark Age cold phase just as Singer and Avery predicted, or something like that.
If you look at the actual scale on the graph it shows years before the present, rather than AD, so you misread the data.
Sorry, my bad, in my haste I did misread the data. Stupid mistake. Looking again (with polished glasses) it seems that in fact, according to the Sargasso graph, the highest temperature in the last 800 years (one of two or three peaks of the Medieval Warm Period) occurred about 500 years before the present, or about 1500 AD.
According to your first description of the Medieval Warm period, it was
> followed by the most recent cold phase, 1300 to 1850 AD (the little Ice Age)
So actually, according to the info you cite, the hottest temperature of the last 800 years (according to the Sargasso data) ocurred during the height of the Little Ice Age.
__
In reality of course, there is so much local variation of temperature that if you choose the right part of the globe to focus on, you can find a temperature peak or valley at pretty much any time you would like to. IIRC, even the Little Ice Age most affected the northern hemisphere (and mostly Europe and the North Atlantic at that).
What about global temperatures? Well, they're not very cyclical: e.g., see
http://www.koshland-science-museum.org/exhibitgcc/historical03.jsp
This whole discussion is why I posted yesterday on your "last day from the conference" report, and expressed such absolute disappointment in the whole tone of the Summit you reported it (folks can go back to that string to read if they like, because of course that whole thread is now back buried and probably a dead string by now).
The reason that so little "action" has been or will be taken on "global warming" is that even if you accept readily the Earth is warming (which now is a statement of fact, not conjecture) and that carbon can cause warming when released in the atmosphere (proven again and again by experiment and modeling), that the level of carbon is much higher than it has been in any time since "civilization" got underway (provable by observation, core samples, etc., and that mankind seems to be the source for much of this spare carbon (again, relatively provable, unless we accept the theory that natural warming of the Earth causes an increasing amount of carbon to somehow be released, not impossible but not scientifically demonstrated), so now, you have the chain of events pretty much down.
Then the public says o.k., what can we do about it? And the brains say, "well, pretty much nothing. The volumes are already locked in, the power plants built or financed, and the world is going to do what it needs to do, whether the developed countries like it or not. Sure you can do the "symbolic stuff, like driving a hybrid, or even the radical green stuff like solar, wind, home gardening and planting trees, but the effect will be at the margins, it will have as much effect as wearing a "stop global warming T-shirt."
So, you have just wasted my time with this freakin' "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" exercise!? :-(
And that folks is increasingly how the global warming argument sounds, "do something, it's an emergency, do something!"
"O.K., what?"
"Well really, nothing can be done that will make a difference..."
This is what the "great minds" of the academic world have reduced themselves to....futility.
What is interesting is that there are at least 50 or 100 good reasons to reduce carbon release and fossil fuel consumption, any of which have much more meaningful impacts HERE AND NOW, and that would reduce threats that are much greater to human health and happiness NOW than trying to reduce global warming (come to Kentucky and West Virginia and watch them blow whole mountains down with the largest mass of explosives used in ANY STATE in the union if you want to see what COAL DOES NOW, and ask your selves how many varieties of plants, animals, insects, fern and lichens, and how many tons of precious soils with an ecosysem that is one of the most diverse in the world in it are turned to dust...this is happening NOW, far before your globe gets warm, but since it doesn't affect your coastal vacation condo in Florida, who gives a crap right?)
(By the way, which is a threat faster, the loss of species in South American rain forests due to the flame and the bull dozer to plant more sugar cane or palm plantations for bio fuel, or the sea level rise on your Carolina condo?
Of course, while some little guilty feeling office girl is made to feel like a pig because she drives to work in a hybrid, she is STILLL contributing to global warming!!!!, while the flare stacks of the oil, gas and chemical industry can still be seen from space.....
The whole thing is becoming folly.....
RC
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom.
Global Warming adds to the impetus to address the entire range of sustainability issues. It is the case that problems that may have biblical consequences increase the urgency to act. Quite likely global warming not peak oil will result in increased mileage standards for automobiles.
I posted this at the bottom, but it really fits in here:
The hot debate over this post is interesting to me considering that this is a peak oil site primarily for this reason: in the current political arena, global warming has the floor while peak oil is absolutely underground. Yet, as mudlogger I believe pointed out, and I believe this thread's controversy backs up, global warming is a much more complex issue than peak oil. The question for me is this: For everyone concerned with the full spectrum of consequences of world fossil fuel usage, which issue, if you had to pick one, would you choose as the political "horse" to mobilize public opinion? For a complex set of reasons, global warming is getting all the air-time right now. Though both issues have strong cases for swift changes of course, I think that peak oil is the simpler one, the more convincing one, and possibly even the more urgent one if I was forced to choose. From this standpoint it seems to me that whether or not any GW skepticism has any merit at all, it might possibly be more politically expedient in our current climate to say, "yes, global warming is a complex issue and the "scientific consensus" may or may not be absolutely foolproof, but there is another issue even more compelling relating to energy--there is a mountain of evidence that global oil production is very near to or may have already reached its peak and will be followed by a steady decline we should have long started to prepare for. Even in the best case energy supply scenario we will be wrestling with dire consequences of fossil fuel scarcity BEFORE we will really start to face serious consequences from CO2 driven global warming according to the most dire GW predictions."
This statement appears to contain a dangerous assumption. It assumes that all serious consequences from AGW lie in the future. Recent discovery of the speed up in glacial melt in both Greenland and Antarctica, the fact that healthy forests emit methane, have served to identify new areas of scientific investigation. These topics have only come to the forefront within the past year; they are too recent to form part of the latest IPCC report. The relevant science is not yet fully known.
We do appear to know the underlying mechanism associated with climate forcing and with mankinds role in that forcing. But we do not know all of the inter-relationships and feedback mechanisms present in the bio-sphere, nor do we know what degree of warming will result in a runaway series of climate events.
We like to think we are at home, safe, sound and secure. We like to think that the world will continue as it has in the immediate past. The current trend in the scientific evidence is that both of these sets of beliefs may be inaccurate. We cannot discount the possibility that we stand on threshold of a great many unwanted outcomes. To my mind this is a serious circumstance and it faces us now, not at an indefinite time in the future.
And for another perspective you may wish to consider that current climate impacts are serious to the people of both the Sudan and Australia.
From where I sit right now, about 2 feet above sea level...... yes indeed I drive my little hybrid around (and feel like a pig) while I go past smokestacks and various semiconductor companies, making things out of highly toxic materials that ultimately only mean more #$%@#$%@#$ cell fones and gameboys and PS2s, and in large areas the landscape is mostly dead. The Silicon Valley area is greener than places in Southern California, but compared to what it once was, it's truly an asphalt wonderland. Except for token trees and patches of grass, and weeds that find a way to grow in the cracks (I notice them and get to know the bigger ones, then am sad when they get removed) it's all asphalt and concrete.
This area was once prime fruit growing territory, and before that it was prime estuary - it's gone down probably 5X in "biotic value" each step. This has been happening all over the world, everywhere. This sizzling asphalt and concrete covered with cars, often gridlocked with cars, replacing cool, living, respirating, land is about as "natural" and "healthy" as a necrotic tumor.
The measures that I am pushing for PO (electrify railroads, move freight from trucks to electric RR (20 BTUs diesel > 1 BTU electricity), Urban Rail & low energy TOD, transportation bicycling) also help with GW. In fact, they are some of the best measures we can take to reduce GW.
Best Hopes,
Alan
From realclimate.org from the Avery and Singer reference you cited:
"The existence of climate changes in the past is not news to the climate change scientific community; there is a whole chapter about it in the upcoming IPCC Scientific Assessment. Nor do past, natural variations in climate negate the global warming forecast. Most past climate changes, like the glacial interglacial cycle, can be explained based on changes in solar heating and greenhouse gases, but the warming in the last few decades cannot be explained without the impact of human-released greenhouse gases. Avery was very careful to crop his temperature plots at 1985, rather than show the data to 2005."
I agree that people should check with the experts before they provide us "new" information.
Here is the link:
Avery and Singer: Unstoppable hot air
Good post. We need this kind of discussion.
I think that Climate Audit is a very well-thought out sceptic blog. To be well informed, we should read both Realclimate and Climate Audit.
CO2 levels are now 50% higher than ever previously observed. If CO2 is the most important warming factor, the expected temperature would be much higher than the mild warming we are now experiencing.
Singer is a sceptic, but I believe he has written that the current warming could be caused as much as 50% by human activities.
In order to get published and get more funding, climate scientists need to get positive results. A finding of no significant relationship just isn't sexy enough to get reviewers and tenure committees interested.
Groups such as Union of Concerned Scientists attack vociferously anyone who has gotten funding, however minor or indirectly, from industry groups, but they don't consider the bias that could arise from the need to show proof of man-caused global warming in order to get funding from government grants and NPO's.
As with any AGW denialist, I see three possibilities:
1) You are not informed.
2) You are informed but not capable of understanding complex science.
3) You are being paid to deny what you know.
May I ask which one it is? I am asking in good faith, by the way. In my world, you can have your opinnion, no matter how wrong. I don't even mind if someone is paying you for publicising FUD, it is a free country and there are no laws against that. But I think it is a matter of sincerity to admit if that is so. Otherwise... you fail on the moral level.
Well I really am not trying to be immoral. In regard to (3) as Prof G might validate, I have not taken any money from the work I do for this site. I do not get paid to deny what I know, and hopefully long-time readers of the site will recognize that I believe in bringing forward information, and in large measure don't give my opinions on it. Although, admittedly, as Leanan has just pointed out, just by putting forward information you are, by that act, venturing an opinion.
So I guess the opinion I was initially expressing was, I haven't heard much about the other side of the GHG Global Warming debate, and maybe the other readers of the site might not have either, so why not read a book on it (which just came out in 2007, by the way) and do a book review. So I did.
In regard to (2) I believe that the National Science Foundation, NASA and the NRC might suggest that I am able to understand complex science (to pick but 3).
And actually, if you read what I wrote, I don't think I denied anything.
don't feed the trolls, HO. others surely moreso deserve the response and the time.
Prof. Goose. Are you calling anyone who points out that one of the editors of TOD has shown very poor judgement by posting a defense of AGW FUD a troll?
I am looking forward to discussing that with YOU.
:-)
"So I guess the opinion I was initially expressing was, I haven't heard much about the other side of the GHG Global Warming debate"
The other side of the "AGW debate" is approximately as scientific as the other side of the "Darwinism debate", if I may say so. And it works along roughly the same religious and political channels and uses about the same methods to create FUD. It mostly relies on the fact that sometimes the truth is complicated, for instance when you have to read real science journals to truly understand it, and most people do not want to spend that much time or simple do not care about the truth because it is inconvenient (to their beliefs, their economic hopes etc.). I wouldn't mind you debating a few of the science papers about AGW that actually present valid criticisms of other work (in specificity rather than in general) using proper methodology and data. Singer et. al. certainly do not belong into that class.
"In regard to (2) I believe that the National Science Foundation, NASA and the NRC might suggest that I am able to understand complex science (to pick but 3)."
In which case I would expect you to bring us a better show than Singer's which every gifted high school student can demask as a fraud. And sometimes even famous and gifted scientists go wrong in their opinnions. How many examples do you want me to give? Your involvement in NSF, NASA etc. says nothing. Your review of Springer, on the other hand speaks volumes.
"And actually, if you read what I wrote, I don't think I denied anything."
I would have to cite Judge Potter Stewart here:
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
In case of your post I would have to say that I think I know FUD when I see it and if someone takes the time trying to defend it (your "reality check"), that defense itself comes awfully close to being FUD itself.
HO. I thought your review was balanced and thought provoking and did not actually espouse a view. Readers should think about that before trashing your character.
Did you actually do a reality check on his "reality check"? Guess not...
Do the words Helicobacter pylori mean anything to you? Clearly there was no way this obscure doctor could have been right in the face of scientific concensus. The brightest minds had already determined this was impossible. Sound familiar?
Science can be wrong, but it takes compelling evidence to show it, especially when you have this kind of data, evidence and consensus you're dealing with. Your argument is almost completely irrelevant. The only conclusion one could draw is that the fewer scientists believe in something, the truer it is likely to be. Ridiculous. If your scientist has a strong observation that is incompatible with the consensus (like with pylori), then fine. If not, I guess you publish novels.
Agreed. I'm going to have to read it again more closely at home, but based on a quick scan, I see no reason to attack HO for writing it.
I want to point out that a 95% chance is not certainty and certainly does not a indicate a scientific fact. Even 95% still yields a one in twenty chance of being wrong. The frustration that I feel comes from the ability of skeptics to misrepresent this uncertainty as an argument for not changing policy. My word, how many problems addresses by the political system have 95% chance of being real and significant, let alone biblical in the severity of their outcome.
Can you substantiate any of your claims of funding denial. I was find that pretty amazing coming from an administration that has been in denial from the beginning and has no intention of doing anything significant about global warming regardless of the outcome of the studies. Their response to the new IPCC studies? Basically, fine, but we aren't going to do anything, including, especially the most obvious, putting caps on emissions.
What evidence can you present regarding your contention that temperatures should be much higher if co2 levels are 50% higher. While co2 levels may be higher, they represent a fairly small percentage of total forcings, therefore, a 50% increase in c02 doesn't represent a 50% increase in total forcings. In addition, since you apparently place a great deal of importance on natural forcings, couldn't it also be that the co2 increases are helping prevent what would otherwise be cooling. I don't believe the latter, but I am just illustrating the implications of what I believe to be your erroneous theory.
You have attacked those who are providing the funding. Please provide documentary evidence that these people are biased and are excluding valid research.
I don't believe there is any damn reason to erroneously prove the existence of man caused global warming. Your offered reason for this is the need to get funding. But the vast majority of scientists are saying this is a settled issue. Why would they do this if they want funding to further study the matter. It is uncertainty, not certainty, that would drive funding.
Climate change scientists should be able to go after you for libel.
Urkkh..
No, on so many counts.
Unless there are negative atmospheric forcings. Which there are (particles, SO2). But their effects will be much less short lived in the atmosphere than GHG effects.
We have excellent models of the positive and negative forcings out there. To the point where the Hansen B Case (1988) of temperature changes 1988- 2003 was so good that the leading critique of him deleted it before taking him on. And Hansen went on to predict, almost exactly, the cooling impact of Mount Pinatubo exploding.
The other (obvious) point made, again and again, is that most of the heating we will experience has yet to happen . We have had only the 0.6 degree C rise-- the vast majority of the rise in temperatures to date has been absorbed by the oceans.
I recommend reading a good textbook on atmospheric science, for example Sir John Houghton Global Warming
http://www.amazon.com/Global-Warming-Complete-John-Houghton/dp/0521528747
So many of the sceptics' objections are addressed in detail in this book.
Usual Denialist screed about scientists are biased, scientists are suppressing the truth, scientists only want more money etc.
The scientific community has been theorising about this since the end of the 19th century, and arguing about it ferociously since the late 1970s.
The reason the scientific community has swung round over the last 15 years is the overwhelming preponderance of data, across many disciplines, is that the planet is warming up. Negative results are published, as are positive ones.
http://192.58.150.33/history/climate/index.html
is a very good hypertext history, I can also recommend the accompanying book.
*and* we have learned that climate changes in history are much faster, and more dramatic, than we previously believed. So we are really playing with fire, conducting this unregulated experiment on the Earth's atmosphere.
CO2 levels are now 50% higher than ever previously observed. If CO2 is the most important warming factor, the expected temperature would be much higher than the mild warming we are now experiencing."
Why? Professional climatologists spend their careers disentangling the multiple physical mechanisms to form quantitative estimates of the resulting change in climate. The current observations agree with the physics thus learned and exemplified in the currently accepted models and parameters. A "wild ass guess" such as the above is not science.
CO2 is the most important warming factor which is a result from human influence and is likely to persist on human generational timescales.
Of course the natural greenhouse effect was here before human civilization, which is preventing the Earth from being a frozen snowball.
Singer is a sceptic, but I believe he has written that the current warming could be caused as much as 50% by human activities.
Isn't the common consensus somewhere near 70%?
But that doesn't matter, what matters is if you accept the physics (which is now very well validated) and any of these numbers, the projection to the future is inevitably far, far stronger and warmer than the current quite small (and not catastrophic) change.
Reasonable projections give a not infinitesimal chance of a 5C warming in a few generations.
This doesn't seem "that bad", but consdier that the depth of the ice age was about 5C colder globally than now. We are talking about hence a Heat Age of equivalent distance from current climate as the Ice Age was from current climate. And the transition will be even faster.
In the Ice Age, the glaciers were two miles thick in New York.
Should we be taking our chances with a Heat Age that big?
First, CO2 levels have been much higher in the past - it's just that they're higher now than they've been for several hundred thousand years. Second, the second sentence above is illogical. Considering the how many factors are involved in climate - including sinks, feedbacks, and forcings - there's no logical reason why the exact CO2 rise we've experienced couldn't have caused the exact temperature rise we've experienced. Whether it does or doesn't account for the rise is work for scientists, not logicians.
I'm no expert on TAR, but IIRC it predicts that a doubling of CO2 from its pre-industrial 280 ppm would lead to a 3- to 5-degrees-centigrade rise in global mean temperature - which is quite in line with what we're observing, considering the considerable time-lag involved with global warming.
HO, what is the 'Labrador field'?
A good post in that we must not blindly accept anything, most especially positions that proclaim to be "science"--they tend to use the term to prop up their own [often] fallacious conclusions. Reality, however, indicates that ol' Fred Singer, his selective data, and his corporate supporters did in fact invoke "science" to prop up their baseless conclusions (not the other way around). One of Fred's--and his subsequent accolytes, including Oregon's "Climate Scientist" George Taylor (what an embroglio!)--favorite things to do is to look back in time, to about 1000 AD, and say: "Look! Climatic variability from something other than CO2! Your argument has thus been devestated." Trouble with this type of logic is that we can look back a little further these days--say, 350,000 years. What do we find when looking back a little further? Climatic variation, to be sure. We also see a strong and simple correlation between temperature increases and atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which obviously belies the complex and dynamic interchanges that occur within the Earth's systemic processes--but the trend is unmistakable (i.e. "strong consensus that CO2 concentrations are linked to climate change"). I'm not a climate scientist, but if the historical data says that CO2 is linked to climatic variation, and the most recent data indicates that CO2 levels are signficantly higher than they ever have been--which can be directly traced to anthropogenic sources (agriculture, fossil fuels, lotsa people breathing--jk on the last one). Am I missing something?
Don't take my word for it though--read the above-linked rebuttals of Singer et al. And, as I cannot pass up a parting shot at the dearly departed Fred Singer Inc., take a look at Singer's bio: he was making similar iconoclastic claims on behalf of cigarette manufacturers in the mid 1990's that berated those silly doctors who thought there was a demonstrable link between cigarette smoke and health problems (the nerve of those doctors!). Fast forward 5 years and he's taking money from big oil, gas, and coal to prove that climatic variation is nothing but natural variation. But this does not detract from his "science"!
Singer never questioned that cigaret smoking is harmful. He did question the science on the risks of second-hand smoke.
You'll have to excuse me for equating cigarette smoke with cigarette smoke, I don't know what I was thinking.
"Singer never questioned that cigaret smoking is harmful." Seth didn't say that. Reread his post.
1. past variation in the Earth's climate does not somehow imply that our activity now is not causing global warming
2. the medieval warm period looks to have been localised in Europe, not to have been global
3. CO2 levels are now at levels not seen for several hundred thousand years. At current rates of growth they will be at levels not seen for several 10s of millions of years.
What do you think will happen when you increase concentrations of an infrared absorbing gas into the atmosphere in those concentrations?
4. it's bollocks to argue we can do nothing. We can do something and the costs are not out of line with the costs of doing nothing. Adapt we will, but by global action to control CO2 emission, we can forestall the worst of events.
It was argued it would be too expensive to phase out CFCs- costs in the billions. We did so, and the rate of depletion of the ozone layer has dropped.
It was argued it was impossible to phase out DDT. We did so, and many threatened bird and animal species have recovered.
It was argued we couldn't do without PCBs, asbestos, lead in petrol. We phased them all out, and our planet and our health is the better for it.
I think I might not have expressed myself well. I hopefully did not say that we can't technically do anything to ameliorate GHG. What I tried to say, and this was quite a common sentiment from speakers at the Conference, is that
a) the costs of doing something (say carbon sequestration as an example) provides a benefit that the average consumer does not see and therefore will not pay for. The current leadership in Washington will not impose the costs needed to fund that program, and thus it won't happen.
b) the world's need for energy will overwhelm the needs to deal with GHG, and the places such as China and India that are expanding are more concerned with providing fuel and power to their people. And if they are providing most of the increase in GHG, so that sequestration in the US and Eastern Europe has no impact, then this will further influence (a).
Yes there have been several successful worldwide campaigns to eliminate disease and environmental nasties, it is just that the implications of this are perhaps too abstract at present for the consumer who will have to pay for this, and the legislators that will mandate it, to take action. And by the time they get around to it, it will be too late. (And if you think that the debate on the causes of GW rouses passions, try denying mothers fuel for their kids in winter).
a. the average consumer doesn't see the benefit of SO2 reduction from power stations. Nor of catalytic convertors. yet he or she pays for it.
If it has to be done, it can be done. A 5 degree centigrade increase in average world temperatures is no longer a remote possibility, and that outcome is one we should do something about.
How many more Katrinas do you think the US will need before the public demands action? How many more January 6ths, where it is 72 degrees in Central Park? How many more droughts?
To name a nation that has denied global warming, but is now waking up to it, Australia. The once in 100 year drought, or maybe the once in 1000 year drought. John Howard is standing there with his jaw open and his foot in it.
Duke Power's CEO, amongst others, has already asked Washington for a clear statement of intent and plans to regulate CO2 emissions.
b. if the US and Europe reduce GHG emissions, then that effort is not wasted.
The logical comparison is Business as Usual v. reduction.
Just because China and India don't reduce, doesn't mean that solution is worse than BAU.
In addition, to persuade China and India to become more efficient in their CO2 emissions, we have to exert moral leadership-- 80% of the CO2 out there is ours, after all. When we move first, we will create the moral and political force which will accelerate their efforts-- note that China has already made energy efficiency a national priority.
We won't easily get to a world of stable CO2 levels of 550ppm. But there is no reason, technologically or economically, why we cannot.
1 the clean air act was passed when the US was considerably more liberal than it is today. In the current era, we will elect, and reelect, a president who trashed the air in his home state by allowing energy companies to write environmental legislation, a policy which he subsequently brought to the white house.
2 catalytic converters benefit those in cities, the group that at one time had sufficient influence to enact environmental legislation. CO2 sequestration benefits everybody on the planet - some much more than others - but costs energy consumers of the given energy producing region significantly.
3 Nuclear power competes closely with coal in cost, but (most) environmentalists that vote against nukes, and therefore for coal, will forever campaign against nukes, and by default for coal. Accordingly, it will be years before a significant number of nukes are contracted for in this country; the consensus, dominated by noisy anti-nukes, will continue voting for the worst co2 emitter known to man. As an aside, the mass of coal wastes is 3x the original mass of the millions of tons of coal, and this waste is spread both regionally and world wide. Nuclear waste could be limited to the minimal mass of non-actinides (all of which could be burned in breeders), and the remaining non-actinide waste would decline to background in a millenium.
Nukes are all very well but only a part of the solution. Sure the US could double its proportion of nuclear energy (from 20% of electricity to 40%) by replacing the existing 84 reactors and building 160 new ones (bigger units, but the power market will also be bigger).
That would reduce US CO2 emissions by c. 10% assuming 100% displacement of coal fired capacity (not gas or wind etc.). Worth having, but not decisive.
Agree about the point about local pollution and costs v. benefits.
I do believe public opinion can change, and can change quite rapidly. Before Katrina and An Inconvenient Truth, there was no hope. Yet now there is a groundswell.
The US may be less liberal, but I don't think it is less environmentally Green, if anything, more so.
Remember the Indian walking up the side of the litter strewn highway, with the tear in his eye? We have not yet had his equivalent for global warming, but I believe we will.
The speakers at the conference do not understand the problem. The issue is not one of getting the consumer to pay for some benefit that they will not see and therefore will not finance.
The problem is that one set of consumers have been "freeriding" on the rest of humanity. This set of privileged consumers have had the benefit of energy consumption without having to pay the true costs of that energy consumption.
The solution to the above is to have the consumer of energy accept the true cost of his/her consumption by pricing the commodity to reflect the true costs of the disutility associated with that commodity.
Unfortunately I have to disagree. The problem is a political one. It goes back to a lot of the discussion we have on Peak Oil. There is a window of time where remedial action must be undertaken, or it will not have enough impact at the point when it is needed.
In both cases we have the problem that the problem is too distanced from the public and political perception. We had the gas prices go up, then a mild winter and, as one of the speakers said "see, we weathered the energy crisis." We had Katrina in 2005, and no hurricanes of that sort in 2006, and "see we weathered the GHG crisis." In both cases that perception is false - your suggestion that we have to make the consumer pay the full cost was brought up at the conference, and shot down as not being realistically achievable.
I hate to sound like an ex-Secretary of Defense, but we live in the world we live in. The speakers did understand the problem, only too well.
Hi Heading Out,
Thanks for your report, and a Q:
"In both cases that perception is false - your suggestion that we have to make the consumer pay the full cost was brought up at the conference, and shot down as not being realistically achievable."
Could you please fill in a little more specifically - who brought this up? Who shot it down?
So, this was an exchange between two people? (Speaker and attendee? Two speakers? Which one(s)?)
From my vantage point, there was little (if any) time or opportunity to have any back-and-forth on any particular topic. For example, if a member of the audience asked a Q, then there was no ability to follow-up with another Q.
Also, just to share my impression...the panels were not organized in a way I've seen: for example: a primary speaker and three respondents, then Q and A for all four. Or something along these lines. Just to say...while valuable at presenting individual views, the overall organization didn't really lend itself to investigating any particular line of thought in much depth. (I'm not saying it fell short of some ideal, just to say...I'm not so sure that addressing particular topics, such as the one you describe, example: "Q: Should the consumer pay full cost? Is this desirable? Is it feasible?" ...was a goal of the organizers.)
And, just to reiterate...there was such a wide variety of opinion, in some ways...to know how someone sees something, requires more time, it seems to me.
In other words, you may be right that "...the speakers understood the problem full well". On the other hand, exactly what each understands...I'm not so sure about. To have a discussion and conversation that leads to some open-ended exploration, on points of philosophy or politics ("What is 'achievable' and what isn't?" "Why do you think it is - or isn't?") and/or action (with the idea of coming up with an action plan) also takes time.
I do agree with your view:
"There is a window of time where remedial action must be undertaken, or it will not have enough impact at the point when it is needed."
It was in one of the Q & A sessions, and one of the members of the audience had said something along the lines of "why not just take all the subsidies from every form of energy, and let the market decide." And one of the speakers I think in the panel that included Michal Moore, but not him, said, that that would be politically impossible, and wouldn't work, but would drive us back into a Depression - but I can't remember who (and not sure I wrote it down at the time - the name that is - I wrote in longhand).
I would have liked (but this is a perpetual gripe) to hear more of what new technologies we might expect to see used in the fossil energy business, and something about algae (given that there are at least 3 projects going that I know of).
HO, I think that this is the crux of the matter.
No matter what share of Global Warming is anthropogenic -- and I think that GHG released by humans is a big share -- what we can and will do about it are quite different stories.
In the USA, in general:
1. We waste enormous resources to continue the Resource War we are now fighting.
2. We refuse to face the need for very significant changes in the way we live.
3. We continue to believe in what E. O. Wilson describes as "Exemptionalism."
We believe that we are exempt from the laws of nature.
Secular Exemptionalists place Techno-magic in the place of the Gods, Goddesses, God, or Force, or Ground of Being, or Whatever....in which religious Exemptionalists place their faith.
I see our USA populace as quite willing to be "intentionally ignorant" rather than to make changes in lifestyle, daily habits, or even assumptions about entitlement to our current way of life as "normal" and something to which we are entitled.
I cannot control the planet, other people, or outcomes.
I can control some of what I do, and I intend to continue to try to live to best effect for the next generation or two.
Even so, I like the occasional pop, glass of wine, or Dorito. Eating Doritos makes little sense to me in terms of working to help our environment. But when I am in the same room with them, I will eat them.
Very few of the things we consume or do every day make sense to me in terms of making the environmment hospitable for the next generation or two
Most of the things we do habitually each day seem to me to contribute to the problems of resource depletion and global warming and geopolitical violence.
We have made ourselves a fine prison, and we are very proud of it, and we won't let any of us escape, even if any of us should be stupid enough to try.
Sorry for the rant. I will now go console myself by fantasizing about those new LED lights.
I am in health care. Daily people are told to stop smoking, lose weight, exercise, etc (to say nothing of alcohol & drug abuse) or we know that their personal risk of heart attack, cancer, stroke, etc will be increased, sometimes over a very short time frame. Same with managing diabetes or other conditions. People will know that they are at high personal risk of blindness, kidney failure, stroke, and yet less than half will get it controlled when all (?) that is required is personal lifestyle changes. Doesn't even depend on anyone else to change.
So, this is human reality. Do we really expect people to change when the threat is distant, abstract, impersonal, and when individual action will accomplish nothing unless everyone else follows? Giving up convenience, habit, pleasured activities is rarely done voluntarily. People can change, but the need has to be immediate, compelling and very personal.
Hi peakearl,
Thanks for your question. It's rhetorical, in a way... and yet at the heart of what we face.
A quick look got me this: http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/HealthIssues/1079981573.html, instead of the article I was looking for...which was about how patients had much higher rates of stopping alcohol abuse when their doctors talked with them personally. Also, a book I've mentioned before, I wonder if you've seen it: The Heart of Addiction: A New Approach to Understanding and Managing Alcoholism and Other Addictive Behaviors by Lance M. Dodes/
So, the need to change has to be
"...immediate, compelling and very personal." Something to contemplate.
Thanks for your thoughts, Aniya. I don't know the specific book, but I am aware of much literature consistent with what you are saying. I personally believe we will not change until the pressure is clearly felt, but I am not an extreme doomer, because I believe people can respond quickly if truly challenged. However, the most vulnerable members of society will suffer a lot, I'm afraid.
Hi Peakearl,
And thanks for responding. I'd be interested in your take on the book, if you get a chance to look at it.
I think peak oil fits these qualifications better than global warming and therefore think it would be better to go light on GW for a while and push peak oil whether or not GW science is absolutely conclusive. Peak oil presents the plausible scenario of drastic economic consequences that could quite possibly develop quickly and soon in a way that even dire GW scenarios won't.
Hi derix,
"Peak oil presents the plausible scenario of drastic economic consequences that could quite possibly develop quickly and soon in a way that even dire GW scenarios won't."
And thus limit the choices that can be made.
I have been doing a Google search to see if anyone has been talking about using 'scrubbed' coal fired generator emissions to feed directly into greenhouses as a way of capturing the CO2 and waste heat in growing plants directly.
A) Have no idea if this has been totally researched and rejected.
B) Also do not know if the metals and sulfur and such can be reduced to the point where they would not directly poison any and all types of plantlife
C) Is it obvious that this method of 'sequestration' could not yield any useful crop or biofuel?
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2006-01-10-algae-powerplants_x.htm
The following article ,which is very negative on coal, does say that most of the other nasties that come out of the stack can be scrubbed out. (mainly not the CO2) I had a job decarbonizing a "scrubber" at a pulp mill once. (probably not the safest thing I've done) Guessing they must use such devices on coal fired plants.
http://www.radioopensource.org/global-warming-coal-its-cheap-and-dirty/
Personally I much favor conservation first and everything else second but if we are likely to burn it anyway......
As a side - instead of a coal plant - has this been looked at for a natural gas fired plant? It still produces CO2 and waste heat, but I would imagine no mercury or most other nasties from coal. It seems feeding the exhaust from natural gas plants would be a very logical place to start.
Good thought.
Isn't 'retrofiting' existing plants (maybe both types) a big part of what we are really saying when we talk about climate change mitigation? (KWh will have to cost more)
Union of Concerened Scientists ,in supporting wind, say 54% of US electricity is currently coal fired. Say what we will about China. I don't know who is dumping more GHG from coal.
I think the US is marginally ahead on coal sourced greenhouse gases
(at least for electric power. China also uses a lot of coal in domestic and industrial heating)
*however*
China will catch up very shortly, if it has not already.
Since the greenhouse gas problem is a stock in the atmosphere problem, we should remember that most greenhouse gases were put there by western activity. I think Europe is 16% of all GHG emissions, but 25% of historic GHG emissions.
It's disheartening to me that HO, who has built so much of value here at theoildrum.com, would use that credibility to play tiddly winks about global warming science. The human link to warming is not a two-sided debate between established scientists. When you look at "both" sides what you are actually doing is comparing an unsavory stew of crackpots, paid denialists, egoists, and fools vs established scientific process stretching decades over the public record of peer-reviewed publications. In short, the result of such a cute approach is intellectual junk and is literally harmful to life on earth.
It never ceases to amaze and horrify that all sorts of individuals who fancy themselves clever are willing to wade into this controversy with nothing more than a notepad and a spreadsheet. Whilst casually playing an ignorance-inspired game of gotcha aimed at world-class career scientists.
All of the issues in "unstoppable hot air" have been seriously studied and discredited yet they still befuddle and impress the amateurs. (I am resisting the urge to detail analogies to this sort of attack of the amateurs, in say, medicine, economics, nation-building, and warfare. HO, I hope you will soon return to matters where you are competent, saving intellectual tourism for those subjects (say pop psychology) that truly warrant a frivolous treatment.
Roy
Er! Not to be too argumentative here, but if you look at what I did, among other things I showed that two virtually consecutive graphs in the IPCC report were inconsistent with one another. That does not take a rocket scientist, or even a tiddley wink player (which is good, 'cos I always lost when I played them) to discern.
So that is quite a feather in your cap apparently! It would be nice to follow up on your claim and see about resolving it. However as you write: "And I read through the first bit (clicking on the Scientific basis button) until I got to the figure that is now known as the hockey stick" is too vague to follow. Can you supply actual sections/links/pages? [For those who haven't looked, the document is subdivided into numerous sections and levels and it is not obvious where HO is referring].
In the absence of practical attribution links, perhaps you could specify precisely the nature of the difference. What records was it based on, what exactly did it purport to measure and how old was the finding. Some of the graph images you posted are too small for the qualifying details to be legible. Likewise: "the world had been getting warmer since 1860", lacks specificity as to earth, air, etc.
The simple fact that two charts done at different times with different methods and different inputs do not agree is of no necessary consequence except for the under-informed who like to play gotcha. Indeed, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to catch a meaningless inconsistency - a child can do that. However, it may take a climate scientist or similar field expert to interpret if the discrepancy is even meaningful, let alone important.
Re tidly winks, I think that pretty much sums up your attitude as I perceive it. ("So it looks as though the IPCC report itself is not self-consistent. So let’s call this a zero for the Mann group") So you are ready to publish yourself claiming that the (whole) report is inconsistent and not even bother to provide clarifying discussion or links.
BTW, did you have any particular angle in mind when you chose to describe the IPCC consensus findings as "ex-Vice President Gore’s perspective"? Same question about "the Mann group"? Both of these constructs are phrased to ring denialist bells.
HO, if you provide more specifics, I will carry the item over to realclimate and you will likely get an expert response (perhaps someone is already doing that).
R
i agree with you that heading out has basically slit the wrists of his creditability on this.
what he did is the same thing faux news does. take a issue, in this case one with vast support and peer reviewed proof on one side, then set up on the same footing the lunatic fringe opposition which has little to no understanding of the science behind the whole situation. then give them equal time when the latter has been so throughly disproved as to not to deserve it.
Well I did give the figure numbers under the figures in question (which are the ones that I showed in the main post- so you don't have to go to the IPCC to read them), but since part of the object of this was to find out why they were different let me go and find them for you (short pause)
Oh, they changed the front page since yesterday, I guess - sorry! The full 2001 report is now found here and the specific graphs I used can be found for figure 2.1 ; figure 2.19 and Fig 2.21 .
I was not trying to get "a feather in my cap" I was just curious to see who might be right. However, since it now turns out that there are two opposing Web sites that discuss this sort of data (so apparently it isn't that "cut and dried") and thanks to sf there is a group that also questions some of these conclusions. How come we don't also ask the folks at Climate Audit ?
As to why I used the "ex VPG" descriptor it just seemed the easiest way to describe it, since it is through his activities that it has got the visibiity it has over the past year, I suspect - and by the way I have read the book and own the DVD.
HO,
Nice post even if I don't agree with it. My first point is that you use references to support your position so I doubt many posters will attack you for idiotic statements!!
My two cents on the whole GW issue is this. The data presented by Singer stays mostly in the modern recorded era of human civilization. This kind of historic data is mostly anectodal from Europe and the northern Eastern Hemisphere backed up with some records of the time. The current debate (and worry) about GW is the global temperature change. Embedded in this small global change will be many local changes of much greater magnitude, both positive and negative.
So just because Europe had mini ice ages and warm spells says nothing about the Global temperature. Unless there are accounts from South America, Africa, North America, Antartica, etc. at the same time, the European data tells us little about the global air temperature. Ditto for the ground temperature - what ground is being measured back 500 years?
I agree with the majority of posters above, that climate scientists have considered just these sorts of skewed data sets and have searched for climate markers that are more useful for tracking (and predicting) global temperature swings. These markers must simultaneously bracket the known climate variation over millions of years plus catch the true outliers when the climate departed from cyclical behavior seen in time spans of 1000's of years, such as human recorded history.
In the parlance of the stock market - CO2 is a leading indicator and we would be smart to take notice of it's divergence from the range of the last few million years.
Thanks, this is actually the type of response that I was hoping to stimulate. Sorry I failed.
You got caught in the crossfire while setting up the target?
Hi Heading Out,
Thanks and I'm wondering, when you say "...actually the type of response that I was hoping to stimulate." - could you elaborate? I was reading over your intro and I realize I (honestly) didn't understand what you wanted.
And when you say "Sorry I failed." Do you mean this ironically? So, it's not like you "failed", it's like we (here) failed you?
I read over your intro again, and it seems you're most concerned about the immediacy of the problem, and concerned that others don't see this and action won't be taken soon enough. (Did I get that much?) Is this your main concern?
And was your post on the book meant to illustrate...a type of intellectual exercise you refer to below? (Or, something else?) (Were you using the book as an example you see as actually not very useful?)
What is it you did want or were wanting from us?
Re: "...no-one in the entire conference, that I heard, talked about mandating speed limits again, as was done in the 70’s."
1) As far as I understood it, the conference didn't have a goal of involving people in a discussion about formulating an energy policy. Or did they? (I , for one, am all in favor of mandating speed limits, for example.)
2) Just to say...if you mean speakers...were they asked to address their solutions as part of their talks?
3) As a member of the audience, I wasn't asked, nor given time to present my thoughts. (I would have enjoyed doing this.)
Re: "So that’s my opinion, I don’t really think that most of the audience grasped the immediacy of the problem,..."
1) Yes, perhaps. On one hand, it's hard to generalize, because the conference wasn't set up with the goals actually laid out. (Was it?) Like...personally, I'd like to see a conference (for example) where we say "Okay, the goal is to define the scope and urgency of the problem, then to propose political solutions, discuss them, and come to some consensus." (That might be one conference.) But this wasn't the goal, as I understood it...
2) OTOH, I did see people really grappling with the problem (from the audience point of view).
3) Also, was there any opportunity for the speakers to say "This is urgent, do you get it? And here's what I want you/us to do..." And actually elicit feedback and possible cooperation or questions?
Re: "...nor did some of the speakers. It was as though it was a nice intellectual exercise, without the reality of the physical impact that is going to happen."
-- Do you have certain speakers in mind? (for each category?)
So, in general, what I hear is a frustration here (perhaps you feel), a need for more immediate action, and less "intellectual exercise".
My Qs:
1) What do you suggest? (Yes, the problem is urgent. Agreed.) What should we do?
2) Can TOD facilitate this, do you think?
3) If so, how?
4) I'm offering to help.
Well, bear in mind that in this issue I am much closer to John Q public that an expert - here is what I thought might, ideally, happen. I read this book that has a relatively legitimate sounding thesis in antithesis to the current popular theories. I figure that most readers of this site are like me, vaguely curious and relatively naive about this particular topic, and so I thought I would do a book review, and normally when this happens we get technical answers as to why the book is wrong. In fact, as you may note from another comment, I was promised one for this. Well before I posted it I sent it out for review, and as the post explained, got a very non-traditional response. Well I am still not aware of the strengths of the two arguments (to give a viewpoint in contrast to the way that Singer has been ad hominemed from the other side I was not sure what a "six degrees of freedom" from Dr Mann search might reveal about the IPCC panel) so I wanted to run a quick test to see if things were as obviously cut and dried as my correspondent had said. The check - which I described, seemed to suggest that the book had some legitimacy, and so I went ahead with the post.
And no, I was really serious when I said I was sorry it failed, because the people that I was hoping would be able, relatively easily, to explain why Singer was wrong, in large measure chose not too. Saying that this was all old hat is none convincing, saying that the DO curve is being generated in a different way, and that the rate changes are faster is. (At least when backed up with a reference, as I try to do).
In regard to speed limits, this was something I sounded off about some time ago - this is doable conservation - but in a conference where one of the senses I initially got was that we are really starting to see a move toward conservation (until the guy from the back pointed out that Amory Lovins speech had been given on a much earlier occasion) no-one talked about it, and I put that in as a marker that to convey the sense that this is still almost an academic discussion, rather than one that is really serious about finding answers.
I think that it was the recounting of the Hansen lecture that caught my attention most about GHG. I think, like most people, you have this way of thinking about the problem as one that is slowly evolving. But apparently it will not be slow. Now I did think that his story of the ice shelf failing was 800 years ago, as I thought I heard it, and since this tied in with the Singer theory (bear in mind I was still naive at that point) I suddenly realized that this will likely not be a smooth transition, and that it is likely to occur a lot sooner than we now (the general public that is) anticipate. Telling me that the world will be 2 degrees warmer in a hundred years does not get me excited - 'cos I'll be dead. (I know the numbers don't say that but you understand the sentiment).
Whether it was 800 years ago or 8,000 however, if the events are going to be that catastrophic, and as we have seen even if it only generated one large tsunami down the East Coast it will cause horrendous damage - the past is prologue. If we are getting close to the same conditions that existed the last time around shouldn't we be looking at what this can mean, from the physical evidence.
And so if I were to try to get folks attention I would focus more on what actually happened back then. I worry about just using models to try and educate the public because, for example with VP Gore's book, if he makes a big thing about changeable weather, right after Katrina, and then we have a year with no problem, then the whole alarm gets thrown away with the "see, we survived that."
I remember watching a projection on one of the New York stations last year as to what would happen if a Katrina hit New York, and it left a big impression. Visualizations like that, tying actual events into current situations as illustration have much more power in convincing individuals that just graphs. (Which is why, among other things I am learning to use 3-D models which include avatars that I can put into different situations).
Well I'll trog back to the newer site and leave a note about this comment - hoped it helped.
Hi Heading Out,
Thanks for responding. Just one quick reply for now, and I'll try to pick up the conversation under your most recent post.
re: When you write: "I think, like most people, you have this way of thinking about the problem as one that is slowly evolving."
1) No, this isn't my view. I do accept discontinuities and rapid change as quite entirely possible.
re: "If we are getting close to the same conditions that existed the last time around shouldn't we be looking at what this can mean, from the physical evidence."
1) Yes, agreed.
re: When you write: "In regard to speed limits, this was something I sounded off about some time ago - this is doable conservation - but in a conference where one of the senses I initially got was that we are really starting to see a move toward conservation (until the guy from the back pointed out that Amory Lovins speech had been given on a much earlier occasion) no-one talked about it, and I put that in as a marker that to convey the sense that this is still almost an academic discussion, rather than one that is really serious about finding answers."
This is what I'm attempting to respond to. I'd like to try again:
1) "...this is still almost an academic discussion, rather than one that is really serious about finding answers."
a) Do you mean "almost an academic discussion" *at this particular conference*? Or, do you mean in general? Or, do you mean that a few/some/all of the speakers/audience were "not really serious"? Or, do you mean me, personally? (I don't think so, just covering all the bases...:)) Or, TOD - in part, total? (i.e., Who are you talking about?)
2) "...one that is really serious about finding answers."
I see both CC and "peak oil" as serious - extremely and of the utmost of serious issues. I share your view that "peak" is the more immediate problem, because, for one thing, it spells to me economic contraction, hence fewwer resources available to deal with CC.
Okay, Agreed so far?
Then, my questions are:
Yes, peak oil is a serious problem - of the utmost seriousness.
Yes, agreed: 55 mph speed limit is important. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that any legislative proposal that does not include an explanation, together with this, is unethical, really.
Yes, agreed: it is a "political problem", in the sense we need Jeffrey's "ELP"
for -- individuals, communities, US *national energy policy, and *the entire world.
Yes, agreed, Urgent action is required.
OK: Questions to you:
What do you suggest we do?
Can TOD facilitate this urgent need for actual action in the real world?
If so, how?
I have ideas and I would like to hear yours.
What do you suggest we do?
Can TOD facilitate this urgent need for actual action in the real world?
If so, how?
I have ideas and I would like to hear yours.
http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2006-05a.htm
A good step in the right direction (US oil use -10% in ten to twelve years) that will lead almost automatically to larger savings in later years, both in oil use and low energy Urban Form.
Best Hopes,
Alan
HO, for a book that somewhat does what you are wanting to do, may I recommend
Climate Crash by John Cox.
...we get technical answers as to why the book is wrong...to explain why Singer was wrong, in large measure chose not too
I was so impressed with the following analysis posted in this thread that I bookmarked it (for future use against GW deniers). It mentioned data, with related analysis that I was aware of but had NOT "connected the dots on".
BTW, I am not I figure that most readers of this site are like me, vaguely curious and relatively naive about this particular topic. I have been following this debate for almost 3 decades and became convinced of the broad thrust of GW about 2 decades ago.
I also thought I added something to the debate showing that the existance of a natural warming trend did not ipso facto, invalidate man-made GW. This is NOT a "thesis - antithesis" issue as you posited. Man-made GW is real and provable (see above). If the currently weak theory of natural GW is also "likely true", then we must take desperate measures to keep from "boiling the planet". Both can be true (although natural warming is almost certainly the smaller effect since we seen to be "out of range" for what is known of recent natural warming periods).
And, yes, I would gladly pay double my $35/month gas & electric bill to reduce GW. (See I conserved, so I can afford to :-)
Best Hopes,
Alan
HO - as you know I've been grappling with global warming issues this past week, not least the fact that opinion seems to be divided into two camps - those who see recent documented warming as part of a natural cycle and those who wish to explain everything by human made climate forcing (net effect of burning fossil fuels).
In the newly published IPCC summary report, I sense movement on the part of the climate scientists who say:
Therefore I think what new account says further up the thread is a pretty fare account of the IPCC view:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2266#comment-159017
I have one issue with your post where I'd appreciate some clarification:
Well I'm afraid this is very refutable. There is as far as I'm aware a very solid consensus view on Pliestocene Ice Ages which is that they are caused by orbital or Milankovitch cycles and have very little / nothing to do with solar cycles:
There are three main orbital cycles:
Figure 9. Precession, one of three orbital cycles.
These orbital cycles, also known as Milankovitch cycles, are believed to play a significant roll in moderating the Pliestocene ice ages (Figure 10). However, the duration of these cycles is too long to account for any of the rapid warming that the Earth currently appears to be experiencing.
Figure 10. Cyclic variations in tempertaure and CO2 over the past 400,000 years based on ice core data from Vostok, Antarctica. It is important to note that fluctuations in CO2 are brought about by temperature change - higher tempeature resulting in higher CO2, although rising CO2 will then provide a positive feed back loop to rising temperature. Also note that recent rise in CO2 to 370 ppm appears as a vertical red line to the right of the chart! Click to enlarge.
The cause of "proper" ice ages is not to be confused with the cause of The Little Ice Age. There seems to be a broad consensus that the Little Ice Age (circa 1400 to 1800) was at least in part caused by solar cycles (see IPCC quote). So IMO clear differentiation needs to be made between orbital and solar cycles and proper ice ages and the Little Ice Age that was a relatively minor cooling event.
To conclude I have two questions:
What is the exact nature of the evidence presented by Singer and Avery?
What is the nature of what they are recording and how reliable do you think this evidence is?
And secondly - when you say:
can you say what the sea level rise has been in the last 2000 or so years (I don't know the answer) - but what I do know is that in addition to sea level going up and down (eusatatic changes) that the land can also go up or down as a result of tectonic processes - so I'm left wondering if on this local scale whether or not your initial appraisal may not have been right?
I think you should put that up as a post, since it is useful, and might otherwise get lost in the noise down here at the bottom.
It's a kind of obvious point that much of the Mediterranean is tectonically unstable.
Think Pompei? Etna?
There are any number of earthquakes recorded both in classical and modern times.
So the obvious answer is that Sardinia has fallen due to tectonic activity.
A related point is the Mediterranean itself. I forget the exact date, but it only became a sea in the last 20,000 years or so (possibly the Black Sea breaking into the Med is remembered as the Flood in the story of Noah-- stories of a Flood are widespread in the ancient religions of the Near East see Gilgamesh). I'm not sure what the sea level changes have been more recently.
The Med is a very old remnant sea, as is the Black Sea and Caspian Sea.
It periodically dried out.
It took its current form when the Atlantic surged through the Straights of Gibraltar.
The Black sea took a similar rapid surge from the Med. Thereby filling up to current MSL.
Probably explains Noah's flood and the flood myths all around the fertile crescent and Med.
It may also go some way to explain the Atlantis Myth.
Melting Ice from the last glaciation played a part.
Bits of the Med are subsiding, bits of the Med (eg:the Roman port of Ostea) are rising, currently at 20 feet above MSL.
The Med is a very tectonically active region.
As Africa pushes north, one day , it may disappear.
But that will not be our concern...
"possibly the Black Sea breaking into the Med is remembered as the Flood in the story of Noah"
It was obviously the Med 'breaking into' the Black Sea, which was very possibly a freshwater lake some 300 feet below current sea level. Probably happened at the tail-end of the last major ice-age.
I'm not 100% sure of my facts here but I think that sealevel rise since Roman times is negligible and the drowning of ancient Mediterranean cities is more likely due to localised teconic movements.
The Mediterranean, Black Sea and Caspian are all in a way remnants of a once mighty Ocean called Tethys that lay between Africa and Europe. Owing to plate tectonic movements, this ocean has been subducted and closed resulting in a 2 continent collision between Africa and Europe - the result is the Alps.
I'm not sure about land bridges at Gibralter and Bosphorus.
I suspect, but am not certain, that the cause of HO's observation is hydroisostatic rebound - after the last glacial maximum sea level rose by 400 feet roughly to Holocene levels as your graph shows. That places additional water weight on continental shelves, which subsequently sink slightly into the mantle in response, meaning that the local sea level may increase slowly further. Obviously it's a complicated thing because there's ice sheets melting (reducing the load on parts of the continents and allowing them to slowly rebound - isostatic rebound), and also the extra weight of water on continental shelves, in addition to ongoing tectonic processes. These adjustments from the LGM are ongoing. Where I grew up (in the Northwest of the UK) there is the same situation - there are forests and Medieval settlements under the sandbanks off the very flat coast. However, there could be some sea level fluctuations from holocene climate fluctuations also. The Wikipedia estimates about 1m of rise between 1000BC and 0AD:
I looked at your graph there and it seems like increases in global temperature cause more CO2 to appear. Solubility of gases in water decreases as the temperature of water rises, therefore the oceans release more CO2 as their temperature rises (for whatever reason it is rising). The extra spike at the end there is certainly man-made but the CO2 spike is not causing the temperature to rise it's the temperature rising that caused the historical CO2 spike. Please tell me the global warming evidence relies on more than this.
I hope HO and others respond to your comment, an excellent observation. Also, its worth noting that, in the absence of higher co2, the world would be on its way back down towards another ice age, albeit slowly. I also read somewher that the little ice age is more typical of the current epoch, and that the warming period since is a pleasant but unusually warm interlude. Maybe we want more co2 than we had pre1800, even if maybe not as much as we now have.
That actually is another chapter of the book, the "which is the cause and which is the effect", and there were other issues as well, apparently under different conditions the cloud patterns and types change, with consequent change in reflectivity - I just thought that this example would work. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though many folk are looking at what I did, rather they argue set positions. Pity really.
Solubility of gases in water decreases as the temperature of water rises, therefore the oceans release more CO2 as their temperature rises
It doesn't quite work that way because the ocean is undersaturated with respect to CO2 but in equilibrium (over a long time scale) with the atmosphere. As a gross simplification, when the atmospheric CO2 concentration goes up, the ocean absorbs more. And it gets a little more acidic...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/attribution-of-20t...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13
Again - not 100% sure of my facts here but in relation to the capacity of the oceans to remove CO2 the following needs to be taken into account:
1. There are two components to the process of removal - solubility of CO2 at the ocean surface and removal of that CO2 by algae and other organisms (which die and sink to the seabed where they become part of the sediment)
2. The solubility of CO2 in water does drop with rising temperature (I think).
3. More important, marine organisms that are effective at removing the disolved CO2 prefer cold water. So when you see beautiful clear tropical water it is because it is devoid of useful life forms.
4. The oceans have enormous capacity to remove CO2, however, this is largely irrelevant because ocean water is stratified and it has been learned that there is a very long mixing time between the upper (very thin) layers and deep ocean water. Warm water is less dense - and floats - so what appears to be happening as oceans warm (which they are doing) is that a stable surface layer about 100 m thick forms. This becomes saturated with CO2 and doesn't mix with the underlying water.
The capacity of the oceans to remove CO2, therefore, is significantly lower than was believed to be the case a few decades ago.
These comments are based on Lovelock - The Revenge of Gaia. Lovelock, incidently, believes that the Earth system is much happier and stable in its cold state - oceans teaming with life and lots of ice at the poles.
One poster on RealClimate.org (comment #17) perfectly nailed it and offered this minimal framework for any "alternate theory" that are challenging the GHG theory to be taken seriously, I quote:
Consequently, before echoing any "alternate theories", we should check that the four observations above are being predicted (and not just a global mean temperature increasing). This is very important to take time to understand this scientific process. Any competitive theory has to meet at least the above requirements that the CO2 theory is predicting accurately!
There is great synergism between the problem of Global Warming and Peak Oil. The end result of both of them is that energy is going to become much more expensive in the future. We as a civilization are going to have to get away from the use of oxidation to create energy. A transition to the future energy economy is going to require a huge investment on every level, and yes a cultural transition also.
We as humans have done this many times in the past, but not on such a large scale. The up side is that this doesn’t have to be done all at once. Don’t panic just yet! Our ancestors survived ice ages, volcanoes, floods, and asteroid impacts, so that we can watch flat screen TV’s!
Hello HO,
Thxs for this keypost.
http://www.semparpac.org/tsunami.jpg
Our best hope is to make PO + GW Outreach universal so people can choose an alternative path.
Otherwise, a tsunami from a massive methane clathrate burp taking out most of the West Coast would still not pry the Soccer Mom's fingers from her SUV. She will be easily convinced by TPTB to proudly drive her teenage offspring down to the military draft office in exchange for a bumper sticker.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
When I post stories on The Oil Drum, I feel that I represent The Oil Drum. So, I do my utmost to be familiar with my subject. Sometimes, I make mistakes.
I was the one who said I would issue a lengthy rebuttal — not to HO, but to people like Fred Singer. I'm not going to bother to do that today, or ever. The climate science is compelling and the "debate" is now closed, in my book. The causes are anthropogenic and the basic physics of putting CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has been known since Svante Arrhenius, although he calculated the climate sensitivity incorrectly according to modern climate science.
Now, we need to figure out what to do about it as peak oil draws near. It seems pretty clear to me, on both counts, that all human societies need to become less based on consumption of fossil fuels. This is the common theme the two subjects share.
I guess that's all I have to say.
I see it as a 2 phase process (or many phased):
- now to 2050 or so (now to 500-550ppm CO2) it's about finding clever ways to keep burning fossil fuels, that do less harm to the environment *and* crafting new solutions (wind, solar, wave, geothermal, AN other technology etc.)
The big key will be energy storage (as always). Oil's salient virtue is that it stores energy well and compactly.
- 2050 and beyond. Phasing out fossil fuels entirely.
I am a techno-optimist. If we can get through the next 44 years without completely effing the planet, then I am confident we can solve the challenges of the subsequent 150 years.
Don't bother with replying to anything S. Fred Singer writes - he is a person I personally know who was involved in denying the link between CFCs and ozone depletion - as he tirelessly repeated, (paraphrasing here), because his science was better than that biased garbage being thrown around by poorly informed people with an agenda, who weren't even being paid nearly as well as he was for just providing his objective opinion. But since the ozone 'controversy' ended before the World Wide Web came into existence, you don't find much about it - though the link at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._Fred_Singer should give you a fine feel for his ethics and scientific credibility in terms of his interests, though in fairness, he is actually a hard scientist. But as further noted in the link, he did simply make up data to bolster his argument - 'Singer has also claimed that most glaciers are advancing, a claim widely publicised by David Bellamy as evidence against global warming. In fact, the vast majority of glaciers have been retreating since 1850. Singer's stated source is an unspecified 1989 article in Science. A search by George Monbiot found no such article to exist.' Not to criticize the long suffering TOD staff, but Heading Out should have spent a minute or two at Wikipedia before automatically granting Singer a free pass - making up data is a mortal sin, along with plagiarism, in the academic world, and Singer has not shied away from committing it. (He does a fine dance about how he doesn't get money from various industries - his foundation, which pays his salary, does, but he doesn't - which should shut all those nagging critics right up about his righteousness.)
Truly, don't waste your time - you might as well write letters to ExxonMobil's CEO for all the good it will do, since he is likely to have more influence on Singer than any abstract principle of scientific inquiry.
FWIW, HO was specifically provided with the Wiki biography of Singer before he made his post, but apparently still considers the book worth reviewing.
Oh. Well, it is hard to imagine just how truly committed Singer is, though that commitment has little to do with what most reasonable people consider science.
From the main post
This is a real and serious crisis. The reports I gave from the conference (and there were readers there who can correct my mistakes) tried to reflect, outside my opinions, what was said. The community that reads this site is better served by that approach, and by open discussion.
So the fact that Singer spent a long time arguing that cigarettes don't cause lung cancer, and then many years arguing that CFCs don't cause the ozone hole has no impact on whether he is worth your/our time on global warming? Suppose he had a past history of advocating that the earth was flat? The moon made of green cheese? That the CIA was communicating to him via the fillings in his teeth? Would we still be required to spend many hours patiently rebutting whatever plausible sounding but disingenuous arguments he came up with? Or does there come a point where we recognize that certain people are not rational and/or not sincere in their desire to attain truth and we start to ignore them.
Please read some of S. Fred Singer's own writing about ozone depletion at the link below before accusing anyone of making an ad-hominem attack.
He has a long paper trail, and if he is the same man he was in 1990, he is very, very proud of his work - he is not a hypocrite, he really does seem to believe what he writes. However, his own belief in himself is not the same as science.
It should be added in terms of ad hominem attacks, I actually knew S. Fred Singer in the later 1980s, and my somewhat flippant paraphrasing is based on actual interaction with him, over a period of years. I was also quite aware of his increasing financial security, and access to power during that time period, having seen how it happened (DC is not a pretty place for anyone who believes in idealism) - and no, he didn't exactly show me his cancelled checks (though when he attracted funding, it was generally worth at least a press release - you know the joke about the difference between university presidents and prostitutes? - there are some things a prostitute won't do for money), but he was not embarassed at raising his standard of living quite beyond that of his academic peers. It was a public display of just how good his science was, after all.
I admit to some strange tastes - I kept looking, and found a nicely organized listing from http://www.sepp.org/key%20issues/ozone/ozone.html , which you will notice peters out around 1998 - after all, ozone research has had an additional 10 years to pretty convincingly answer most of S. Fred Singer's questions.
But the real gem was this, from 1994, titled 'CFC POLICY: WILL IT LEAD TO CONTROLS ON ENERGY?
lecture by S. Fred Singer
Accuracy in Media Conference, McLean VA, September 24, 1994'
...'CFC Policy is a Blueprint for Control of Energy Use
The real reason for attacking the present CFC policy is not just to demonstrate how science has been ignored, perverted, misused, and otherwise manhandled, but to avoid having this sad episode repeated for other issues on the international eco- activists' agenda.
The most prominent issue now is the specter of a greenhouse warming calamity. It drove President George Bush--under pressure from his EPA chief William Reilly in an election year--to sign the Global Climate Treaty at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Goaded into demonstrating environmental "leadership," the U.S. then became the fourth nation to ratify the treaty, right after Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the Marshall Islands. The Clinton- Gore Administration followed up in October 1993 with its Climate Change Action Plan to keep carbon dioxide emissions for the year 2000 at the 1990 level--knowing full well that this public relations exercise could only slow the ongoing increase of atmospheric CO2 and delay any putative warming by a few years.
But more reprehensible than the cynicism of the White House is the politically driven distortion of scientific information in the current push to reduce CO2 emissions further--by up to 60 percent!- -to achieve the activists' goal of no further increase in carbon dioxide by clamping controls on the burning of energy fuels. A recent example is a September 15 press release, issued by the leadership of the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which not only misrepresents the underlying scientific report but invents conclusions that are not even in the report. By exaggerating the risk of climate change and raising public fears about hypothetical disasters, the authors of the press release betray the integrity of the many honest scientists who contributed to the IPCC climate studies yet do not share such apocalyptic visions....
...The sole reason for the distortion, I suspect, is to satisfy ideological objectives of constraining the use of energy and thereby stopping economic growth. The cost of such actions, in terms of human misery throughout the world, is beyond measure. But this matter seems of little concern to the activist elites that are demanding drastic reductions in energy development.'
http://www.sepp.org/key%20issues/ozone/cfcpol.html
As you can see, even in 1994, S. Fred Singer was very concerned about how controlling CFCs could become the wedge to deprive Americans of their right to burn fossil fuels while fueling the profits of fossil fuel companies.
For those who think that Americans simply ignored reality, understand that people like S. Fred Singer get invited to cozy chats with Senators and Representatives, not some researcher with 15 years experience measuring ice accumulation in Antartica, or some Swiss engineer who is intimately familiar with melting glaciers, or the satellite imagery specialist determining the melt water rate and movement of glaciers in Greenland. After all, Singer is a scientist, and those other people are just eco-activist frauds, who can't even afford to look good in a nice suit.
I forgot just how disgusting some of this stuff was. And remember, this is 1994. Read it all, to get a feel for a well funded public policy debate. And remember, this is not science, this is hardball politics pretending to be scientific while writing things like ' It is interesting to watch the proponents of the ozone-CFC theory squirm when under scientific attack.' As noted, his ozone related material peters out by 1998 - Singer doesn't squirm, he merely slinks away, in a puff of tobacco smoke, to the next debate requiring his rigorous scientific defense - from those activist lung cancer victims, who were also against unrestricted growth - that being the definition of cancer.
Yikes. o_O
Dear Mr. Cohen,
I hope you do make that post and that we continue to bring the evidence forward to be independently judged. Maybe the case is closed, although I don’t believe 95% certainty constitutes a scientific fact. I have been working as an activist on global warming for several years and I am convinced the world is better off with Florida and the Outer Banks of North Carolina above water. My disappointment with this current discussion is the complete absence of mention that climate is a wildly non-linear response system. This non-linearity is the reason I believe sane scientists can still argue about other mechanisms that could potentially cause planetary warming.
HO mislead us a little, as he suggested he would address abrupt climate change such as DO (Dansgaard/Oeschger) events, in which temperatures at the Greenland Summit have risen more than 20 degrees in a few years
Fine post, HO!
I agree that we need to review and talk about various viewpoints regarding PO and GW.
I have pretty strong opinions about both, but I feel like a good look at views divergent from my own will test my own viewpoint and perhaps help me communicate with others as well.
So, good job!
Yes, you stirred things up a bit, but there we go.
In a world of viral marketing and Stink Tanks masquerading as Think Tanks, things can get a bit dicy in these conversations.
You took a risk. Thanks!
There is a wonderful media studies history to be written about the global warming Denialist movement.
The tactics have been incredibly professional, the message well pitched and tuned.
Even now we haven't put a stake through that particular vampire's heart.
Even now, when the clear agenda of the world has moved on to doing something, we are still fighting this horrific, bloody rearguard action against well primed denial, informed by bogus analysis, propaganda and carefully shaded half truths.
I would worry less if it mattered less. Since we are, quite literally, gambling with the future of the planet, I cannot find it in myself to take my usual detached cynicism.
It was easier to watch them promise to unearth Weapons of Mass Destruction and links to Al Quaida. All that was going to happen then was a bunch of American and British kids from mostly working class families were going to get blown up, and a bunch of faceless Arabs too, of obscure religious sects called 'Sunni' and 'Shia'. I mean who gave an eff, really?
It made for quite entertaining TV, all told. Especially on Fox. Go and kill all the effers, and let G-d sort them out.
One of my long-term interests is in the "meta" issue of the best way to come to conclusions in areas of controversy. Unfortunately it has become clear to me that the methodology preferred by most participants on this site, personally studying the issue, is extremely unreliable and is unlikely to lead you to a correct conclusion.
HO's post is a good example. He has made a good faith effort to study this issue, he happened on a book which presents a challenge to the scientific orthodoxy, and he found it persuasive. He checked some facts in the conventional explanation and found discrepancies. To him, the challenge looks good and the conventional explanation is questionable.
The problem in all this is that the methodology is completely inadequate to the problem. Climate scientists spend their entire working lives studying these issues. They have far more information at their disposal than any lay person can achieve with the amount of study which HO put into it. They further are aided by an infrastructure, the scientific method, which encourages detection and correction of errors.
And despite claims to the contrary, the overwhelming scientific consensus is in favor of the conventional wisdom. There is no serious controversy within the field. Yes, there are a few mavericks, and of course there are still unanswered questions, but the main concepts about the important role of human activity in climate change are only becoming better established.
In virtually every case, a better methodology to learn about an issue than trying to study it and think for yourself is simply to adopt the scientific consensus. Our society spends considerable money supporting researchers, and it is a great waste not to take advantage of all these brilliant minds putting so much effort into understanding the world. Putting your own limited information and judgment ahead of the scientific consensus is foolhardy.
Probably most people agree so far, but IMO the issue hits hard against many Peak Oil models as well. So far as I know there is no academic consensus in favor of any of the more severe Peak Oil scenarios. No academic research finds that oil production has probably already permanently peaked, as many PO believers claim. No peer reviewed journals of resource economics promote any such view. And it is certainly not the consensus of resource economists.
So who is right, a bunch of amateurs who have studied the limited information on their own, who take pride in thinking for themselves? Or the mainstream consensus which says that oil is getting harder to find but that any crisis is still many years or decades away? Look at Heading Out's unfortunate failure to understand global warming as a cautionary tale. The same mistake is IMO lurking at the very foundations of the scenarios advanced by this site.
Thinking for yourself is usually an enormous mistake. If you can, let other, smarter and more motivated people think for you. It's the best use of your limited resources.
Re: bunch of amateurs
Yours is the comment I was expecting. I'll put my analysis of the future oil supply up against anyone's in the business. Anyone. This concern does not keep me up nights, believe me. I am constantly questioning my assumptions. Thus, we move forward.
You should be ashamed of what you just wrote.
You should be ashamed of what you just wrote.
Why? It may be uncomfortable but it is true. Amateur scientists are virtually always wrong when they conflict with the mainstream of professional ones.
No matter what amateurs might think about cardiology, actual cardiologists and the stream of mainstream scientific thought on that subject are very profoundly more right than amateurs.
Also the issue is global warming and climatology; the climate scientists are not, by contrast as accomplished experts on resource bases, but this is only secondary to their point as they model significant unknowns in future human emissions.
I am a physicist myself, and I might also just understand enough about climate to misunderstand if I were so inclined. Nevertheless I belay my own judgement and intuition versus that of actual climate scientists if they come in conflict. As it turns out, my own opinion is that nothing I've seen among climate science now leads me to any doubt about the truthfulness of the scientifically accepted position.
My experience: The more I look the more I see that an enormous possible range of potentially confounding factors, including many I would have never imagined, have already been considered and investigated thoroughly. The scientists have already had their own reasoned internal debate and skepticism, and answered it with science and data, years to decades before the issue is in the mainstream media. My confidence that this is very serious and well done science grows, along with the very strong experimental evidence.
Wow, you sure are smart. So smart, in fact, that you managed to miss my point entirely.
OK, sorry about that. I think other could have misinterpreted what you said in the same way that I did.
What was your point?
I now realize I completely muffed my attributions and misunderstood who said what. Very sorry, Mr Cohen. Assume anything I wrote was directed at denialists and not you.
"You should be ashamed of what you just wrote."
Here's the bottom line - Time Will Tell.
It may not be surprising that when I make a very infrequent scan of TOD I agree with dissenting posts like Halfin's. I think that's because I see TOD more now as an evolving sub-culture, with evolving cultural values and beliefs. Some of those beliefs may provide accurate predictions, but time will tell.
Maybe it's just my perspective, but I see the thrust of your article more about how to translate GW into the TOD culture, rather than a broad survey of the external world-knowledge on global warming.
Who is doing the thinking for you? And why isn't that person posting instead of you?
I have been critical of HO in this thread but wish to defend him here. Halfin states:
To describe this as some form of personal failing on the part of HO is, I believe, unfair to HO. Peak Oil is a challenge as we have to stretch to understand the degree to which our civilization has been erected on a fountain of cheap, inexhaustible, non-renewable energy.
AGW is a further stretch as we have to gain an understanding of the degree to which that same energy flow has served to modify an entity that we percieve as near infinite and immutable.
Where the post falls down is not in a personal failure of understanding as we are all guilty of that - it is the way we learn - but that the post moves away from fact based evidentiary arguement and supplants this with an anecdotal review that results in a mis-stating of key issues and framework associated with the scientific endevour.
"He has made a good faith effort to study this issue, he happened on a book which presents a challenge to the scientific orthodoxy, and he found it persuasive. He checked some facts in the conventional explanation and found discrepancies. To him, the challenge looks good and the conventional explanation is questionable."
I doubt very much that HO made a good faith effort. Singer is easily identified as a fraud. I would expect a gifted high school student to be able to do a simple background check on the internet to find out where the "science" of Singer et. al. originates. HO claims to be a scientist. As such he knows that, with the exception of peer reviewed sections of science text books, books are not a source of useful science information. I can go home now, write a book about why the earth has to be flat and publish tomorrow. I can even sell a million copies because of the funny title and cover of my book and none of that would validate my opinnion expressed in that book. This one says it all, look it up. HO should have looked at it, too:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=S._Fred_Singer#Published_Work...
Now, to your criticism of PO. PO is in no way close to climate science. For one thing the data climate scientists use is noisy. The data people use to estimate the timing of the peak is fraudulent. We can always increase the precision of our climate data by throwing more money at it. We will have a hard time getting all relevant information for PO from the major players, no matter how much money we could spend. Actually, this is not true, all we have to do is to buy all the oil that is still in the ground and we will know pretty well how much was left at any given time.
Now, no one in their right mind mistakes PO models for a theory of equal scientific value and quality as climate science. On the other hand, also no one in their right mind denies that PO is happening. The question if it has already happened or if we are looking at five years of very modest increases in world oil production is completely secondary on all levels. Responsible nations (like the Europeans) have begun mitigation of PO a long time ago. In the US any political structures which could do something similar are absent on the federal level, therefor the question of mitigation by any means other than the markets is fairly irrelevant.
HO's failure to check what he was writing about is fundamentally the mistake of a single individual. PO, on the other hand, is an obeservable phenomenon that everyone, even you, can follow without the need of any science. All you have to do is to wait. In my personal opinnion, you won't have to wait very long. The most you or I have to gain from discussing it is a "told you so" moment. I am looking forward to calling you to say "Told you so!".
He did; he wrestled with this for days.
He has more soul and intellect is his pinky than...ah, you're not worth my time. Go elsewhere and spout your drivel.
I strongly object to this PG. HO has chosen to post about something where his understanding is obviously not very deep, and it's predictable that people will point that out. I strongly support their right to do this (as I also supported HOs right to publish his thoughts, notwithstanding my low opinion of their quality). I think as an editor "Go elsewhere and spout your drivel" are inappropriate to this commenter.
Stuart - Thank you for posting this. I was composing my own response and did not see yours.
My posting objected to the nature of Prof Goose's post but I also wish to act affirmatively and lend my voice to your statement regarding the comment as being inappropriate to IP. IP is not afraid to challenge bad thinking (including my own) and I respect him both for that and for his willingness to present science to those who would prefer feeble homilies and subjective impressions.
I think PG responded that way not because of this particular post, but the body of IP's posts, including at least one that has been deleted. (Not by me, BTW.)
Yes, Leanan that is correct.
In its first sentence this constitutes an appeal to authority and this is an exceedingly poor basis for an informed argument. It then shades into an argumentum ad personem.
Not up to the standard I would expect from this site.
I agree that where a scientific consensus exists, one needs to be either a) very brave or b) very foolish to go against it, and if one wishes to be seen in the a) category, one should spend a long time studying the issue before venturing an opinion. That said, the history of science is littered with the carcasses of incorrect consensi. So it's worth trying to develop heuristics for the health of the consensus.
I do see peak oil and climate change as somewhat different. In the climate change case, we have well-formed mechanisms for determining the consensus (eg the IPCC, the various national academy reports, etc). In the case of oil resources, no such mechanisms exist and it seems that industry has mainly been relying on market analysts who frequently (as a class, in my experience) have conflicting incentives. There simply isn't a large body of data collected by scientists that one can have confidence in. Instead, there is a variety of data of dubious provenance delivered by actors who do not have incentives to be honest, and appear to have been dishonest in the past. The subject has not received that much attention in the academic literature until recently, and now that it is, there are a variety of papers on both sides.
So I don't really see a consensus existing in the peak oil case.
Well said. And, what we have here on this thread is an attempt by some to conflate climate change science and uncertainty about peak oil — comparing apples to oranges.
Those who would cast doubt on our credibility will continue to do so. Those who might be interested in the data & arguments will continue to read.
However, it doesn't help matters that some people are way off in the weeds talking about stuff that they have little information about, talking about apples, whereas the discussion is actually about oranges. This doesn't help matters of more interest, like "peak oil" at all.
Perhaps I could be more clear about what I am saying here, but, God Knows, I don't know how, since I am trying to be respectful and polite here.
From what I wrote
And to repeat myself - the two graphs that I found inconsistent are in the same IPCC document. To that extent this is not therefore about Singer's character (the ad hominem approach is alive and well and truly flourishing today) So far, out of about 100 posts, only 1 has seriously spoken to that.
Pity really!
I note that the comparison you made between the borehole data in figure 2.19 and the multi-proxy records is explicitly addressed in the discussion in Section 2.3.2.1, right next to the 2.19 graph.
In short, they advise that the comparison you are doing cannot be done reliably with the state of knowledge of the time.
Again, since this ad hominem attack theme is bothering me, please read some of what S. Fred Singer is proud to represent as his thinking in terms of the link between CFCs and ozone depletion - the link at http://www.sepp.org/key%20issues/ozone/ozone.html presents his work very clearly.
Please, spend a good 15 minutes or so reading any couple of his articles, then come back and talk about ad hominem attacks - Singer's writing will give you real insight into how to use such attacks in an ostensibly 'scientifc' debate. He has been doing it for decades at this point, and really, he is quite good at it - after all, when you go pro like he did, you have to be at the top of your game.
Halfin - I don't mind being called an amateur by someone ignorant of my background - its the closest thing I can find to amusment on this thread. I once boasted in the TOD email loop that I probably had more published papers than any of the TOD contributors - until HO pointed out he had 300+ papers on his resume.. however I digress.
If you read "The Prize" by Sir Daniel Yergin you will see that during the early decades of the 20th Century that there was a very close association between the major oil companies and national government and these ties survive today - because of the strategic nature of energy to our 21st century lives. Now it is a fact that most of the technical data and knowledge in relation to global oil and gas resources resides in the vaults of the major oil companies, the NOCs and a very small number of service companies - i.e. IHS Energy.
I put it to you that their assessment of this data may not be entirely objective because it does not suit their ends (making loads of $$££) to admit that their assests are dwindling and that their future prospects are grim - declining production and contraction.
Similarly, it does not suit the ends of national governments to convey to the general public that global energy supplies may be insufficient to meet future demand.
Our elected politicians are in the great majority amateurs when it comes to energy matters - they do not really undersatnd the concept of "finite supply", "cannot be created (or destroyed)" and "increasing entropy". In the UK, it is often joked that BP act as energy advisors to HM government - and our ignorant politicians are only too happy to believe the "good news story" that suits both BP's and political ends.
It is a fact that the UK was once a significant oil and gas exporter and now has to import both - from where? Norway of course who as we all know has a limitless supply of both:) Well not quite, I seem to recall this peak in oil production in 2001 and apparently, despite drilling tonnes of wells - no major discoveries in 2006 - no need to worry there!
A consensus in and of itself is not evidence for the validity of anthropogenic global warming. The science stands on its own feet and the denialist "rebuttals" and "theories" are simply inane (e.g. Singer's drivel). Companies like Exxon are/were trying to manufacture a consensus against global warming and if they succeed it will be because of the malleable perceptions of human herds and not because of the facts.
Of all the posts in this thread, Halfin, your last two paragraphs surprised me most. And that is saying rather a lot.
Which 'experts' do you suggest one should believe on PO?
The working petro-geologists who are (probably) shackled by the oil companies that employ them? The retired petro-geologists that are less gagged? The economists who generally have no great understanding of the geological reality? ...I could go on.
It seems to me that one MUST think for oneself on such issues while recognising one's own level of competence and understanding. There is no one, I repeat: no one, that one could be wise to trust on something like this in present circumstance.
I am very glad that many in this thread have thought for themselves and criticised, though perhaps a bit less glad the way it's been expressed at times. I'm glad that you generally seem to think as well, you often have welcome insights that help expand my thinking. Do you really, honestly, believe your last two paragraphs?
If the internet had existed 30 years ago and some bunch of anthropogenic global warming 'extremists' had invented the climate change version of TOD they would have been derided even more than TOD and its premise have been. It is not always wise to believe 'experts', things do not always continue as they have been.
This simplistic a question is based on a wrong premise.
First, you have promulgated the falacious argument that because everyone else is doing it, we should emit greenhouse gases too. In fact, the Chinese government is, due to the obscene pollution levels in Beijing, starting to address their pollution and climate issues. India, due to rapid melting of Himalyan glaciers reducing the quantity of their drinking water, is also starting to address these issues. Even if we accepted your falacious reasoning, not everyone else is doing it and, hence, nor should we.
Second, you also ignore that there are real economic benefits to purchasing green electrical energy today. Currently, my green energy is frequently less expensive than fossil fuel, read gas, energy. As a TODder, surely you agree with the basic economics that as an item becomes scarce that it becomes more expensive and alternatives become economically viable? That is already happening with wind. Therefore, there are strong economic fundamentals in favor of renewables. Due to the 'dispatchability problem' renewables have engineering limts to their contribution to grid energy. Yet, with the continued contribution to capping energy demand growth from conservation activities, they will play a significant role in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. (In the municpal energy utility I help oversee, Austin Energy, we have seen our energy savings, due to conservation investments, eliminate our need for at least one new power plant. The ROI has been high and permanent.)
Third, folks always seem to think that conservation means sacrifice. That just isn't true. I will place my quality of life on any pragmatic engineering and aesthetic measure in my passive/active solar house up against any other personal dwelling on the planet. I will go further and say that the green designed house has resulted in a better quality of life than other house designs. Yes, it cost more and it has delivered more while costing less to live in.
Paying double for energy will cause folks to rethink their profile of use. Whether we are paying double for environmental reasons or scarcity reasons, we are still paying double. Surely, you will admit that 'twofer' investments for no increase in cost are worthwhile?
Andrew
I don't disagree with anything you have said, the point (and it isn't really just mine) is that there are political realities that must be overcome. That little quote was the sort of advert that you might see run against the idea of paying for carbon sequestration.
I mentioned in reviewing the conference that I expect Energy Production Efficiency to become more of an issue in the future, but I just don't think you are going to be able to get the general public, and the legislators who have to raise the cost of power, to do so. As a result it will be market driven, and there will be the occasional far sighted company, but there will also be a lot that are not.
As one of the speakers said (and I commented on) the power generation community is centralized and heavily regulated, this almost ensures that it is highly resistant to change.
Hi Heading Out,
Thanks for this comment:
"As one of the speakers said (and I commented on) the power generation community is centralized and heavily regulated, this almost ensures that it is highly resistant to change."
I'm wondering if you might expand upon this a little. Do they necessarily go hand-in-hand? So, being centralized but not heavily regulated might lead to a better result? Or de-centralized and regulated?
What do you see as the disadvantage in regulation? And by "centralized", do you mean - fewer kind of monopolistic corps or what?
I had the impression some of the problems of maintaining the grid are a result of lack of centralization, in the sense that there are many diverse user companies and no one in charge of the most efficient means of transmission from different sources, and no one really in charge of upkeep or of looking at the whole picture. Here's an article that talks about de-regulation as being a cause of failure.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20E14F835550C758DDDA008...
It's almost axiomatic that highly concentrated, oligopolistic industries with mature technology are resistant to change.
Think the mainframe computer industry. They had a technological priesthood, captive customers (at IBM we were doing something like $1bn a year business with the Canadian government in the mid 80s-- all mainframe leases and software licensing). The mainframe companies certainly did not invent the microcomputer revolution (IBM did, but did so by creating a separate business unit with no ties to the main company).
Power is a highly conservative industry (I am the son of a 'big power' engineer). There have been few major changes in production technology in the last 50 years except:
- introduction of nuclear power under government subsidy
- 'dash for gas' - combined cycle gas turbines in the mid-late 90s, in line with deregulation of power markets
- coal fired plants with supercritical steam (by no means fully deployed)
Such an industry will resist decentralisation and technological innovation, quite fiercely.
I would add (as significant innovations in last 50 years)
- Wind turbines
- High Voltage DC lines
- Geothermal
with solar thermal & solar PV looming. Landfill gas and other biomass may not qualify.
Best Hopes,
Alan
They are all good innovations, but they are not widely used?
Wind is coming to the fore. Geothermal I don't know (I gather MIT is bullish, but I've really only heard of it in regard to Iceland).
High voltage DC is not used in North America or the UK, but I don't know about the rest of the world. I think the Soviets did quite a lot in this area.
Three major HV DC lines in North America (Portland OR - Los Angeles, Northern Quebec to near New York border, Northern Manitobe to S. Manitoba) and two planned from Wyoming to Phoenix AZ. HV DC between North & South Islands, New Zealand and quite a few in Sweden. Inga to Katanga in Congo is world longest (1,700 km from memory). Itapu dam to near Sao Paulo, Brazil. Plus Russian/Soviet. Probably more than these.
US produces more geothermal than Iceland. About 2 GW from uncertain memory. Also New Zealand, some in Africa, Japan, perhaps South America.
Best Hopes,
Alan
In relation to vineyards in the UK the decline in UK wine production has probably very little to do with climatic change.
Evidence for large scale wine production exists in Roman times as does the first physical evidence of large scale vineyard on the river Nene near Northampton. This would be consistent with the Romans export of their wine producing skills through the empire, Germany being a notable case.
As to the archeological evidence of later viticulture during the 'Dark Ages', I am not sure, but there was a definite renaissance after the Norman conquest in 1066. A number of major religious undertakings, monastries and cathedrals were started from the end of the 11th century and many of these incorporated vineyards in the near vicinity. This was the church securing the wine for the sacrements. Evidence of vineyards and wine production continued in England until the 16th century and the dissolution of the monastries by Henry VIII after his disagreement with Rome.
It appears that winemaking dissapeared from the national conciousness in this period, or those skilled were lost with the destruction of the vineyards. Which way wine making has only reappeared in earnest in the UK in the last 40 years from current commercial enterprises.
The point is that the history of winemaking and vineyards in England is one of culture,religion and history - not one of climate.
fyi I live within half a mile of what once was a vineyard belonging to the cathedral in Peterborough UK established in the 1160's, unfortunately long gone...
I haven't yet read the book so I'll not comment on it. But there are a couple of general points that ought to be made.
First off, informed dissent is crucial. So is describing things we do not understand. That said, there appears to be a serious logical leap here. To say "This happened in the past, it may be happening now" is legitimate. To say "This happened in the past, so it is happening now" is causation by correlation and is not acceptable. To say "This happened in the past, so it explains what is happening now" is for the same reason also not acceptable. It may be true that whatever happened in the past is what is driving what is happening now (including magnitude and timescale) but that doesn't make the statement acceptable. If you are going to claim cause and effect you must demonstrate causality, not simply correlation.
For the moment let us stipulate that the DO is active and is in a warming phase (I haven't read the book but from the timing I'm guessing it deals with Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. The current warming is not classic DO, but that's also argument by correlation). It does not follow that it is responsible for the observed warming. Other factors may be and almost certainly are also operating, some of which may (or may not) be more important.
I'm no DO specialist, but AIUI this is a phenomenon we don't really understand, so it may not be fair to say "Fine, show how this is DO driven". (If the book is not talking about DO, substitute with phenomenon of choice). But conversely you simply cannot claim that this phenomenon is driving the observations.
If you do not agree with the generally accepted models, what you must do is show that the uncertainties in the models are large enough that the models have no skill. Ultimately the only validation for the theory (any theory) is its predictive ability. As of 2001, it looks like this. If you agree with the theory, you might note that over the validation period (the last 2 decades or so) the theory has been doing pretty well, though it's trending a bit low. Perhaps that failure can be attributed (at least in part) to this 1500 year cycle. Perhaps not. If you do not agree with the theory, please show that the agreement is by chance and does not demonstrate skill.
There is a lot we do not understand, a lot we understand poorly. But
modeling complex systems is easier if there are a few dominant driving (forcing and feedback) terms. We don't need to get everything right to predict the general behavior. That's a big if, and again the proof is in the pudding: do the predictions show skill or not?
Timescale is important. In the 70s it was noted that we are headed into an ice age (which caused a small flap in the media). We are, and we'll probably be in the thick of it in 20000-30000 years. Our weather predictions are excellent for 1 day, pretty good for 3 days, useless at 7 days. Climate is far less chaotic than weather, and so far (we've only been making serious predictions for about 20 years) we haven't seen chaotic behavior, but it doesn't follow that predictions won't go pear-shaped in 10 or 50 or 500 years because of nonlinearity (tipping points).
A couple of other points: that Sargasso Sea sediment plot does not show a 1500 year periodicity (also, that climateaudit link: I know McIntyre is still smarting from the self-inflicted incineration he got for publishing that article in Energy and Environment, but I had hoped he would spend less time on obfuscation and more on clarification. But maybe having a gadfly around, even when it isn't usually relevant, can be useful sometimes). The Thames freezing over is interesting but is a data point, not necessarily representative of global mean temperature. Solar output is steadily increasing, perhaps at 0.05%/decade, but if solar irradiance were driving the show, global temperatures would be dominated by the sunspot cycle (which is demonstrably not the case).
Finally, to those who would claim that scientists are just looking for funding and singing the politically correct tune is the way to get it, I'll just say this: ad hominem attacks are the refuge of the ignorant.
Thank you very much, this was the sort of informed comment I was hoping to get. Sorry I got a bit side tracked in regard to writing a bit more about DO - but I believe that is what I was referring to.
There is a LOT of sloppy thinking out there. Much of it is waving of hands saying "well we don't understand this part of the system so clearly we don't understand the system well enough to say anything about it!" Much of it is confusing causation and correlation. Always ask: do these putative uncertainties diminish the predictive ability of our current understanding, and if so, is it significant? (The concept of skill is a useful one) Does the new theory have better predictive ability than the old? (as far as DO goes, that's a "no", btw)
As far as the book goes, if they do a good job describing this 1500 year cycle, good for them. If they go on to say that this may be significant in the currently observed warming trend, that's fine too. If they claim on the basis of correlation that this is principally or wholly responsible for the observed trend, that's ridiculous.
Fact check your fact checking.
After looking at your two graphs (Fig 2.21 TAR and Sargasso), I don't see how you find them so different. You note that the first shows the world getting cooler after 1000AD...but so does the other (modulo a little blip upwards at 1050AD that both graphs show). Similarly, both show a little blip up and down before 1850, and then the recent warming period.
Both graphs show the same thing!
And yet you conclude that they show very different data. I'm somehow not surprised you generated a certain amount of fuss - your analysis has all the appearance of stark bias in action.
He is fixated on the borehole graph. But the borehole based ground temperature comes with an explicit warning in the text that it is not realiable:
"While borehole data provide a direct estimate of ground
surface temperatures under certain simplifying assumptions
about the geothermal properties of the earth near the borehole, a
number of factors complicate their interpretation. Non-temperature-
related factors such as land-use changes, natural land cover
variations, long-term variations in winter snow cover and soil
moisture change the sub-surface thermal properties and weaken
the interpretation of the reconstructions as estimates of surface air
temperature change. In central England, where seasonal snow
cover is not significant, and major land-use changes occurred
many centuries ago, borehole ground surface temperature trends
do tend to be similar to those in long instrumental records (Jones,
1999). In contrast, Skinner and Majorowicz (1999) show that
borehole estimates of ground surface temperature warming
during the 20th century in north-western North America are 1 to
2°C greater than in corresponding instrumental estimates of
surface air temperature. They suggest that this discrepancy may
be due to land-use changes that can enhance warming of the
ground surface relative to that of the overlying atmospheric
boundary layer (see also Lewis, 1998). Such factors need to be
better understood before borehole temperature measurements can
be confidently interpreted."
The borehole fit is a simple exponential. It is four times as large as the Northern Hemisphere air tempearture anomaly at year 1500 (Fig 21). The superimposed air tempearture anomaly after 1860 is supposed to show that the ground temperature follows it in step. Obviously using a simple monotonic fitting function is producing garbage before the 1800s, which even the token 2-sigma error bars cannot salvage. Borehole temperature inferences are predicated on knowing how the heat dissipates into the ground. The models for this are going to be fuzzy since the ground is not a homogeneous material and ground water variations associated with rainfall changes over centuries are hard to take into account (yes, water moves through solid rock terrain). One can expect that the "hindcasts" of these models are going to have increasing error the farther in time they are pushed. In this regard Chapter 2 is sadly lacking in explanation. The reader is supposed to go and find the referenced papers and figure it out on their own. But this is not an "inconsistency".
Clearly Figures 2.1 a and b agree with Figure 2.21 even though the latter is just for the Northern Hemisphere. From the post it seems that he is claiming that they do not agree, which is inane.
HO: For me, this is the take away quote from your article:
The theme is mitigation vs. adaptation. From your reports, my interpretation of the ethos of the conference was that of a lot of very smart young brainiacs bonding with some very high powered venture capitalists fantasizing over how insanely rich they will become. And if mitigating choices will start limiting opportunities for "wealth creation", well, suddenly the room goes quiet. I find these thoughts to be very sobering.
Hi Yosemite Sam,
Thanks for your comment. "From your reports, my interpretation of the ethos of the conference was that of a lot of very smart young brainiacs bonding with some very high powered venture capitalists fantasizing over how insanely rich they will become. And if mitigating choices will start limiting opportunities for "wealth creation", well, suddenly the room goes quiet. I find these thoughts to be very sobering."
I can see how you might imagine a picture like this. I'm not so sure this was either the make-up or the mood of the attendees, though.
It may be true that few people think much about the intersection of energy input from the physical world with the idea of money and consumption. (I mean I find it not so easy to find people to talk to, that's why I'm here at TOD...)
Still, let's see...Chuck McDermott (http://www.c2c.ucsb.edu/summit2007/bio_charles_mcdermott.php) began his talk by saying he'd been looking at "peak oil" for two years and come to the conclusion it was true. I felt like he spoke without getting feedback for his statements, (which may have been true of most people, due to the nature of it being a conference...except for personal conversations at social times.) So, really, I couldn't begin to tell you what he actually meant by this, or what he thinks about. Yet, he did say it.
I had a sense at least a few of the speakers felt strong emotions of what I might call "grave concern". And likewise, the couple of young entrepreneurs I met seemed interested in saving the world (One medical device, one working on a new way to do solar)... though I didn't have a chance to meet many. I bet there were people who had never thought about the implications of anything like "Olduvai"...My impression was we could use more meetings, actually.
Good to hear your perspective. Mine is an interpretation not only of HO's post but also of a few off hand verbal comments from one of the speakers (name withheld). He also was quite impressed with much of what went on--I think he would agree with you on the need for more meetings. I think he was speaking to what was for him was one disturbing impression among many impressions both positive and negative.
Hi again, Yosemite Sam,
Just a point of clarification: When Heading out writes:
"Quick audience check, would you pay double your current electric bill for no visible benefit, but to pump carbon dioxide underground for no change in the global warming progress? Didn’t think you would."
As I observed and understand it, no such vote or "audience check" actually took place. Heading Out was using this to illustrate some other point of his. As I believe he explains elsewhere. Is this correct, Heading Out?
For me, it would be easier if he made the point more directly, however, I'm trying to understand it.
What a clusterfuck this all is.
Amen.
I wonder how many commenters have actually read the book. I wonder how many have actually read the TAR. I wonder how many will take the trouble to read AR4.
How about we pull the entire thread down, sleep on it. When we wake up, we say, collectively, "Shit, you wouldn't believe this dream I had. Oh, well."
Dear "Heading Out" and Dave,
I have a need for respect personally and also in regard to my goal of responding to our urgent problems: "Peak Oil" and GCC.
It seems Heading Out wanted some feedback, and he didn't get the feedback he wanted. This is my translation of what he says here:
"...people that I was hoping would be able, relatively easily, to explain why Singer was wrong, in large measure chose not too."
Or, perhaps he got some of what he wanted in the way of responses, but not all. Would this be correct, Heading Out?
Okay, so then I hear Dave say an expletive-type word, and I translate this to mean he feels a huge lot of frustration with Heading Out's post - and perhaps with the responses, as well. He sees this as disruptive, in several respects. I'm not sure all how, as he did not spell it out.
Dave, am I correct on this?
Dave, I'd like to know: Is there something specific Heading Out could do at this point to address your extreme frustration?
For example, (I'm just venturing a guess): If HO said: "Dave, I hear you that you're afraid my question will mislead people. Could I better explain the tie-in? Why I am bringing this up, when I was reporting on my feelings and thoughts about the conference?"
(Or another example). "Heading Out, would you like an explanation from experts? Then, if so, could you please take this over to "real climate" and then get back to us on your findings there? I am distressed and have a need to focus on the urgency of the problem we face regarding "peak". Or, if you don't want to do this, could you please explain to me more about what it is you are wanting from me, for example?"
Dave, speaking for myself here: personally, I'd like it if you could explain more specifically: exactly what HO said or did that you don't like and what it is you'd like instead. It would be really helpful to me if you could articulate it. My guess is, this might also be helpful to others, as well.
THANK YOU HO.
for an HONEST, Unpolitically correct review of one of the non-conformist books on the topic of The Religion known as gLObaL wArMing...
(the 'godz' must be crazy- and pissed off. Hope you don't have any grants on the subject up for review ;).
Also thank you editors of TOD for letting HO post this...
and as HO said, "it might get us back to something we know a lot more about..." No joke.
Oh my God... The Religion known as gLObaL wArMing...
Thorazine is often recommended, but that really knocks you out. Other, less intrusive, drugs are available that might smooth the transition from your current mental state to another place, not necessarily happier, that is more in touch with reality...
get well soon,
Dave
GW is a popular religion for the masses and I suspect to many in science. We do not understand the system under study well enough to make the conclusions and "projections" so many want to believe.
And worse yet, there are many ManbearPig chasers who actually think we should "do something" like try to "scrub" CO2 from the atmosphere... teh 3 year olds playing with guns.
In the meantime, peak oil is here and the Saps have worked themselves up into a frenzy chasing grant money for Trivial Pursuits.
Now Dave, please pass the thorazine. I think we are all gonna be needing it and other "less intrusive drugs" as the our available energy begins declining.
Hello sendoilplease,
Undoubtedly, you are objective enough to reach the above conclusion.
I read HO's article and was not impressed. He used too many words to essentially say nothing at all. I read the following discussion and was again unimpressed. I trust like IPCC a whole lot more than I would ever trust anyone associated with the oil industry.
To the oil industry: Thanks for all the pollution.
To Peak Oil: How soon? How soon? Why are you taking so long?
To global warming: Both certain and certainly getting worse every year.
To the fate of humankind: Extinction ahead. Don't worry, though, because there is plenty of shopping & television watching to do today.
To the "burn everything" doctrine: Burn, baby, burn. Exterminate humankind as quickly as possible. Nature has given humankind all of these fossil fuels specifically for the purpose of exterminating humankind. Get the job done, fossil fuel industries! Get the job done!
To the ideal of abandoning the coast: Of course, humankind won't have any choice on this matter. Exactly where all these millions of people will go might pose a little problem, but who cares about the suffering of the impoverished?
To the techno-God: If you believe, the techno-God will save you. By faith in the techno-God humankind's survival is guaranteed.
Sincerely,
David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
There is a good discussion about a talk given by Dennis Avery co-author of "Unstoppable Global Warming – Every 1,500 years," at RealClimate.< /a> It should be noted that Dennis Avery has no formal qualifications in climate science and Dr. S. Fred Singer has long been a contrarian on a number of subjects such as the effects of passive smoking. Until recently he held that there was no global warming at all, natural or man made . There have been allegations that he was funded indirectly by the tobacco industry for his reports into the effects of smoking and by the oil industry (Exxon Mobile as if you couldn't guess) on his climate science. He has denied such links and threatened to sue.
Examples of such allegations are here
Screamingly one-sided, and in my mind diminished by their reflexive use of derogatory adjectives but still containing a lot of documentary evidence that needs explaining if we are to take any of Dr Singer's publications seriously are those given here< /a> and here< /a>
Here is a diagram of Dr. Singer's connections with Exxon Mobile funded institutes that often purport to be independent
HO, The graph you showed (figure 2.19) shows reconstruction of past surface temperatures from present day bore hole temperatures at various depths. Not surprisingly the remnant signature hundreds of metres below ground of a surface variation of a degree or so when flattened out by several hundred years of thermal conduction is faint indeed. The report says of the graph,
If you read this comment in the report, it is a little less than rigorous to still say
As for the comment that figures 2.1 a and b show,
look at them again and you will see they show no change from the 1860 point to the 1920 point with wiggles in between. Neither of these curves are inconsistent with Mann's curves or the others who have tried reconstructions. Nor are any of the facts about the freezing of the Thames
More disturbing is the assertion :-
This graph shows the projected warming from the latest IPCC report
The AFI scenario is fossil fuel intensive the AT1 is low fossil fuel. They and the other scenarios are described in the report .
We can make a substantial difference within 50 years and can in that time set in train differences that will mean survival or not for hundreds of millions within 70 years. It is vital that we pin the changes on human action now or we will not act to prevent these deaths. You and I, HO will be dead before we see such change but I care deeply what my children and any children they might have will have to face. I hope you have the same concerns.
There is a moral side to raising such questions on forums such as this. TOD carries significant influence. There are many people only to willing to accept that it is not our fault or if it is there is nothing we can do about it.
In 1987 Professor Peter Duesberg, first wrote that HIV does not cause AIDS. This was disseminated by various means, mostly on the internet and as a result Thabo Mbeki's was convinced and his opposition to antiretroviral drugs has caused hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in South Africa.
In talking about "both sides of the question" you are promoting exactly the view that the contrarians would like to be accepted, that this is some kind of balanced debate. The IPCC report is not one side of the question, it is the consensus view of over 2000 of this planet's most skilled and knowledgeable inhabitants in this regard. Opposing them are a handful of people, most of which have no qualifications relevant to the question or have dubious motives.
HO, you have been of very great service to TOD and I look forward to your future contributions but by promoting this book when it is clear you do not clearly understand the questions I am afraid you have lessened the prestige of this forum.
I don't think this is entirely fair. There is nothing wrong with dissenting opinion, provided all are working in good faith (granted that is a big proviso, as the efforts of Exxon show). Even if it's wrong it can still improve the science. But they have to show that what they propose improves the current understanding: that is, present theory does not have predictive value, while theirs does.
Better questions for HO would be: do they claim that present theory is not sufficient to predict observed trends? Do they establish a causal (not correlative) link? Does their theory show higher skill?
Or better yet, just read the book and see for yourself.
Your Dr.Singer six degrees of separation graph has to be the most sophisticated ad-hominem attack I've ever seen.
In reality, that wasn't quite a pure 'ad hominem' attack.
"An ad hominem fallacy consists of asserting that someone's argument is wrong and/or he is wrong to argue at all purely because of something discreditable/not-authoritative about the person or those persons cited by him rather than addressing the soundness of the argument itself. The implication is that the person's argument and/or ability to argue correctly lacks authority."
Singers arguments are wrong because they are scientifically incorrect, not just because Exxon or other right-wing propaganda houses funded them.
The web of background funding sources, by contrast, gives logical explanation as to why an otherwise seemingly qualified scientists would continue to promote ideas which are fundamentally misleading and repudiated by virtually all other scientists.
In any case, if Exxon were funding somebody on chemical engineering or catalysts or petroleum geology, one shouldn't be automatically suspicious, because it stands to reason that Exxon funding a scientist in those areas is doing so because they want solid, scientifically valid and productive results, since it helps their business.
When it comes to climate, and you add in the right wing political groups, the underlying motivation might be quite distinct: it gets in the way of some people making money.
There is also a lot of difference between a study that ends with words like "we wish to thank XXXXX for their financial help in this project" and one where both the author and the donor deny such support but there is documentry evidence not only to show that such support was given but that the support was routed via third parties with deliberate efforts to conceal this fact.
RealClimate is run by the hockey stick crew, the very people the validity of whose published work is being questioned by the sceptics. They may or may not be right, but they can hardly be cited as an unbiased source.
Nick, thanks for the info on Dr. Singer.
Actually, I did not remember the name of the pseudo-science prostitute who worked for big tobacco and now for big oil.
At least that is how I view Dr. Singer at this point.
Never-the-less, truth is truth, even from the devil's mouth. One might want to check the arguements out to see what's what.
The experience HO had of reading the book and presenting some of the ideas in the book for consideration here has been very beneficial for me.
How many people become convinced that they know all about complex issues like Peak Oil or Global Warming after reading one book, or even after just hearing someone talk about a book?
I don't think HO or most readers here are in danger of being permanently swayed by reading one book, but we all need to stay open to the possibility -- even though we may see it as a very slight possibility -- that we have missed some crucial evidence or analysis that could change our point of view very much.
I spoken with some intelligent folks who have a fair understanding of Global warming and Peak Oil who cannot accept whatever level of "Doomerosity" that their understanding leads to, and so they are very motivated to believe that they are somehow wrong.
"Maybe we'll be OK after all...." or "Maybe there is nothing I can do about it after all...." This takes the awful wieght of responsibility off of our backs.
For me this was an exercise in following through on an honest and important question. I'm glad for the chance to do so.
Dear Mr. Cohen,
I see an opportunity not a clusterfuck – however, the clusterfuck is going to happen if people like you and I don’t do our best to express arguments not condemnation. I haven’t been reading TOD that long, but I think this is the most personal, fact free discussion I have seen. I also think we all need to consider how complicating a wildly non-linear response system is to claiming conclusive knowledge. To be honest the potential that massive positive feed back loops will lead to abrupt warming keeps me awake at night. The human race is not smart enough to avoid war in such a circumstance.
Interesting thoughts daniel morris, but of course, the question will surely occur, given that you a citizen of a nation with only 5% of the worlds population, that most of the projected coal plants are already operating and or financed to be built, that the electric demand is pretty much a done deal, and that given the amount of carbon already turned loose and the coming tar sand, heavy oil and possibly shale oil growth, more will be, what do you (we, the U.S., take your choice) intend to do about it?
In the meantime, let me show you something that keeps me awake at night:
Go to
http://www.fiafoundation.com/
Go over to the right of the screen and watch "Watch the Make Roads Safe Film" I assure you, you will be moved if you have a heart.
Go to:
http://www.makeroadssafe.org/
for more.
Every three minutes, a child dies on world roadways, a burden that has grown fastest and created the most hardship in developing countries.
In many developing countries, highway death now kills more children than TB or malaria.
This does not begin to take in the number of children and adults lef permanently disabled in nations with no long term healthcare or facilities for physical rehabilitation.
The need for transportation in these nations is fundamental to achieving access to jobs and education, but the toll on the highways of the world due to the explosive growth of automobiles, scooters and motorbikes and trucks has grown at an equally explosive rate.
It is calculated that an amount equaling the amount of bi-lateral aid from the G8 nations is spent on victims of highway death and lost wage earnings, often with the only breadwinner in the household killed or severely disabled.
The First United Nations Global Road Safety Week will be on April 23-29, 2007.
Of course, since this slaughter going on right now poses no threat to Americans coastal condo, do you really think most of them care or stay awake at night thinking about the hoards of injured or killed children on world highways? (and yeah, I know, ban their cars and bikes and let em do without school and jobs, right? heard it all before....)
RC
Remember, we are only one square mile from freedom.
Dear ThatsItImout,
Really interesting and surprising response from such an intellectually developed person. It is taking everything I have not to launch into a long evolutionary psychology based discussion on why such individual and personal tragedy engages our emotions while the potential end of mankind does not. Cool though, keeping things personal keeps me grounded.
By the way, I struggle daily with the logic behind pursueing my career (biochemistry/genetics), while the major issues of my generation lie in addressing environmental sustainability.
dm,
You are of course correct, my post was intended as rant, (but hopefully one that causes people to see a very good cause about which something can actually be done), and was not intended as disrectful of your post.
I am right now suffering from an extreme bout of "I am sick to death of elitism" in which we endlessy discuss the ways in which we are going to tell the world how to operate and make big changes in things we have absolutely no control over, as if the changes would make more than a marginal difference anyway, while purposely staying very blind to the things we could possibly have an effect on to the good of all the nations we intend to instruct (note that...giving instruction is cheap, spending real effort and money on things that can be changed is not). Jonathan Swift's "Academy in the Sky" is alive and well, thank you.
RC Remember, we are only cubic mile from freedom.
Hi Roger,
1) Point well taken: "...what do you (we, the U.S., take your choice) intend to do about it?"
What do you suggest?
What about if "we" (here) have a discussion that leads to a minimal consensus list, followed by a strategy list. Example: Discussion> Energy policy for US: gasoline tax? import tax? rationing? 55 mph or...? Strategy...
Robert R's article was a start. We've had these...not all in one place, though - (?)
2) "...things we could possibly have an effect on..."
What are you thinking here?
Almost all the existing US coal fired electricity plants will be replaced within the next 30 years.
They would already be replaced except for the 'New Source Review' a political sop to the utility industry which allows old power plants the ability to keep on polluting at levels not permitted to new power plants.
With the exception of gas fired capacity (and wind), the US power plant estate is *old*. Nothing much has been built since the era of deregulation has kicked off-- all the new entrant merchant power was gas fired.
Thanks ThisIsItImOut for mentioning one of the normally unassailable sacred cows.
Somehow the casualties of the Vietnam War are considered horrible in the US, but the same amont of deaths EACH YEAR in the US is acceptable - mostly innocents, men, women, and children.
The US is a very good place to be, if you are a car. The movie CARS apparently got all kinds of awards, and the soundtrack CD is advertised on the radio - the glossy book "The Artwork of CARS" is in the bookstore. Walking as an activity ranges from dangerous to insane in the US. The laws even favor killings by car in the US - walk up to someone and hit 'em on the head with a lead pipe and you'll go to prison for murder. But drive up onto the sidewalk with your car and nail 'em or mow 'em down in a crosswalk and drag 'em for a block or two, make 'em die a lingering and painful death, and simply tell the judge you were distracted because you were doing your nails while driving - he'll understand, and in many cases like this, community service is all that's called for.
Pray for the closing of the Straits of Hormuz.
Quote of the day!
The hot debate over this post is interesting to me considering that this is a peak oil site primarily for this reason: in the current political arena, global warming has the floor while peak oil is absolutely underground. Yet, as mudlogger I believe pointed out, and I believe this thread's controversy backs up, global warming is a much more complex issue than peak oil. The question for me is this: For everyone concerned with the full spectrum of consequences of world fossil fuel usage, which issue, if you had to pick one, would you choose as the political "horse" to mobilize public opinion? For a complex set of reasons, global warming is getting all the air-time right now. Though both issues have strong cases for swift changes of course, I think that peak oil is the simpler one, the more convincing one, and possibly even the more urgent one if I was forced to choose. From this standpoint it seems to me that whether or not any GW skepticism has any merit at all, it might possibly be more politically expedient in our current climate to say, "yes, global warming is a complex issue and the "scientific consensus" may or may not be absolutely foolproof, but there is another issue even more compelling relating to energy--there is a mountain of evidence that global oil production is very near to or may have already reached its peak and will be followed by a steady decline we should have long started to prepare for. Even in the best case energy supply scenario we will be wrestling with dire consequences of fossil fuel scarcity BEFORE we will really start to face serious consequences from CO2 driven global warming according to the most dire GW predictions."
I hear you - but,
I made the point above that global warming will probably be the political force the results in increasing vehical mileage standards.
I'm not sure it has the oomph though--in fact I'm sure it doesn't at the moment!... I think we need a PO GW one two punch that would MUCH more accurately present the total situation, and that means a major supplemental focus on peak oil, even to the point of going light on global warming for a while. I'm dreaming of course. It is just another in of the heap of follies we are buried under that global warming rather than peak oil is the issue everything is presently riding on, in my opinion!
No GW will hit us first.
In fact, GW is now, we've already banked the first 2 degrees centigrade, most likely. We've only experienced 0.6 degrees of that, because of lag effects in the earth's climate and because of SO2 and particulate emissions (which drop away quickly).
The argument now is what do we do in the next 20 years, to avoid the 3 degrees centigrade that comes after.
It's refreshing to hear alternative explanations presented without stridency or judgment - thank you.
Does anyone know the CO2 concentration at which the atmospheric absorption spectrum "bottoms out?" I can't remember the reference, but it's at some not-too-ridiculously-high level of CO2 in the atmosphere that further additions do not significantly increase the heat trapping. That is, after all the IR within the absorption bands has been reflected, the atmospheric spectrum has "bottomed out."
The implication is not that CO2 doesn't matter right now, but it does suggest that methane could be the more significant player in the mid-to-long-run. All those clathrates have been building up in the oceans for many millenia, and sooner or later they're going to escape. I'm just hoping it's not going to be via a Lake Nyos type of catastrophic inversion event, on a global scale.
An old argument, the original critique of Arrhenius back in the early 1900s.
Apparently the layering of the atmosphere means there isn't much 'bottoming out'. And of course water vapour (created by rising temperatures) is the most potent greenhouse gas of all.
Put it another way, you can become Venus before you 'bottom out'.
This side of 1000ppm, at least, CO2 is still a problem.
To add a note to Heading Out, since he seems to have run into unanticipated problems a forum where he has added much useful knowledge, I thoroughly support the need to inquire into the world around us.
In general, people do not read much outside of their beliefs, and it is always good to challenge orthodoxy, or to at least understand that orthodoxy surrounds us, and being able to recognize it is a valuable trait.
No snide remarks, no barbed hooks - simply presenting information is not something to attack, especially if such attacks reduce the flow of information in the future.
This is perhaps one of TOD's core problem currently - the distinction between data/facts/physical realities/etc. is being dissolved into the beliefs which we hold, and other beliefs are simply dismissed, regardless of the validity of the data which lead others to other conclusions.
The attempt to broaden the discussion is worthwhile, and Heading Out deserves respect for the attempt itself, aespecially in light of how it turned out.
Well, I learned a lot more about GW and "scientific debate."
I thought the premise of this site was to present all pertinent evidence and encourage readers to think for ourselves. Obviously some will have a lot more expertise than others, and we need and appreciate their efforts to educate the rest of us. But if we are not to think for ourselves, who will tell us which "experts" to believe?
I am no expert on GW but AIUI Nora and a host of other Mediterranean ancient cities are sinking due to geological action not sea level rise. The "liquid flow" model of mountain and plateau creation IIRC.no doubt someone will straighten me out on the details
the entire southern end of Sardinia is sinking relatively fast... large parts of greece are doing the same thing.
Boris
London
Lordy, Lordy Heading Out. What have you wrought? I've noticed over the last 10 years or so that whenever I try to point out something, anything, that somehow, possibly, even remotely calls into question the idea that we humans are smoking the planet, I've been labelled some pretty awful things.
Here is one for you. There are many physicists that frequent this site. Here is a question for you all. What probability has the IPCC assigned to the theory that humans have caused the bulk of the recent warming? How many of you would accept such a probability level in your own specialty field of research as a basis for fact?
Once you ask it, you'd better duck! Something is coming your way, and it won't be pretty!
Just for the record, I have not made any comment one way or the other regarding my opinion on human-induced global warming, and it would not be proper to try to read between the lines of what I have posted here.
The only debate is about the *magnitude* and not the presence of the effect. Only quacks and ignoramuses claim that there is zero effect of increasing CO2 and/or that humans do not increase CO2 in the atmosphere. Citing Singer as a source is quite pathetic. Might as well cite David Duke on the subject of the Holocaust.
The answer to your question:
is 90%. The IPCC characterizes their 90% certainy as "highly likely". In a situation where many, many causal factors are at play (the Earth is one of the most dynamic systems we have found), a 90% certainty of causality is HUGE. In my field (sociology), 90% certainty on a specific causal variable having a signficant impact to a dynamic system is a beyond a home-run.
Isn't 95% probability is considered statisticallly significant?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that in a Newtonian, mechanistic, reductionist model--yes. One of the greatest challenges facing those of us who work on dynamic systems (whether its biological, ecological, climatic, or social) is conveying the levels of certainty/uncertainty inherrent to specific models. The trouble with a saying that something is "statistically significant" is that you are referring to the correlations between variables, not the likelihood that a chain of cauality is present. In short, the move is toward stochastic modeling (probabilistic instead of a deterministic framework). Even then, causality is not something that any statistical procedure can assure (though you can explain away variance). The 90% cited by the IPCC is based on a theoretical assumption that anthropogenic CO2 is the driver of out-of-the-ordinary temperature variation, and that the collected statistics confirm--by correlation--this supposition. That's what I think anyway.
Ok, I will correct you because you are wrong. The relation between CO2 and the temperature driver isn't a correlation, but causal. See, there are the hard science like chemistry and phisics. They say how CO2 behave and what the CO2 make.
At social sicences you need be carefull because correlation isn't causation. However, climatology isn't a social science. They know that CO2 cause some effect and they know that there are more CO2 now because we are burning fossil combustible. The problem they have is determine what is the main factor, and all the clues and research point to anthropogenic CO2.
But what they know? They are only scientists... and everyone know that Earth is flat.
Joao...that was perfect.
HO,
I've learned a lot from you. Even today.
My turn to correct. Keep in mind that I fully support the conclusions of climate scientists and their methodological approach to this issue--specifically that CO2 (and other GHGs) are causing global warming. I have to take issue with the way you described their methodology. Further, I think your response highlights the common misconception of what "science" is--I’ll get to that after re-describing the basic climate science methodology. You say:
CO2 having “some effect” is true; we know that, generally, it can cause temperature increases--this has been validated via reductionist Newtonian experimental science, which is what you are referring to as “hard science” (more on that later). "Some effect" is the entire point of my previous argument though--we do not know for sure what the magnitude of impact CO2 has on the climate system. Once you take something out of the lab--a controlled environment--and attempt to describe its relationship with a dynamic, complex system of interpenetrating variables and phenomenon--the Earth’s climate is the best example of just such a system--you must assume the probabilistic framework.
We also know, via empirical measurements, that CO2 concentrations have increased substantially, and that it is very safe to say that this increase has been caused by anthropogenic means--though this causation is imputed from the correlation between anthropogenically emitted CO2 and rising atmospheric CO2 levels. I'll say it again: statistical analysis cannot demonstrate causality. When you look at the data, it’s stupid to say that this dramatic rise in CO2 could be due to anything else--but statistically, it’s still a correlation.
Ok. Since the Earth is not a controlled laboratory experiment, we have to assume the probabilistic framework of analysis. So let’s take this rise in CO2 and toss it into a stochastic (i.e. probabilistic) model that attempts to control for what we perceive as other causal variables (such as other gas concentrations, earth axis tilt, solar cycle, seals breathing, etc.). The result is a probabilistic framework that explains the probable impact of the modeled causal variables on the dependent variable (average temperature variation). The result is manifested in the IPCC's 90% certainty--notice that their number is presented as a probability--that the specific causal variable we’re discussing--human induced CO2 increases--is responsible for the rise in temperature. Again, the probabilistic framework does not imply causation, it implies stochastic probability--logic says, “Dude: it’s the people.”
I feel like I’m repeating myself. Onto your mischaracterization of science.
You are distorting climate science--and science in general--by saying it is "hard". The popular misconception of science (even in academia) is that there exists a delineation between "hard" science and other [say social] science, where "hard" science = the mechanistic, reductionist Newtonian model (i.e. the inductive scientific method (1) observe phenomenon, (2) formulate hypothesis, (3) use hypothesis to predict outcome experiment, (4) perform experimental tests to prove/disprove hypothesis). While some are still following this mechanistic approach, the direction in what I have to call non-reductionist, dynamic science--rather than attempting to take ownership of the term "science"--is towards a probabilistic framework of understanding. “Hard” science is an anachronism.
We cannot perform controlled experiments on the climate, social structures, biological systems, or even quantum phenomenon due to the inherent complexity and interpenetrating nature of phenomenon in question. We’ve learned that the real world is too complex, for the most part, to reduce reified concepts to linear, uni-directional relations--which is where stochastic, probabilistic frameworks of understanding are useful.
I think I need a beer.
I would offer one if I could get it to you.
Thanks, Seth...
(Me, too...and I don't drink.)
Me three.
One of the issues TOD faces is that the participants not only have wildly different perceptions of the oil industry but they also have wildly different understandings of the tools they use to attempt to arrive at a better understanding of the industry.
Cheers!
Seth, there is only two categories: Science and not-Science. For a hypothesis be Science need suffer some test and be falseable.
The Greenhouse Gas model was tested. When the climatologists say they tested they show how they tested it, because they have data that show:
1) The cooling trend in the stratosphere as opposed to warming in the troposphere.
2) The trend in diurnal range, night warming more than day.
3) The seasonal trend, winters warming more than summers.
4) The last 3 decades of warming despite the lack of trends in solar activity over that period that may otherwise explain that warming.
All these phenomena are predicted by the Greenhouse model they use. If the heating were caused by, for example, more radiation from Sun, we were seeing diferent phenomena. If it was more radiation from sun, day warming was to be more higher than the noturnal warming. And the summer warming was to be higher than the winter warming. At both the cases, the situation is inverse. So, the other explanations fail the test, while the Greenhouse model can explain that phenomena. That is the way as Science works.
See... it is Science, real Science. Popper cannot say that climatology isn't Science.
Now, about reducionist Newtonian model. Sorry, a Relativistic model work for speed near light or higher gravity than exist on Earth. And a Quantic model work only for small things. So, you need work the Earth clime with Newtonian models. But they are no way "reducionist" models. Remember that the climatologists are the first guys to use chaotic models. Their models are more holistics than you think.
About the lab crap... well, climatology work with meteorological data. Yes, all that baloons with sensors, artificial satelites, meteorological stations all over the world. And they too work with data from ice from Antartica and Greenland, they drill the ice and store the ice at freezers for analize the data on lab. Other data tehy get from sediments from lakes and any other data tehy can thind. See, hard work, and that is real Science. There is no other way to make Science without hard work. But you will discard that hard work because it is LAB work? Well, there is no time machine that show us how was the climate a thousand years ago or 100 thousand years ago. They need go to the lab to find the data they need for see how was the climate at the old ages. There is no other way to see how the climate changes over long time: laboratorial work.
Well, I hope now you understand what is Science. Because from what I saw, you have no idea.
And I am sad that Oil Drum lost credencials with this post about Singer's book. I think you can post now about Abiotic "Snake" Oil with no problems. You lowered your standards to that.
Joao,
Look, you're not challenging what I said, you're regurgitating your simplified definition of science. I don't mean this as a personal attack, but I really wish you had a better grasp on what you are trying to argue--this could be a fruitful discussion, but I don't feel that it is. Your argument is that of positivism--try wikipedia if you are unsure of the meaning.
I do not support or believe that Karl Popper's falsification principle is of much value to science. I support his notion of demarcation between science and non-science, which you seem to refer to without understanding what it actually means. We must be able to demarcate between valid claims (i.e. made with Science is simply a way of knowing; but more importantly, science it is a way of adjudicating competing claims.
What's more important is that Karl Popper does not support your presented claims. Go back and read Chapters 8,9, and 10 in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery"; you'll find that he addresses this very argument (regarding probability and the lack of falsifiability of probabilistic claims). Popper realized that our study of the world was becoming more probabilistic and, therefore, much more difficult to neatly fit into his falsification regime. That did not dissuade him from remaining a staunch positivist though.
Show me the cart full of falsified hypotheses that followed Popper's "The Logic of Scientific of Discovery" and I'll convert to your cult. The trouble with falsification is that knowledge does not proceed in that manner. You are actually doing a great disservice--as I have pointed out three times now--by peddling this false notion of science. Global warming challengers simply have to say:
"Look, you can't falsifiy our hypothesis, therefore we have validity".
Here's a final suggestion: learn about what you are trying to argue. I would suggest looking up the following terms, as they all pertain to your archaic view of "science": mechanistic, reductionist, Newtonian, positivist, essentialist.
Seth,
Sorry, but who is making a great disservice is you. A thing you decided not discuss, and I think was intentional, is that the alternate hypothesis to GH model don't survive to test, while the GH survive. The alternate hypothesis were testable. They were discarded by the scientists (the climatologists) because they failed the test. The scientific knowledge isn't separated from any kind of test. "Science it is a way of adjudicating competing claims". But what decide what claim is valid or not is the experimental test, that is the only way for Science work. Science don't work with "Divine" spiration, they work with data, data from the real world.
Social Sciences will make all that statists for see how the "subject" (the human population) behaves, they try make objective an information that is subjective. They need make that subjective information be objective for test various hypothesis.
But the problem with comparing the statistcs used by Social Science with the statistics used by Climatology is that the data taht climatology uses is no human. Temperature is measured objectivelly by precision instruments, it is not a subjective data from start.
Currently, the Global Warming "sceptics" aren't making scientific work. They give no alternative hypothesis. They propose no scientific test for an alternate hypothesis because they have no hypithesis to work. If they don't propose any hypothesis to test and they cannot make any test and if the tests made say that the GH model survive, can you say that they make Science? Problably yes, because you don't understand Science.
And a thing you appear don't note about the Singer and Avery's book is that they DON'T use the "statistical" data for attack the GH model. They use the LABORATORIAL data, because the data about the climate at past ages is laboratorial. But there is a trick they use, a trick that other snake oil salers used before. They choice what data they want to show to the public. They don't show ALL laboratorial data that exist, they show only the laboratorial that they have interest to show. Data that contradict what they say isn't showed.
The laboratorial data is important for climatology because is the only way to see how the climate behave at the past ages. But the laboratorial data have problems:
1- the data is LOCAL, not world wide;
2- there is imprecision with dating, and the imprcision is higher at more ancient data;
3- the world sample is small, and small samples don't give the better statistics;
4- you don't make a direct measure from temperature and other climatic data, you make an indirect measure.
With all these problems is easy to pick the data that prove anything you want. And that is exactly what Singer and Avery made. And someone that have no knowledge about the real Science behind the matter buy the snake oil.
With relation to "archaic" vision of Science, you need abandon your fantasious visions about Science. Science is hard work. What we read from the divulgation books that the real scientists wrote is only a small filtered part from the real work. They mantain out the divulgation books the boring part.
Sciences as cosmology have scientists like Hawkings that can derive interesting models and hypothesis, but a lot of hard work need be made for prove that hypothesis. The big problem for Hawking is prove the small Dark Holes that his models predict and he consider various ways to test it experimentally (including airplanes flying at high atmosphere with special sensors). The trick is that a lot of people is making the hard work testing the Hawking's hypothesis.
Cosmology and quantic physics have a lot of interesting models to explain how the Universe was created. The most interesting model now is the Cords. But don't be deceived by the divulgation books trying to explain it. They need test the hypothesis and they are trying to test the hypothesis experimentally. That is the reason they build giant particle accelerators. They want to make some experimental tests, they are trying to recreate Big Bang inside an assay pipe.
Molecular genetics is certainly a Science that isn't archaic. The Watson and Crick's model for the DNA, the double helix is famous now. They developed that model analysin X-ray difraction, an experimental method developed to analyse protein structure. What everyone forget now is that a lot of diferent models for the DNA's structure were made at that time, but only the double helix model survived to experimental test.
Science have a lot of hard work. Any Science. And almost all that hard work at physical and biological sciences is experimental. There is nothing archaic at experimentation, it is how Science works and how Science continue working today.
And answering to HO: the alternative is to pay 100 times more at 30-50 years. And who is making that kind of question now are exactly the snake oil sellers. That is an old tatics to distract the public that the snake oil sellers know very well, they create a false problem for cover the real problem.
You have, again, failed to address any of my original assertions, except to cite examples that support my position (though you claim that they support yours). If you are so staunch in your definition of science that you cannot do the requisite reading to understand where science is really at these days, then there truly is little hope. I'm off to do that "hard work"...
Ask an insurance adjuster what the recommended course of action would be if you knew there was a 90% chance of a catastrophe. Ask a lawyer where you'd be going if you knew that 90% chance but willfully ignored it. Ask an emergency services coordinator whether "90% chance this major hurricane will strike the city" would call for an evacuation order.
Anyone looking for a mathematical certainty is barking up the wrong tree.
Like so many other things in the real world, this is a matter of probabilities and maximizing your expected value. Looked at simplisticly, there are 4 cases:
Define this as the default scenario, with zero cost.
We'd have made the world a harsher place for us to live in; a British government report has put the cost at 30% of GDP.
We waste some amount of effort; that report put it at (IIRC) 2% of GDP.
We spend some amount of effort (2% of GDP) to mitigate some amount of the problems (say 2/3, or 20% of GDP); net cost is 12% of GDP.
Given the above, the expected value of doing nothing about Climate Change is 0.1*0% + 0.9*-30% = -27% to GDP, whereas the expected value of working to mitigate it is 0.1*-2% + 0.9*-12% = -11% to GDP.
Certainty or lack thereof is largely irrelevant at this point; the expected cost of ignoring Climate Change is so much higher than the expected cost of trying to mitigate it that it would be (economically) irrational to not try to mitigate it, given current data.
Sounds too much like Pascal's Wager IMHO.
Did Pascal's Wager even include probabilities on the choices, much less probabilities that enjoyed a scientific consensus after years of intensive study?
It's nothing more than a cost-benefit analysis, and those are used all the time to make important decisions. It's quite a rational approach to take, if you have sufficient evidence on the costs and probabilities. Pascal did not have those; we do.
Actually it's all a little worse than that.
The range of possible GDP losses is big (-5 to -30%)
The costs of amelioration also have a big range of estimates: from -1% of GDP (ie net growth due to the new energy industries created) to 5%.
In addition, try as I might, I cannot find a calculation in the Stern Review for the destruction of civilisation.
There are a number of ways that might happen:
- collapse of the THC (North Atlantic/Gulf Stream) triggering new global ice age
- very rapid rise in temperature to more than 5 degrees C, leading to mass migration from the equatorial regions and war. Note Israel-Palestine and India-Pakistan, the most likely sites of the start of the Third World War, are both vexed by severe water shortage/ allocation issues. Syria threatened to attack Turkey over its river plans.
Can the US handle 50 million Latin and Central Americans trying to cross its borders? How about 5 million Cuban and Carribean Islanders? Can the US handle a 'new Dust Bowl' leading to the collapse of agriculture on the Great Plains?
- methane 'pulse' along the lines of the great global extinction at the end of the Permian Era (90% of all species extincted)
James Lovelock thinks that the death of billions and the collapse of our civilisation is now inevitable.
Call that 100% of GDP. Try as i might, I can't see where Stern enters that into his calculations.
What chance does one need of the above situations to want to take action?
10%?
5%?
1%?
0.5%?
I would argue that a .5% chance of a 100% loss of GDP is *not* the same thing, in terms of our utility, as a 100% chance of a 5% loss of GDP, even though they are mathematically the same.
It should be stressed that climate scientists don't think a 5 degree centigrade rise is some remote possibility. Plausible estimates of more than 20% chance under Business As Usual (BAU) scenarios exist out there.
More than 20%.
Once we hit the positive feedback loops, where the earth no longer naturally sequesters as much CO2, then we could have entered into the realm of uncontrollable climate change. The benign Holocene (sometimes called the Anthropocene, in honour of the Third Chimpanzee) era will be over.
This is all about avoiding the extreme costs of global warming. The low case scenario, 2 degrees Centigrade, is more or less in the bank. We will have that degree of warming, and we will adapt.
It's the 3 plus degree scenarios, and the unknowable effects of same, that justify prompt and widespread action against global warming.
Hi Valuethinker,
Just a late note to say I appreciate your going into this detail. It reminds me of www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~odland/Odland_PeakOilMgt_Dissertation.pdf.
I wish it could reach a wider audience.
My turn again. Guessing most have moved on as TOD has something of a 24-hour news cycle feel to it. I had written a more detailed response, but somehow it didn't get posted, and I lost what I wrote, so I'll be brief.
Seth: Your statement that 90% confidence was "a home run" took me by surprise. From my days in physics, 2 standard deviations was not even worth looking at, and generally it took 5 standard deviations to get any respect, and it was only accepted after confirmation by independent experiment. Unfortunately we don't have that option here, naturally which makes a probability assessment, as Pitt the Elder has done, the proper approach, IMHO. I'd go on, but hell, let's get onto the next thing.
I'll buy you that beer if ever in the NYC area.
Thanks, I appreciate it. The 90% as a homerun is a reference to a probabilistic framework assessing a dynamic system (I tried to provide a delineation between controlled experiments and uncontrolled systems, but I don't think the difference sank in for many). If you are just referencing standard statistical correlations between unitary, simple phenomenon under controlled circumstances, signficance at .05 level is standard guideline for putting a star by your variable, which is what I think you are referring to (which of course still does not say anything about causality).
Hi Ho
Perhaps somebody in the 200+ already raised this point, but sorry I did not find.
Take you back to Roman port in Med that started your musing on sea level.
Something called isostatic compensation post-glaciation.
Here in UK, NW Scotland is still rising, raised beaches etc., (London going down).
South in the Med, the sea level is still going up.
See quote from SELF project google
" The trends determined from the longer RLR records available in the Mediterranean are compiled in Table 3 together with the relative sea-level rise expected from isostatic compensation due to post-glacial rebound. In the Mediterranean, this effect is of the order 0.3 mm/a. Thus, at tectonically stable sites we should expect a relative sea-level rise close to the global one."
For 'Hockey Stick'try Potsdam Insitute and Stefan Rahmstorf. He is pretty good on projected sea rise as well, see Science, 19 Jan 2007.
best
Phil
Realclimate.org had this link,
http://bostonreview.net/BR32.1/emanuel.html
to an excellent article written by Emanuel Kerry (primary author on one of the studies on increasing hurricane intensities), on the uncertainties in current understanding of climate behavior. More importantly from my perspective, he included a multilayered explanation of the wildly non-linear responses climate often displays to minor forcing events.
I have read a lot of these and this may be the best. He used extreme effort to be non-partisan and non-confrontational.
"I thought I would try another unscientific experiment. So I picked a reference...So in my little check on the two sides, the book authors win by a score of one to zero." If you use this criterion for judging a book, then Velikovsky's "Worlds in collision" shows that the astronomical events described in the Bible (Sun standing still etc) are absolutely true and the author was a genius. Unfortunately Velikovsky was a crackpot.