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Pentagon Climate Change Author Interviewed
cynical writes "Just in time for the opening of The Day After Tomorrow, the futurism/technology/environment blog WorldChanging has an interview with futurist Doug Randall, co-author of the "Abrupt Climate Change" scenario [PDF] commissioned by the Pentagon earlier this year. The report generated a storm of controversy a couple of months ago, and drew attention to the possibility that global warming could disrupt things enough to trigger a rapid-onset ice age. Now that the furor has died down, Randall can talk about climate change, how the report came to be, and just what he thinks about the new disaster movie."
Apparently playing hockey has nothing to do with the climate... Tampa bay ? That doesn't sound too cold a place. It costs more energy to get the ice to freeze, though, so actually playing hockey in Florida is one of those things that cause global warming !
IANWYTIA (I Am Not Who You Think I Am)
While I'm sure it's hard studying something that by definition you can never experience, measure or predict, I'd rather get my climate scares from a meteor-, climat- or oceanologist, thanks very much.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
I'll start by saying I did not RTFA.
Can someone tell me how a warming can start an ice age. I thought warming melted ice.
Evolution or ID?
As far as a massive global storm, it isn't unrealistic. Just look at Mars. There is a storm going on there that is so big you can see it from earth and it has been going on for years.
Evolution or ID?
Get a life man, Idependence Day was, like it or not, a success and in my opinion, a wonderful popcorn movie. Sure, the situation of use beating a technologically superior race of mind reading aliens is not very likely, but it sure makes you feel good when they blow that big saucer up! Movies are supposed to be FUN! If I had a cerebral movie that was factually correct and thats all there was to see, I guarantee you I won't see it.
Gorkman
For a great intro to chaos theory try this book by James Gleick.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
OK, I'm impressed. I was ready to read another misguided rant filed with half-baked theories and unsubstantiated jumps to conclusions, but the guy is actually displaying the exact right mindset.
He is humble.
In any debate on this subject, many people get into a religious frenzy and froth at the mouth when you present evidence that reality might be more complex than what they believe. It's refreshing to see a guy who actually explains that we mostly don't have enough data to make even educated guesses.
This is very different from the movie, of course, which is about as scientific as your average Star Trek show.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Well it is sad, but, given that quote, how else can they respond ?
"We know lots about the history of climate change" - great, but can't do anything about the past...
"we know little about the future of climate change" - great, so do we make policy for ice age or global oven, no one knows, so, do nothing.
can't really do it in a small post, but here's a generic scenario. This is VERY simplistic. Say it's getting warmer. The reasons are a totality, not one or the other. Greenhouse gases accumulating, not allowing heat to escape, etc. That's why they are called greenhouse gasses, they mimic what happens inside a greenhouse. The gasses come from both man made (various civilisation *things* that cause heat) and natural sources, like volcanoes, big forest fires, etc,etc. Part of the gasses are also just water vapor. Partly it also the particulate matter suspeneded in the atmosphere, blocking sunlight/heat, a disruption that effects plants in general, they won't grow as well, and therefore can't help mitigate the climate like they do now.
.... !!??1!!"
As it gets warmer, ice that is non floating, the ice that's on land in the arctic and antaractic melts, dumping huge quantities of cold fresh water into slightly warmer salt water. And the more that melts the faster it melts, because the white ice reflected heat, now it's bare rock and dirt, which is darker and absorbs heat, accelerating the melting. This also adds to the overall depth of the oceans, it rises. Floating ice is neutral, but land locked ice adds to the depth after it melts. OK, this new free flowing water up in the arctic (and off antarctica, but we'll just look at the arctic) sinks, causing changes in the global sea currents. One of the important ones is the gulf stream, which cycles around the atlantic as it gets heated in the tropics, flows north up the east coast of north america, dumps heat across northern europe, etc, then sinks back down, flows back across down to the gulf again. If the newly melting arctic ice is injected into this current from melting, it slows this gulf stream down, tremendously. You can see pics now, BTW, that shows this is happening to a large degree in the arctic. Without that warm gulf stream water constantly hitting the northern latitudes, well, it gets a LOT colder there. And the more the gulf stream slows down, the colder it gets up in the northern latitutdes, until such a time as a near- stasis is re established, where the conflicting events cancel each other, then it just hangs as an "ice age" for quite a long time as the smaller events start to accumulate and it reverses. Back and forth and forth and back it goes.. You get your localised "ice age". Hundreds of millions of people live up there, but it's become a lot more un-liveable,all the way to near-impossible, plus the water has risen to the point that coastal communities become flooded, and coastal communites have a huyge % of the populations, because mankind has accumulated itself to a great degree near oceans, and near where rivers enter oceans.
Basically hilarity and chaos ensue. "social unrest*" and "economic re adjustments**" and so on.
The only real debate is how fast and how much it can happen. That it DOES happen is just historical record. We do have evidence now that it can happen in a time span much less than millenia. Beyond that, "they" are only guessing.
I hope this is close enough, it is the cliff notes version as far as I understand it.
*social unrest = buncha them canuckians all move down here to georgia after they get theyselves all frozen out, where they drink up all the beer and get to eyeballin all our big hair gals-well, we gonna have a faht then, surely
**economic re-adjustments = "whatchoo mean a loaf of bread is now 19.89$, and a gallon 0 gas is 142.999$
and stuff like that there. It would be the sucks.
I don't know which is worse -- the "Let's do nothing" mentality, or the let's panic NOW (and blame our problems on SUV's) mentality. Both the naysayers and the alarmists (at least, the vocal ones) seem pretty irrational. The fact is that there's gotta be some middle ground because the fact is that we don't know. For every bit of evidence, there's contradictory evidence (ie historical trends). For every bit of contradictory evidence, there's something else showing that it's possible and/or happenning now.
I just with that we could all think rationally about this and put some of the emotion aside (no, I'm not holier than anyone else...I can get charged up about this too). It seems that both extremes are...well...dumb.
-Turkey
I'm not a natural-scientist, just a CS/mathematician. One thing that I've never understood about the global warming debate is this:
We know that over the last 100 years that the world-wide temp has gone up by roughly 1 degree. But before that time period, there is no climate data at all. So, how can we conclude that this is unnatural or not?
Or, more importantly, how can we use a ~100 year data set to make forecasts on a planet that is millions of years old. I mean hell, we know that the magnetic field inverts every couple 100,000 years and that we're over due for that... maybe the world gets a little hotter ever couple of 100,000 years too???
Isn't this possible?
actually it can be measured.
several years ago I was watching a documentary on some Antarctic geologists or something and they made a tunnel under the surface to "x" depth so they could look at the layers of ice and what they contained and over how many years the span was. I don't know why they didn't just use core samples, maybe they did the tunnel for the documentary so they could bring the camera in?
I don't know, anyways- The guy with the goggle and frozen beard was explaining what all the various strata meant in the ice wall we were looking at. It was fairly mundane until he pointed out one section that, based on the information he had provided earlier, showed rather obviously that SOMETHING had happened to cause a dramatic climate shift to another "ice age" in a period of JUST 50 years.
He didn't speculate on what caused it, but noted that it was possible as it had happened in the past and we were now staring at the evidence.
That's all I got for my science, some some documentary on the Discovery Channel.
I like microcars
In this movie, millions of worlds poorest and most vulnerable die horribly when the economic systems that keep them alive are disrupted by Ivory tower plans of the world's frivileged elite.
The ironic twist at the end of the movie comes when it is reveled decades latter that massive economic dislocations that killed all those people where made in response to exaggerated dangers based on flimsy scientific evidence. All those people died for nothing.
We could call it "The Energy Crises part II: This time it's personal"
That rant reminds me of how I used to get annoyed when people claimed we had enough nukes to blow up the world X amount of times.
In fact, we only had enough nukes to destroy all life X amount of times (if that). To me, destroying the planet means cracking it in half or something. I don't think we had enough nukes for that. Especially not if they were only detonated in a MAD scenario (surface and atmosphere only).
Of course, now I'm too busy worrying about terrorism to care about that stuff.
I don't know how much energy it would take to crack the Earth in half. But it's interesting to calculate how much it would take to "blow it out of existence", which could be loosely defined as a big enough explosion that all the bits can acquire escape velocity, and so can never recoalesce back into a planet.
The gravitational binding energy of the Earth is U = GM^2/R, where G is Newton's gravitational constant, M is the mass of the Earth, and R is its radius. Plugging in the appropriate numbers (see Wikipedia), you get 2.24x10^32 joules. For reference, if a ton of TNT is 1 billion calories (4.184 billion joules), then that works out to be 5.35x10^22 tons of TNT, or about 50 trillion gigatons. By way of comparison, I think I read that the world's nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War was somewhere between 20 and 50 gigatons.
I rather think I do. I attend 6-8 environmental conferences a year, and speak, in my own small capacity, at most of them.
.....
Oh so no science there then. But plenty of vested interests.
Only if you close your eyes and ears to years of research, and an overwhelming scientific consensus.
Except that no such consensus exists. In point of fact over 18,000 signatures (including 7000 physicists) have signed the Oregon petition which makes the point that the Kyoto Protocol is fatally flawed in its science and economic models and should be rejected.
Go read the Kyoto report, or the opinion of the US Academy of Science, or the Royal Society of London. (I could go on).
I have, and guess what? The statements made in the Summary for Policymakers (which is as far as you've read) are not supported by the science provided in the papers by the Working Groups. Quite the reverse. But then, when you're trying to bamboozle people with false certainties about things that no-one has any certainty about, then claiming a non-existent "scientific consensus" is par for the course.
Oh and the fact that the "Mann Hockey-Stick" which the IPCC endorsed has turned out to be a thumping scientific fraud, has strongly colored my belief that the Greenhouse Warming hysteria is just that, a hysteria.
A hysteria with a massive paycheck to keep that gravy train moving. Of course, all those conferences can't happen without those dreaded fossil fuels...have you thought about getting Texaco to sponsor them?
In fact, its very hard to find a contrary view from a source unfunded by vested interest.
It's very hard to find any opinions that are unfunded by vested interests, especially when more than $4 billion was poured into the laps of climate scientists to keep this particular gravy train going. And there's Greenpeace and the Sierra Club and WWF and
I have an a B.S. and M.S. in Geophysics from Cornell and Arizona State. I still contend that global warming SCIENCE is twisted for political purposes by liberal left environmentalists.
an ill wind that blows no good