Global Warming: Do You Believe?

Perhaps because science and technology have always been dominated by educated, sometimes arrogant elites, and are far beyond the attention spans or formats of conventional media, few scientific issues manage to attract the attention of large numbers of people. Gene mapping and genomics could change the nature of life itself, but few national political figures in the U.S. talk much genetics, or the impact of fertility drugs on kids and families. Spielberg raises some profound moral issues involving A.I. in his new movie, drawing a number of critical raves but proving a disappointment at the box office. And Hollywood hasn't yet even heard of nano-technologies. The emerging exception appears to be global warming, which Americans are suddenly very worried about. Maybe this is the beginning of a new era for science and politics.

This concern about global warming is significant, especially in light of the fact that the government's existing environmental policies (along with growing perceptions of technological and cultural imperialism) are making the U.S. once again the most resented country in the world. Already high on the agenda of Western Europe and a cause on U.S. college campuses, this could be the first in a series of techno-political issues that will rise up in the 21st Century. Issues like genomics will morph from gee-whiz cover stories in Time to very real concerns for individuals.

Most Americans are now aware of global warming, says a comprehensive report cited in American Demographics magazine, even though significantly fewer express concern or understanding about its impact.

In August 2000, the Harris poll asked Americans about their beliefs concerning global warming and, more specifically, about the relationship between temperature changes and forest fires. Many more than in previous surveys said they believed that global warming exists and is a serious environmental issue, although only 35 percent believe it was directly responsible for increasing forest fires in the United States.

In l997, 67 percent of Americans surveyed believed that increased carbon dioxide and other gases released into the atmosphere would, if unchecked, lead to global warming and increasing average temperatures. By last year, the figure had risen to 72 per cent. Even though they weren't aware of any specific or urgent impac on their own lives, and thus weren't particularly alarmed, nearly half thought that global warming should be treated as a "very serious" problem. In fact, only 13 percent of Americans said global warming wasn't a serious problem, a record low.

But science and the environment are becoming among the planet's hottest political issues. President Bush touched off a firestorm when he refused to sign the Kyoto accord. Although the reaction in the U.S. was less pronounced, a March 2001 Time/CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans think the President should develop a plan to reduce the gas emissions that may contribute to global warming.

The U.S. has largely remained reluctant to address science through politics no matter how serious the issues. Big media political coverage tends to focus attention on scandal and confrontation, away from explanations of issues like global warming, or the equitable distribution of technology. Although they differ on certain scientific and environmental issues, neither of our two increasingly similiar dominant American political parties pay much attention to technological issues, or have anything resembling a scientific ideology or agenda.

When a serious matter like medical research involving stem cells from frozen embryos arises, politicians worry at least as much about religious support as they do about what scientists advise.

One might think members of Congress would be up in arms at the growing control of genetic research by a handful of bio-tech corporations; instead, there's hardly any debate about it at all.

My prediction: global warming will become the first issue of science and politics that captures the imagination of large numbers of American voters and becomes a national political issue (one on which the President definitely seems to have taken the unpopular side.) Why? Because it's a tactile phenomenon; people can feel that the weather is changing. They can see pictures of penguins dying in Antarctica. They read that skin cancer rates are rising.

Unlike more abstract scientific issues like genetics (which may become a highly visible political issue, but which isn't yet), or technologically-related social issues like intellectual property and copyright, even the myopic American political and media system, which focused for nearly two codependent years on Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, will have to start paying attention to global warming.

Comments

Katz: Belief trivializes the matter.

[maynard]

This is real and serious. Not only has the UN and the vast majority of climate scientists agreed that Global warming and climate change is upon us, but even the Bush Administration has been forced to face these facts. Please read the US National Assessment of the potential consequences of human generated climate change. This is the report the Bush administration commissioned to assess the validity of the UN report on climate change which concluded ten years ago that it is happening and that it represents a serious threat to not only the survival of our civilization, but earth's very biodiversity is under threat by mass extinction.

The business community would like us to put our heads in the sand and forget about all these pesky problems steamrolling our way. But the consequences of inaction could be devastating for life across the planet, and our species survival. To continue to trivialize the debate by turning the issue into one of belief instead of verifiable facts simply accepts the common US big media propaganda and spin. This is not a debate of the number of angels on the head of a pin, it's a scientific debate whereby the vast majority of academic scientists the world over have accepted a common view that global climate change is real and could be devastating to life on earth. Please also see: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development documents on the issue as well.

--Maynard

This thread very graphically demonstrates...

[freeBill]

...the sheer volume of nonsense and dishonesty being propagated by those who oppose the Kyoto Treaty. There are certainly questions about the scientific truth of global warming predictions. But they are not being accurately portrayed in the three posts above this one. Let's look at three posts (working downward in the current tree):

general_re started with:

...there is far from any consensus that this warming is a result of human activity. --general_re

Master Bait replied with:

About the only people in the scientific community that don't believe in what you say are the very few who get research grants from big oil companies to make up research poopooing global warming. -- Master Bait

And Golias weighed in with:

That's fun to say, but the largest and most current study to date on the topic (a joint venture by the feds and the National Academy of Sciences done almost immediately after the final nail in the Kyoto Treaty coffin was hammered in), showed that there was, in fact, no consensus in the scientific community about this at all.

I read a report from two members of NAS which raised several issues:

1. There is no certainty about any of this. We are very bad at predicting weather, and still understand very little of it.
...
4. Geological temeratures are in constant flux. From about 800 to 1300 AD there was successful agriculture in Greenland. The cold period of the centuries that followed forced the Vikings to abandon their settlements in North America, and shortened average human life spans in Europe by 10 years.
...
6. The sun spot cycles seem to have a much bigger impact on global climate than we once suspected. When your main source of heat is a massive, chaotic, uncontrolled fusion reaction, change is something you need to learn to expect.
7. Over the short term (less than a century or two), upper-atmosphere clouds have been discovered to be extremely efficient thermostats for the Earth. When the ammount of heat coming from the sun changes, the clouds get bigger or smaller to compensate, regulating the climate.

Some people feel that the best way to counter all this carbon going into the air (mostly in the form of CO2) is to use some kind of machine to extract atmospheric carbon. Fortunately, such machines already exist. They are called trees. It appears that John Denver had the solution to global warming figured out before anybody ever heard of it. -- Golias

Here we see FUD of the highest order: everything from outright lies to glib irrelevancies.

Start with general_re's claim that "there is far from any consensus that this warming is the result of human activity." By any definition of "consensus" this is flatly false. There is a consensus (indeed, very close to unanimity) that global warming exists. There is a consensus (strong and widespread, verging on unanimous) that some portion of that warming is caused by humans. There is a consensus (strong and growing, but not unanimous) that the human-caused share is signficant and dangerous. There is even a consensus (much weaker, but still signficant) that most of the currently observed warming is caused by human activity. This last consensus derives primarily through negative data showing that other proposed causes are not contributing.

While Master Bait's claim that only people who aren't part of this consensus get grants from big oil isn't strictly true, it is true that a disturbing number of the "skeptics" are financed by those with a financial interest in the results. Master's exaggerations are dwarfed by Golias' counter-exaggeration:

"That's fun to say, but the largest and most current study to date on the topic (a joint venture by the feds and the National Academy of Sciences done almost immediately after the final nail in the Kyoto Treaty coffin was hammered in), showed that there was, in fact, no consensus in the scientific community about this at all."

Which is also fun to say, I'm sure, but far more inaccurate than Master Bait's overstatement. Almost as fun as paraphrasing "members of the NAS" without citing references, credentials or names (or giving anyone a chance to see if they have since changed their minds -- as many skeptics have).

Picking on four of Golias' itemized points, I would say: (1) wrong or irrelevant; (4) irrelevant; (6) irrelevant and wrong; and (7) totally irrelevant (as befits all good FUD). And then he ends with a true fact which argues against everything he seems to be saying. (All of this is not to imply endorse any of the other points.)

(1) We're not very good at predicting the weather, but we're pretty good at predicting the climate. It's going to rain in the rain forest. It's going to snow in the mountains during winter. Weather is a chaotic system; climate is a thermodynamic system. Northern Europe might cool off while the rest of the world is heating up, but the average has been pretty accurately predicted (by those models Golias derides in item 2). And we're getting better. And the degree to which we aren't good at predicting climatic change is irrelevant if our best current knowledge says a disaster will come if we don't respond.

(4) Geologic temperatures are in constant flux on a geologic time scale. And that flux has often meant bad things for the creatures of earth. The fact that historically recorded fluxes have shortened people's lifetimes is an argument against a concern for global warming only for those who don't care if their lives are shortened. The fact that geologically recorded fluxes have wiped out a vast majority of all the species which have ever evolved on the planet is an argument against a concern for global warming only for those who don't care if their species is wiped out.

(6) Sun spot cycles have been long suspected as contributors to climatic change (since it was first realized that the earth could be viewed as a thermodynamic system and the numbers didn't add up). They have also been completely eliminated as the cause of the observed global warming of last 10 years (as recently confirmed by Pres. Bush's commission on which he made sure there were respected "skeptics"). To the degree that item 6 is not wrong, it is irrelevant: It would not matter to the dead people whether they were killed by sun spots or the combined neglect of two Bush administrations; they would still be dead.

(7) Upper-atmosphere clouds (and, indeed, the entire chaotic system of weather and climate) have, in fact, been discovered to be extremely efficient thermostats by precisely the same kind of science which has discovered that greenhouse gases turn up that thermostat. The fact that upper-atmospheric clouds also regulate the temperature of Venus does not prevent it from being a hellish wasteland of greenhouse gas.

And, finally, the fact that trees can be used to mitigate the accumulation of CO2 says nothing about whether that accumulation should be mitigated.

Re:No real evidence

[abelsson]

That's right, you're obviously not a scientist.

Theories dont get proven, only disproven. (newton's gravity is an unproven theory. As is elecromagnetism). An unsubstansiated idea is called a "hypothesis" in science lingo, once sufficient tests have been made that doesnt disprove the idea the hypotheis is elevated to a theory. A theory is acctually the most "certain" form of a scientific knowledge, usually backed up with a lot of observations that agree with the theory and none that contradict it.

Unfortunately, many people mistake the word "theory" as meaning a "wild idea" and request that "the theory is proven" before they do anything. Repeat after me: Nothing is ever proven in science, only disproven. A scientific theory is backed up by loads of evidence and has next to nothing to do with the every day meaning of the word. Or, from a dictionary: "a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena"

-henrik

Climate worthy of study, because we know so little

[lythander]

The modern study of climate encompasses maybe 50 years. Oldest reliable weather obs date back about 400 years (and at a precious few locations), and older data are deduced from ice cores and such making assumptions which could be wrong and which yield less-than-finely-grained data. With an enormous and enormously complex system involved, and with the physics and chemistry incompletely understood, not to mention extremely challenging to model, and assuming infinite computational power (which is not as bad as you might think, since climate and nuke modelling are #s 1 and 2 on CPU use over most supercomputing facilities), we can't possibly venture more than barely educated guesses.

Scientists are pretty evenly split on whether global warming even exists, though neither the press nor the politicians are clever enough to convey this to the public, who are probably not interested or educated enough to understand even that. Read this by a scientist involved in evalutaing claims used to support Kyoto. There is ample evidence to support claims on both sides, and only the most zealous and those with agendas will claim irrefutable proof.

Do people affect the environment they live in? Sure. Do greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere? Of course, that's why they're called that. Can these effects really overwhelm the huge natural processes and cycles of the planet to modify it enough for us to notice? We don't know.

Maybe we're staving off the now-overdue ice age. Perhaps we're experiencing a regular or otherwise cycle of climatic oscillation. Maybe we're screwing ourselves. Who knows? It is relatively certain that curtailing our emissions would have smaller impact on the environment, but that impact might already be much smaller than we think.

Certainly it couldn't hurt, but Kyoto could, and a decision to support it or not should be based on solid environmental, economic and political considerations. Kyoto not only radically reduced limits on pollution in the US and other 1st world nations, but guaranteed the right of 3rd world nations to continue to pollute indefinitely. There were many other difficulties as well, many of which reflect the USA's decreasing involvement in international affairs (W can't even spell UN, so we shouldn't be surprised), and the diplomatic Napoleon complex being expressed by the EU, trying to throw it's new, generally left-leaning politcal weight around.

The world is likely to be severely impacted by an asteroid large enough to cause catastrophic climate change, and will without doubt suffer even worse damage as our sun ages in a billion years or so. Politicians pay no atention to these issues, which would be easy to mitigate given the time until their effects will be felt. Any time they spend on Global Warming is to garner public accolades for their "green" side. Maybe this cancels out drilling in ANWAR.

Re:Yeah, Right

[gowen]

Most of the climate change predictions are based on computer models. Given our inability to forecast weather accurately at any interval, I doubt very much the computers can handle the much greater complexities of climate change

Then you misunderstand some of the complexities of weather forecasting. One of the reasons that many disparate models of long term climate change agree is that over sufficiently long time scales (10 years plus) the small scale effects (macroscale topography, daily wind variability as opposed to seasonal averages, the exact rate at which polynas open to create saline deep Antarctic water) that contribute to weather forecasting being hard can be neglected. Effectively, you don't need to know "There'll be a tornado in Kansas on Tuesday", when the long timescale model works perfectly well if it knows "They'll be some tornados in the Mid West in 2001".

Think of it like this, if you drop a sheet of paper of a building, you can't tell every flutter it'll make, but you know damn well its going to hit the ground.

Badly Named

[nick_davison]

Global Warming unfortunately carries with it the assumption that "the earth must get hotter or it isn't happening." After all, it's warming, right?

Maybe Global Climate Change is a better term. Even as the earth does get warmer, a degree or so either way isn't something we're really going to notice - daily variations tend to be much greater anyway. What we do notice is the weather systems getting screwed up as a result of the small rises knocking the established systems out of whack.

Over the last year or so, we've had the atlantic weather systems reverse themselves; a weather front set itself up over Europe, all summer long, so the north didn't get a summer and the south stayed in the 100s (40s in C); the Mississippi has taken to flooding regularly; Southern California, as opposed to its usual 5 days of rain hardly stopped raining from January through March; and then there's South America that seems to go from one weather related disaster to another.

I'm sure a load of people who know the subject far better than I [or at the very least are convinced they do] can offer other explanations. All I'm attempting to show is that Global Warming [assuming it exists] wouldn't be something that's visible by "Oh cool, extra beach days," but by that extra degree or two screwing up the weather in general.

Re:bah...

[nanojath]

This would be a great point of view if it wasn't so full of shit. I am a degreed scientist (I'd like to know what you are) who has been following science news about global warming for close to a decade. In that time what I have seen is story after story, report after report, that affirms that global warming is occurring and, increasingly, that human activity is indicated in it's cause.

"[R]eal scientists displaying real data..." I guess in your little fantasy world this doesn't include the World Meteorological Organization or it's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which includes scientists from a hundred countries, and has been developing the evidence that global warming is real since the 80's. I guees it doesn't include the National Acedemy of Science, which concluded last year that:

"The warming trend in global-mean surface temperature observations during the past 20 years is undoubtedly real and is substantially greater than the average rate of warming during the twentieth century. The disparity between surface and upper air trends in no way invalidates the conclusions that surface temperature has been rising."

I guess it doesn't include such publications as Science, Nature, Scientific American and Chemical & Engineering News (and literally hundreds of others which have all repeated the same conclusion: that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is real.

The alternate opinion that you express is so phenomenally unsupported, so completely discredited by the overwhelming burden of valid scientific evidence, that it is espoused only by vested interests like power generation and conservative wackos like yourself. Practice what you preach and leave science to the scientists: you don't know what you're talking about.

Evidence: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ol/climate/globalwarming. html#Q9

http://www.sciam.com/2000/0800issue/0800epstein.ht ml

http://www.ucsusa.org/environment/0warming.html

http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/faq/index.html

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/

Educate yourself. Sea levels are rising. The permafrost is melting. Ozone depletion (yes, it IS linked to global warming) is worsening. And the planet is getting hotter. These are scientific facts that no amount of bullshit rhetoric will change. And it will affect us in purely negative ways in our lifetimes and in our children's lifetimes.