More on Global Warming

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NOG, you need to pay a bit more attention to what Climatologists are actually saying. Climatologists are still saying that we are heading towards an ice age. Global warming, they state, is exactly what is accelerating it. You see, as ice melts, whatever caused it to melt actually gets colder*. We are careening** towards an ice age because of global warming. The last ice age was caused by a global temperature increase of only 9 degrees (and we're about half way there right now), so this "contradiction" you've found doesn't actually exist. It never did.

This is a terrible oversimplification of the science and a perfect illustration of why lay-people need to stay out of scientific debates. You are correct to state that solar radiation causes the Ozone over Antarctica to thin, but you are wrong to imply that climatologists are trying to say that Ozone depletion is only caused by CFC's released by human activity....or that they ever were, for that matter. That was never their stance. Their stance, one which is still held today, is that man made CFC's exacerbate Ozone depletion...not that they are the sole cause. Now, while folks love to point out that the ozone layer has gotten better, they also tend to fail to point out that 1)it's still worse than it was in the '80's and we now have to holes in the Ozone layer rather than one (which isn't actually a bad thing) and 2) nations have been aggressively legislating against CFC's since the early '90's. The correlation between improvements in our Ozone layer and major reductions in our CFC emissions should not be ignored.

If you want to be critical of the IPCC or climatologists in general, you are going to first need to know what they are actually saying. That means going to the original sources wherever possible to check if peoples facts are actually, well, factual. All too often, conservatives in the media (the few left who still fail to acknowledge global warming) are just making straw-man arguments without actually being taken to task for it. This is why you must always go to the original source after hearing someone's argument.

*If you don't believe me, then test it yourself! Take the temperature of a glass of ice water and the air right around it. Right after the ice melts, do it again. Not only will the water be colder than it was in the beginning, but so will the air around the glass.

**"Careening " is a rather disingenuous term, of course, since ice ages take thousands of years to happen. Even if we somehow quintupled the speed of the impending ice age, none of our grandkids will be around to see it. Climatologists state we are accelerating the speed at which the next ice age will begin. They aren't saying it's going to happen the day after tomorrow. Climatologists aren't Hollywood screenwriters, after all.

 

They're inextricably linked, hence Snook's point is, in my opinion, valid.

The sample is still too small for the scientists to be able to prove the theory and yet it is accepted by many as "fact." We have at most 200 years of study on the climate (probably far less) out of 4 billion years of earth history and we're supposed to believe that humans are causing this so-called catastrophe? As I understand it the climate has changed innumerable times in the past without our help. And what about the general warming and cooling trends that happened during the middle ages? I kind of doubt that those were caused by humans. Maybe they were caused by cow dung. That's it!

Oh, and it seems that only the West is expected to be responsible about the environment/climate while China and India and the developing world in general get a free pass. China is one of the most polluted places on earth and yet we're supposed to make the sacrifice to save the planet.

I'm not against reasonable environmental protections because it makes the world a nicer place to live. We certainly don't want wholesale environmental degradation. However, we seem to be going over-the-top here (which is par for the course these days). I don't believe that there is anything humans can do to stop global warming if it is indeed a general long-term trend. The earth's going to do what it wants regardless of our actions. Snook is correct. Global warming is a new religion and if you don't believe you're a heretic. I'm just waiting for the inquisitors to come and get me. This whole thing rather brings to mind GWB's quote about the war on terror: "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists." Just replace "us" with the global warming alarmists and "terrorists" with global warming skeptics. There is no middle ground here, apparently.

 

Science hasn't "proven" that we have tectonic plates, either. We've never "proven" Einstein's theory of relativity. Science has very rigid standards for declaring something a law. The only way to "prove" the reality of global warming would be to do nothing about it. If everything normalizes without human intervention and things don't get worse before they get better, then man-made global warming is probably a myth. This won't actually disprove it. If, on the other hand, the oceans continue to rise, weather continues to get more erratic, and temperatures continue to heat up without having the normal "cooling periods" between heat waves we still won't have "proof". Global warming, like nearly everything scientists study, will always be theory rather than law. The question is how we react to the warnings coming to us from (most of) the climatological community. To me, it's a no-brainer, though it obviously isn't for everyone.

Why you folks seem convinced that it is somehow wiser to throw caution to the wind than to take some preventative measures is beyond me. If it looks like a car is coming towards you and isn't slowing down, do you wait to see if maybe the car will stop before it hits you, or do you get out of the way? Everything in life involves risk, but some risks are just stupid.

 

@Drew

Ah, now we are getting to the root. Just because I am a heretic doesn't mean that I want the Earth to burn and our great great .... grandchildren to die. Many of us heretics live very sound ecological lives. Mrs. Snook is the patron saint of recycling. She threatens to thrash myself and little Snook if we happen to take a bag from a store when we don't need one. We live in a neighborhood that is very condusive to walking and bike riding and always prefer human powered modes of transportation to gasoline powered ones.

Your analogy to a car coming at you is an oversimplification. A speeding car is acknowledged by everyone as an imminent danger and you must get out of the way or die. Global warming on the other hand is not an immediate danger as it may or may not be a real danger. However, taking steps to avert this potential long term disaster may cause more short term disasters that in the long run do not avert global warming anyway. As an example as Dinsdale posted the Kyoto treaty that everyone hates the U.S. for not signing exempted China and India and much of the developing world from having to participate. What if the U.S. had signed the treaty? It would be conceivable that we would have had to transfer even more manufacturing to China, India, etc. Now all we have done is transfer where the damage is being done. We haven't done a thing to reduce it, all we have done is move it. Of course, the consequences here would have been terrible as we would have severly damaged our economy and put millions out of work. Now I'm not an economist so I don't pretend to understand what really may have happened, but from my experience as an accountant it certainly seems plausible.

Not to get too off-topic, but I liken this to banning pesticides and fertilizer as they may cause cancer. I think if you ask a hungry person if they want food, but may die of cancer in forty years, it is more than likely they will take the food and hope the doctor can cure him in forty years.

I am also an optimist. If in the future we can prove that global warming is happening and it is manmade, I figure the future will be better suited to solve the problem as we clearly don't have the technology to do it now. Who knows, by the time it becomes an issue we may have colonized other worlds.

@Darkthrone

I agree that weather isn't the exact same thing as climate, but it makes sense to me that weather which is more short term should be easier to predict. With all of the sateliites, doppler radars, etc. they still can't come up with computer models that are accurate and now I'm supposed to believe a computer model that would have to be infinitley more complex?

I guess that is one of the things I have a major problem with. The computer is just spitting out what it is told to spit out based on how it is programmed and the data that is put into it. Any type of model that is going that far into the future can be all futzed up by even the slightest incorrect assumption or data.

 

drew, the car you mentioned is on the other side of town, has to make it thru 19 intersections & turn a corner before it becomes a threat to you, so why move now?

 

My doctor tells me that if I keep eating 3 cheeseburgers per day I'll have a heart attack, but he can't tell me when, so he must be wrong.

 

Because it isn't. According to the consensus opinion of the climatological community, we are currently feeling the effects of the carbon we put into the atmosphere in the 1960's and 1970's. If we stopped everything right now, it would (if the consensus is correct) keep getting worse for the next 40 years. Once we are actually able to "see the car", in this case, it will already be too late to get out of the way.

Quoted for truth. I find it amazing that so many people find it easier to believe that the mostly government funded climatologists (even in the US, well over half of all climate research is government funded) -who get paid the same whether their findings agree with the current consensus or not- are involved in some sort of bizarre, secret conspiracy to make everyone embrace green energy and otherwise lower their "carbon footprints" than it is to believe that those few maverick climatologists who disagree with the consensus (and, generally, make hand over foot writing books- controversy sells) and are more likely to be on the payrolls of the fossil fuel industry (and are not likely to continue recieving grants if the findings are, in some way, deleterious to their benefactors) are somehow less biased and self-serving.

A government researcher has no conflict of interest to affect his bias. A researcher for BP, on the other hand, does. Yet time and time again, people on television (and in this very thread) continue to assert that the climatological community has some sort of vested interest (other than survival) in controlling the tenor of the debate.

 

I'd say Nagasaki and Hiroshima were far more convincing arguments for relativity than anything I've seen for global warming.

 

No it doesn't make him wrong, but it also doesn't make him right. Your heart attack could be because you are 350 pounds, have a family history of heart disease, don't exercise, smoke three packs of cigarettes a day and also eat an entire fried chicken everyday. The cheeseburgers may be the healthiest thing in your diet.

I suggest you consult your local government and pass local ordinances banning the sale and consumption of cheeseburgers as that will obviously prevent your fictional heart attack.

 

This is new to me. When did this consensus occur? I suspect it came about after the NASA database was found flawed (but then I'm somewhat cynical).

 

T2: Agree with it or not, but the IPCC considers itself a consensus, calls itself a consensus, and you especially should be acknowledging that the vast majority of climatologists (whether rightly or wrongly) are in agreement on man's role in global warming. If you ask the IPCC, there's been a consensus since 1992. If you have a problem with it, argue with them.

I'm not going to waste my time playing semantics.

 

Actually, Drew, it was a real question. Specifically about the length of time for greenhouse gasses to affect the environment (30-40 years was your statement). So, when did the climatologist community decide the gasses from the 60's and 70's are the culprit of today? As I said, that was new to me.

 

yep, drew, you need to listen to your own words. show the proof

 

This may take me a bit of time. I'll have to go through my books and check the bibliographies for the primary sources used. I'll post the primary sources as soon as I've tracked it down, though (within a day or 2). No guarantees it'll be available online, though.

 

please take your time. i to would like to see this just like t2bruno as i havent heard this before

 

Here you go. This is a pretty good explanation of what I'm getting at. Link.

So, according to Mr Moore, it's actually worse than I previously stated.

 

Not wanting to ignore this....

Very interesting article Drew. It was a bit short on data though -- too bad there were no references cited.

One of the issues I have always been curious about was the affect of volcanic activity on climate change and how this has been factored into the entire global warming scenario. We are at a fairly low point in volcanic activity for the earth -- and volcanic eruption have a tremendous cooling affect on the environment. This would certainly be a contributor, but I do not know how great.

 

You bring up a very interesting point. It's true that volcanoes are able to cause a temporary (1-2 year) reduction in the earth's temperature, but they also send a pretty fair bit of carbon into the atmosphere,which, when there isn't a significant amount of carbon regularly released into the atmosphere each and every year (man), is likely mitigated by it's own effect on the troposphere because, by the time the cooling period is over, the carbon levels have already returned to normal. Spikes in atmospheric carbon have often been linked to increased and prolonged periods of volcanic activity. These spikes were, historically fairly short, since once the prolonged period of volcanic activity is over, there isn't another significant source of atmospheric carbon to take it's place. In other words, the process of returning atmospheric carbon to normal is not hampered by the re-introduction of copious amounts of atmospheric carbon into the atmosphere. The difference between then and now, of course, is that we regularly put our carbon into the atmosphere, so the levels build up faster than the forces at work to neutralize them can do their job. The reduction of our forest land certainly isn't helping, either.

There's also the theory that volcanic eruptions actually serve to mask global warming. This article is kind of short and to the point, but I thought it was interesting.

 

Drew, here is the problem I have with that explanation. You've just said the cooling period can last 1-2 years for a large erruption (as has been experienced from events like The Year Without a Summer), yet your research says that, even if all carbon emissions were eliminated by 2100, it would take centuries for the carbon in the atmosphere to be filtered out. Now, eruptions like Krakatoa may no longer match all carbon emissions in human history, but I know of one about 642,000 years ago that easily did. You see, Yellowstone National Park is actually inside the caldera (or volcanic crater left after the collapse of a magma chamber) of a massive super-volcano (about 300 miles across) that last errupted then. This erruption put several inches of ash on the east coast of the US, and released quantities of CO2 unmatched by anything other than similar super-volcanos and the massive volcanic activity that led to the Jurassic Period. So here's my quesiton: Why didn't the CO2 from this event lead to massive global warming for centuries to come? There was a marked cooling period for several years afterward (but less than a decade), so why no marked increase for 300-500 years after that?

On another issue, if you want a really good look at what runaway global warming looks like here on earth, look at the Jurassic period. Life on earth didn't die off, nor did the vast majority of all land mass flood, and that was when the ice caps were completely melted. Now granted, NY would still be underwater, and the Netherlands would be in bad shape, but it really isn't the end of the world.

 

First of all, I'm going to need to see some proof that this eruption actually put more carbon into the atmosphere than the estimated 315 billion metric tons humans have put there since the industrial revolution. From my research, this volcano put 240 square miles (or 1000 cubic kilometers) of ash into the atmosphere which covered North America (In other words, unlike global warming, this was a local phenomenon that mostly affected North America), but no data, in metric tons, has been available on the total amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by the eruption anywhere I've looked. Now, for the sake of argument, I'll entertain for a moment the idea that this eruption actually did put 315 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. There are several differences between then and now.

First of all, trees. No one was clear cutting one of the most important tools the earth has for neutralizing its carbon levels, so the rate at which the earth was able to lower its carbon levels was greatly improved. Second, the greenhouse effect doesn't happen over night. We didn't feel it's effects in 1750, when we first started burning fossil fuels in large quantities, or even in 1850. That's because the greenhouse effect takes some time to build on itself. So, if the earth had already neutralized its carbon levels within 50 or 100 years, the worst of the greenhouse effect would have been averted before it really had a chance to start, so even if conditions "worsened" for a few hundred years afterwards, the results would have barely been noticeable as they would have been a mere continuation of the (slow) increases of the global temperature that were already going on. I also could find no evidence that there wasn't an increase in global temperature following the 10 year cooling period after this eruption, so I think a citation will be needed there, as well.