Promoted from the comments, the download of the BBC Radio 4 'Now Show' (Mar 16) is available here (at least for now). Key bit starts at about 18min in, (the rest of the show is pretty funny too).
Amusing, yes, but perhaps as well not to get too friendly with the Now Show - if I remember correctly, they’ve been none too kind to Al Gore in the past. Mind you, I can’t recall them being kind to anybody in the past.
Just read the transcript and I want to congratulate the folks who put their effort into the global warming debate in New York city. Regardless of the outcome of the vote at the end, you did a fantastic job! Clearly on substance, as one reads the transcripts your “sceptic” crowd said almost nothing about global warming, lots of funny comments but nothing substantial at all. Don’t know how it will sound on NPR yet but on paper, word for word, idea for idea, it was a great effort! And very helpful for someone like myself who took part in Gore’s training in Nashville and am to some extent dealing with the same challenges myself during my own presentations. THANK YOU.
I read the transcript of the debate you participated in. Those formats are useless for getting to the bottom of anything, but there may be a better way - the blogosphere.
Here is Lindzen’s closing statement. Perhaps you would like to rebut:
RICHARD S. LINDZEN Yes. I think it’s a little bit difficult to know how to respond,
to be told that, uh, one shouldn’t attack scientists while you’re attacking scientists,
to go and say you have to control methane without explaining that methane has
stopped growing. You don’t explain why there’s global warming on Mars, Jupiter,
Triton and Pluto. You don’t look at the ocean data and see, that whereas your boss
Jim Hansen was saying that the heating of the ocean proved the flux that he needed
for high sensitivity, that in the last year there’ve been two papers in the same
journal, that point out that the original Levitus data’s wrong, that the ocean is cool,
and that the new numbers would call for one-tenth the sensitivity that Hansen
mentioned. If all this is so certain, why is the data changing, or is it a case when the
data changes you ignore it, and
BRIAN LEHRER One
RICHARD S. LINDZEN stick to the point. [APPLAUSE]
Marcus Brigstocke is good, however he certainly does tend to the left in UK political terms. His aim can be a little wobbly sometimes, see for example his interesting assertion than “global warming is supported by 80% of the world’s scientists” — but of course it’s a five minute angry rant, not a paper in Nature.
Well done the Corduroy King
Incidentally the language is rather more direct than usual - this goes out at 6:30pm on a Friday evening on the main BBC speech radio channel, I’m rather surprised he got “bastard” and “prick” through. Excellent venting of spleen, though, and interesting to hear the background of the producer of this “documentary”.
There was also the “Moral Maze”, Radio 4, on Wednesday 14th March 2007 which discussed GW and included George Monbiot of the Guardian. Sadly the beeb don’t produce downloads for it.
The Moral Maze is broadcast on Radio 4 at 8pm on Wednesdays and repeated on Saturdays at 10.15pm i.e tonight. One of the questioners accused George of sidestepping a certain question three times. Can you help him and me? I’ve forgotten the Q myself.
I clicked “here”. The internet churning went on for a while, then I saw nothing but this site the same as before. What happened? I am using MacOS 9.1 and ie5 on a 15 year old machine that works fine.
Please transcribe the show into text so that we can all see what was said.
I’m glad that someone else heard the Now Show. I rarely listen, but was glad I did. Humour and sarcasm have a way of cutting the legs from under ill-considered opinion in a way that common sense and logic often fail to do. Pens v swords. Perhaps something to remember if you go head-to-head in another debate?
To listen you will need to have a programme called RealPlayer installed
on your computer. Download it for FREE from our audio help page - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/audiohelp.shtml
If you’re not using a machine that plays streaming audio (or using for example the Lynx text browser, popular for blind people who read using text-to-speech) the radio show is also — for the moment — downloadable as a .MP3 audio file via this link, found at the show’s main page:
Don’t know whether it’s relevant to TGGWS, but the Great British public have this evening voted for a song which appears to be a celebration of air travel as their chosen entry for the Eurovision song contest.
I love the stand-by power bit, it’s so sad; otherwise intelligent people are absolutely wedded to this stand-by, “instant on” thing. And, the irony is that people will search for five or ten minutes for the misplaced remote so they can turn the television on, rather than simply pushing the buttons on the set. I guess they like the “magical” “action at a distance” quality of it….
Probably the only way to really solve the problem is to either do away with standby, (one’s magical remote will still work after one turns the set on), or get the manufacturers to develop much more efficient stand-by modes. I have serious doubts that many people will pull the plugs on their stand-by appliances voluntarily, it’s much too “inconvenient”.
Mike, in the question posed (three times) to George Monbiot what we have is a perfect example of Melanie Phillipsâ�� complete misunderstanding of the precautionary principle aspects of ‘Post Normal Science’ (PNS).
Funtowicz and Ravetz (Futures Sept 1993) pointed out that in order to formulate policies in relation to risk issues “where the facts are uncertain, values are in dispute, stakes are high and decisions urgent” then an â��extended peer communityâ�� is needed in order to deliberate a policy solution. This is in contrast to the pure-science curiosity-driven approach which promotes reductionism and testing until scientific â��truthâ�� is deducted, a replicable test designed and the process peer reviewed.
What Funtowicz and Ravetz suggested is that �Science cannot always provide well founded theories based on experiments for explanation and prediction, but can frequently achieve at best only mathematical models and computer simulations, which are essentially untestable. On the basis of such uncertain inputs, decisions must be made, under conditions of some urgency. Therefore policy cannot proceed on the basis of factual predictions, but on policy forecasts�
In asking the question [as aggressively] as she does Phillips is suggesting that, in her understanding, PNS makes fossil-fuel companies completely justified in their approach of hypothesis formulation and testing i.e. their starting point (H0) is that �fossil fuel use is not a problem� but their testing merely involves searching for anything (absolutely anything) which proves that hypothesis whilst discounting any other evidence, because that�s what they want to do.
In essence pure-science has indicated that there is an interaction between the atmosphere, the sun and increasing CO2 concentrations which causes global temperature to rise. This process cannot, however, be explicitly tested in-situ because of the sheer scale and complexity of the atmospheric system and the irreducible uncertainties introduced by other processes acting within it. What this necessitates is multiple stakeholder (not just by amongst scientists) deliberation about what is known and what is uncertain in order that value commitments can be made over the policies to be enacted which can affect their own welfare as well as that of other stakeholders, including future generations and other species.
In answering the question Monbiot is absolutely correct in asserting that pure-science is still vital to PNS because it introduces urgent issues into the policy domain. Where Phillips couldn�t be more wrong is in her belief that post normalism (as described by Mike Hulme) simply means that climate science is so uncertain that the science can be thrown out with the bath water in order to allow a purely value based decision process to prevail.
The remarkable thing is not that I was attacked. But that the attacks have been so feeble. The ice-core data was the jewel in the global-warming crown, cited again and again as evidence that carbon dioxide ‘drives’ the earth’s climate. In fact, as its advocates have been forced to admit, the ice-core data says the opposite. Temperature change always precedes changes in CO2 by several hundred years. Temperature drives CO2, not the other way round. The global-warmers do not deny this. They cannot.
During the post-war economic boom, while industrial emissions of CO2 went up, the temperature went down (hence the great global-cooling scare in the 1970s). Why? They say maybe the cooling was caused by SO2 (sulphur dioxide) produced by industry. But they say it mumbling under their breath, because they know it makes no sense. Thanks to China and the rest, SO2 levels are far, far higher now than they were back then. Why isn’t it perishing cold?
Too many journalists and scientists have built their careers on the global-warming alarm. Certain newspapers have staked their reputation on it. The death of this theory will be painful and ugly. But it will die. Because it is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Jeez, I answered (as an amateur) the ‘why isn’t it cold from Chinese sulfates just yesterday in another thread (because in 1970 only half the total fossil fuel had been burned, aerosols act fast, CO2 warming happens over decades); now with twice that much fossil fuel burned, we’re well into the warming from the past emissions and the aerosols are just reducing that trend — operating on a very different background than they did in 1940-1970.
Guess whoever asked it was cut’n'pasting, eh? Someone competent, correct my answer please.
By the way, that debate Gavin attended was interesting. It had Crichton, Lindzen and Philip Stott on one side, Gavin, Brenda Ekwurzel and Richard Somerville on the other. The motion was “Global Warming Is Not A Crisis”.
Prior to the debate they polled the audience and found 30-57-13 for-against-don’t know. After the debate it was 46-42-11. The ‘con’ side of the debate, if the numbers are square, took an audience that believed in their case and unconvinced them of it.
I would live to hear Gavin’s thoughts on this.
If this means that sound science loses the sound-byte war because it takes too long to explain it, then there is probably going to be a nagging problem communicating this sort of nuance to the public.
“During the post-war economic boom, while industrial emissions of CO2 went up, the temperature went down (hence the great global-cooling scare in the 1970s). Why? They say maybe the cooling was caused by SO2 (sulphur dioxide) produced by industry. But they say it mumbling under their breath, because they know it makes no sense. Thanks to China and the rest, SO2 levels are far, far higher now than they were back then. Why isn’t it perishing cold?”
Because sulfur dioxide emissions are going down and CO2 levels are going up would be my guess.
The CO2/temperature ice core lag is dealt with elsewhere on RC- but let’s take Durkin’s statement on global SO2 emissions to task. China’s emissions in 2006 were equal to the USA’s 1980 emissions at around 25.5Mt. In 1970 USA emissions were around 31Mt. The USA has now reduced emissions by @ 50% since 1970. Does anyone have more data on global SO2 emissions? With the collapse of the Soviet economy and severe SO2 reductions in W. Europe because of environmental legislation I suspect global SO2 emissions are lower now than during the 1970’s.
Funny how everyone seems to be concenreating on climate change here in th UK when politically we are well on the way doing something about it and most Britons seem convinced that something needs to be done, well enough Britons to start the three main parties vying for votes by offering policies anyway and the EU has a even wider climate science remit.
The issue is the United States where only states seem to be doing anything, the country as a whole seems hell bent on burning more fossil fuels than ever with the plans to build 159 new coal fired power plants over the next decade and the technology to sequester it is just a prototype at the moment, nice.
I have just read a peice in the Daily Telegraph concerning this man, Prof Nigel Weiss, from the department of astrophysics at Cambridge University. He is an astrophysicist there and he is claiming to have been misrepresented in the following peice which seems to be stating that CO2 may not be the sole cause of climate change that is relevant to our current warming, the Sun might be assisting us also.
It looks like what he is saying is that the Sun is going through its lower polar magnetic field moment in 50 years.
I wonder if real climate could resolve the solar issue once and for all if possible by contacting these solar and astro physicists and asking them for their expert opinion on why all of a sudden the Sun is becomming the tour de force of climate change?
It all seems plausable even if these people have beem misquoted.
Re: #22 (off-topic) Pete, isn’t that 3-4 times you make the same point? Some progress re this concern:
US legislative bodies are presently deliberating bills to (1) amend Clean Air Act to regulate emission of greenhouse gases from electric utilities; (2) accelerate reduction of US greenhouse gas emissions; (3) green capitol buildings to lead US by example, and so on. Not end results, but activity that merits awareness.
Some scientists in the UK seem to have decided Durkin didn’t do a good enough job and the anti-AGW brigade could do with their help, too. It seems they’ve accused the American Association for the Advancement of Science of the â��Hollywoodisation” of climate science.
Doesnâ��t look very contentious, although one might wonder why they only mention Kilimanjaro and ignore all the other glaciers. They seem to imply none of them are retreating due to AGW. And does the term “tipping point” really have “no scientific definition”? I thought scientists objected to its misuse , not to not using it at all. Maybe I’ve got that wrong.
Sense About Science has final responsibility for the content and gives a phone number for information 020 7478 4380
Perhaps someone should ring them up about the glaciers and in passing ask them who’s idea it was to use the word “Hollywoodisation”.
Lord Taverne, who Chairs Sense about Science, is not known for championing climate science, and has some interesting friends.
Wow, Durkin has a lot of gall. I hope the UK audience that reads his remarks has also seen the program. It actually hurts the skeptics’ side, not helps.
Prof. Wunsch’s inclusion is something I spotted as new, which is why I ended up on RC, reading about The Great Global Warming Sandbagging.
Durkin should be honest: It runs through some of the standard skeptic fare, then quickly descends into the conspiracy theory that AGW is a weapon that is the creation of Maggie Thatcher in her war against the coalworkers union. It then ends with an emotional piece about poverty in Africa.
Oh, man, this is not good to read. Looks like Sourcewatch has an article on them that should be checked as well, but look for the long cautionary post (with footnotes, copied below) here:
“* Underwent a political odyssey which took them from the authoritarian left to the libertarian right without any splits or the whole thing falling apart…..
“…. there are indubitably large numbers of dodgy think tanks and advocacy groups around. As this particular one has a great lack of information about how it functions Iâ��m naturally skeptical.
“The fact that it appears to be linked to the LM/RCP/IoI people makes me even more wary, especially when they appear to have been involved in both setting it up and running it.
> A leading solar expert has told how he was vilified by environmental campaigners and condemned
> by scientists after he was wrongly branded a climate-change denier.
> …
> Larry Solomon, the columnist who wrote the profile of Prof Weiss, said: ‘I wrote the piece as a
> laudable profile of Prof Weiss and his work. I am perplexed as to why he has responded in this way.’
Solomon who doesn’t know the meaning of the word “laudable” — unless he’s congratulating himself on the excellence of his own writing there.
I would certainly like to see an investigation of the IP addresses of the “environmental campaigners” who attacked Dr. Weiss — I’d bet on sock puppets pretending to be environmentalists, behind such actions. And whether they’re RCP-types or naive #$&@ [edited], either way, they ought to come to light.
———-
Anecdote, from experience: during the 1960s anti-war protests in the USA, a fair number of us who were more interested in first aid and crowd control than in any rhetoric would go to demonstrations to stand _behind_ the audience and _behind_ the speakers, looking away from them, watching out for the yahoos who would come up and try throwing rocks and bottles over the pacifists to provoke the police. As far as I heard at the time, those yahoos were usually RCP types. Provoking violence by pretending to be on _all_ sides of any debate, to stir up trouble and misunderstanding, is a political tactic.
Don’t fall for this #*$&[edited]. It works quite well:
pretend attack, provoke attack, bogus attack, profit for those who benefit from the confusion.
——-
Yes, there are #%$* [edited] who call themselves ‘environmentalists’ (ask them about ecology — they think it means green stuff out past the suburbs, rather than a science with great uncertainty).
But I think it’s really, really important to validate who’s who when attacks start happening.
Perhaps time for digital signatures, in fact, to know people are who they claim to be.
Indeed the USA are considering bills and acts to do something about it, however considering that 50% of US electricity is coal based and as clean coal technologies do not exist yet to fit to these 159 power stations so what does the USA do? Well I would imagine that they are harrdly going to leave themselves at an economic disadvantage are they and hence I doubt that any of these bill and acts come to anything anytime soon.
What technology presently can replace coal or sequester its exhaust?
Maybe just another instance of scientists taking too little care when talking to the press.
However, I do wonder at the complacency of people sitting in the beautiful, but rarified atmosphere of an Oxford college, with food and drink on tap, and for whom the word drought means little more than not being able to water the front garden, criticizing those who see AGW as a threat to society. It may not seem much of a threat amongst the dreaming spires, but I daresay it looks it bit different if you are living in one of those places in the world where daily life is already a desparate struggle for survival. For these people catastrophe really doesn’t sound too strong a word. And you don’t need to be talking about catastrophic climate change either.
Climate change isn’t some abstract concept , it happens in the real world, interacting with existing circumstances. We can’t deal with the mess we’ve got now, how on earth does anyone think we’re going to cope if it gets worse.
If saying that makes you guilty of “Hollywoodisation”, then I really am living on a different planet.
Just to point out another (and more serious!) rebuttal of TGGWS in this narrated Powerpoint presentation by Christopher Merchant, which nicely points out some of the main errors and logical fallacies.
He does make an error on the solar-T curve, though it’s an understandable one given that the graph is misattributed and mislabelled (and he’s presumably not aware of the Friis-Christensen stuff). The “solar” curve is actually solar cycle length rather than sunspot number, and is dealt with here. His point about selective presentation of the pre-1980 data still stands though.
Marcus Brigstoke said what should have been said by every scientist this week on radio 4 when asked about the programme. Instead we got Sir John Houghton (having written a very good (bad)review of the whole thing http://www.jri.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=137&Itemid=83
totally fluffed it when asked to name one thing wrong with it. It could be argued that he was just overwhelmed by the ‘target-rich environment’ that question opened up, but frankly he just waffled.
I’ve posted about Hardakers own particular brand of stupidity when interviewed on Friday 17th on another thread (but you should be able to listen to the interview on the BBC’s radio 4 web page - truely a horrible experience), but it shows that some are buying into the idea that the seriousness of AGW is something that should be dabated as some sort of ‘philosphy of science’ question, suitable for high table. Unfortunately, the BBC led with it for the whole morning (Today is the headline leading programme in the UK for news and politics, so if its top of their news, its the top of everyone else’s as well).
The media does not do nuance, it does not do ‘are we absolutely sure?’ and it does not do scientific uncertainity at all well. Whereas the deniers will say something cannot be happening, academics feel much more comfortable with ‘maybe and ‘possibly’. It’s fine when you write it in an article or paper, because we all understand the rules. But when you do it on the Today programme, when you have three minutes before the sport opposite someone who really does not care about truth, its fatal. A large number of people believed that programme (just look at C4, the BBC, the Times and the Guardian’s message-boards), and waffling or welcoming a non-existant ‘debate’ will simply convince them that Stott, Chrichton and co have as much weight as the vast number of scientists actually working on AGW .
But its not just Collier and Hardaker who seem to be sipping the KoolAid. Michael Hulme of the Tyndall Centre seems to also being on this particular track. Back in Feb., he wrote a piece about the media reaction to the IPCC report relase saying pretty much the same thing http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001117mike_hulme_in_nature.html
, which got a response from the Guardians Science editor that
‘Mike accuses us of “appealling to fear to generate a sense of urgency”
Guilty as charged. Is it not frightening? Is it not urgent?’.
About a month ago, he featured heavily in a rather weak programme on Radio 4 called ‘The Interregation’, which was supposed to take a hard look at Stern and the IPCC report. It was the same line. The programme failed to deliver, relying on nitpicking and the possibility that things might not be as bad in the future as Stern warns. Without his imput, it would have been a very thin programme indeed. He was at it agin this week, with a widely read article saying much the same thing http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2032821,00.html. He actually managed to give Singers new book a plug of sorts in the second paragraph (he does say its wrong in the eighth, but its a bit late by then), and seems to follow a similar path to Collier and Hardaker.
Indeed, according to this article in the Observer http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2036762,00.html he’s joined forces with them. Its true that the media does spin stories, but is there any real evidence that climate scientists have actually made the effects of climate change more dramatic? If anything, they may have underplayed the effects. Bill McKibben and New Scientist has both noted that the IPCC is rather conservative, and the 4th report will probably not include the latest and most alarming data.
This breast-beating does nothing to help convince the public that scientists are speaking with one voice on climate change, and will undoubtably do a great deal of damage. Since its taken the British media a great deal of time to cover it in the first place http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2007/no1_andreadis_smith.htm, why can the scientist involved refrain from giving such mixed signals.
Frankly, if the Royal Society and others does not get its act together, it will be left to george Monbiot and one or two others to fight against the deniers. He’s a zoology trained journalist, but he’s not a climate scientist and ultimately its not his job to do this alone. There should be a real effort to get out the message to the public, a message that should be simple and unambigous.
I’ve tried very hard to get to some facts about GW but find it increasingly difficult. It all seems to boil down to ‘our scientific group is bigger and has better credentials than yours’ or ‘their information may have been funded by an oil company’.
All this seems little better than ‘my dad’s bigger than yours’ and frankly, what does it matter if research is funded by an oil company. The evidence it finds can be tested on it’s own merit. Who paid for it shouldn’t make any difference to any facts - unless of course this whole GW area doesn’t actually have any hard facts.
I watched the program and read the rebutals but still cannot for the life of me understand if CO2 levels lag behind the temperature by 800 years how CO2 causes the temperature to change. You can invoke all kinds of linked feedback mechanisms plus an ‘unknown’ reason why the temperature intially kicked off but surely the simplest possibility is that CO2 does not effect the temperature as much as temperature effects the CO2.
If 1000’s of scientist are so sure then why cant we just have a straight answer on this - please.
The reaction to this single program strikes me as a case of the ‘lady doth protest too much’
Re #32: PhilC — In the ice core records, temperatures rise and this causes carbon dioxide to rise. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, carbon dioxide rises (due to burning carbon) and this causes temperatures to rise.
It is a matter of the temperature and the carbon dioxide in the air being out-of-balance. Try reading Wikipedia about greenhose gases.
Someone please correct me…but I understand that this is a complete red herring and is NOT what is in the peer reviewed literature…and Lindzen DOES NOT CONTRIBUTE PEER_REVIEWED LITERATURE THAT STANDS UP UNDER SCRUTINY… he is a quack and a charliton.
The correct order is a three step process (from EPICA ice cores as well as three other ice core records).
First, the average Earth’s temps first go up a little. Second, there is a huge CO2 increase as the oceans get warmer/permafrost starts melting, methane starts increasing due to more swamps and the ice age winds stop/slow down (no feeding the hungry little plankton)…and thirdly 600-1000 years later there is a huge temperature increase over the next several thousand years….this is driven largely by the positive CO2 feedback…ie. in effect CO2 causes temperature to rise because it is a feedback.
[I wonder if real climate could resolve the solar issue once and for all if possible by contacting these solar and astro physicists and asking them for their expert opinion on why all of a sudden the Sun is becomming the tour de force of climate change?]
Me too but I think most of the RC posters have already concluded the Sun is a minor player in the recent warming.
We are now with 15-20 years of the end of the 90 year cycle of increased solar output and magnetic activity. Unforunately, our best records of solar output, and hence our understanding of solar output, date only from the middle of cycle. During this same period humans have dumped huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. This creates a muddled picture since both solar activity and CO2 have been increasing at the same time. Both sides would agree that increased CO2 and increased solar activity would increase warming but they differ in the degree of influence they assign to each.
The fact that the current cycle of increased solar activity is nearing its end may be pretty well confirmed:
Phil C (#32):
The lag you mention is observed in the ice core data for past warmings (from glacial to inter-glacial temperature regimes).
What it means is that in the past (when there was no industrial civilisation mining carbon out of the ground and releasing it into the atmosphere) there wasn’t enough flux in the various sources and sinks of the carbon-cycle for CO2 to initiate a warming. Instead you had to wait for changes in the earth’s orbital paramaters to start the world’s climate out of a glacial episode - once the warming started however, the ice core data shows that C02 levels rise shortly thereafter (cause unknown, although there are some hypotheses around), and this rise in CO2 intensifies the warming (’cuz CO2 is a greenhouse gas dontchaknow). All of which is a jolly good thing, because orbital changes aren’t enough to effect a full deglaciation without a helping hand from the carbon - if the CO2 hadn’t come along then I’d be composing this post from the middle of a glacier. So anyway, absent something significant like an industrial civilisation or a massive bout of vulcanism, you need orbital changes to start the ball rolling and then carbon comes along afterwards and gives it enough of a wallop to get it over the line.
This time is different, because this time (as you may have noticed) there is an industrial civilisation mining carbon out of the ground and emmitting it to the atmosphere. So you don’t need to wait for a change in orbital inclination to cause an uptick in temps which then (via mechanisms unknown) causes a noticeable rise in C02 to prolong and increase the warming. We’ve cut out the middleman and, by virtue of the known properties of atmospheric CO2, we are going straight to the ‘prolong and increase’ part of the story directly.
#32, Phil, who ever said that every warming cycle is initiated by increasing greenhouse gases? Greenhouse gas emission can also occur as a positive feedback to a warming trend already in progress. Such a feedback tends to intensify and lengthen the warming trend. Remember, these warming epochs last 5000 years or so, while the CO2 kicks in after the first 800 years or so.
Now, you may ask how do we know that the current epoch is different? It is because in this case CO2 is leading. We know this because the carbon in fossil fuels actually has a different isotopic abundance than carbon that has been in the carbon cycle (all the Carbon-14 has decayed, for one thing), and we are putting enough fossil carbon into the atmosphere, that we can actually see the isotopic abundances changing. So, we know where the carbon is coming from. We know it is enough to cause warming, and we know that the release of carbon via the positive feedback mechanisms has not yet started to occur in this epoch of warming. When it does, we’ll see methane increase dramatically as well as CO2, and this likely will cause even greater warming. There is no great mystery here.
Re #32: [If 1000’s of scientist are so sure then why cant we just have a straight answer on this - please.]
Maybe because you don’t bother to look for that straight answer. I know I’ve given my simplified, not-a-climate-scientist version in a recent thread; other people have given better ones. This is over-simplified, but over the past many millions of years prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was essentially a fixed amount of CO2 in the system. Some was in the air, some in the ocean. Those ice cores show what happens in that system: if the world gets warmer for some reason, CO2 comes out of the ocean (a process that takes several centuries), and causes further warming. Eventually all of it gets into the air, and you have an extended, high CO2 warm period. Then something causes the world to cool beyond a critical point, CO2 goes from the air back into the ocean, and you have a cool period.
Then humans came along and added a lot more CO2 to the system. This changes its behavior. To begin with, it cranks up the thermostat, so you might think you’d have the same cycle, just a few degrees higher. The problem, though, is that the coolings seem to depend on having lots of snow & ice in the polar regions, and if the planet’s too warm, you won’t get that.
“How can it be that chemical reactions cause a match to burn if the chemical reactions lag behind friction? Look, when you strike a match it’s just friction, right? Friction is what causes the match to burn, not some putative feedback effect involving chemicals in the match head.
Thus, the most reasonable explanation is that the chemical reactions do not affect the temperature, but rather that the temperature changes affect the chemical reaction - and it’s all due to friction.”
Sounds reasonable - but is utter nonsense. A little bit of friction provides the activation energy for further chemical reactions.
Let’s consider the ice age transition:
You say: “You can invoke all kinds of linked feedbacks effects plus an ‘unknown’ reason why the temperature initially kicked off..”
Look: there is no ‘chicken and egg’ paradox here. The ‘unknown’ reason is known; this is the change in the Earth’s orbital characteristics. Imagine if the Earth’s axis of rotation was pointed towards the sun, so that the North pole was in perpetual darkness. In fact, the Earth’s axis of rotation does change, and this leads to changes in the distribution of sunlight hitting the Earth. That’s your ‘unknown’ trigger - the Milankovitch cycle effect.
CO2 release is one amplification mechanism that is activated by the initial Milankovitch cycle effect; the lag is only an initial effect. Another amplification mechanism is the change in albedo as ice sheets begin to melt back: more bare soil and vegetation and less ice and snow mean less sunlight is reflected to space, i.e. a lower albedo. We can calculate albedo effects; we can calculate CO2 and CH4 radiative forcing effects, and we know (from ice core records) that glacial/interglacial transitions are always accompanied by rises in CO2 and CH4 and a reduction in albedo.
Putative mechanisms for CO2 release are uncertain - but if you defrost your freezer, and it’s full of food, then it will become a source of CO2 and other gases as microbes go to work. Most explanations work along similar lines. Unfortunately, noone was around with a video camera to observe what happened - but we have the record.
Now, consider that we are in an interglacial currently, and we’ve found new sources of CO2 (fossil fuels) to add to the atmosphere, and that we know CO2 played a large role in the complete glacial/interglacial transition (and we’ve added a lot of methane and N2O as well). In fact, we’re increasing CO2 at rates 30X greater than anything seen in the glacial record. Should we expect a strong response? Yes! How fast will the changes occur? Still uncertain… but we seem to be in an accelerating phase of CO2 emissions. It’s no accident that this past winter was the warmest on record since accurate global recordkeeping began in 1880 - and yet that’s a record that will surely fall in the next few years. Global cooling trends? Not unless we see record levels of volcanic activity - or an asteroid strike - and that would only be a temporary effect.
We need to plan for more of the same (heat waves, intense hurricane seasons, drought & flooding) while reducing CO2 emissions to head off potentially catastrophic effects, like inducing massive methane releases and ocean anoxia.
“Following a misleading account of my views in the Toronto Financial Post last month, a number of right-wing lobbyists have asserted that I claimed that an impending drop in solar activity would lead to global cooling that would cancel out the warming caused by greenhouse gases. On the contrary, I have always maintained that any temperature changes caused by variations in solar activity — while interesting in themselves — are not significant compared to the global warming that we are already experiencing, and very small compared to what will happen if we continue to burn fossil fuel at the present rate.”
As coal-fired emissions decrease, however, so will the sulfate aerosol cooling effect. It’d be interesting to see an estimate of the net effect of eliminating all coal emissions on a global basis - shouldn’t IPCC scenarios include this kind of specific estimate? (sulfate aerosols have a far shorter lifetime than CO2, so the CO2 from past coal combustion is still in the air; the sulfates are not). See the excellent links posted by Tavita in #19.
Re #35 “Who paid for it shouldn’t make any difference to any facts…”
In a perfect world, it wouldn’t. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. Surely you’ve heard how the tobacco companies suppressed the research of their own scientists when that research revealed that smoking was harmful to one’s health? And big pharmaceutical companies have done the same thing. Research sponsored by big oil companies may well result in good science, but one can’t easily know for sure.
As for your inability to find some “facts” about global warming, you must not have tried very hard. Why not try the Science Links posted on the RC home page?
If I understand this correctly, an initial rise in temperature causes an increase in CO2 which then causes an increase in termperature which would cause another rise in CO2.
Once this process starts - what stopped it from running completely out of control in the past?
Re# 44 & 46 - Value of research funded by oil companies:
I would be very impressed if they or anyone else was able to fund the development of a climate model that like the others i) is based on known physics, ii) is able to effectively hindcast historical and paleological climate as successfully as the existing models and iii) predicts no or minimal CO2 induced temperate increase.
Perhaps this is an effective response to the skeptics. Meet that challenge and then they’ll be credible.
I’d be particularly excited if they, or anyone else for that matter, could come up with a model that effectively predicts the El Nino/La Nina climate pattern. I depend on direct rainfall capture alone and want to know how big a water tank I need to buy to keep my vegie patch going through future Australian summers.
Comment by Ike Solem “…it looks like China is taking some positive action: China Bans New Small Coal-Based Power Generators - shouldn’t the United States do the same?”
According to your link, this is only to reduce SO2 and soot, something the US has been doing for many years.
re 45
There’s only a fixed amount of carbon that is mobile between the different components of the Earth system: atmosphere, oceans (hydrosphere), biosphere and lithosphere (surface rocks). So the process can’t carry on indefinitely. Unless a global civilisation works night and day to pump carbon out of the ground and into the air. The fossil fuels we are burning have been out of the equation for hundreds of millions of years. We need to take our foot off the accelerator.
Philc:
search: biogeochemical cycling
White cliffs of Dover
plankton
calcite and aragonite
“Plankton cooled a greenhouse”
There’s plenty on this; it’s a FAskedQ — the answers are in the research; that’ll help find postings.
Look into it just a bit first, it will help you ask questions about the science if you read the frequent answers and those searches in the searchbox at top of page will turn up the answers, asked very often here.
“Once this process (co2 being incresed naturally -RO) starts - what stopped it from running completely out of control in the past?”
Again anyone step in. Here is a simplified explanation. There are several processes (can be called negative feedbacks) which stop the Co2 (on Earth…not poor Venus)from going “runaway” (”runaway greenhouse effect”).
The first is, is that rocks (silicate rocks), in the long term, remove the CO2 out of the air with a reaction with rain.
The warmer it gets, the more these chemical reactions increase (because it rains more when it gets warmer-ooops, what does that mean is happening now?).
Now this solution flows to the sea and dumps CO2 into the sea. in other words to paraphase from your high school chemistry that you were required to take: CaSiO3 + 3H2O + 2CO2 turns into Ca2+ + 2(HCO3- ) + H4SiO4).
Notice how the CO2 disappears. This is called the chemical weathering process and is part of the “carbon cycle.” In the ocean, types of animals absorb the carbon out of the water to make shells…they die and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
A second process to stop co2 from growing , is that the warmer it gets (the ice-covered lands disappear and the more trees and plants appear. They absorb more CO2 from the air and transfer it by roots deep in the soil where it combines with water to make an acid “carbonic acid” which disolves calcium silicate in rock to to make calcium carbonate (notice the word carbon in carbonate).
The calcium carbonate (carbon) is then transported in solution to the oceans where it can be dumped out as limestone.
Okay, those are the two basic processes. Otherwise, co2 gets reduced during ice ages when the Earth’s orbit changes the amount of sun energy hitting at least the northern hemisphere during the summer in regular (pretty regular) three cycles of about 26,000 years, 41,000 years and 100,000 years (Milankovitch cycles).
You know the routine: Cool the air. Cool the oceans which can hold more co2 in solution (think of your cold versus hot pop bottle). Now increase the ice on Earth. This makes higher winds by air coming over ice, rapidly sinking and making winds. With an ice age, more dusty land is exposed as sea levels drop as water becomes ice. This carries more dust. Dust has iron. More iron feeds more plankton in the oceans. More plankton (plant variety) eats more co2 and sinks.
In ice ages, the ocean currents often also get more active because of a bigger difference in temperatures between the poles and the equator and this allows even more co2 to be absorbed (subducted).
That is a simplified expanation that leaves a lot out.
RE#45, This was discussed from many perspectives at the “Swindled” thread; my attempts can be viewed at #150, #202, #291, but to quote one of the moderators:
“Response:AFAIK, people don’t know exactly why CO2 stopped at 280 in interglacials and 180 in glacials. It doesn’t have to be feedbacks: there could simply be some reservoir that is exhausted. Also, thats for the previous 4 interglacials: before then, EPICA shows 250. This again is unexplained - William”
If you look at http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1124-climate.html , you can see a graph of the ice core CO2 record (halfway down the page). We know that CO2 stops increasing - why is uncertain.
Once again (as with the solar issue, see Nigel Weiss’s comments above) you have contrarians using one-sided distortions of scientific uncertainties to support their views.
‘Some confusion surrounded the views of the RMS scientists yesterday after Prof Hardaker told the IoS that he could not think of a case where a scientist had overstated the position. He did however mention a statement by the American Association for the Advancement of Science that described an “intensification of droughts, heatwaves, floods, wildfires and severe storms” as “early warning signs of yet more devastating damage to come”.
He said he did not disagree with any of this, but thought the AAAS should have made it clear what could be justified by the scientific evidence and what was based on judgement. He pointed out that he and his colleague were not experts on climate change. ‘
So after all this fuss, he did not disagree with any of the statement, and ‘he and his colleague were not experts on climate change’. Strange, since the BBC Today website still has the interview http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today2_climate_20070317.ram with the headline ‘Two of Britain’s most senior climate researchers have told the BBC that scientists have been overplaying the message on climate change.’. Still, if you wanted to get lots of pulicity for outfit like Sense about Science (who have some slightly dodgy links to the RCP/Spiked crowd), then this nonsense would have done you no harm…
I’ve been following the “pro” and “cons” for a while now and still can’t get to some conclusion of it all. On questions I have for instance is: The CO2 we are releasing now is that not previously free CO2 that have been captured at some time in history? And if so, are these volumes not already in the climate system and we are actually not adding anything that did not exist before?
Re #35, climate change is relative is the answer. Today millions of people live along the coasts of the world, when the seas rise due to climate change they will be in trouble, it does not matter that 50 million years ago the earth was 5 degrees hotter and the seas 70 meters higher does it as it did not impact anyone ?
It is all about forcings or which the earths albedo and vegetation is the strongest followed by greenhouse gases. Both do not need to be high for warming to occur either can cause warming or cooling for that matter. 10,000 years ago the earths natural cycles (known to us as miltankovitch cycles) starting to bring us out of an ice age and hence the albedo effect was the cause of this warming. As you have been told it takes some 800 years of warming before albedo and vegetation had been effected enough although RC tell us that it may not have been this long. Anyway the source of the CO2 is most likely the oceans which absorb CO2 when it is cold and release it when it is warmed and it is this released CO2 that then causes further warming of the atmosphere.
In the modern world 280 ppm seems to be the earths natural limit and we are not at 390 ppm due to industrial burning. Further burning will cause steadily increasing CO2 levels and hence further warming.
Yes, most CO2 we are producing at present was at some point in history captured and converted to fossil fuels, which then remained safely underground (and outside the climate system) until we recently started re-releasing it into the atmosphere.
re#49
if, at some point, it was all in the atmosphere why have the “unpleasant consequences” (runnaway greenhouse I presume) not been seen in the historical record.
[Response: Who says “runaway greenhouse”? -William]
I should maybe start by stating that I recognize the fact that earth is warming… And with that out of the way… After considering your answer I still don’t understand why many claim that the CO2 levels have never been this high when evidently “all” the CO2 we’re releasing must have been around some point in time. I understand the consequences at present and future time for mankind but in the history of earth (and I’m thinking rather recently) there must have been worse situations than the one that is proposed to be?
Rob…the problem is I think pre-Industrial Revoluton levels of CO2 were 270ppm with a very small population and now C02-equivalent levels are way over 400ppm with a population heading towards 9.5 billion by 2050. These people need to be fed, housed, clothed, and have access to clean water and good sanitation. If extreme weather events increase and the temperature gets hotter, then this has severe implications for that larger population. If there were still less than a billion people in the world and the temperature rose naturally rather than being forced there wouldn’t be such a problem. Isn’t this what we are all really worried about?
Exactly, we should worrie about the consequences of a warmer world rather than try to rectify something that we might or might not be able to influence. Is it not so that a very high percentage agrees and recognize that the world is getting warmer (independent of source)? And are we also not on agreement that this warming will continue for a long time regardless of any action taken to prevent that? If so, shouldn’t the prudent way of the humankind (as history have told us) be to adapt?
The claim about “CO2 levels never been this high” is made (as far as I know) for the last 650,000 years (this is found from analysing air bubbles in ice cores).
With a little googling I found this temperature graph: http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm which has several maxima at ca 22 deg C global T, for example in the Cretaceous some 100 million years ago (currently we’re at 15-16 deg C). Presumably CO2 concentrations were also higher then (but I am no paleoclimate expert).
However, as people have often pointed out in the hockeystick discussion, whether CO2 levels were higher at some time in the past is really not the issue*). Even if we had no clue whatsoever about the climate before 1800 there is plenty of evidence that the theory of global warming is sound and we’re involved in a dangerous global experiment.
*) Of course I don’t mean to deny the importance of paleoclimatology. It it is a good thing to have the complete picture, and to check our theories wherever we can.
“…I still don’t understand why many claim that the CO2 levels have never been this high when evidently “all” the CO2 we’re releasing must have been around some point in time.”
Bear in mind that the coal / oil deposits we’re burning through weren’t laid down overnight. The CO2 we’re re-releasing WAS all in the atmosphere in the past, but not necessarily all at the same point in time (unless you go billions of years back, before life on the planet).
[[You don’t explain why there’s global warming on Mars, Jupiter, Triton and Pluto. ]]
All we know about Mars is that one of its polar caps has shrunk a bit in the past three years. That proves exactly nothing relevant to the overall thermal balance of Mars.
Jupiter is not undergoing global warming. Where did Lindzen get that idea?
Triton? Where is Neptune in its orbit just now? Ditto Pluto. Neither Triton nor Pluto has an atmosphere worth speaking of, but they do have summer and winter. Is Lindzen aware that Pluto takes 248 years to go around the Sun, and therefore that its seasonal change in any direction will last a lot longer than on Earth?
Coming up at 10am on C-SPAN, another episode of “Stop Interfering with My Research.” Today, the big boys go at it. The CEQ head’s name is actually James Connaughton, a fairly important policymaker on climate change, but who is seldom seen or heard. C-SPAN usually repeats these hearings, so check the schedule.
Global Warming Research
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) chairs an Oversight and Gov’t Reform Cmte. hearing on claims of poli-
tical interference with government scientists & their research on climate change. Witnesses include James Hansen, Dir., NASA Goddard Inst. for Space Studies; John Connaughton, Council on Environmental Quality & others.
thanks for the replies so far - I do appreciate the time people take to put forward information but…
All of this started off in the 1970’s with the simple idea that Co2 warms the atmosphere. This has developed so that now ice coverage, methane, CO2 etc all contribute. Throw in solar and cosmic activity and I’d say you have a very, very complex system youâ��re trying to model. Anyone who is willing to take a firm stand on any prediction being right is a brave sole.
A computer model of this would have to take account of every contributing factor in exactly the right amount for its predictions to have any chance of being right. Not only the initial conditions but also the exact nature of how everything interacts with everything else. Should any of these be out (or some other as yet unrecognized factor be missed altogether) then after a few interations the model would bare no relation to how the world’s real climate will change.
Perhaps this is why the GW predictions I read range from �not too bad� to �the end of life as we know it�.
Other theories like relativity or quantum mechanics stand or fall on very definite predictions. The predictions from GWT have such a wide variation that the theory itself seems very under-developed.
Re:63
Perhaps Lindzen is suggesting Earth’s orbit is as eccentric as Pluto and Neptune. This seems an unusually amateurish attempt at baiting and misdirection.
[[I watched the program and read the rebutals but still cannot for the life of me understand if CO2 levels lag behind the temperature by 800 years how CO2 causes the temperature to change. ]]
Try reading the past posts in the blog. RealClimate and posters have covered this many, many times.
We know more CO2 in the air raises the temperature of the ground. That’s basic radiation physics which goes back at least to Arrhenius in 1896. If any temperature increase for another reason raises CO2, the CO2 will raise the temperature further. It can’t be avoided unless there’s some counteracting factor, and no one has ever found one despite diligent search for many decades.
[[If I understand this correctly, an initial rise in temperature causes an increase in CO2 which then causes an increase in termperature which would cause another rise in CO2.
Once this process starts - what stopped it from running completely out of control in the past? ]]
The math governing it is essentially a converging series — each increment is smaller than the last, so the total comes to some finite sum. Compare the series 1 + 1 + 1 … which diverges to infinity, with 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 … which converges to 2.
[[I’ve been following the “pro” and “cons” for a while now and still can’t get to some conclusion of it all. On questions I have for instance is: The CO2 we are releasing now is that not previously free CO2 that have been captured at some time in history? And if so, are these volumes not already in the climate system and we are actually not adding anything that did not exist before?]]
Most of the carbon on Earth is not in the climate system, but in sedimentary rocks on the ocean floor. It does eventually get recycled to the air, but the process takes millions of years.
You’re right that the total amount of carbon is fixed — mass is conserved in any non-nuclear reaction. But what’s happening now is that carbon is being released from the rocks — fossil fuels — and dumped into the atmosphere faster than natural recycling can handle it.
[[I should maybe start by stating that I recognize the fact that earth is warming… And with that out of the way… After considering your answer I still don’t understand why many claim that the CO2 levels have never been this high when evidently “all” the CO2 we’re releasing must have been around some point in time. I understand the consequences at present and future time for mankind but in the history of earth (and I’m thinking rather recently) there must have been worse situations than the one that is proposed to be?]]
There have been times in geological history when CO2 was much higher and the world was much warmer, and life survived. It will survive now. But the transition to that warmer state will be faster than our agriculture and our economy can handle. In the Jurassic when the sea level was higher, there were no cities built on the coastline. There are now.
The model problems are not so severe as you make them out to be.
1. Some factors are less important than others, so it doesn’t matter whether we know them accurately, as long as we’re in a reasonable range. There are also some statistical ‘tricks’ to deal with uncertainty, as they do in the ClimatePrediction project.
2. Some important factors (what CO2, CH4 etc do with radiation) are well known from independent experiments.
3. It gives A LOT of confidence that the models reproduce measurements fairly well, not only over time, but also in space: temperature and rain distributions over the globe for example.
There is the matter of lacking knowledge of ice dynamics (melting) of course, but from what I gather this will probably make matters worse than better.
And what’s the alternative? Just ignore the best predictions science has to offer?
“On questions I have for instance is: The CO2 we are releasing now is that not previously free CO2 that have been captured at some time in history?
And if so, are these volumes not already in the climate system
and we are actually not adding anything that did not exist before?”
My over-simplified explanation was too simplified on how Earth’s systems keep CO2 in check. I named only two general processes.
There is at least a third important process at work that keeps the CO2 naturally in check…sometimes known as biological sequestering or a biological pump. This is also part of the carbon cycle.
This third process is approximately as follows (again very simplified)… the CO2 levels rise, Earth’s average surface temperatures rise.
Now trees, plants, algae (in comparatively now stagnant oceans and lakes-[algae are plants]…think scum on a summer pond surface) and swamps and bogs spread massively.
Oceans often become more stagnant during long warm periods because of fewer temperature differences between the poles and the equator.
The warmth spreads to almost the poles. Palms and ferns grow at the equivalent of the artic circle area…ie most of the Earth’s land surface now becomes covered by swamps and the oceans by algae.
Trees, plants, algae and other single-celled animals absorb CO2. They die and are covered by newer trees, plants and algae in this stagnant wet swamp/bog/ocean envriroment.
They sink (in swamps, bogs and oceans) and are covered my more plants and trees. After a while (millions of years) this is turned by pressure and heat…into coal, oil and gas full of…carbon.
It basically stays this way…unless we humans suddenly dig it up and release it to the atmosphere by burning oil, coal and gas. This carbon now combines with oxygen to form…co2 when you burn it.
Guess what one of the biggest geological ages was called when this “biological sequestering or biological pump” was occurring about 300 million years ago…the “Carboniferous age” (note the word carbon).
That is a third major process that keeps co2 in check…and has severe implications for today and the future. In short…”this ain’t natural.”
on the American Institute of Physics website. Arrenhius’ (1896) prediction was that for a doubling of CO2 there would be roughly 5degree increase in temperature, I believe the current estimate for this sensitivity is a little lower.
I wonder if he intended for us to test his prediction experimentally?
For those who’d rather not install RealPlayer to listen to BBC programmes (those that aren’t podcast), Google “Real Alternative” for an, er alternative.
1.. “The model problems are not so severe as you make them out to be.”
you can only know how severe they are by waiting until the predictions have come true - or not. If it turns out to have even a slightly different effect that you origianlly thought your model can be way off.
2. “Some important factors (what CO2, CH4 etc do with radiation) are well known from independent experiments.”
experiments that actually show their overall effects on the real climate, or do they just extrapolate an effect in the laboratory.
Am I wrong in thinking that the different models report widely varying predictive effects (between 1-6 degree temperature changes for example)
How can they be accurate yet produce widely differing at the same time
[Response: There are two parts to making a projection. The first is the scenario that is used that determines how much CO2 etc. might change, and secondly, the physical model is to project the change in the climate. The range you quote is for both sorts of uncertainty, and most of it is related to the different scenarios, not the different models. The model sensitivity is significantly less for any one scenario. See the SPM for details. - gavin]
Carbon trapped in limestone deposits is returned to the atmosphere when the limestone is subducted during a plate collision. It can then react with silicate rocks
and the CO2 is expelled, through volcanoes funnily enough (so much for the assertion that volcanoes emit CO2 - it’s often fossil atmosphere anyway).
And of course, the organic stuff can be returned when their strata are eroded and the material is then oxidised.
Scientists also critiqued and thought the science was generally sound for “An Inconvienient ruth.”…although they were quick to nitpick a few scientific points.
“So, because you don’t fully understand the computer models of global climate, you assume everyone else is a ignorant as you?”
while someone (admittedly not me) may fully understand a model I just question the idea that you can accurately model the entire atmosphere of a planet.
But it didn’t take long for the name calling to start
I’ve been busy & need to catch up, so this might be off topic, but several posts ago Chris Mooney raised the issue of Al Gore being incorrect on something in AIT, and how that might damage credibility or something.
If Gore underestimated GW, then that is a bad mistake & morally reprehensible (if done purposely). If he overestimated the harm, then that is perfectly okay.
The only debate in my view is between the scientists, avoiding false positives (not making a claim re GW unless they are extremely sure), and the environmentalists (and everyone else), avoiding false negatives (being cautionary in assuming and trying to prevent the worst). So, the skeptics and contrarians and denialists are all in the “avoid the false positive” camp, with only the scientists having a morally valid reason to be there.
So any mistake on the “assuming the worst & trying to prevent it side” is a non-problem. It’s perfectly okay. That’s were everyone, except the scientists, should be.
You needn’t take offense, Phil, the word “ignorant” was used in its literal rather than pejorative sense.
You do have a point. Climate models have a lot of utility in investigating climate, but the boundaries between their uses and abuses are complex and controversial. It’s not especially easy or obvious what we should trust about them and what not to.
The public and much of the scientific community focuses on the conceptually simple use of prognostication that the IPCC report cycle drives. (Note that it’s prognostication and not prediction; all of the climate models of the future are predicated on CO2 concentration scenarios, which in turn depend on 1) human behavior and 2) carbon cycle feedbacks; there’s no way around the first part at least.)
How reliable these prognoses are is not better than the scatter among them, which is large. It may be worse than that, because there may be some unconscious bias toward producing a “typical” result among the modeling centers. However, it is difficult in practice to imagine how such biases might operate.
So it is a bit of a quandary.
The less you believe the models, the more vigorously you should support carbon mitigation. I feel compelled to come out and say this on occasion, since most people get it backwards. The weaker you think the science is, the bigger the risk you believe we are taking, and hence the more effort you should put into avoiding the worst cases. The cost of overreacting to benign climate change scenarios has to be balanced against the much larger cost of overreacting to catastrophic ones. The cost of the catastrophes increasingly dominate the more uncertainty you place upon the estimates.
It is also important to take note of the fact that despite enormous motivation to do so, nobody has been able to build a model that reasonably represents contemporary climate that has a greenhouse gas sensitivity different from the model consensus by a factor of greater than two.
The models continue to fail to represent local changes well enough to rely upon for local policy. Whether they can be improved enough to do so remains an open question. I think it is too soon to give up, but late enough to start exploring alternative design methodologies. That is a topic that is worthy of a real scientific debate.
Your question whether we “can accurately model the entire atmosphere” depends very much on what sort of accuracy you are looking for. The models produce storms that go where storms go and, as of recently, hurricanes that go where hurricanes go. The gulf stream goes where the gulf stream goes, and so does the Kuroshio and the Antarctic current. The sea ice grows and shrinks at roughly the right times and rates. The intertropical convergence zone and the El Nino, however, remain wretched. Make of this what you will. (I make of it a living, myself.)
But the climate sensitivity to CO2 is essentially known. There’s very little evidence that would place it far from 3 degrees C per CO2 doubling, and a great deal that puts it near that quantity. Models agree with other evidence on this matter. It’s not really an open question; any scientist proposing a dramatically different value at this point would have an awful lot of ’splainin’ to do.
“…while someone (admittedly not me) may fully understand a model I just question the idea that you can accurately model the entire atmosphere of a planet. …” - PhilC
As long as we’re mixing things, a prediction of the weather to be on Thursday morning requires a degree of accuracy akin to threading the eye of a tiny needle; hitting the broad side of a barn 200 years from now doesn’t.
RE PhilC,
Any person should question the idea that you can model the atmosphere of a planet… but then, assuming that’s the question of interest (and not, how can I inject doubt into scientific discussions of climate in order to prevent governments from taking action?) then you’d want to look at weather models, and how climate models are derived from weather models, and how ocean circulation and heat transport is modeled, and how ocean models are coupled to climate models… and so on. You’d want to compare past model predictions to reality (see for example http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=148 “Planetary Energy Imbalance”)…and then you’d realize that the models do a pretty good job.
Of course, there’s always something that might be missing, but that’s true for any model - a model of air flowing over an airplane wing, a model of a bridge. That’s why comparing models to observations matters; if there’s a persistent discrepancy it can tell you about what your model is missing (for example, early models didn’t include aerosol effects). That’s how science is done.
If you ignore the facts after they’re presented to you and persist with the same discredited arguments, as Lindzen et al do, then you simply lose all credibility.
“As long as we’re mixing things…. hitting the broad side of a barn 200 years from now doesn’t.”
What am I mixing?
The current models seem to predict different ‘barns’ depending on who’s running the model (i.e. different temperatures and climate effects etc) - how come they differ so much if they are essentially accurate.
Mark, that’s the difference between what you see and what you get (grin).
You old enough to remember the 48-star flag? I’m still flying mine, it hasn’t worn out yet — it’s a grid (stars aren’t offset), six rows. You don’t see all eight columns in the WSJ Editorials picture.
Trust me, that’s the flag from before the upstart Alaska and Hawaii Territories intruded themselves into the country (and the current staggered-to-fit-fifty star layout became the official flag).
Aw, you knew that, I’m such a sucker for a good troll sometimes. Gulp.
Michael Tobis (#87) was correct - I was using “ignorant” and “ignorance” to describe your apparent lack of knowledge about global climate models. Had I intended to disparage you personally, I would have chosen some other term (and the comment would surely have been deleted by the RC moderators).
As others have pointed out on this and other RC threads, computer models used to make forecast are commonly run mutiple times using different starting values to account for the known (or expected) variability of the input parameters (i.e., the assumptions on which the model is based). The result is a range of possible output values (predictions/prognostications, whatever you want to call them). Yes, the predicted magnitude of global warming is a range of temperature values - usually these predicted values are assigned some degree of certainty akin to confidence limits in statistics. It will take some time to verify the accuracy of these predictions, but the fact that they all predict global warming should be alarming to everyone - keep in mind that one degree C is almost two degrees F, and a rise in global mean temperature of even 1 degree C over a couple of decades could be expected to have very serious implications for sea level rise, animal and plant survival, disease outbreaks, etc.
Re #37: Richard Ordway — My understanding of the LGM to Holocene temperature increase of 6–8 K is that only about half of that can be attributed to so-called greenhouse gases. (My amateur attempt only supplies about 2 K.) The rest of the temperature increase might be due to albedo changes?
There’s a mathematical way to understand why it might not run away: The positive feedback is smaller than the initial kick. So, if we take the initial kick as having one unit of strength (in other words, call it 1), the positive feedback could be 3/4 the size. Then that 3/4 causes a feedback 3/4 the size of that one, etc:
1 + 3/4 + (3/4)*(3/4) + (3/4)*(3/4)*(3/4) + …
This is what is called in mathematics a “convergent” series, which adds up to 4. So the final effect is that the change is 4 times as big as the original effect.
Plus, there could be a time delay as it takes effect. So, for example, the solar change that kicks it off happens at time t=0, but then t=100 years later the initial 3/4 takes effect. Then at t=200 years the next 3/4 takes effect, etc. What you’d see is the CO2 rise trailing the climate change in precisely the observed way.
It is possible that the feedback was bigger than the initial kick, say 1.2. Then the series is:
1 + 1.2 + (1.2)*(1.2) + (1.2)*(1.2)*(1.2) + …
This series is called “divergent” - it never stops growing. I have heard that it is believed that this is what happened on Venus. (Of course, in any physical system you eventually get cut off - you run out of carbon, for example.)
What we really need to fix is our science education.
The final vote of the debate was really a notice that society is not going to make a determined effort to restrict ghg emissions until our infrastructure is flooded, and we are living in a tent on Mt Ararat. Noah did, and so can we. I have lived in a tent and herded sheep, it is not so bad â?? if you have those skills.
In only a 150,000 years, the waters will recede and we can reclaim places like New York City, Houston, London, Istanbul, Bombay, and Shanghai. Not to mention every major refinery in the world. Of course, without those refineries, even inland cities could no longer function.
We have a society that does not understand science: not climate science, not economics, and not geography.
Piers Corbyn, the meteorologist that supplies long range forecasts for industry says the IPCC in fairness should include a temperature record going back to the end of the last ice along with the CO2 record of the same period. Do you agree with him?
[Response: Umm… sure. If such a thing existed. But we don’t even have good data for the global mean back before 1000 years ago (and Mr. Corbyn would probably dispute that also), so how we can have it going back 15,000 years is a little odd. The graph he uses appears to a very rough copy of one of the Greenland ice cores, but that is hardly typical, and certainly not a global mean. - gavin]
Re #97: At some point we need to remind ourselves that many interlocking feedbacks are involved: GHGs (with water vapor doing the major part of the work as always), albedo, dust clouds, carbon sinks, sea ice, ocean currents, atmospheric circulation patterns, vegetation, plankton, etc. Bear in mind that the entire climate system is being shifted into a different state. *Everything* that can change does change. That certainly makes modeling it difficult, but it turns out to not be impossible:
I’ve linked it before, but since we’ve been talking ice ages and models on this thread these fresh results are very much worth reading. I’d love to get the opinion of one of the modelers on this, but from my humble POV these results seem very good indeed (although not perfect by any means, plus they avoid dealing with the Mid-Pleistocene Transition).
Re #101: Steve Bloom — Yes, many interactions occur. My goal is to keep it simple as long and as far as possible.
Regarding your link, my amateur reading is that the work is quite good, but with the important exception of the transition from the Eemian (last previous interglacial) to the first stade, which did not model well…
Hearings Clear Up Misunderstanding About Censorship
I managed to watch several hours of the House Govt. Reform Committee hearing on scientific censorship of climate change research before C-SPAN cut away to cover the House. The full hearing will probably be shown later. But no matter. It was all a big misunderstanding.
The hearings were to focus on why the Bush Admin. had deliberately tried to prevent government scientists from giving media interviews on climate change and on the selective editing of important policy documents produced on climate change such that the edits did not accurately reflect the science.
Witness Phil Cooney, formerly and presently of Big Oil testified he only made changes he thought should be made and that James Mahoney, the then head of the Climate Science program didn’t include most of his changes anyway. No harm, no foul. It was agreed that having an oil man in that position was probably a bad idea, certainly from a PR standpoint.
Witness George Deutsch, the former NASA press information officer, testified that he was only a messenger boy, telling James Hansen and others what the big boys at NASA HQ on the 9th floor wanted done. Specifically that they didn’t want him to give interviews, especially after the one where Hansen said that 2003? 04? was the warmest year on record. Deutsch, who did not have a college degree at the time of his tenure at NASA and was chastised for misleading people that he had a degree has now graduated and runs a radio call in show for the mentally ill. Not qualified for this one either or competition for Limbaugh?
Witness James Connaughton, still head of the Council on Environmental Quality praised Dr. Hansen and said that they invited Hansen to make a presentation to them on non CO2 GHGs and this led to the various international agreements to reduce methane. Hansen himself said this was a success.
But witness Hansen was not living in the same bizarro world as these guys and reminded the committee that obstructing scientists would not make the problem of global warming go away, it would just make it harder to solve. He wouldn’t give a specific amount when asked how much federal money should be spent on solving global warming based on a range of $3 billion (now spent) vs. $350 trillion (amount needed to immediately solve problem in U.S. according to one congressman). He said that more money should be spent on developing renewable energy and not just on nuclear energy, a favorite of Connaughton. The $3 billion figure seems to be quoted a lot more since I exposed the phony $6 billion number claimed by the Admin. for some time, as a lot of hypothetical tax credits and unrelated work spray painted green.
The hearing went off the paved surface and up a dirt road on several occasions with some time spent debating whether Al Gore’s house is more energy efficient than Bush’s Crawford ranch. Members also agonized over whether it would have been better if Bush had taken the high road on Kyoto or climate change in general.
The issue of whether Hansen endorsed Kerry for president because he had received a $250K prize from the Heinz foundation came up because Republicans wanted to portray Hansen as a hypocrite since the issue of bought and paid for staff had come up regarding Cooney’s hiring. No evidence was presented that there was any connection with the endorsement of Kerry and Hansen said he supported any candidate who took the issue of global warming seriously, including John McCain.
There was also some discussion of Hansen’s comparison of the Administration’s censorship of scientists as like that of Nazi Germany and whether this was appropriate. Agreed. He could have chosen a less inflammatory example. USSR, N. Korea, Cuba, Myannmar (a little too esoteric perhaps), Turkmenistan, Iraq (pre-2003), Iran, Libya, Syria, the former E. Germany. Why play the Hitler card when you have Belarus and Zimbabwe to choose from?
This led to the question of whether government employees have the right to speak out publicly when they disagree with a stated policy. Hansen said this was allowed under the First Amendment.
And on the subject of debates and censorship, Hansen said he would not censor any of his approx 120 staff on a scientific matter, but he also did not encourage debates with the handful of climate contrarians, since it gives them an apparent equal status and a platform from which to cherry pick facts that would likely confuse a lay audience. Not that anything like that would ever happen.
The people most worried about bird flu fall into two groups — those actively trying to educate the public and improve public health, and those who are improving their personal private property and stocking up what they expect to need when public health and services break down during a crisis.
The “Reveres” who write Effect Measure commented on this a while back, saying they are not taking up stockpiling and planning for personal survival, they are spending their time and effort trying to educate people about how to prevent the problem.
I have no problem believing that Mr. Bush’s private ranch is very energy efficient, and likely has all his family needs to be self-sufficient.
Piers Corbyn is not a meteorologist. He does not have a PhD and his highest degree is an MSc in astrophysics. Regarding his “forecasts” see here and here.
I would like to thank those who patiently have answered the questions posed by PhilC. You may not convince him, but you have provided the rest of us with a wealth of information and explanation.
So please correct me if I’m wrong, but this is what I glean from the discussion. We have recovered from past glaciations because orbital variations have started a warming cycle that released, in 800 years or so, CO2 from the oceans and other sources, which resulted in additional warming for thousands of years until CO2 was stable in the atmosphere (since CO2 is not an infinite resource). Then over geologic time, CO2 was sequestered back into the ocean and rocks, cooling the planet.
But now, we do not have the orbital change driving the warming, but instead the increase in CO2 has resulted in jump starting the warming. The end result should be that additional CO2 will be released as the planet warms, until CO2 again is exhausted from “natural” sources.
EXCEPT that at this time, we have dumped (and will continue to dump) huge amounts of fossil CO2 into the atmosphere. This fossil CO2, combined with the CO2 that will be released as the oceans warm, will lead to conditions which have not been seen for hundreds of millions of years.
This suggests to me that it is going to get very, very hot here on Earth, and this with continue for a very, very, very long time.
Re 95: Nevermind ‘magna est veritas, et praevalet’. More like ‘veritas fortis est, et praevalebit’. I sincerely hope that Gore reads RC and has learned from the experiences of others. Monckton is attempting to hook Gore by playing the ’southern gentleman’ card. Gore should refuse to play this game, not get sidetracked from the real job in hand, and walk away.
Re 29: [What technology presently can replace coal or sequester its exhaust?]
Considering the abundance of coal and the affordability of its electricity, none that I’m aware of today. But it’s in development, e.g. Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) and Supercritical Pulverized Coal (SCPC). Web searches provide info on these systems. The government consideration I referenced in #24 in conjuction with similar international efforts, driven by science, could result in economic drivers that make these or other similar-purpose systems reality.
17 March 2007 at 11:25 AM
Amusing, yes, but perhaps as well not to get too friendly with the Now Show - if I remember correctly, they’ve been none too kind to Al Gore in the past. Mind you, I can’t recall them being kind to anybody in the past.
17 March 2007 at 11:43 AM
very funny stuff
17 March 2007 at 1:01 PM
Just read the transcript and I want to congratulate the folks who put their effort into the global warming debate in New York city. Regardless of the outcome of the vote at the end, you did a fantastic job! Clearly on substance, as one reads the transcripts your “sceptic” crowd said almost nothing about global warming, lots of funny comments but nothing substantial at all. Don’t know how it will sound on NPR yet but on paper, word for word, idea for idea, it was a great effort! And very helpful for someone like myself who took part in Gore’s training in Nashville and am to some extent dealing with the same challenges myself during my own presentations. THANK YOU.
17 March 2007 at 1:16 PM
That gets me off the hook on laundry today!
17 March 2007 at 1:36 PM
(Off Topic)
Gavin,
I read the transcript of the debate you participated in. Those formats are useless for getting to the bottom of anything, but there may be a better way - the blogosphere.
Here is Lindzen’s closing statement. Perhaps you would like to rebut:
RICHARD S. LINDZEN Yes. I think it’s a little bit difficult to know how to respond,
to be told that, uh, one shouldn’t attack scientists while you’re attacking scientists,
to go and say you have to control methane without explaining that methane has
stopped growing. You don’t explain why there’s global warming on Mars, Jupiter,
Triton and Pluto. You don’t look at the ocean data and see, that whereas your boss
Jim Hansen was saying that the heating of the ocean proved the flux that he needed
for high sensitivity, that in the last year there’ve been two papers in the same
journal, that point out that the original Levitus data’s wrong, that the ocean is cool,
and that the new numbers would call for one-tenth the sensitivity that Hansen
mentioned. If all this is so certain, why is the data changing, or is it a case when the
data changes you ignore it, and
BRIAN LEHRER One
RICHARD S. LINDZEN stick to the point. [APPLAUSE]
17 March 2007 at 1:41 PM
Re. #1, it’s a satirical show, no-one is exempt from being caricatured by them.
17 March 2007 at 2:14 PM
Marcus Brigstocke is good, however he certainly does tend to the left in UK political terms. His aim can be a little wobbly sometimes, see for example his interesting assertion than “global warming is supported by 80% of the world’s scientists” — but of course it’s a five minute angry rant, not a paper in Nature.
Well done the Corduroy King
Incidentally the language is rather more direct than usual - this goes out at 6:30pm on a Friday evening on the main BBC speech radio channel, I’m rather surprised he got “bastard” and “prick” through. Excellent venting of spleen, though, and interesting to hear the background of the producer of this “documentary”.
17 March 2007 at 2:49 PM
There was also the “Moral Maze”, Radio 4, on Wednesday 14th March 2007 which discussed GW and included George Monbiot of the Guardian. Sadly the beeb don’t produce downloads for it.
The Moral Maze is broadcast on Radio 4 at 8pm on Wednesdays and repeated on Saturdays at 10.15pm i.e tonight. One of the questioners accused George of sidestepping a certain question three times. Can you help him and me? I’ve forgotten the Q myself.
I’ll try and tape the prog.
Mike
17 March 2007 at 2:56 PM
I clicked “here”. The internet churning went on for a while, then I saw nothing but this site the same as before. What happened? I am using MacOS 9.1 and ie5 on a 15 year old machine that works fine.
Please transcribe the show into text so that we can all see what was said.
17 March 2007 at 2:58 PM
I’m glad that someone else heard the Now Show. I rarely listen, but was glad I did. Humour and sarcasm have a way of cutting the legs from under ill-considered opinion in a way that common sense and logic often fail to do. Pens v swords. Perhaps something to remember if you go head-to-head in another debate?
17 March 2007 at 2:59 PM
And good old Aunty - here’s their link to Radio 4’s Moral Maze programme on Global Warming. With their blurb included…
Mike has sent you a link to listen to a radio show using the BBC Radio Player. Click on this link to listen:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/noscript.shtml?/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/moralmaze
To listen you will need to have a programme called RealPlayer installed
on your computer. Download it for FREE from our audio help page -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/audiohelp.shtml
from
Mike
17 March 2007 at 4:53 PM
If you’re not using a machine that plays streaming audio (or using for example the Lynx text browser, popular for blind people who read using text-to-speech) the radio show is also — for the moment — downloadable as a .MP3 audio file via this link, found at the show’s main page:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio4/thenowshow/thenowshow_20070316-1830_40_st.mp3
17 March 2007 at 5:40 PM
Don’t know whether it’s relevant to TGGWS, but the Great British public have this evening voted for a song which appears to be a celebration of air travel as their chosen entry for the Eurovision song contest.
You couldn’t make this up.
17 March 2007 at 6:08 PM
I love the stand-by power bit, it’s so sad; otherwise intelligent people are absolutely wedded to this stand-by, “instant on” thing. And, the irony is that people will search for five or ten minutes for the misplaced remote so they can turn the television on, rather than simply pushing the buttons on the set. I guess they like the “magical” “action at a distance” quality of it….
Probably the only way to really solve the problem is to either do away with standby, (one’s magical remote will still work after one turns the set on), or get the manufacturers to develop much more efficient stand-by modes. I have serious doubts that many people will pull the plugs on their stand-by appliances voluntarily, it’s much too “inconvenient”.
17 March 2007 at 6:10 PM
Mike, in the question posed (three times) to George Monbiot what we have is a perfect example of Melanie Phillipsâ�� complete misunderstanding of the precautionary principle aspects of ‘Post Normal Science’ (PNS).
Funtowicz and Ravetz (Futures Sept 1993) pointed out that in order to formulate policies in relation to risk issues “where the facts are uncertain, values are in dispute, stakes are high and decisions urgent” then an â��extended peer communityâ�� is needed in order to deliberate a policy solution. This is in contrast to the pure-science curiosity-driven approach which promotes reductionism and testing until scientific â��truthâ�� is deducted, a replicable test designed and the process peer reviewed.
What Funtowicz and Ravetz suggested is that �Science cannot always provide well founded theories based on experiments for explanation and prediction, but can frequently achieve at best only mathematical models and computer simulations, which are essentially untestable. On the basis of such uncertain inputs, decisions must be made, under conditions of some urgency. Therefore policy cannot proceed on the basis of factual predictions, but on policy forecasts�
In asking the question [as aggressively] as she does Phillips is suggesting that, in her understanding, PNS makes fossil-fuel companies completely justified in their approach of hypothesis formulation and testing i.e. their starting point (H0) is that �fossil fuel use is not a problem� but their testing merely involves searching for anything (absolutely anything) which proves that hypothesis whilst discounting any other evidence, because that�s what they want to do.
In essence pure-science has indicated that there is an interaction between the atmosphere, the sun and increasing CO2 concentrations which causes global temperature to rise. This process cannot, however, be explicitly tested in-situ because of the sheer scale and complexity of the atmospheric system and the irreducible uncertainties introduced by other processes acting within it. What this necessitates is multiple stakeholder (not just by amongst scientists) deliberation about what is known and what is uncertain in order that value commitments can be made over the policies to be enacted which can affect their own welfare as well as that of other stakeholders, including future generations and other species.
In answering the question Monbiot is absolutely correct in asserting that pure-science is still vital to PNS because it introduces urgent issues into the policy domain. Where Phillips couldn�t be more wrong is in her belief that post normalism (as described by Mike Hulme) simply means that climate science is so uncertain that the science can be thrown out with the bath water in order to allow a purely value based decision process to prevail.
17 March 2007 at 7:30 PM
Durkin fights back (in the UK’s Telegraph of course):
‘The global-warmers were bound to attack, but why are they so feeble?’
Please guys, don’t shoot the messenger.
17 March 2007 at 8:02 PM
Jeez, I answered (as an amateur) the ‘why isn’t it cold from Chinese sulfates just yesterday in another thread (because in 1970 only half the total fossil fuel had been burned, aerosols act fast, CO2 warming happens over decades); now with twice that much fossil fuel burned, we’re well into the warming from the past emissions and the aerosols are just reducing that trend — operating on a very different background than they did in 1940-1970.
Guess whoever asked it was cut’n'pasting, eh? Someone competent, correct my answer please.
17 March 2007 at 8:35 PM
Re: #16
Thus the need for articulation.
By the way, that debate Gavin attended was interesting. It had Crichton, Lindzen and Philip Stott on one side, Gavin, Brenda Ekwurzel and Richard Somerville on the other. The motion was “Global Warming Is Not A Crisis”.
Prior to the debate they polled the audience and found 30-57-13 for-against-don’t know. After the debate it was 46-42-11. The ‘con’ side of the debate, if the numbers are square, took an audience that believed in their case and unconvinced them of it.
I would live to hear Gavin’s thoughts on this.
If this means that sound science loses the sound-byte war because it takes too long to explain it, then there is probably going to be a nagging problem communicating this sort of nuance to the public.
18 March 2007 at 5:03 AM
Durkin is quoted as saying,
“During the post-war economic boom, while industrial emissions of CO2 went up, the temperature went down (hence the great global-cooling scare in the 1970s). Why? They say maybe the cooling was caused by SO2 (sulphur dioxide) produced by industry. But they say it mumbling under their breath, because they know it makes no sense. Thanks to China and the rest, SO2 levels are far, far higher now than they were back then. Why isn’t it perishing cold?”
Because sulfur dioxide emissions are going down and CO2 levels are going up would be my guess.
For S02 go here,
http://www.rpi.edu/~sternd/Sulfur.html
For C02 here,
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/
and
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/graphics_gallery/other_stations/global_stations_co2_concentration.html
18 March 2007 at 5:15 AM
The CO2/temperature ice core lag is dealt with elsewhere on RC- but let’s take Durkin’s statement on global SO2 emissions to task. China’s emissions in 2006 were equal to the USA’s 1980 emissions at around 25.5Mt. In 1970 USA emissions were around 31Mt. The USA has now reduced emissions by @ 50% since 1970. Does anyone have more data on global SO2 emissions? With the collapse of the Soviet economy and severe SO2 reductions in W. Europe because of environmental legislation I suspect global SO2 emissions are lower now than during the 1970’s.
18 March 2007 at 5:25 AM
Here’s another source on global SO2 emissions.
http://www.iea-coal.org.uk/content/default.asp?PageId=712
It confirms a decreasing trend in global emissions but acknowledges that growth in Asia is a concern.
18 March 2007 at 5:40 AM
Funny how everyone seems to be concenreating on climate change here in th UK when politically we are well on the way doing something about it and most Britons seem convinced that something needs to be done, well enough Britons to start the three main parties vying for votes by offering policies anyway and the EU has a even wider climate science remit.
The issue is the United States where only states seem to be doing anything, the country as a whole seems hell bent on burning more fossil fuels than ever with the plans to build 159 new coal fired power plants over the next decade and the technology to sequester it is just a prototype at the moment, nice.
18 March 2007 at 8:27 AM
I have just read a peice in the Daily Telegraph concerning this man, Prof Nigel Weiss, from the department of astrophysics at Cambridge University. He is an astrophysicist there and he is claiming to have been misrepresented in the following peice which seems to be stating that CO2 may not be the sole cause of climate change that is relevant to our current warming, the Sun might be assisting us also.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=17fad0e2-6f6b-41f3-bdd8-8e9eeb015777&k=0
However is is saying that he has been misquoted but the more worrying thing is that he is being victimised and threatened apparantly:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/18/ngreen318.xml
It looks like what he is saying is that the Sun is going through its lower polar magnetic field moment in 50 years.
I wonder if real climate could resolve the solar issue once and for all if possible by contacting these solar and astro physicists and asking them for their expert opinion on why all of a sudden the Sun is becomming the tour de force of climate change?
It all seems plausable even if these people have beem misquoted.
18 March 2007 at 9:47 AM
Re: #22 (off-topic) Pete, isn’t that 3-4 times you make the same point? Some progress re this concern:
US legislative bodies are presently deliberating bills to (1) amend Clean Air Act to regulate emission of greenhouse gases from electric utilities; (2) accelerate reduction of US greenhouse gas emissions; (3) green capitol buildings to lead US by example, and so on. Not end results, but activity that merits awareness.
Recent US Speaker of the House of Representatives environmental posts:
http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?cat=12
Active US Senate bill status (select ‘Active Legislation’, then ‘Greenhouse gas emissions’):
http://www.senate.gov
18 March 2007 at 10:42 AM
Some scientists in the UK seem to have decided Durkin didn’t do a good enough job and the anti-AGW brigade could do with their help, too. It seems they’ve accused the American Association for the Advancement of Science of the â��Hollywoodisation” of climate science.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2036728,00.html
(Sorry if this link doesn’t work - you may have to paste it in.)
Apparently the AAAS are standing by their statement -
http://www.24dash.com/environment/18055.htm
but Sir John Houghton is weighing in -
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2368999.ece
The booklet theyâ��ve produced, “Making Sense of the Weather and Climate,” is available here -
http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/126
Doesnâ��t look very contentious, although one might wonder why they only mention Kilimanjaro and ignore all the other glaciers. They seem to imply none of them are retreating due to AGW. And does the term “tipping point” really have “no scientific definition”? I thought scientists objected to its misuse , not to not using it at all. Maybe I’ve got that wrong.
Sense About Science has final responsibility for the content and gives a phone number for information 020 7478 4380
Perhaps someone should ring them up about the glaciers and in passing ask them who’s idea it was to use the word “Hollywoodisation”.
Lord Taverne, who Chairs Sense about Science, is not known for championing climate science, and has some interesting friends.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=542
Perhaps Carl Wunsch isn’t the only one who should have asked a few more questions.
18 March 2007 at 12:01 PM
Wow, Durkin has a lot of gall. I hope the UK audience that reads his remarks has also seen the program. It actually hurts the skeptics’ side, not helps.
Prof. Wunsch’s inclusion is something I spotted as new, which is why I ended up on RC, reading about The Great Global Warming Sandbagging.
Durkin should be honest: It runs through some of the standard skeptic fare, then quickly descends into the conspiracy theory that AGW is a weapon that is the creation of Maggie Thatcher in her war against the coalworkers union. It then ends with an emotional piece about poverty in Africa.
18 March 2007 at 12:23 PM
Oh, man, this is not good to read. Looks like Sourcewatch has an article on them that should be checked as well, but look for the long cautionary post (with footnotes, copied below) here:
http://www.badscience.net/?p=343 in the comments:
“* Underwent a political odyssey which took them from the authoritarian left to the libertarian right without any splits or the whole thing falling apart…..
“…. there are indubitably large numbers of dodgy think tanks and advocacy groups around. As this particular one has a great lack of information about how it functions Iâ��m naturally skeptical.
“The fact that it appears to be linked to the LM/RCP/IoI people makes me even more wary, especially when they appear to have been involved in both setting it up and running it.
“[1] www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,295888,00.html [commas break link; cut and paste it]
“[2] www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2503/
18 March 2007 at 1:02 PM
> A leading solar expert has told how he was vilified by environmental campaigners and condemned
> by scientists after he was wrongly branded a climate-change denier.
> …
> Larry Solomon, the columnist who wrote the profile of Prof Weiss, said: ‘I wrote the piece as a
> laudable profile of Prof Weiss and his work. I am perplexed as to why he has responded in this way.’
Solomon who doesn’t know the meaning of the word “laudable” — unless he’s congratulating himself on the excellence of his own writing there.
I would certainly like to see an investigation of the IP addresses of the “environmental campaigners” who attacked Dr. Weiss — I’d bet on sock puppets pretending to be environmentalists, behind such actions. And whether they’re RCP-types or naive #$&@ [edited], either way, they ought to come to light.
———-
Anecdote, from experience: during the 1960s anti-war protests in the USA, a fair number of us who were more interested in first aid and crowd control than in any rhetoric would go to demonstrations to stand _behind_ the audience and _behind_ the speakers, looking away from them, watching out for the yahoos who would come up and try throwing rocks and bottles over the pacifists to provoke the police. As far as I heard at the time, those yahoos were usually RCP types. Provoking violence by pretending to be on _all_ sides of any debate, to stir up trouble and misunderstanding, is a political tactic.
Don’t fall for this #*$&[edited]. It works quite well:
pretend attack, provoke attack, bogus attack, profit for those who benefit from the confusion.
——-
Yes, there are #%$* [edited] who call themselves ‘environmentalists’ (ask them about ecology — they think it means green stuff out past the suburbs, rather than a science with great uncertainty).
But I think it’s really, really important to validate who’s who when attacks start happening.
Perhaps time for digital signatures, in fact, to know people are who they claim to be.
18 March 2007 at 3:07 PM
Re #24: (off-topic)
Indeed the USA are considering bills and acts to do something about it, however considering that 50% of US electricity is coal based and as clean coal technologies do not exist yet to fit to these 159 power stations so what does the USA do? Well I would imagine that they are harrdly going to leave themselves at an economic disadvantage are they and hence I doubt that any of these bill and acts come to anything anytime soon.
What technology presently can replace coal or sequester its exhaust?
18 March 2007 at 3:18 PM
Interesting piece from someone who attended the Weather and Science conference.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/03/oxford_climate_conference.php
Maybe just another instance of scientists taking too little care when talking to the press.
However, I do wonder at the complacency of people sitting in the beautiful, but rarified atmosphere of an Oxford college, with food and drink on tap, and for whom the word drought means little more than not being able to water the front garden, criticizing those who see AGW as a threat to society. It may not seem much of a threat amongst the dreaming spires, but I daresay it looks it bit different if you are living in one of those places in the world where daily life is already a desparate struggle for survival. For these people catastrophe really doesn’t sound too strong a word. And you don’t need to be talking about catastrophic climate change either.
Climate change isn’t some abstract concept , it happens in the real world, interacting with existing circumstances. We can’t deal with the mess we’ve got now, how on earth does anyone think we’re going to cope if it gets worse.
If saying that makes you guilty of “Hollywoodisation”, then I really am living on a different planet.
18 March 2007 at 3:21 PM
Just to point out another (and more serious!) rebuttal of TGGWS in this narrated Powerpoint presentation by Christopher Merchant, which nicely points out some of the main errors and logical fallacies.
He does make an error on the solar-T curve, though it’s an understandable one given that the graph is misattributed and mislabelled (and he’s presumably not aware of the Friis-Christensen stuff). The “solar” curve is actually solar cycle length rather than sunspot number, and is dealt with here. His point about selective presentation of the pre-1980 data still stands though.
18 March 2007 at 3:56 PM
Marcus Brigstoke said what should have been said by every scientist this week on radio 4 when asked about the programme. Instead we got Sir John Houghton (having written a very good (bad)review of the whole thing http://www.jri.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=137&Itemid=83
totally fluffed it when asked to name one thing wrong with it. It could be argued that he was just overwhelmed by the ‘target-rich environment’ that question opened up, but frankly he just waffled.
I’ve posted about Hardakers own particular brand of stupidity when interviewed on Friday 17th on another thread (but you should be able to listen to the interview on the BBC’s radio 4 web page - truely a horrible experience), but it shows that some are buying into the idea that the seriousness of AGW is something that should be dabated as some sort of ‘philosphy of science’ question, suitable for high table. Unfortunately, the BBC led with it for the whole morning (Today is the headline leading programme in the UK for news and politics, so if its top of their news, its the top of everyone else’s as well).
The media does not do nuance, it does not do ‘are we absolutely sure?’ and it does not do scientific uncertainity at all well. Whereas the deniers will say something cannot be happening, academics feel much more comfortable with ‘maybe and ‘possibly’. It’s fine when you write it in an article or paper, because we all understand the rules. But when you do it on the Today programme, when you have three minutes before the sport opposite someone who really does not care about truth, its fatal. A large number of people believed that programme (just look at C4, the BBC, the Times and the Guardian’s message-boards), and waffling or welcoming a non-existant ‘debate’ will simply convince them that Stott, Chrichton and co have as much weight as the vast number of scientists actually working on AGW .
But its not just Collier and Hardaker who seem to be sipping the KoolAid. Michael Hulme of the Tyndall Centre seems to also being on this particular track. Back in Feb., he wrote a piece about the media reaction to the IPCC report relase saying pretty much the same thing http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001117mike_hulme_in_nature.html
, which got a response from the Guardians Science editor that
‘Mike accuses us of “appealling to fear to generate a sense of urgency”
Guilty as charged. Is it not frightening? Is it not urgent?’.
About a month ago, he featured heavily in a rather weak programme on Radio 4 called ‘The Interregation’, which was supposed to take a hard look at Stern and the IPCC report. It was the same line. The programme failed to deliver, relying on nitpicking and the possibility that things might not be as bad in the future as Stern warns. Without his imput, it would have been a very thin programme indeed. He was at it agin this week, with a widely read article saying much the same thing http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2032821,00.html. He actually managed to give Singers new book a plug of sorts in the second paragraph (he does say its wrong in the eighth, but its a bit late by then), and seems to follow a similar path to Collier and Hardaker.
Indeed, according to this article in the Observer http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2036762,00.html he’s joined forces with them. Its true that the media does spin stories, but is there any real evidence that climate scientists have actually made the effects of climate change more dramatic? If anything, they may have underplayed the effects. Bill McKibben and New Scientist has both noted that the IPCC is rather conservative, and the 4th report will probably not include the latest and most alarming data.
This breast-beating does nothing to help convince the public that scientists are speaking with one voice on climate change, and will undoubtably do a great deal of damage. Since its taken the British media a great deal of time to cover it in the first place http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2007/no1_andreadis_smith.htm, why can the scientist involved refrain from giving such mixed signals.
Frankly, if the Royal Society and others does not get its act together, it will be left to george Monbiot and one or two others to fight against the deniers. He’s a zoology trained journalist, but he’s not a climate scientist and ultimately its not his job to do this alone. There should be a real effort to get out the message to the public, a message that should be simple and unambigous.
18 March 2007 at 6:15 PM
Off-topic, but a good read:
E. Dendy Sloan
Fundamental principles and applications of natural gas hydrates
Nature 426, 353–363 (2003).
18 March 2007 at 6:28 PM
Any thoughts on the geo-engineering article in The Economist from their Quarterly Technology Review Section?
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_RSGVJPD
18 March 2007 at 6:28 PM
I’ve tried very hard to get to some facts about GW but find it increasingly difficult. It all seems to boil down to ‘our scientific group is bigger and has better credentials than yours’ or ‘their information may have been funded by an oil company’.
All this seems little better than ‘my dad’s bigger than yours’ and frankly, what does it matter if research is funded by an oil company. The evidence it finds can be tested on it’s own merit. Who paid for it shouldn’t make any difference to any facts - unless of course this whole GW area doesn’t actually have any hard facts.
I watched the program and read the rebutals but still cannot for the life of me understand if CO2 levels lag behind the temperature by 800 years how CO2 causes the temperature to change. You can invoke all kinds of linked feedback mechanisms plus an ‘unknown’ reason why the temperature intially kicked off but surely the simplest possibility is that CO2 does not effect the temperature as much as temperature effects the CO2.
If 1000’s of scientist are so sure then why cant we just have a straight answer on this - please.
The reaction to this single program strikes me as a case of the ‘lady doth protest too much’
18 March 2007 at 6:46 PM
Re #32: PhilC — In the ice core records, temperatures rise and this causes carbon dioxide to rise. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, carbon dioxide rises (due to burning carbon) and this causes temperatures to rise.
It is a matter of the temperature and the carbon dioxide in the air being out-of-balance. Try reading Wikipedia about greenhose gases.
18 March 2007 at 7:22 PM
re 32 and #33. re does CO2 cause temp rise?
Someone please correct me…but I understand that this is a complete red herring and is NOT what is in the peer reviewed literature…and Lindzen DOES NOT CONTRIBUTE PEER_REVIEWED LITERATURE THAT STANDS UP UNDER SCRUTINY… he is a quack and a charliton.
The correct order is a three step process (from EPICA ice cores as well as three other ice core records).
First, the average Earth’s temps first go up a little. Second, there is a huge CO2 increase as the oceans get warmer/permafrost starts melting, methane starts increasing due to more swamps and the ice age winds stop/slow down (no feeding the hungry little plankton)…and thirdly 600-1000 years later there is a huge temperature increase over the next several thousand years….this is driven largely by the positive CO2 feedback…ie. in effect CO2 causes temperature to rise because it is a feedback.
18 March 2007 at 7:28 PM
Re #23
[I wonder if real climate could resolve the solar issue once and for all if possible by contacting these solar and astro physicists and asking them for their expert opinion on why all of a sudden the Sun is becomming the tour de force of climate change?]
Me too but I think most of the RC posters have already concluded the Sun is a minor player in the recent warming.
We are now with 15-20 years of the end of the 90 year cycle of increased solar output and magnetic activity. Unforunately, our best records of solar output, and hence our understanding of solar output, date only from the middle of cycle. During this same period humans have dumped huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. This creates a muddled picture since both solar activity and CO2 have been increasing at the same time. Both sides would agree that increased CO2 and increased solar activity would increase warming but they differ in the degree of influence they assign to each.
The fact that the current cycle of increased solar activity is nearing its end may be pretty well confirmed:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm
18 March 2007 at 7:39 PM
Phil C (#32):
The lag you mention is observed in the ice core data for past warmings (from glacial to inter-glacial temperature regimes).
What it means is that in the past (when there was no industrial civilisation mining carbon out of the ground and releasing it into the atmosphere) there wasn’t enough flux in the various sources and sinks of the carbon-cycle for CO2 to initiate a warming. Instead you had to wait for changes in the earth’s orbital paramaters to start the world’s climate out of a glacial episode - once the warming started however, the ice core data shows that C02 levels rise shortly thereafter (cause unknown, although there are some hypotheses around), and this rise in CO2 intensifies the warming (’cuz CO2 is a greenhouse gas dontchaknow). All of which is a jolly good thing, because orbital changes aren’t enough to effect a full deglaciation without a helping hand from the carbon - if the CO2 hadn’t come along then I’d be composing this post from the middle of a glacier. So anyway, absent something significant like an industrial civilisation or a massive bout of vulcanism, you need orbital changes to start the ball rolling and then carbon comes along afterwards and gives it enough of a wallop to get it over the line.
This time is different, because this time (as you may have noticed) there is an industrial civilisation mining carbon out of the ground and emmitting it to the atmosphere. So you don’t need to wait for a change in orbital inclination to cause an uptick in temps which then (via mechanisms unknown) causes a noticeable rise in C02 to prolong and increase the warming. We’ve cut out the middleman and, by virtue of the known properties of atmospheric CO2, we are going straight to the ‘prolong and increase’ part of the story directly.
Regards
Luke
18 March 2007 at 8:25 PM
#32, Phil, who ever said that every warming cycle is initiated by increasing greenhouse gases? Greenhouse gas emission can also occur as a positive feedback to a warming trend already in progress. Such a feedback tends to intensify and lengthen the warming trend. Remember, these warming epochs last 5000 years or so, while the CO2 kicks in after the first 800 years or so.
Now, you may ask how do we know that the current epoch is different? It is because in this case CO2 is leading. We know this because the carbon in fossil fuels actually has a different isotopic abundance than carbon that has been in the carbon cycle (all the Carbon-14 has decayed, for one thing), and we are putting enough fossil carbon into the atmosphere, that we can actually see the isotopic abundances changing. So, we know where the carbon is coming from. We know it is enough to cause warming, and we know that the release of carbon via the positive feedback mechanisms has not yet started to occur in this epoch of warming. When it does, we’ll see methane increase dramatically as well as CO2, and this likely will cause even greater warming. There is no great mystery here.
18 March 2007 at 8:39 PM
Re #32: [If 1000’s of scientist are so sure then why cant we just have a straight answer on this - please.]
Maybe because you don’t bother to look for that straight answer. I know I’ve given my simplified, not-a-climate-scientist version in a recent thread; other people have given better ones. This is over-simplified, but over the past many millions of years prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was essentially a fixed amount of CO2 in the system. Some was in the air, some in the ocean. Those ice cores show what happens in that system: if the world gets warmer for some reason, CO2 comes out of the ocean (a process that takes several centuries), and causes further warming. Eventually all of it gets into the air, and you have an extended, high CO2 warm period. Then something causes the world to cool beyond a critical point, CO2 goes from the air back into the ocean, and you have a cool period.
Then humans came along and added a lot more CO2 to the system. This changes its behavior. To begin with, it cranks up the thermostat, so you might think you’d have the same cycle, just a few degrees higher. The problem, though, is that the coolings seem to depend on having lots of snow & ice in the polar regions, and if the planet’s too warm, you won’t get that.
So is that answer straight enough?
18 March 2007 at 9:11 PM
RE#32: PhilC, let’s rephrase your argument:
“How can it be that chemical reactions cause a match to burn if the chemical reactions lag behind friction? Look, when you strike a match it’s just friction, right? Friction is what causes the match to burn, not some putative feedback effect involving chemicals in the match head.
Thus, the most reasonable explanation is that the chemical reactions do not affect the temperature, but rather that the temperature changes affect the chemical reaction - and it’s all due to friction.”
Sounds reasonable - but is utter nonsense. A little bit of friction provides the activation energy for further chemical reactions.
Let’s consider the ice age transition:
You say: “You can invoke all kinds of linked feedbacks effects plus an ‘unknown’ reason why the temperature initially kicked off..”
Look: there is no ‘chicken and egg’ paradox here. The ‘unknown’ reason is known; this is the change in the Earth’s orbital characteristics. Imagine if the Earth’s axis of rotation was pointed towards the sun, so that the North pole was in perpetual darkness. In fact, the Earth’s axis of rotation does change, and this leads to changes in the distribution of sunlight hitting the Earth. That’s your ‘unknown’ trigger - the Milankovitch cycle effect.
CO2 release is one amplification mechanism that is activated by the initial Milankovitch cycle effect; the lag is only an initial effect. Another amplification mechanism is the change in albedo as ice sheets begin to melt back: more bare soil and vegetation and less ice and snow mean less sunlight is reflected to space, i.e. a lower albedo. We can calculate albedo effects; we can calculate CO2 and CH4 radiative forcing effects, and we know (from ice core records) that glacial/interglacial transitions are always accompanied by rises in CO2 and CH4 and a reduction in albedo.
Putative mechanisms for CO2 release are uncertain - but if you defrost your freezer, and it’s full of food, then it will become a source of CO2 and other gases as microbes go to work. Most explanations work along similar lines. Unfortunately, noone was around with a video camera to observe what happened - but we have the record.
Now, consider that we are in an interglacial currently, and we’ve found new sources of CO2 (fossil fuels) to add to the atmosphere, and that we know CO2 played a large role in the complete glacial/interglacial transition (and we’ve added a lot of methane and N2O as well). In fact, we’re increasing CO2 at rates 30X greater than anything seen in the glacial record. Should we expect a strong response? Yes! How fast will the changes occur? Still uncertain… but we seem to be in an accelerating phase of CO2 emissions. It’s no accident that this past winter was the warmest on record since accurate global recordkeeping began in 1880 - and yet that’s a record that will surely fall in the next few years. Global cooling trends? Not unless we see record levels of volcanic activity - or an asteroid strike - and that would only be a temporary effect.
We need to plan for more of the same (heat waves, intense hurricane seasons, drought & flooding) while reducing CO2 emissions to head off potentially catastrophic effects, like inducing massive methane releases and ocean anoxia.
18 March 2007 at 9:39 PM
RE#23, Pete, you can go right to Prof. Nigel Weiss website ( http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/now/ ) and see what he has to say:
“Following a misleading account of my views in the Toronto Financial Post last month, a number of right-wing lobbyists have asserted that I claimed that an impending drop in solar activity would lead to global cooling that would cancel out the warming caused by greenhouse gases. On the contrary, I have always maintained that any temperature changes caused by variations in solar activity — while interesting in themselves — are not significant compared to the global warming that we are already experiencing, and very small compared to what will happen if we continue to burn fossil fuel at the present rate.”
Regarding #23, it looks like China is taking some positive action: China Bans New Small Coal-Based Power Generators - shouldn’t the United States do the same?
As coal-fired emissions decrease, however, so will the sulfate aerosol cooling effect. It’d be interesting to see an estimate of the net effect of eliminating all coal emissions on a global basis - shouldn’t IPCC scenarios include this kind of specific estimate? (sulfate aerosols have a far shorter lifetime than CO2, so the CO2 from past coal combustion is still in the air; the sulfates are not). See the excellent links posted by Tavita in #19.
18 March 2007 at 10:24 PM
Re #35 “Who paid for it shouldn’t make any difference to any facts…”
In a perfect world, it wouldn’t. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. Surely you’ve heard how the tobacco companies suppressed the research of their own scientists when that research revealed that smoking was harmful to one’s health? And big pharmaceutical companies have done the same thing. Research sponsored by big oil companies may well result in good science, but one can’t easily know for sure.
As for your inability to find some “facts” about global warming, you must not have tried very hard. Why not try the Science Links posted on the RC home page?
18 March 2007 at 10:28 PM
Thanks for the replies.
If I understand this correctly, an initial rise in temperature causes an increase in CO2 which then causes an increase in termperature which would cause another rise in CO2.
Once this process starts - what stopped it from running completely out of control in the past?
18 March 2007 at 10:30 PM
Re# 44 Research sponsored by big oil companies may well result in good science, but one can’t easily know for sure.
Yes you can, by seeing if the results are true or not.
18 March 2007 at 11:05 PM
Re# 44 & 46 - Value of research funded by oil companies:
I would be very impressed if they or anyone else was able to fund the development of a climate model that like the others i) is based on known physics, ii) is able to effectively hindcast historical and paleological climate as successfully as the existing models and iii) predicts no or minimal CO2 induced temperate increase.
Perhaps this is an effective response to the skeptics. Meet that challenge and then they’ll be credible.
I’d be particularly excited if they, or anyone else for that matter, could come up with a model that effectively predicts the El Nino/La Nina climate pattern. I depend on direct rainfall capture alone and want to know how big a water tank I need to buy to keep my vegie patch going through future Australian summers.
18 March 2007 at 11:26 PM
Comment by Ike Solem “…it looks like China is taking some positive action: China Bans New Small Coal-Based Power Generators - shouldn’t the United States do the same?”
According to your link, this is only to reduce SO2 and soot, something the US has been doing for many years.
18 March 2007 at 11:42 PM
re 45
There’s only a fixed amount of carbon that is mobile between the different components of the Earth system: atmosphere, oceans (hydrosphere), biosphere and lithosphere (surface rocks). So the process can’t carry on indefinitely. Unless a global civilisation works night and day to pump carbon out of the ground and into the air. The fossil fuels we are burning have been out of the equation for hundreds of millions of years. We need to take our foot off the accelerator.
18 March 2007 at 11:50 PM
Philc:
search: biogeochemical cycling
White cliffs of Dover
plankton
calcite and aragonite
“Plankton cooled a greenhouse”
There’s plenty on this; it’s a FAskedQ — the answers are in the research; that’ll help find postings.
Look into it just a bit first, it will help you ask questions about the science if you read the frequent answers and those searches in the searchbox at top of page will turn up the answers, asked very often here.
19 March 2007 at 12:24 AM
re. 45 Phil writes:
…re. why CO2 disappears natually.
“Once this process (co2 being incresed naturally -RO) starts - what stopped it from running completely out of control in the past?”
Again anyone step in. Here is a simplified explanation. There are several processes (can be called negative feedbacks) which stop the Co2 (on Earth…not poor Venus)from going “runaway” (”runaway greenhouse effect”).
The first is, is that rocks (silicate rocks), in the long term, remove the CO2 out of the air with a reaction with rain.
The warmer it gets, the more these chemical reactions increase (because it rains more when it gets warmer-ooops, what does that mean is happening now?).
Now this solution flows to the sea and dumps CO2 into the sea. in other words to paraphase from your high school chemistry that you were required to take: CaSiO3 + 3H2O + 2CO2 turns into Ca2+ + 2(HCO3- ) + H4SiO4).
Notice how the CO2 disappears. This is called the chemical weathering process and is part of the “carbon cycle.” In the ocean, types of animals absorb the carbon out of the water to make shells…they die and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
A second process to stop co2 from growing , is that the warmer it gets (the ice-covered lands disappear and the more trees and plants appear. They absorb more CO2 from the air and transfer it by roots deep in the soil where it combines with water to make an acid “carbonic acid” which disolves calcium silicate in rock to to make calcium carbonate (notice the word carbon in carbonate).
The calcium carbonate (carbon) is then transported in solution to the oceans where it can be dumped out as limestone.
Okay, those are the two basic processes. Otherwise, co2 gets reduced during ice ages when the Earth’s orbit changes the amount of sun energy hitting at least the northern hemisphere during the summer in regular (pretty regular) three cycles of about 26,000 years, 41,000 years and 100,000 years (Milankovitch cycles).
You know the routine: Cool the air. Cool the oceans which can hold more co2 in solution (think of your cold versus hot pop bottle). Now increase the ice on Earth. This makes higher winds by air coming over ice, rapidly sinking and making winds. With an ice age, more dusty land is exposed as sea levels drop as water becomes ice. This carries more dust. Dust has iron. More iron feeds more plankton in the oceans. More plankton (plant variety) eats more co2 and sinks.
In ice ages, the ocean currents often also get more active because of a bigger difference in temperatures between the poles and the equator and this allows even more co2 to be absorbed (subducted).
That is a simplified expanation that leaves a lot out.
19 March 2007 at 12:31 AM
RE#45, This was discussed from many perspectives at the “Swindled” thread; my attempts can be viewed at #150, #202, #291, but to quote one of the moderators:
“Response:AFAIK, people don’t know exactly why CO2 stopped at 280 in interglacials and 180 in glacials. It doesn’t have to be feedbacks: there could simply be some reservoir that is exhausted. Also, thats for the previous 4 interglacials: before then, EPICA shows 250. This again is unexplained - William”
If you look at http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1124-climate.html , you can see a graph of the ice core CO2 record (halfway down the page). We know that CO2 stops increasing - why is uncertain.
Once again (as with the solar issue, see Nigel Weiss’s comments above) you have contrarians using one-sided distortions of scientific uncertainties to support their views.
19 March 2007 at 2:18 AM
RE#32 - I’ve just read the Independent article someone linked to after my post on Hardarker & Co.
From the article http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2368999.ece
‘Some confusion surrounded the views of the RMS scientists yesterday after Prof Hardaker told the IoS that he could not think of a case where a scientist had overstated the position. He did however mention a statement by the American Association for the Advancement of Science that described an “intensification of droughts, heatwaves, floods, wildfires and severe storms” as “early warning signs of yet more devastating damage to come”.
He said he did not disagree with any of this, but thought the AAAS should have made it clear what could be justified by the scientific evidence and what was based on judgement. He pointed out that he and his colleague were not experts on climate change. ‘
So after all this fuss, he did not disagree with any of the statement, and ‘he and his colleague were not experts on climate change’. Strange, since the BBC Today website still has the interview http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today2_climate_20070317.ram with the headline ‘Two of Britain’s most senior climate researchers have told the BBC that scientists have been overplaying the message on climate change.’. Still, if you wanted to get lots of pulicity for outfit like Sense about Science (who have some slightly dodgy links to the RCP/Spiked crowd), then this nonsense would have done you no harm…
19 March 2007 at 2:52 AM
I’ve been following the “pro” and “cons” for a while now and still can’t get to some conclusion of it all. On questions I have for instance is: The CO2 we are releasing now is that not previously free CO2 that have been captured at some time in history? And if so, are these volumes not already in the climate system and we are actually not adding anything that did not exist before?
/Br. Rob
19 March 2007 at 4:07 AM
Re #35, climate change is relative is the answer. Today millions of people live along the coasts of the world, when the seas rise due to climate change they will be in trouble, it does not matter that 50 million years ago the earth was 5 degrees hotter and the seas 70 meters higher does it as it did not impact anyone ?
It is all about forcings or which the earths albedo and vegetation is the strongest followed by greenhouse gases. Both do not need to be high for warming to occur either can cause warming or cooling for that matter. 10,000 years ago the earths natural cycles (known to us as miltankovitch cycles) starting to bring us out of an ice age and hence the albedo effect was the cause of this warming. As you have been told it takes some 800 years of warming before albedo and vegetation had been effected enough although RC tell us that it may not have been this long. Anyway the source of the CO2 is most likely the oceans which absorb CO2 when it is cold and release it when it is warmed and it is this released CO2 that then causes further warming of the atmosphere.
In the modern world 280 ppm seems to be the earths natural limit and we are not at 390 ppm due to industrial burning. Further burning will cause steadily increasing CO2 levels and hence further warming.
19 March 2007 at 4:07 AM
Re #47 Earth’s atmosphere (Rob)
Yes, most CO2 we are producing at present was at some point in history captured and converted to fossil fuels, which then remained safely underground (and outside the climate system) until we recently started re-releasing it into the atmosphere.
Look for example in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_atmosphere#Evolution_of_the_Earth.27s_atmosphere
But regardless of where that CO2 was in history, the trouble now is that all that CO2 in the atmosphere will have rather unpleasant consequences.
19 March 2007 at 4:35 AM
re#49
if, at some point, it was all in the atmosphere why have the “unpleasant consequences” (runnaway greenhouse I presume) not been seen in the historical record.
[Response: Who says “runaway greenhouse”? -William]
19 March 2007 at 4:38 AM
Re #49 Earth’s atmosphere (Dick V)
I should maybe start by stating that I recognize the fact that earth is warming… And with that out of the way… After considering your answer I still don’t understand why many claim that the CO2 levels have never been this high when evidently “all” the CO2 we’re releasing must have been around some point in time. I understand the consequences at present and future time for mankind but in the history of earth (and I’m thinking rather recently) there must have been worse situations than the one that is proposed to be?
/Br. Rob
19 March 2007 at 5:29 AM
Rob…the problem is I think pre-Industrial Revoluton levels of CO2 were 270ppm with a very small population and now C02-equivalent levels are way over 400ppm with a population heading towards 9.5 billion by 2050. These people need to be fed, housed, clothed, and have access to clean water and good sanitation. If extreme weather events increase and the temperature gets hotter, then this has severe implications for that larger population. If there were still less than a billion people in the world and the temperature rose naturally rather than being forced there wouldn’t be such a problem. Isn’t this what we are all really worried about?
19 March 2007 at 6:30 AM
Re #50 Worries (Philip M)
Exactly, we should worrie about the consequences of a warmer world rather than try to rectify something that we might or might not be able to influence. Is it not so that a very high percentage agrees and recognize that the world is getting warmer (independent of source)? And are we also not on agreement that this warming will continue for a long time regardless of any action taken to prevent that? If so, shouldn’t the prudent way of the humankind (as history have told us) be to adapt?
/Br. Rob
19 March 2007 at 6:40 AM
Re #47, #50 Earth’s atmosphere (Rob)
The claim about “CO2 levels never been this high” is made (as far as I know) for the last 650,000 years (this is found from analysing air bubbles in ice cores).
With a little googling I found this temperature graph: http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm which has several maxima at ca 22 deg C global T, for example in the Cretaceous some 100 million years ago (currently we’re at 15-16 deg C). Presumably CO2 concentrations were also higher then (but I am no paleoclimate expert).
However, as people have often pointed out in the hockeystick discussion, whether CO2 levels were higher at some time in the past is really not the issue*). Even if we had no clue whatsoever about the climate before 1800 there is plenty of evidence that the theory of global warming is sound and we’re involved in a dangerous global experiment.
*) Of course I don’t mean to deny the importance of paleoclimatology. It it is a good thing to have the complete picture, and to check our theories wherever we can.
19 March 2007 at 7:10 AM
Rob,
“…I still don’t understand why many claim that the CO2 levels have never been this high when evidently “all” the CO2 we’re releasing must have been around some point in time.”
Bear in mind that the coal / oil deposits we’re burning through weren’t laid down overnight. The CO2 we’re re-releasing WAS all in the atmosphere in the past, but not necessarily all at the same point in time (unless you go billions of years back, before life on the planet).
19 March 2007 at 7:29 AM
[[You don’t explain why there’s global warming on Mars, Jupiter, Triton and Pluto. ]]
All we know about Mars is that one of its polar caps has shrunk a bit in the past three years. That proves exactly nothing relevant to the overall thermal balance of Mars.
Jupiter is not undergoing global warming. Where did Lindzen get that idea?
Triton? Where is Neptune in its orbit just now? Ditto Pluto. Neither Triton nor Pluto has an atmosphere worth speaking of, but they do have summer and winter. Is Lindzen aware that Pluto takes 248 years to go around the Sun, and therefore that its seasonal change in any direction will last a lot longer than on Earth?
19 March 2007 at 8:13 AM
Different Kind of Debate
Coming up at 10am on C-SPAN, another episode of “Stop Interfering with My Research.” Today, the big boys go at it. The CEQ head’s name is actually James Connaughton, a fairly important policymaker on climate change, but who is seldom seen or heard. C-SPAN usually repeats these hearings, so check the schedule.
Global Warming Research
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) chairs an Oversight and Gov’t Reform Cmte. hearing on claims of poli-
tical interference with government scientists & their research on climate change. Witnesses include James Hansen, Dir., NASA Goddard Inst. for Space Studies; John Connaughton, Council on Environmental Quality & others.
19 March 2007 at 8:34 AM
thanks for the replies so far - I do appreciate the time people take to put forward information but…
All of this started off in the 1970’s with the simple idea that Co2 warms the atmosphere. This has developed so that now ice coverage, methane, CO2 etc all contribute. Throw in solar and cosmic activity and I’d say you have a very, very complex system youâ��re trying to model. Anyone who is willing to take a firm stand on any prediction being right is a brave sole.
A computer model of this would have to take account of every contributing factor in exactly the right amount for its predictions to have any chance of being right. Not only the initial conditions but also the exact nature of how everything interacts with everything else. Should any of these be out (or some other as yet unrecognized factor be missed altogether) then after a few interations the model would bare no relation to how the world’s real climate will change.
Perhaps this is why the GW predictions I read range from �not too bad� to �the end of life as we know it�.
Other theories like relativity or quantum mechanics stand or fall on very definite predictions. The predictions from GWT have such a wide variation that the theory itself seems very under-developed.
19 March 2007 at 8:41 AM
Re:63
Perhaps Lindzen is suggesting Earth’s orbit is as eccentric as Pluto and Neptune. This seems an unusually amateurish attempt at baiting and misdirection.
19 March 2007 at 8:50 AM
[[I watched the program and read the rebutals but still cannot for the life of me understand if CO2 levels lag behind the temperature by 800 years how CO2 causes the temperature to change. ]]
Try reading the past posts in the blog. RealClimate and posters have covered this many, many times.
We know more CO2 in the air raises the temperature of the ground. That’s basic radiation physics which goes back at least to Arrhenius in 1896. If any temperature increase for another reason raises CO2, the CO2 will raise the temperature further. It can’t be avoided unless there’s some counteracting factor, and no one has ever found one despite diligent search for many decades.
19 March 2007 at 8:58 AM
[[If I understand this correctly, an initial rise in temperature causes an increase in CO2 which then causes an increase in termperature which would cause another rise in CO2.
Once this process starts - what stopped it from running completely out of control in the past? ]]
The math governing it is essentially a converging series — each increment is smaller than the last, so the total comes to some finite sum. Compare the series 1 + 1 + 1 … which diverges to infinity, with 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 … which converges to 2.
19 March 2007 at 9:02 AM
[[I’ve been following the “pro” and “cons” for a while now and still can’t get to some conclusion of it all. On questions I have for instance is: The CO2 we are releasing now is that not previously free CO2 that have been captured at some time in history? And if so, are these volumes not already in the climate system and we are actually not adding anything that did not exist before?]]
Most of the carbon on Earth is not in the climate system, but in sedimentary rocks on the ocean floor. It does eventually get recycled to the air, but the process takes millions of years.
You’re right that the total amount of carbon is fixed — mass is conserved in any non-nuclear reaction. But what’s happening now is that carbon is being released from the rocks — fossil fuels — and dumped into the atmosphere faster than natural recycling can handle it.
19 March 2007 at 9:05 AM
[[I should maybe start by stating that I recognize the fact that earth is warming… And with that out of the way… After considering your answer I still don’t understand why many claim that the CO2 levels have never been this high when evidently “all” the CO2 we’re releasing must have been around some point in time. I understand the consequences at present and future time for mankind but in the history of earth (and I’m thinking rather recently) there must have been worse situations than the one that is proposed to be?]]
There have been times in geological history when CO2 was much higher and the world was much warmer, and life survived. It will survive now. But the transition to that warmer state will be faster than our agriculture and our economy can handle. In the Jurassic when the sea level was higher, there were no cities built on the coastline. There are now.
19 March 2007 at 9:29 AM
Re #65, PhilC
The model problems are not so severe as you make them out to be.
1. Some factors are less important than others, so it doesn’t matter whether we know them accurately, as long as we’re in a reasonable range. There are also some statistical ‘tricks’ to deal with uncertainty, as they do in the ClimatePrediction project.
2. Some important factors (what CO2, CH4 etc do with radiation) are well known from independent experiments.
3. It gives A LOT of confidence that the models reproduce measurements fairly well, not only over time, but also in space: temperature and rain distributions over the globe for example.
There is the matter of lacking knowledge of ice dynamics (melting) of course, but from what I gather this will probably make matters worse than better.
And what’s the alternative? Just ignore the best predictions science has to offer?
19 March 2007 at 9:47 AM
re. 54. Rob wrote:
“On questions I have for instance is: The CO2 we are releasing now is that not previously free CO2 that have been captured at some time in history?
And if so, are these volumes not already in the climate system
and we are actually not adding anything that did not exist before?”
My over-simplified explanation was too simplified on how Earth’s systems keep CO2 in check. I named only two general processes.
There is at least a third important process at work that keeps the CO2 naturally in check…sometimes known as biological sequestering or a biological pump. This is also part of the carbon cycle.
This third process is approximately as follows (again very simplified)… the CO2 levels rise, Earth’s average surface temperatures rise.
Now trees, plants, algae (in comparatively now stagnant oceans and lakes-[algae are plants]…think scum on a summer pond surface) and swamps and bogs spread massively.
Oceans often become more stagnant during long warm periods because of fewer temperature differences between the poles and the equator.
The warmth spreads to almost the poles. Palms and ferns grow at the equivalent of the artic circle area…ie most of the Earth’s land surface now becomes covered by swamps and the oceans by algae.
Trees, plants, algae and other single-celled animals absorb CO2. They die and are covered by newer trees, plants and algae in this stagnant wet swamp/bog/ocean envriroment.
They sink (in swamps, bogs and oceans) and are covered my more plants and trees. After a while (millions of years) this is turned by pressure and heat…into coal, oil and gas full of…carbon.
It basically stays this way…unless we humans suddenly dig it up and release it to the atmosphere by burning oil, coal and gas. This carbon now combines with oxygen to form…co2 when you burn it.
Guess what one of the biggest geological ages was called when this “biological sequestering or biological pump” was occurring about 300 million years ago…the “Carboniferous age” (note the word carbon).
That is a third major process that keeps co2 in check…and has severe implications for today and the future. In short…”this ain’t natural.”
19 March 2007 at 9:47 AM
PhilC @ #65 - all of this started a long time ago, long before the 1970’s. I was curious and found this timeline:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timeline.htm
on the American Institute of Physics website. Arrenhius’ (1896) prediction was that for a doubling of CO2 there would be roughly 5degree increase in temperature, I believe the current estimate for this sensitivity is a little lower.
I wonder if he intended for us to test his prediction experimentally?
19 March 2007 at 10:01 AM
For those who’d rather not install RealPlayer to listen to BBC programmes (those that aren’t podcast), Google “Real Alternative” for an, er alternative.
19 March 2007 at 10:03 AM
RE SomeBeans #73 see the top “Science Links” link on the RHS side bar for the full history.
19 March 2007 at 10:13 AM
AHHH, if only you guys were 1/10 as diligent and skeptical of the info in Inconvemient Truth…
19 March 2007 at 10:25 AM
the entire TGGWS is now on YOuTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttV2C6B8pU
19 March 2007 at 10:26 AM
Here’s the latest hit piece from the WSJ from the dropout John Fund.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110009804. He quotes Milloy!
19 March 2007 at 10:41 AM
Re # 65 So, because you don’t fully understand the computer models of global climate, you assume everyone else is a ignorant as you?
I frequently warn my students about the logical fallacy of arguments based on ignorance.
19 March 2007 at 10:42 AM
The Waxman hearings are on now on C-Span. The Souder from Indiana is particularly vile and hostile to Hansen.
19 March 2007 at 10:43 AM
re #71
1.. “The model problems are not so severe as you make them out to be.”
you can only know how severe they are by waiting until the predictions have come true - or not. If it turns out to have even a slightly different effect that you origianlly thought your model can be way off.
2. “Some important factors (what CO2, CH4 etc do with radiation) are well known from independent experiments.”
experiments that actually show their overall effects on the real climate, or do they just extrapolate an effect in the laboratory.
Am I wrong in thinking that the different models report widely varying predictive effects (between 1-6 degree temperature changes for example)
How can they be accurate yet produce widely differing at the same time
[Response: There are two parts to making a projection. The first is the scenario that is used that determines how much CO2 etc. might change, and secondly, the physical model is to project the change in the climate. The range you quote is for both sorts of uncertainty, and most of it is related to the different scenarios, not the different models. The model sensitivity is significantly less for any one scenario. See the SPM for details. - gavin]
19 March 2007 at 10:56 AM
Mark, did you notice, on the website, the age of the flag next to that WSJ opinion piece? 48 stars on it.
Chuckle.
19 March 2007 at 11:25 AM
Re #72
Richard - an amplification.
Carbon trapped in limestone deposits is returned to the atmosphere when the limestone is subducted during a plate collision. It can then react with silicate rocks
and the CO2 is expelled, through volcanoes funnily enough (so much for the assertion that volcanoes emit CO2 - it’s often fossil atmosphere anyway).
And of course, the organic stuff can be returned when their strata are eroded and the material is then oxidised.
But of course, all this happens very slowly.
19 March 2007 at 11:36 AM
#76 [[AHHH, if only you guys were 1/10 as diligent and skeptical of the info in Inconvemient Truth…]]
The above shows little understanding of how science works.
Scientists were harsh of the climate disaster movie the 2004 Day After Tommorow’s science.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5058474/
Scientists also critiqued and thought the science was generally sound for “An Inconvienient ruth.”…although they were quick to nitpick a few scientific points.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=299
19 March 2007 at 11:42 AM
re#79
“So, because you don’t fully understand the computer models of global climate, you assume everyone else is a ignorant as you?”
while someone (admittedly not me) may fully understand a model I just question the idea that you can accurately model the entire atmosphere of a planet.
But it didn’t take long for the name calling to start
19 March 2007 at 11:45 AM
I’ve been busy & need to catch up, so this might be off topic, but several posts ago Chris Mooney raised the issue of Al Gore being incorrect on something in AIT, and how that might damage credibility or something.
If Gore underestimated GW, then that is a bad mistake & morally reprehensible (if done purposely). If he overestimated the harm, then that is perfectly okay.
The only debate in my view is between the scientists, avoiding false positives (not making a claim re GW unless they are extremely sure), and the environmentalists (and everyone else), avoiding false negatives (being cautionary in assuming and trying to prevent the worst). So, the skeptics and contrarians and denialists are all in the “avoid the false positive” camp, with only the scientists having a morally valid reason to be there.
So any mistake on the “assuming the worst & trying to prevent it side” is a non-problem. It’s perfectly okay. That’s were everyone, except the scientists, should be.
19 March 2007 at 12:09 PM
re #85, #79;
You needn’t take offense, Phil, the word “ignorant” was used in its literal rather than pejorative sense.
You do have a point. Climate models have a lot of utility in investigating climate, but the boundaries between their uses and abuses are complex and controversial. It’s not especially easy or obvious what we should trust about them and what not to.
The public and much of the scientific community focuses on the conceptually simple use of prognostication that the IPCC report cycle drives. (Note that it’s prognostication and not prediction; all of the climate models of the future are predicated on CO2 concentration scenarios, which in turn depend on 1) human behavior and 2) carbon cycle feedbacks; there’s no way around the first part at least.)
How reliable these prognoses are is not better than the scatter among them, which is large. It may be worse than that, because there may be some unconscious bias toward producing a “typical” result among the modeling centers. However, it is difficult in practice to imagine how such biases might operate.
So it is a bit of a quandary.
The less you believe the models, the more vigorously you should support carbon mitigation. I feel compelled to come out and say this on occasion, since most people get it backwards. The weaker you think the science is, the bigger the risk you believe we are taking, and hence the more effort you should put into avoiding the worst cases. The cost of overreacting to benign climate change scenarios has to be balanced against the much larger cost of overreacting to catastrophic ones. The cost of the catastrophes increasingly dominate the more uncertainty you place upon the estimates.
It is also important to take note of the fact that despite enormous motivation to do so, nobody has been able to build a model that reasonably represents contemporary climate that has a greenhouse gas sensitivity different from the model consensus by a factor of greater than two.
The models continue to fail to represent local changes well enough to rely upon for local policy. Whether they can be improved enough to do so remains an open question. I think it is too soon to give up, but late enough to start exploring alternative design methodologies. That is a topic that is worthy of a real scientific debate.
Your question whether we “can accurately model the entire atmosphere” depends very much on what sort of accuracy you are looking for. The models produce storms that go where storms go and, as of recently, hurricanes that go where hurricanes go. The gulf stream goes where the gulf stream goes, and so does the Kuroshio and the Antarctic current. The sea ice grows and shrinks at roughly the right times and rates. The intertropical convergence zone and the El Nino, however, remain wretched. Make of this what you will. (I make of it a living, myself.)
But the climate sensitivity to CO2 is essentially known. There’s very little evidence that would place it far from 3 degrees C per CO2 doubling, and a great deal that puts it near that quantity. Models agree with other evidence on this matter. It’s not really an open question; any scientist proposing a dramatically different value at this point would have an awful lot of ’splainin’ to do.
19 March 2007 at 12:13 PM
“…while someone (admittedly not me) may fully understand a model I just question the idea that you can accurately model the entire atmosphere of a planet. …” - PhilC
As long as we’re mixing things, a prediction of the weather to be on Thursday morning requires a degree of accuracy akin to threading the eye of a tiny needle; hitting the broad side of a barn 200 years from now doesn’t.
19 March 2007 at 12:21 PM
Hank I only counted 36.
19 March 2007 at 12:25 PM
RE PhilC,
Any person should question the idea that you can model the atmosphere of a planet… but then, assuming that’s the question of interest (and not, how can I inject doubt into scientific discussions of climate in order to prevent governments from taking action?) then you’d want to look at weather models, and how climate models are derived from weather models, and how ocean circulation and heat transport is modeled, and how ocean models are coupled to climate models… and so on. You’d want to compare past model predictions to reality (see for example http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=148 “Planetary Energy Imbalance”)…and then you’d realize that the models do a pretty good job.
Of course, there’s always something that might be missing, but that’s true for any model - a model of air flowing over an airplane wing, a model of a bridge. That’s why comparing models to observations matters; if there’s a persistent discrepancy it can tell you about what your model is missing (for example, early models didn’t include aerosol effects). That’s how science is done.
If you ignore the facts after they’re presented to you and persist with the same discredited arguments, as Lindzen et al do, then you simply lose all credibility.
19 March 2007 at 12:50 PM
re# 86
“As long as we’re mixing things…. hitting the broad side of a barn 200 years from now doesn’t.”
What am I mixing?
The current models seem to predict different ‘barns’ depending on who’s running the model (i.e. different temperatures and climate effects etc) - how come they differ so much if they are essentially accurate.
19 March 2007 at 12:52 PM
re #81
“The model sensitivity is significantly less for any one scenario. See the SPM for details. - gavin]”
Gavin, could you let me know what the SPM is?
Many thanks
Phil
[Response:Sorry. Summary for Policy Makers from IPCC - discussed (and directly linked to) here. Look at Figure SPM-5 - gavin]
19 March 2007 at 1:41 PM
Mark, that’s the difference between what you see and what you get (grin).
You old enough to remember the 48-star flag? I’m still flying mine, it hasn’t worn out yet — it’s a grid (stars aren’t offset), six rows. You don’t see all eight columns in the WSJ Editorials picture.
Trust me, that’s the flag from before the upstart Alaska and Hawaii Territories intruded themselves into the country (and the current staggered-to-fit-fifty star layout became the official flag).
Aw, you knew that, I’m such a sucker for a good troll sometimes. Gulp.
19 March 2007 at 2:06 PM
Philc,
Michael Tobis (#87) was correct - I was using “ignorant” and “ignorance” to describe your apparent lack of knowledge about global climate models. Had I intended to disparage you personally, I would have chosen some other term (and the comment would surely have been deleted by the RC moderators).
Re your comments in #91:
You seem to be confusing precision with accuracy - if so, these links might be helpful in clarifying the difference:
http://www.flatsurv.com/accuprec.htm
http://www.chem.tamu.edu/class/fyp/mathrev/mr-sigfg.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
As others have pointed out on this and other RC threads, computer models used to make forecast are commonly run mutiple times using different starting values to account for the known (or expected) variability of the input parameters (i.e., the assumptions on which the model is based). The result is a range of possible output values (predictions/prognostications, whatever you want to call them). Yes, the predicted magnitude of global warming is a range of temperature values - usually these predicted values are assigned some degree of certainty akin to confidence limits in statistics. It will take some time to verify the accuracy of these predictions, but the fact that they all predict global warming should be alarming to everyone - keep in mind that one degree C is almost two degrees F, and a rise in global mean temperature of even 1 degree C over a couple of decades could be expected to have very serious implications for sea level rise, animal and plant survival, disease outbreaks, etc.
19 March 2007 at 2:11 PM
Now I’ve seen everything.
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/docs/20070316_monckton.html
19 March 2007 at 3:37 PM
Don’t go there (grin). Hardly the sort of link you want to have Google think is a recommended one, eh? Sourcewatch is good on “SEPP” info.
19 March 2007 at 3:42 PM
Re #37: Richard Ordway — My understanding of the LGM to Holocene temperature increase of 6–8 K is that only about half of that can be attributed to so-called greenhouse gases. (My amateur attempt only supplies about 2 K.) The rest of the temperature increase might be due to albedo changes?
19 March 2007 at 4:22 PM
Re #45: PhilC:
There’s a mathematical way to understand why it might not run away: The positive feedback is smaller than the initial kick. So, if we take the initial kick as having one unit of strength (in other words, call it 1), the positive feedback could be 3/4 the size. Then that 3/4 causes a feedback 3/4 the size of that one, etc:
1 + 3/4 + (3/4)*(3/4) + (3/4)*(3/4)*(3/4) + …
This is what is called in mathematics a “convergent” series, which adds up to 4. So the final effect is that the change is 4 times as big as the original effect.
Plus, there could be a time delay as it takes effect. So, for example, the solar change that kicks it off happens at time t=0, but then t=100 years later the initial 3/4 takes effect. Then at t=200 years the next 3/4 takes effect, etc. What you’d see is the CO2 rise trailing the climate change in precisely the observed way.
It is possible that the feedback was bigger than the initial kick, say 1.2. Then the series is:
1 + 1.2 + (1.2)*(1.2) + (1.2)*(1.2)*(1.2) + …
This series is called “divergent” - it never stops growing. I have heard that it is believed that this is what happened on Venus. (Of course, in any physical system you eventually get cut off - you run out of carbon, for example.)
19 March 2007 at 4:44 PM
What we really need to fix is our science education.
The final vote of the debate was really a notice that society is not going to make a determined effort to restrict ghg emissions until our infrastructure is flooded, and we are living in a tent on Mt Ararat. Noah did, and so can we. I have lived in a tent and herded sheep, it is not so bad â?? if you have those skills.
In only a 150,000 years, the waters will recede and we can reclaim places like New York City, Houston, London, Istanbul, Bombay, and Shanghai. Not to mention every major refinery in the world. Of course, without those refineries, even inland cities could no longer function.
We have a society that does not understand science: not climate science, not economics, and not geography.
19 March 2007 at 5:18 PM
Piers Corbyn, the meteorologist that supplies long range forecasts for industry says the IPCC in fairness should include a temperature record going back to the end of the last ice along with the CO2 record of the same period. Do you agree with him?
http://www.weatheraction.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=37
[Response: Umm… sure. If such a thing existed. But we don’t even have good data for the global mean back before 1000 years ago (and Mr. Corbyn would probably dispute that also), so how we can have it going back 15,000 years is a little odd. The graph he uses appears to a very rough copy of one of the Greenland ice cores, but that is hardly typical, and certainly not a global mean. - gavin]
19 March 2007 at 5:41 PM
Re #97: At some point we need to remind ourselves that many interlocking feedbacks are involved: GHGs (with water vapor doing the major part of the work as always), albedo, dust clouds, carbon sinks, sea ice, ocean currents, atmospheric circulation patterns, vegetation, plankton, etc. Bear in mind that the entire climate system is being shifted into a different state. *Everything* that can change does change. That certainly makes modeling it difficult, but it turns out to not be impossible:
I’ve linked it before, but since we’ve been talking ice ages and models on this thread these fresh results are very much worth reading. I’d love to get the opinion of one of the modelers on this, but from my humble POV these results seem very good indeed (although not perfect by any means, plus they avoid dealing with the Mid-Pleistocene Transition).
19 March 2007 at 5:49 PM
Re #101: Steve Bloom — Yes, many interactions occur. My goal is to keep it simple as long and as far as possible.
Regarding your link, my amateur reading is that the work is quite good, but with the important exception of the transition from the Eemian (last previous interglacial) to the first stade, which did not model well…
19 March 2007 at 6:01 PM
More antarctic drilling info coming in all the time.
http://www.scar.org/news/antarctic/
19 March 2007 at 8:17 PM
Hearings Clear Up Misunderstanding About Censorship
I managed to watch several hours of the House Govt. Reform Committee hearing on scientific censorship of climate change research before C-SPAN cut away to cover the House. The full hearing will probably be shown later. But no matter. It was all a big misunderstanding.
The hearings were to focus on why the Bush Admin. had deliberately tried to prevent government scientists from giving media interviews on climate change and on the selective editing of important policy documents produced on climate change such that the edits did not accurately reflect the science.
Witness Phil Cooney, formerly and presently of Big Oil testified he only made changes he thought should be made and that James Mahoney, the then head of the Climate Science program didn’t include most of his changes anyway. No harm, no foul. It was agreed that having an oil man in that position was probably a bad idea, certainly from a PR standpoint.
Witness George Deutsch, the former NASA press information officer, testified that he was only a messenger boy, telling James Hansen and others what the big boys at NASA HQ on the 9th floor wanted done. Specifically that they didn’t want him to give interviews, especially after the one where Hansen said that 2003? 04? was the warmest year on record. Deutsch, who did not have a college degree at the time of his tenure at NASA and was chastised for misleading people that he had a degree has now graduated and runs a radio call in show for the mentally ill. Not qualified for this one either or competition for Limbaugh?
Witness James Connaughton, still head of the Council on Environmental Quality praised Dr. Hansen and said that they invited Hansen to make a presentation to them on non CO2 GHGs and this led to the various international agreements to reduce methane. Hansen himself said this was a success.
But witness Hansen was not living in the same bizarro world as these guys and reminded the committee that obstructing scientists would not make the problem of global warming go away, it would just make it harder to solve. He wouldn’t give a specific amount when asked how much federal money should be spent on solving global warming based on a range of $3 billion (now spent) vs. $350 trillion (amount needed to immediately solve problem in U.S. according to one congressman). He said that more money should be spent on developing renewable energy and not just on nuclear energy, a favorite of Connaughton. The $3 billion figure seems to be quoted a lot more since I exposed the phony $6 billion number claimed by the Admin. for some time, as a lot of hypothetical tax credits and unrelated work spray painted green.
The hearing went off the paved surface and up a dirt road on several occasions with some time spent debating whether Al Gore’s house is more energy efficient than Bush’s Crawford ranch. Members also agonized over whether it would have been better if Bush had taken the high road on Kyoto or climate change in general.
The issue of whether Hansen endorsed Kerry for president because he had received a $250K prize from the Heinz foundation came up because Republicans wanted to portray Hansen as a hypocrite since the issue of bought and paid for staff had come up regarding Cooney’s hiring. No evidence was presented that there was any connection with the endorsement of Kerry and Hansen said he supported any candidate who took the issue of global warming seriously, including John McCain.
There was also some discussion of Hansen’s comparison of the Administration’s censorship of scientists as like that of Nazi Germany and whether this was appropriate. Agreed. He could have chosen a less inflammatory example. USSR, N. Korea, Cuba, Myannmar (a little too esoteric perhaps), Turkmenistan, Iraq (pre-2003), Iran, Libya, Syria, the former E. Germany. Why play the Hitler card when you have Belarus and Zimbabwe to choose from?
This led to the question of whether government employees have the right to speak out publicly when they disagree with a stated policy. Hansen said this was allowed under the First Amendment.
And on the subject of debates and censorship, Hansen said he would not censor any of his approx 120 staff on a scientific matter, but he also did not encourage debates with the handful of climate contrarians, since it gives them an apparent equal status and a platform from which to cherry pick facts that would likely confuse a lay audience. Not that anything like that would ever happen.
19 March 2007 at 8:29 PM
The people most worried about bird flu fall into two groups — those actively trying to educate the public and improve public health, and those who are improving their personal private property and stocking up what they expect to need when public health and services break down during a crisis.
The “Reveres” who write Effect Measure commented on this a while back, saying they are not taking up stockpiling and planning for personal survival, they are spending their time and effort trying to educate people about how to prevent the problem.
I have no problem believing that Mr. Bush’s private ranch is very energy efficient, and likely has all his family needs to be self-sufficient.
19 March 2007 at 8:52 PM
Piers Corbyn is not a meteorologist. He does not have a PhD and his highest degree is an MSc in astrophysics. Regarding his “forecasts” see here and here.
20 March 2007 at 12:42 AM
Very droll, but some print responses to TGGWS defy satirization , like this one By Jerusalem Post Ed Page Editor Saul Singer –
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDg5ZGU0MTFjY2E2ZWIzMmFmMjU4MzIyZDRiZTM3ZDE=
20 March 2007 at 2:13 AM
I would like to thank those who patiently have answered the questions posed by PhilC. You may not convince him, but you have provided the rest of us with a wealth of information and explanation.
So please correct me if I’m wrong, but this is what I glean from the discussion. We have recovered from past glaciations because orbital variations have started a warming cycle that released, in 800 years or so, CO2 from the oceans and other sources, which resulted in additional warming for thousands of years until CO2 was stable in the atmosphere (since CO2 is not an infinite resource). Then over geologic time, CO2 was sequestered back into the ocean and rocks, cooling the planet.
But now, we do not have the orbital change driving the warming, but instead the increase in CO2 has resulted in jump starting the warming. The end result should be that additional CO2 will be released as the planet warms, until CO2 again is exhausted from “natural” sources.
EXCEPT that at this time, we have dumped (and will continue to dump) huge amounts of fossil CO2 into the atmosphere. This fossil CO2, combined with the CO2 that will be released as the oceans warm, will lead to conditions which have not been seen for hundreds of millions of years.
This suggests to me that it is going to get very, very hot here on Earth, and this with continue for a very, very, very long time.
20 March 2007 at 5:16 AM
Re 95: Nevermind ‘magna est veritas, et praevalet’. More like ‘veritas fortis est, et praevalebit’. I sincerely hope that Gore reads RC and has learned from the experiences of others. Monckton is attempting to hook Gore by playing the ’southern gentleman’ card. Gore should refuse to play this game, not get sidetracked from the real job in hand, and walk away.
20 March 2007 at 6:09 AM
Re 29: [What technology presently can replace coal or sequester its exhaust?]
Considering the abundance of coal and the affordability of its electricity, none that I’m aware of today. But it’s in development, e.g. Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) and Supercritical Pulverized Coal (SCPC). Web searches provide info on these systems. The government consideration I referenced in #24 in conjuction with similar international efforts, driven by science, could result in economic drivers that make these or other similar-purpose systems reality.
20 March 2007 at 7:11 AM
Re #108, don’t go from a skeptic to a extreme convert. You have the jist of it right but remember all CO2 is doing is trapping