Scientists Agree on Global Warming

Kryptonomic writes: "This might be interesting news in the light of the previous Slashdot article on global warming. On Thursday the UN's International Panel on Climate Change released a damning report warming that the global warming is happening at a much faster rate than previously predicted. In this report the world's most distinguished meteorologists also give their unqualified backing not only to the argument that global warming is happening faster, but also that it is definitely due to human activity."

Comments

good article in New York Review of Books

[Anonymous Coward]

The New York Review of Books recently published a good article on how the current Bush administration policy runs counter to the scientific consensus on climate change.

Re:Earth's oceans are key to climate change

[Anonymous Coward]

and the warm sea currents from tropical oceans transport some of this heat to northern continents like the USA and Europe

Since when is the USA a continent?

Try checking your facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Smog comes primarily from a combination of heat and car exhaust. Dallas wasn't "more polluted" than Los Angeles by a long shot, but southern California was unseasonably cool, and Texas was unseasonably warm. Hence, more smog. You're not a democrat huh? I take it you must be a member of the green party or the socialist party then. Like it or not, we have to get our oil from somewhere, and the same people that were bitching about rolling blackouts and too high energy prices are usually the same ones bitching about offshore drilling and drilling on the ANWR. Personally, I'm glad California is suffering rolling blackouts. Serves 'em right for being dumb enough not to build any new power plants for 10 years ("we're going to conserve our way to energy independence!"). As far as Bush and his governorship goes, the Texas governorship is probably the weakest one out of all the 50 states. The lieutenant governor holds all the power and sets the agenda. So blaming Bush for problems in Texas is sort of like blaming Queen Elizabeth for England's problems. Its convenient but not altogether accurate.

Re:Try checking your facts

[mjwise]

Even if we covered the western states in solar arrays, we still couldn't create enough power to power the entire US. You need lots and lots of direct sunlight for solar arrays to work, and many places in the US don't get enough of that to make solar arrays for power generation feasible. (Solar panels for, say, home heating, are an entirely different matter.)

Yes, let's "force" everyone to use solar power. If it causes power prices to skyrocket, say, 1000% (if not more) and singlehandedly destroys the American economy, then all those "environmentally correct" folks will finally get what they always wanted: a destruction of an eeeeevil way of life.

Try and not to contradict yourself either. In one sentence you talk about "capping" non-renewable resource usage as a good thing, and in the next sentence you talk about how price "capping" etc. as a stupid thing. They're both stupid because they create an artificial shortage that doesn't need to exist. Bleh.

Re:Try checking your facts

[mjwise]

Why not use more wind, tidal, and solar energy?

Because it's uneconomical. Simple as that. Solar arrays are unusable for mass power generation outside of deserts. Wind power has environmental effects too (birds are killed!), and does not generate as much power as one might hope. I've yet to read or hear much about tidal energy. Power generating dams often come under fire for destroying the environment too. As long as coal, oil, and other fossil fuels are abundant and cheap, the economy will be unwilling to support alternatives. I recently read that my state (Ohio) has enough coal within our borders to supply our own demand for power generation for the next 200 years, even when considering the exponential nature of population growth and factoring in no technological improvements! The holy grail of power generation is nuclear fusion, but that's decades and decades away. Until then, we have to make do with what we have.

Re:Try checking your facts

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Even the most uneconomical solutions become practical when they are mandated by law or when the alternatives are outlawed.

If solar power became mandatory, or if there were legal caps placed on the consumption of pollution and non-renewable resources, then the environmentally correct energy sources would get use.

That's economics too. If there is a demand, it will be satisified by whatever suppliers are (allowed to) exist in the market. Prices could rise, but shortages won't occur unless there are price caps or stupidity involved. Which is usually the case with rolling blackouts - i.e. somebody MAJORLY screwed up - usually including mispredicting demand - rolling blackouts would'nt occur if the demand was forseen in time - then additional resources could be acquired, plants fixed and brough online, etc.

Re:Try checking your facts

[Ian-K]

I've long known one thing:

If you placed a big enough array of solar panels in a desert, that could very easily cater for all the electricity needs of the planet. And I'm not talking about arrays the size of a small country.

Of course, you're gonna say there's loads of politics in the middle and the fact that whoever controls these arrays controls the power supplies to everybody else. True enough. But for a country like the States, where you've got enough deserts to waste, this should not be a problem.

Now (everybody) go figure why this hasn't happened so far...

Trian

Re:Try checking your facts

[Ian-K]

If it causes power prices to skyrocket, say, 1000% (if not more) and singlehandedly destroys the American economy...

Did the word FUD spring to anybody else's mind? Why would the prices skyrocket? In the long run these investments will pay off in many more ways. We'll have a planet to live on, to begin with. Oh, sorry, I forgot; it's not that important compared to the American economy... And how 'bout not having to pay for that oil conventional power facilities burn every day?

Before you touch that keyboard again, go do your math and get real, mate.

Trian

Re:Try checking your facts

[SnapShot]

This could be a response to just about any message on this subject.

You want to stop global warming? You really, really want to stop global warming? Fine... put birth control pills in Coke and Big Macs and all foriegn food aid and wait twenty years.

Re:Try checking your facts

[maddogsparky]

Try checking your facts Queen Elizabeth I or II?

I'm an independent. I've been looking for a party, but all of them seem to have major stances on issues that have nothing to do with each other (abortion, tax reform, election reform, welfare, medicare, science funding, infrastructure, etc.). I like the reform party (but not the guy that hijacked it).

No, I've not hugged trees, but I want my grandkids to have the same access to natural beauty that I have today. Oil is to valuable to burn (think plastic, medicine, etc.). Why not use more wind, tidal, and solar energy? Even if global warming is in question by some people, the pollutants that are given off are KNOWN to be bad for organisms that are exposed to them.

Re:Try checking your facts

[blang]

Because it's uneconomical.

economic

1. archaic : of or relating to a household or its management
2. ECONOMICAL
3. of or relating to economics
4. of, relating to, or based on the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services
5. of or relating to an economy
6. having practical or industrial significance or uses : affecting material resources
7. PROFITABLE

You seem to refer to the PROFITABLE part of economical. It's true, the alternative power sources are not as profitable as fossil fuels, but they are still more economical in terms of resource consumption. Consumption of fossil fuels not only taxes non-renewable resources, they also tax other resources such as fresh air, wildlife, clean water.

If you use the term economic, you need to include these resources, too. Since legislators, corporations, and the grey masses of brainless consumerbots, still consider fresh air and clean water to be unlimited and free resources, the only way to get any progress is to put a price tag on these resources. This can be done by taxation. The proceeds from the taxation can then be used to pay for the recovery of of these vital resources.

Also a good link

[mjwise]

The Hockey Stick theory questioned. Orwellian memory holes, here we come. After all, we can't have a medieval warm period (warmer than today claimed the IPCC in 1995!) unrelated to greenhouse gases. That same thing may be happening now beyond our control. It's a shame that borehole data only goes back to 1500. I would have loved to see if it confirmed or denied a medieval warm period from 1000 to 1500.

Re:How about considering the evidence?

[mjwise]

That should be a reduction to .075C/year. Duh.

How about a balanced view, Slashdot?

[mjwise]

We could conceivably be over-estimating the effect of human activity on the Earth's climate, but alternatively we could also be under-estimating it. -- IPCC Chair

What kind of ridiculous statement is that? He might as well say he doesn't have a clue what is going on. Don't rely on UN bureaucrats, get the facts for yourself. John Daly is a noted opponent of the IPCC's shenanigans and has a web site chock full of hard facts and data. Interesting things the IPCC has completely ignored include the satellite temperature records which show no net warming since they were sent up in the late 70's. Mysteriously enough, only a highly-questionable surface record cobbled together from equally questionable sources, many in third world countries, actually shows any warming. Here's a nice graph to look at. Why doesn't the surface record agree with the satellite records? Hmmm....

All of John Daly's site is a good read, with many guest writers that don't tow the IPCC line. The IPCC is hardly an honest, unbiased group. They are a political agency of the UN. Nothing more and nothing less.

And Slashdot, please stop mimicking the liberal media mindset that the earth is undeniably warming, and furthermore that "everyone" agrees with that statement. They don't. Climate science is still a region of massive debate and we can't just say with certainty what the climate will be like in 100 years. Current climate models are trying to extrapolate from very limited datasets. If we had, say, a 1000 years of hard, reliable data, then we could estimate the next 100 with some accuracy. But we barely have 100 years of data now....and never forget that the climate changed far before man ever was around.

Re:How about a balanced view, Slashdot?

[Bearpaw]

We could conceivably be over-estimating the effect of human activity on the Earth's climate, but alternatively we could also be under-estimating it. -- IPCC Chair

What kind of ridiculous statement is that?

It's not any kind of ridiculous statement. It's a statement that acknowledges that while it's pretty damn clear that we're having an effect, trying to estimate the extent of that effect results in, duh, an estimate, which may be high or low.

This level-headed, matter-of-fact acknowledgement about the limits of knowledge that's a sign of good scientific thinking is, of course, vulnerable to the classic corporate PR spin that if scientists don't know everything then they don't know anything.

If I realize that I'm driving towards a cliff at "about 70mph", I'm going to put on the brakes rather than spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out whether I'm actually going a little slower or a little faster than that.

Re:How about considering the evidence?

[mjwise]

I suggested looking at John Daly's site as an opposing view as a way to balance the bias shown in the IPCC reports. It's fairly obvious to any reader what John Daly and most of his guest writers think about global warming. Duh.

Furthermore, let's avoid destroying economies over fears of what might happen when we just don't have enough evidence. You see, temperatures were rising before the earnest start of the industrial revolution (the US one, anyway) in the mid-to-late 1800's. Heck, the entire graph from a little after 1500CE shows warming. The graph you reference shows that the earth may be warming (according to that dataset), and even at an accelerating pace, but how do we know that we are causing the warming? That's a potentially more frightening scenario, the thought that the earth might be warming and we can't do a damn thing about it. The earth may still warm even if we destroyed every polluting device tomorrow. Great...

And what do you plan to do to bring so-called developing countries into line? Kyoto gave them free reign and gave the US the shaft, but that's not a solution. Soon enough they will be polluting as much as the US per capita, and they won't care if a wannabe world government like the UN thinks they are being naughty. The US can be shamed and politicized into compliance, even if it is at the expense of the economy, although it is instant political death of whatever president that finally gives in. Clinton dodged the enforcement of Kyoto (among other things), Gore would have done the same, and Bush is at least honest enough to let US citizens to know he hates it (Don't get me wrong, I despise Bush. I didn't vote for him.) In most Americans' minds, economy comes way before environment. Simple as that.

Re:How about considering the evidence?

[mjwise]

What level of confidence will satisfy you? I think that 50% is enough to start taking action. It's my impression that we're well over 95% confident at the moment. It's pretty hard to deny that if you dump a whole lot of stuff that's infrared-opaque into the atmosphere, that it's going to trap infrared more effectively. Unless you reduce the amount of heat coming in to compensate, a really simple calculation says it's going to get warmer. How much warmer we don't know due to the complexity of positive and negative feedback loops, but change such an important forcing function as CO2 concentration and you're going to see an effect.

Ah, but an effect of any consequence? Even if we threw a significant part of the US federal budget solely aimed at helping reducing greenhouse emissions such as CO2 and water vapor, the US alone would affect only a tiny fraction of a degree of warming per year. And no one is going to want to be holding the bag when we find out we crippled our economy and wasted trillions of dollars reducing emissions only to see no discernible effects, say, within a decade. And the borehole graph shows warming well before the industrial age. Do you not agree that even if we were to completely cease polluting now, we'd still see warming? Do you agree or disagree that there was a medieval warm period and a little ice age following that occurred in complete absence of any meaningful human action? This is not a simple case of "It's all our fault. All we have to do is buck up, reduce emissions and we can save the world." I wish it could be that simple. I certainly don't see 95% confidence to spend mucho dinero, and we're still shy of 50% if you ask me. We may exacerbate existing warming, but we still have no way to determine how much might be "our fault." Let's say the global mean temperature is increasing .1C/year, and we are causing a full half (.05C) of it. The best we could hope for is, say, halving our emissions (which is really quite optimistic), reducing global warming to .75C/year only if every nation in the WORLD did exactly as much as we would do to reduce emissions. Not exactly a stellar improvement, especially if it cripples industrialization across the world and has ruinous effects on economies. And who knows how long it might take before we see the real results of our experimenting...decades perhaps. We're not all going to revert to living in caves, grunting in the dark, wondering where we could find a good cup of capuccino.

I have the same gripe about Kyoto. Since I am not in a policy-writing position, I don't think it's productive to expound upon it here. Suffice it to say that the US and EU could probably get a large part of the world (including China) to fall in line by denying foreign aid and trading rights. We still have things they want.

Oh, great, there's a wonderful idea. As if the US didn't have enough ill will towards them, let's try bullying every country into doing our environmental will. The last time we turned our back on the world and placed massive tariffs on imports (in 1930, The Hawley-Smoot Tariff), all it did was deepen a terrible situation, the Great Depression. Hampering free trade is a particularly bad way of getting things done. Doing it in the name of saving the world don't lessen the effects.

The way science works

[apsmith]

The popular image that scientists dispense "facts" is simply wrong! The product from scientific activity is "explanations", not "facts". Sometimes those explanations are pretty good, and allow you to make good predictions. In climate science the goal is to explain climate around the world and throughout history; there are a lot of "facts" there that need explaining: why is the Sahara a desert? Why ice ages? Why is the temperature in San Francisco always somewhere around 65 degrees? Why in particular were the 1990's the warmest decade in 1000 years? Some of these "facts" may be explainable by other means (for example, there are arguments that the warming trend in measurements is an illusion caused by where the measurements are being taken). But gradually, within the body of scientists working on these problems, after years of rational debate between competing concepts and explanations, consensus starts to form about which groups of explanations explain the most and are the most consistent with the facts.

Now in other sciences, say physics or chemistry, when such a consensus is reached about, for example, the concept that atoms are real objects and not mere mathematical conveniences, experience has shown that these concepts give us great power in predicting and manipulating the world around us. Somehow the nature of these rational debates within science is such that we actually do uncover something fundamental about the real world when we settle on such explanations. But at the point when "consensus" is reached, it's sometimes hard for any given scientist to enumerate all the reasons why one explanation is better than a competing one. And adherents of the competing, particularly older, explanations generally hang on for years after the consensus has shifted. So it's easy for an outsider to come in and say "look, these scientists don't have any idea what they're talking about - they've never seen an atom, they even tell us it's impossible to see one - and here are ten expert scientists with dozens of respected publications who categorically say there's no such thing as an atom."

But despite the opposition, the consensus group makes predictions based on their explanations, confirms them (or not) with later experience, and over the years gains confidence in those predictions. This is the fundamental rational process by which science works, and it is hard to deny its overall reliability.

Now, given that, should a preliminary explanation, still disputed by some segment of a scientific group, be used to influence public policy? In some respects one could give the predictions a percentage likelihood of being correct - the consensus group would probably run close to 100%, the naysayers close to zero - what if you average the two using the number of proponents of each view. Ok, there you have a rough idea - the predictions on global warming have (by this method using some made-up numbers) a 65% chance of being correct.

The question then is - is a 65% chance of major climate catatsrophe enough for us to change our ways? In Europe and much of the rest of the world, that question has been answered "Yes". Only in the US does it seem we need 99% certainty of major disaster before we do anything. Or am I wrong?

Hollywood Meteorologists?

[SEWilco]

If being "distinguished" is what makes one's reports match what the real world does, I want to hear what a world-famous meterologist from Hollywood knows.

Re:Industrial Pollution....

[SEWilco]

"...Nuclear Power Plant cooling tower!!!??? They give off gigaWatts of heat, but no evil 'greenhouse gases'. Geez, talk about undermining the credibility of the story!"

Actually, those evaporative cooling towers do release large quantities of the gas which causes over 90% of Earth's greenhouse effect: water vapor.

Re:Short answer

[MikeBabcock]

It is quite possible, and even likely, that the right solution to any given problem won't be necessarily profitable.

This is usually fixed by giving tax credits to those who do what the populace considers to be the 'right things' and heavily tax those who do the 'wrong things' to give a money incentive.

It would be nice, of course, if companies and individuals operated for the common good inherently, but we don't :-(.

Re:Longer answer

[MikeBabcock]

I have long been a fan of carbon taxes for exactly this reason.

I was just listening to the CBC today and they were going on about how the effects of Toronto's urban sprawl (the second fastest growing city in N-A) should be asssisted by having better transit systems in place.

That's when this discussion came back to me and it occured to me that if nothing else, N.A. governments should be subsidising mass transit a lot more than they do.

Consider the effects if major urban centres in North America had fast and efficient mass transit service to and from the surrounding areas (see the Go Transit homepage).

Re:That's fighting too many battles at once

[MikeBabcock]

Just a few points: rail is extremely fast in europe, it doesn't have to be slow in N-A. Buses are very efficient in cities like Ottawa (Canada) where they have their own routes and road systems not available to the public (and can travel faster). If the bus stops every 5-7 minutes (as it does in some places in Toronto), inconvenience is a silly excuse. What we need to do is stop building parking lots in downtowns and stick them on the outskirts, next to bus depots.

What a distinguised computer scientist thinks...

[heliocentric]

Calling people "distinguished meteorologists" and writing about something you don't know about is not a good thing. I could dupe some reporter into thinking I'm a distinguised comptuer scientist. "Yes, Mrs. Reporter, I know about Knuth, the Exact Cover Problem, and I can throw around words like DFS and Splay Tree so I must be distinguised..."

Anyway, I have seen scientists take the approah, "Hmm... there are lobbyists out there who pay big $$ for research grants... if I say I want to investigate global warming I can get their $$ and sometimes even dupe the Governmnet into it... and what harm is it to conclude *bad* things about fossil fules, it's not like lowering our need for them is a bad thing... hmm..."

Beleive me or not, as I said, I could dupe "Mrs. Reporter" and I could have duped you. However, aslong as this makes you consider the validity of this type of thing, that's a *good* thing.

John Stossel's show

[heliocentric]

Did anyone cat the John Stossel special on "Challenging the Doomsayers" ?? I found it very well done although IMHO I don't think he cover both sides adaquately. However he did a great job finding idiots on both sides to stick their foot in their respective mouths.

The best linkage I can find (short of ordering the video) is

http://abcnews.go.com/onair/2020/stossel_010629_ta mperingwithnature.html

Can anyone do any better?

Re:The quotes are the best part...

[RevAaron]

He won't, naturally, answer to that, because he's right! and that's the end of the story.

Same people said "New Ice Age Unavoidable" in the

[tz]

Go back and check. The "scientific consensus" back then was that the smoke and smog was cooling the earth and the temprature would be dropping and we would have glaciers in Nebraska.

This consensus had only one thing in common with the current global warming (and the CFCs - of course Mt. Pinatubo spewing more chlorine than has every been used in CFCs directly into the stratosphere couldn't have any effect on the ozone layer...).

Basically, Man is killing the earth, ecosphere, atmosphere, oceans, etc. and that we must kill off 95% of the people on earth (or contracept them) and return to a dark ages lifestyle.

The worshippers of Gaia want to sacrifice others on an even wider scale than even the Aztecs, and perhaps even more painfully

Re:The quotes are the best part...

[nickjennings]

I just can't wait to get home and fire up the pollution machine I've got rigged up on my roof

What, you mean your CAR!?

Re:The quotes are the best part...

[Louis_Wu]

[picture caption] Industrial pollution is the main offender Hold on now - isn't that a cooling tower?

Give that man a cigar! That is indeed a cooling tower.

Cooling towers are most commonly associated with nuclear reactors, but they can be used to cool anything which isn't near a VERY large body of water; a more effiecient and less expensive method of cooling is dumping the heat into the nearby ocean/huge lake/massive river. But a cooling tower lets you dump heat directly into the atmosphere, regardless of your location.

Re:How about considering the evidence?

[Ian-K]

I'll second to that.

I live in Greece and in England and I can tell you that in both countries (esp. Greece) I've seen the climate change considerably over the last few years. The scientists may still argue over 0.1 degree Celsius temperature changes, but hell, I sure feel and see their effects on our climate. And I can tell you, I'm not happy at all when I think of what it's gonna be like in 20 years.

Trian

Re:Stop throwing curves at each other

[KjetilK]

Eh? That's a serious charge.

Well, it is not quite as bad is it sounds. He said he showed them only as an instructional aid. It had to do with CO_2 measured in ice cores, if I remember correctly. They had measured ice cores at many different locations, but only one sample exhibited the "desired" exponential behaviour. So they threw away all except the sample that had the exponential behaviour. Also, to get it to really look exponential, they had to time shift one of the series. I think those who attacked this was, off the top of my head, Heike et al and Segalstad et al. To the audience, at least to me, the argument that it was just for instructional purposes was very unconvincing. If you need to use a graph that has nothing to do with reality, you don't really have a case.

Was it an actual member of the IPCC or just someone trying to present the IPCC's case?

Good question, I shouldn't be too sure. The moderator gave the impression that he was, but I really don't know.

Besides, we're typically using at least twice as much energy as we need to to accomplish our desired ends, and sometimes 10 times as much.

Oh, yes, I agree completely with that point. We should really cut back on energy consumption. Besides, burning fossil fuel is a terrible waste. Fossil carbon shouldn't be burnt at all, it should be used in e.g. plastic production.

So how do we do all this?

Stop throwing curves at each other

[KjetilK]

Oh, I've been to so many of these debates, I know exactly how they go.

One scientist puts a curve on the overhead saying "this proves conclusively that the climate is warming up", the next puts another curve on the overhead saying "yes, I am of course aware of those data, but they do not take into account that [something], but the following data does". The first comes up with another graph "saying, yes, I understand that analysis, but it ignores that", and then the scientists continue for hours to throw curves at each other, each more convincing to themselves, but less convincing to the audience.

The last time I was to such a debate, it ended when one of the IPCC folks managed to throw a well-known forgery on the overhead. He was caught, and that concluded it.

My position is that climatologists severly underestimate the uncertainty in their statements (as do many other physicists, my own field is severly plagued by it as well).

Better safe than sorry, you understand.

Are you really sure about that? It is very easy to swing public opinion in any direction. It wouldn't be hard to tell people that we need to pour out more CO_2 to prevent the next ice-age, if you had the PR machine to do it. Well, I call myself an environmentalist, and I feel that in the current situation, you'd better make very sure the things you do, don't cause more harm than good. And the only way to do that is to make sure everything you do rests on solid science. What the IPCC has today just isn't it.

Re:Stop throwing curves at each other

[Spamalamadingdong]

The last time I was to such a debate, it ended when one of the IPCC folks managed to throw a well-known forgery on the overhead. He was caught, and that concluded it.

Eh? That's a serious charge. Was it an actual member of the IPCC or just someone trying to present the IPCC's case? Do you have any further documentation I could review?

It wouldn't be hard to tell people that we need to pour out more CO_2 to prevent the next ice-age, if you had the PR machine to do it.

Oh, I agree entirely. But the problem is that it's much easier to go and burn a lot of fossil carbon as an incidental thing if it turns out that we need to, than it is to stop burning fossil carbon once we've based most of our economy on it. Besides, we're typically using at least twice as much energy as we need to to accomplish our desired ends, and sometimes 10 times as much. Done correctly, the savings from efficiency would pay for themselves and we'd have no regrets even if global warming turns out to be flawed models and a minor burp in the solar cycle. To my mind, that means we ought to just do that without arguing about it; that's what I mean by "better safe than sorry".
--

Bush environmental history

[maddogsparky]

When he was governer of Texas, Texas became the most polluted state in the US. Dallas passed Los Angelos in the number of smoggy days every year.

He "supported" environmental protection by calling in heavy polluters and asking them to come up with a plan to cut back on emissions. The result was an optional reduction plan--one that was never implemented by any of the polluters who drafted it.

Texas also has a large number of plants that were grandfathered in when the earlier federal rules took effect at the beginning of the environmental movement. There has been no real effort on his part, other than asking them, to meet current federal standards.

I'm no democrat, but man, am I glad that he can't ramrod his energy policy through congress anymore (you know, the one with offshore oil drilling, opening national recreation and refuges to energy prospecting, etc.).

Re:Bush environmental history

[Bryan_A]

OI, another round of this. Global warming isn't just about what areas are getting warmer. It effects the amount of overall change in the temperature of the atmosphere and the amount of radical change in weather patterns. Now, on the other hand we don't have enough historical data to form an adquate mapping of weather patterns. Bush had better not put that coal burner on the border with BC, as that area funnels back down the coast.

Listen up, Bush

[billybob2001]

Hey, Gee Dubya, you might not mind putting your own kids in Detox, but I don't want you putting mine there!

How can I get a job where no-one knows I've screwed everything until it's far far too late?

Move to Redmond?

Earth's oceans are key to climate change

[Wills]

• What does global warming have to do with the oceans?

  Some of the highly counter-intuitive effects (described below) of global warming may not be appreciated without an understanding of the contribution made to climate by the Earth's oceans.

• Why are the oceans so important to climate?

  Simply because the world's seawater stores millions of times more heat than the atmosphere, and the warm sea currents from tropical oceans transport some of this heat to northern continents like the USA and Europe which would otherwise be permanently freezing cold due to their northerly latitude. Warm sea currents are vital to agriculture and our continued well-being.

• Could the vital warm sea currents ever stop due to climate change?

  Yes, the warm sea currents that keep the planet warm have an Achilles heel -- sea currents stop moving if the saltiness of the seawater falls be low a critical level (the density of seawater depends on its saltiness, reduced-salt seawater won't sink as it normally does in the coldest polar regions, and without sinking seawater the ocean currents stop moving).

  One of the agreed effects of increasing Carbon Dioxide emissions is that rainfall will increase in northern latitudes, diluting the seawater. In the limit dilution shuts down the warm sea currents.

• What is the most important warm sea current?

  The Gulf Stream is the most important warm sea current because it can alter worldwide climate by various positive feedback mechanisms. The climate and food production of the USA and Europe, for example, both depend on the Gulf Stream keeping the climate warm enough to grow crops.

• How secure is the Gulf Stream?

  The Gulf Stream is known to be sensitive to changes in rainfall over the Atlantic. Rahmstorf's bifurcation model of Atlantic thermohaline circulation is widely accepted by independent scientists. This model implies the Atlantic Ocean has only tw o stable modes of circulation -- ON and OFF. The Atlantic Ocean is currently in the ON mode with an active Gulf Stream. 100000 years ago, it went into the OFF mode when the Gulf Stream shut down causing a worldwide massive Ice Age. The model shows the likely cause of the shutdown was increased rainfall.

• How is the present-day Gulf Stream doing?

  The Gulf Stream changes slightly in intensity from year to year, but overall its average state in recent decades is stable and active. However, the situation should be monitored closely because it is unknown exactly how much additional rainfall the Gulf Stream can tolerate without shutting down. The Rahmstorf model predicts a critical threshold of about 1Sv/yr (10^6m/yr) (sustained increase) which is ~50% above current long-term average rainfall, whereas rainfall over Northern Europe has actually been increasing only by about 2% a year over the last 20 years -- a total rise of 40% which is currently below the 50% threshold. Conclusion: the Gulf Stream looks safe now but vulnerable to future rainfall increases.

• How would plants survive a Gulf Stream shutdown?

  Most agricultural plants probably wouldn't survive. The summer air temperature in the US Mid-West, for example, would be just 32F(0C) which would stop all agricultural production.

  The ORNL has researched the types of vegetation in the US in present-day conditions and in zero-Gulf Stream conditions.

  • US vegetation for Gulf Stream OFF (Ice Age conditions)

  • US vegetation for Gulf Stream ON (present day conditions)

Industrial Pollution....

[Muad'Dave]

from a Nuclear Power Plant cooling tower!!!??? They give off gigaWatts of heat, but no evil 'greenhouse gases'. Geez, talk about undermining the credibility of the story!

If cooling towers are such a horrible thing, causing all the global warming, shouldn't we preemptively nuke all those French nuclear power plants from orbit?

Re:Industrial Pollution....

[gigagoat]

Er, cooling towers are not used exclusively by nuclear power plants... and we dont have nuclear warheads in orbit. At least not yet, but give W. a little time.

UN full of Hot Air

[Associate]

C'mon now. Who really takes the UN seriously when it comes to anything important. Let them continue to decide how long women should breast feed and other nonsense.

Re:How about considering the evidence?

[Spamalamadingdong]

Ah, but an effect of any consequence?

The current track appears to be toward a 5.8 C (10.4 F) warming by the year 2100. Even a one degree F change in this trend would be highly consequential, IMHO.

Even if we threw a significant part of the US federal budget solely aimed at helping reducing greenhouse emissions such as CO2 and water vapor, the US alone would affect only a tiny fraction of a degree of warming per year. And no one is going to want to be holding the bag when we find out we crippled our economy and wasted trillions of dollars reducing emissions only to see no discernible effects, say, within a decade.

It took upwards of 20 years before the ban on DDT yielded unambiguous improvement in the state of the bald eagle and peregrine falcon. With regard to the rest of that paragraph,

• There's only a tiny fraction of a degree of warming per year, period. But the USA accounts for about 20% of global CO2 emissions, and any technology developed by the USA will be usable by much of the world. That increases its impact.
• Technology is one of the USA's most lucrative exports. Efficiency technology could be added to the list.
• Our current practices in areas like architecture are so bad that savings of 60% and more can be achieved for zero capital cost; the savings mount up year after year. By simply prohibiting old, inefficient practices we could build huge amounts of savings of both energy and money into our economy. Imposing taxes on inefficiency (instead of, say, income) would create a continuing incentive to invest in better technology even if the investment horizon was artificially short compared to the lifespan of the equipment. If there's anything that's known about human behavior, it's that people apply a ridiculously high discount rate (30% per year or more) to efficiency-related savings. This makes no sense ecologically, economically, or any other way.
• We'd probably see great political results. The reduced clout of the oil dictatorships in politics and finance cannot help but improve the state of the entire world.

My idea of what the US economy would look like with carbon emissions 90% below the present day would fill an entire web site, and I'm having enough difficulties writing letters to my congresscritters; I can't possibly illustrate it here. But I don't think we'd have to accept a quality of life lower than today's, and certainly nothing resembling "living in caves".

And the borehole graph shows warming well before the industrial age. Do you not agree that even if we were to completely cease polluting now, we'd still see warming?

Yes, it does (note, we were cutting and burning forests in the 16th century). Yes, we would probably still see warming even if we cut back 80% today, because the oceans are still heating up and will take decades to stabilize. Is that an excuse to make things even more extreme? I don't think so, I think it's an argument for better action as fast as we can implement it.

As if the US didn't have enough ill will towards them, let's try bullying every country into doing our environmental will.

You forgot, it's a lot of the less-developed countries which have the most to lose from warming and the consequent drying (Africa) and rise in sea levels (Bangladesh, island nations). It's political jiu-jitsu; they asked for it, they have to go along for the ride. And go along they would, because they wouldn't be able to back out on their own demands.
--

It's a news graphic

[Spamalamadingdong]

Note that it's not a scientific-quality graph, and the X axis is probably mis-labelled. If you looked at some other sites you can probably find a better graph. This page has a graph with better labelling, maybe done by the same news flunky, maybe by a more clueful one.
--

Re:It's a news graphic

[madPatter]

Yes it's a news graphic, but it should still be accurate. I think the suspicion that the media is biased, perhaps unintentionally, on this issue is supported by the loose checking of such things. Now, if all that is wrong is the labelling of 1900 instead of 2000 (or whatever it's supposed to be), the factual evidence of the graph is not hurt (not to say I agree or disagree with the predictions). However, the fact that the mislabelling (or perhaps more serious problems) was missed indicates that the graphs are not being checked very closely. Now I may be wrong, but if that graph was evidence against global warming, I would guess that it would have been scrutinized rather closely.

More evidence of a media bias: check out what one of the author's of the NAS's June report had to say about the media's treatment of the report.

Re:How about considering the evidence?

[Spamalamadingdong]

The graph you reference shows that the earth may be warming (according to that dataset), and even at an accelerating pace, but how do we know that we are causing the warming?

What level of confidence will satisfy you? I think that 50% is enough to start taking action. It's my impression that we're well over 95% confident at the moment. It's pretty hard to deny that if you dump a whole lot of stuff that's infrared-opaque into the atmosphere, that it's going to trap infrared more effectively. Unless you reduce the amount of heat coming in to compensate, a really simple calculation says it's going to get warmer. How much warmer we don't know due to the complexity of positive and negative feedback loops, but change such an important forcing function as CO2 concentration and you're going to see an effect.

That's a potentially more frightening scenario, the thought that the earth might be warming and we can't do a damn thing about it.

Is that an excuse for not doing what we can to reduce the problem? And once again you're arguing that ignorance is an excuse to do nothing.

And what do you plan to do to bring so-called developing countries into line? Kyoto gave them free reign and gave the US the shaft, but that's not a solution.

(That's free rein, as in letting a horse run free.) I have the same gripe about Kyoto. Since I am not in a policy-writing position, I don't think it's productive to expound upon it here. Suffice it to say that the US and EU could probably get a large part of the world (including China) to fall in line by denying foreign aid and trading rights. We still have things they want.
--

News accuracy would be nice. But...

[Spamalamadingdong]

While public suspicion may be increased due to the errors in reporting, this doesn't have anything to do with the reliability of the science at the base of it. Besides, is anyone going to bother to upgrade the editorial rigor when so much of the public is turned off by anything that resembles quantitative analysis?

This is just another example of dumbing-down, and we're not going to see it reverse until the public educates itself and demands better of both the news media and the political commentators (I note that the link you provided was not to a scientific paper, but to an editorial site: opinionjournal.com). As long as people have no idea how to even read the real reports, the spinmeisters can say whatever they want and they will be believed by the part of the electorate which is suitably indoctrinated. This serves the spinmeisters and their masters, because the last thing they want is people who think for themselves and cannot be controlled. (Did I miss a <cynicism> tag there?)
--

Short answer

[Spamalamadingdong]

So how do we do all this?

The simple answer from this capitalist running-dog is: make it pay, and people will fall over themselves to do it.
--

Longer answer

[Spamalamadingdong]

It is quite possible, and even likely, that the right solution to any given problem won't be necessarily profitable.

That's why I said "make it pay", not "it pays".

This is usually fixed by giving tax credits to those who do what the populace considers to be the 'right things' and heavily tax those who do the 'wrong things' to give a money incentive.

I have long been a fan of carbon taxes for exactly this reason. CO2 is fungible; there is no difference between a pound of CO2 emitted in India from a coal fire and a pound of CO2 from a natural-gas-fired turbine in California, so far as the environment is concerned. Tax the release of fixed carbon and you've taken care of that.

It would be nice, of course, if companies and individuals operated for the common good inherently, but we don't :-(

Individuals and companies can't, if the rules of the game ignore the external costs; if doing the right thing is suicide, people and companies will do the wrong thing out of necessity. As I said, make it pay and people will automatically choose the right thing.
--

That's fighting too many battles at once

[Spamalamadingdong]

I was just listening to the CBC today and they were going on about how the effects of Toronto's urban sprawl (the second fastest growing city in N-A) should be asssisted by having better transit systems in place.

That's when this discussion came back to me and it occured to me that if nothing else, N.A. governments should be subsidising mass transit a lot more than they do.

The problem with mass-transit is that it is rightfully perceived as inconvenient, time-consuming, and oftimes dangerous. Rail is horribly expensive to buy right of way, and the planning is usually ten years out of date at best; buses move no faster than the rest of the traffic on the road, and you have to accept whatever route they run whether it goes where you need to or not. Then there's crime.

People prefer private automobiles for a reason. Unless the mass transit offers a large advantage (or loses some of its disadvantages), people will still prefer to use private automobiles. Given that preference, changing the automobile will probably do more to eliminate greenhouse emissions than changing the subsidies for buses and trains (except at the very bottom end of the economic spectrum, where people can't afford a great deal of anything). At the very least you won't be trying to fight people's desire for independence and a personal "cocoon" against unpleasant or even hostile elements and/or people.

(This is one of my complaints about the "watermelons", who are green on the outside and red on the inside. They claim to be concerned about the environment, but their proposals for addressing environmental issues all involve re-shaping society in their preferred image - and that in turn causes the environmental message to be resisted, even rejected outright.)

Consider the effects if major urban centres in North America had fast and efficient mass transit service to and from the surrounding areas...

Consider the population density and pedestrian-unfriendliness of most suburbs, plus the increasing change of commuting patterns from suburb-downtown to suburb-suburb. Now ask yourself if people will need to use their cars anyway, and once in them if they will get out of them before they've arrived where they want to go.
--

How about considering the evidence?

[Spamalamadingdong]

Borehole temperature data conclusively proves that the climate is warming, and at an accelerating pace. We don't have a mere 100 years of data, we have 500 years of data in the ground and all we have to do is use techniques which go back to Fourier to read it. If John Daly can't explain the facts, he's obviously not balanced is he?

Satellite temperature records don't reflect the measurements on the ground. Nobody knows why yet, but what are you going to put more stock in: records from physical thermometers (a very well-understood measurement system) on the ground where people, crops and wildlife exist, or satellite radiometers which give discrepant readings from the physical thermometers for unknown reasons and may be giving some kind of systematic error that is not yet understood? My money's on the mercury, not the infrared.

And Slashdot, please stop mimicking the liberal media mindset that the earth is undeniably warming, and furthermore that "everyone" agrees with that statement. They don't. Climate science is still a region of massive debate and we can't just say with certainty what the climate will be like in 100 years.

MJ, please stop parroting the SEPP/GEC party line that human activity isn't warming the climate, and on the minuscule chance that it is it isn't doing any harm to our interests. Sure, we don't know what the climate will be like in 100 years. What I do know is that we are far less likely to have unwanted, undesirable and destructive changes in it if we avoid altering the atmosphere's infrared transparency before we have a solid understanding of the way it behaves. Better safe than sorry, you understand.
--

The quotes are the best part...

[t0mmyb]

Way to go, BBC! Glad to see sensationalistic journalism is alive and well in areas other than the US. Call me a troll or mod this down as flamebait if you must, but I just can't stand bad reporting like this.

Co-chairman of the panel, Sir John Houghton "The 1990's were the warmest decade in the Northern Hemisphere for the whole millennium"
That's probably true. Indulge me in speculation that August will be the hottest month this summer... Doesn't the climate vary anyway? And I'm not talking about the annual variations in temperature, or even ones in the scope of 1000 years. Think of cycles in the tens to hundreds of thousands of years folks.

The BBC's Susan Watts "It's the American people who are the chief culprits in pumping global warming gases into the atmosphere"
I like it when a news source quotes it's own reporters for use as supporting material. And as a red-blooded American, I just can't wait to get home and fire up the pollution machine I've got rigged up on my roof. Puh-leeez.

Keith Shine, meteorologist "The overwhelming majority of people accept the evidence that the climate has warmed up"
The climate *has* warmed up, at least in terms of geologic time, and I'll go wayyy out on a limb and go along with the possibility that many people accept this. I guess this is rock-solid evidence in support of whatever point the BBC is trying to make.

Dr Robert Watson, IPCC Chair "We could conceivably be over-estimating the effect of human activity on the Earth's climate, but alternatively we could also be under-estimating it"
Aha. Glad they pulled a null statement like this out into it's own colored box for emphasis. Sadly, this is perhaps the most credible quote made in the entire article.

"We know enough to say climate change is a serious environmental issue," said Dr Watson.
Finally, the voice of reason. Here's another tip: cash-flow is important to the state of your personal finances.

[picture caption] Industrial pollution is the main offender
Hold on now - isn't that a cooling tower? If chemical or particulate matter is being emitted from that, there are a few engineers with a lot of work to do. On the other hand, if all those nasty cooling towers are actually producing enough thermal energy to melt the ice caps and affect the salinity of the planet's oceans, then somebody really designed some inefficient power plants... And correct me if I'm wrong, but are those windmills I see in the background?


It's not as if the BBC needed to fill inches on a page to justify their ad rates, right? So why was this article even written? It could have been about three sentences long, and made its legitimate points better. At least I can't pick on them for mixing up the depletion of the ozone layer with all of this...

Re:The quotes are the best part...

[blang]

Call me a troll

Troll.

Re:The quotes are the best part...

[kahei]

I like it when a news source quotes it's own reporters for use as supporting material. And as a red-blooded American, I just can't wait to get home and fire up the pollution machine I've got rigged up on my roof. Puh-leeez.

I think you'll find it's in your garage, laddie.

This is strange

[madPatter]

This is a bit off-topic, but check out some graphs from the BBC's global climate change evidence.

Notice that emission reductions today affect what the temperature was 50 years ago.

Hmmm, methinks there's some bias here.

Um, what?

[Raging Idiot]

One small group of scientists that agree to agree with eachother agree that global warming is occuring and that humans are to blame. That doesn't exactly equate to ALL scientists agreeing thet global warming, or that if it is happening humans have anything to do with it.

In short, the debate rages on, and we are none the wiser.

bird-deaths and other red herrings

[gigagoat]

Because it's uneconomical. Simple as that. ... Wind power has environmental effects too (birds are killed!), and does not generate as much power as one might hope

Got any actual facts to back up your claim that wind power poses a significant threat to birds? How many birds are we talking about? More, say, than would die from loss of habitat due to strip mining?

Studies indicated that hundreds of millions of birds are killed by automobiles, cats, and window-strikes. I haven't heard of any evidence that that wind turbine bird deaths would approach even a fraction of those numbers. And these figures don't even broach the issue of population declines due to habitat loss.

Furthermore, how does this relate to economic infeasibility? Have you checked the figures for wind power generation costs lately? They have decreased by about order of magnitude in the last decade. Wind turbines are becoming economically competitive with oil, gas and nuclear power generation. Coal is still substantially cheaper of course, but the billable of cost of coal power does not include environmental externalities.

As long as coal, oil, and other fossil fuels are abundant and cheap, the economy will be unwilling to support alternatives

Nice theory, but empirical evidence indicates otherwise. Experiments with "green power" pricing options in California and other places have enjoyed robust public support.

Learn some basic chemistry, moron

[gigagoat]

Smog is formed in a photo-chemical reaction involving hydrocarbons and NOx compounds. Heat may affect the reaction rate, but it sure as hell isn't combining with any of the reactants. If you've got any evidence that levels of ozone, hydrocarbons and NOx were lower in Texas, please post it. Otherwise, stop whining.

Warning: Junk Science in preceding post

[gigagoat]

As a general rule, I try to avoid arguing with trolls and Limbaugh fanatics -- these comments are intended to warn other readers about inaccuracies in the previous post.

Go back and check. The "scientific consensus" back then was that the smoke and smog was cooling the earth and the temprature would be dropping and we would have glaciers in Nebraska.
Please, absolutely do go back and check, but check the scientific literature, not the NY Post or the National Enquirer. Apparently, in tz's universe "a couple of speculative articles in the popular press" is synonymous with "scientific consensus". His assertion of a "scientific consensus" is preposterous. Virtually no atmospheric scientists were even researching this issue then, much less arriving at a consensus that cooling was occuring. There were a few articles in regular newspapers, but practically no research was done, presumably because the hypothesis was not taken seriously by meteorologists. Contrast that with research on global warming today: several thousands scientists from all over the world publishing enormous amounts of papers, and the vast majority are in agreement that warming is occuring. The comparison tz makes is absurd.

This consensus had only one thing in common with the current global warming (and the CFCs - of course Mt. Pinatubo spewing more chlorine than has every been used in CFCs directly into the stratosphere couldn't have any effect on the ozone layer...).
Isn't it amazing how a person can utterly destroy their credibility in a single sentence? There is a small problem with tz's (sarcastically implied) assertion that vulcanism is responsible for ozone depletion: It has been proven incorrect. Conclusively. Volcanoes produce chlorine, but in the form of hydrogen chloride (HCl). HCl is water soluble, and the vast, vast majority of HCl in the atmosphere get washed out almost immediately. HCl is a factor in ozone depletion, but it's contribution is a tiny fraction of CFC's contribution. The evidence for this is quite solid: CFCs contain chlorine. If CFCs are responsible for the chlorine in the stratosphere, one would expect to find the remaining fragments of the CFC molecules present there also. They are there, and in the expected amounts. Anyone arguing that vulcanism is the primary agent of ozone depletion is hopelessly ignorant or deliberately lying.

Basically, Man is killing the earth, ecosphere, atmosphere, oceans, etc. and that we must kill off 95% of the people on earth (or contracept them) and return to a dark ages lifestyle.
So mainstream environmentalists are now advocating genocide on a worldwide scale. Hmm... I must have missed that press release. And BTW, if anyone out there knows how it is possible to "contracept" a human being after not only conception but even birth, I'd be fascinated to hear your theory.

New climate theory involves CO2

[Mike Hydrate]

See http://www.ssiatty.com/climate/ or to discuss theory: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/methanehydrateclub It is a very powerful theory. It predicted Allison hitting Texas--IN APRIL. Right now theory predicts another Mitch like hurricane late this fall.