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'Gaia' Scientist Admits Mispredicting Rate of Climate Change
DesScorp writes "James Lovelock, the scientist that came up with the 'Gaia Theory' and a prominent herald of climate change, once predicted utter disaster for the planet from climate change, writing 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.' Now Lovelock is walking back his rhetoric, admitting that he and other prominent global warming advocates were being alarmists. In a new interview with MSNBC he says: '"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.' Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace."
Yes, but Lovelock is a nut; he was on the alarmist edge. Always was. The "Gaia" model is a cool thing to talk to the public about, but it's not real science.
The mainstream climate scientists are not and have not been mispredicting the rate of climate change. If you look at the data from models from 1979 (the National Academy of Science study), or even the models from 1967 (the Manabe greenhouse-effect calculation)-- the actual data fits the model very nearly exactly.
The lesson to take home is that denying climate change is wrong, but exaggerating it is also wrong. Pay attention to the real scientists, and try not to give the fringe too much credance. Look at the data.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This pretty much brings James Lovelock into agreement the mainstream science, where the consensus prediction is for anthropogenic warming of at most a few degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. And hey, that's exactly what you're supposed to do when confronted with actual data, isn't it?
I'm still waiting for the deniers to do the same.
Yes, Lovelock was being overly alarmist. He also has no expertise in climate change prediction, so his guess is as good as yours. The fact that he's wrong doesn't mean that actual experts who've made less extreme predictions are also wrong.
Lovelock is a black-and-white kind of guy(*), who tends toward hyperbole. His Gaia hypothesis is the same way: he takes a small truth about negative feedbacks in Earth systems and blows it up into some huge quasi-religious theory of everything.
* Yes, that was a Daisyworld joke.
As glad as I am we got rid of CFCs, it's actually a bit of a funny story where things went from there. The replacement chemicals for CFCs are greenhouses gasses over 4,000 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/19/AR2009071901817.html
No one is saying that.
What is being said is that climate is incredibly complicated.
What we know for sure is that we do not know. They were not a little bit off here. They were way off the mark.
Not because they are stupid. Not because they want to lie.
There was a TED talk on this. Where we think we can understand things that are really way too complicated for our brains to ever understand.
Luckily he does also point out that just because we can not truly understand something does not mean we can not solve it.
Everyone should watch this TED talk.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
How did this make the front page of Slashdot??? James Lovelock is not a Climate Scientist, he's and an independent scientist and environmentalist who is famous for the Gaia Hypothesis a half-scientific half-philosophical metaphor for understanding Earth's biosphere. There is no reason anyone should give this man any credibility when it comes to speaking on the subject of Climate Change projections.
Do you know who is qualified to speak on this subject? James Hanson, and a 1981 paper he published in a peer-reviewed journal attempted to project the rise in temperatures over the next 30 years. Those projections still managed to underestimate the observed rise in temperatures by 30 percent and even the worst case scenario of those projections managed to underestimate the observed trend.
So no. You are not vindicated. You have demonstrated that you have no understanding of how science works, elevating the opinion of someone speaking outside their realm of expertise over the peer-reviewed published research of an expert with over three decades working inside the subject of climate change.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
> Changing power sources is dismantling civilization?
If there isn't anything to change to it is. And there currently isn't. Name one potential source that could replace fossil fuels and I'll show you a source the same greens are already trying to deem unacceptable. Lets review:
1. Nuke. Do I even have to go there? Even if we perfect fusion the greens will still wet themselves over the notion of power from anything with the N word attached.
2. Hydro. Disrupts Gaia. Harms fish reproduction and prevents 'healthy' rivers. And there is some point to their arguments. If nothing else our attempts at dams for flood control have certainly had a mixed record of success.
3. Wind. Assume it could actually produce enough energy. (Work with me here.) NIMBY is already rampant, greens are up in arms because when you fill square mile after square mile with windmills birds die. Who would have thunk it?
4. Solar. Makes sense as a source of off-grid energy but will never compete on a cost basis. And that is if you ignore the horrid ecological side effects of making the panels. And again, now that there are plans to actually cover over mile after mile of desert with the things the usual suspects are aghast.
5. Geothermal. Causes earthquakes.
6. Biofuels. Will cause widespread famine long before providing a noticable fraction of world energy production. Take the recycled plant waste, switchgrass on land unusable for more productive use but don't plan on it being anything but a boost. Not a primary source.
And if I have left your pet alternative energy source off this list be assured that it won't work either. It is great for soaking up grant money, deploying on a small scale to give egoboo to celebs but the second someone things it can be produced at a profit the downside will become clear.
Democrat delenda est
You might be interested in reading some actual analysis - the Rocky Mountain Institute has done great research for years on this. Reinventing Fire What you have above is a good case study of a set of logical fallacies. How many can you find?
Japan has just finished turning off all nuclear power over a "disaster" that proved just how safe modern nuclear can be
And this is why no one takes you or your kind seriously.
#1 Japan didn't turn off all nuclear. For one, it would take far longer than a few months to do so. For two, they're taking them offline for security checks. They plan on bringing them back online. It just so happens that there will be a period of time when no nuclear plant will be online.
#2 Solar panels work great. I have em, and they cut my bill in half. You mean they can't replace coal by themselves by tomorrow? SHocking. They must be useless and tossed out.
#3 One solar thermal plant wasn't built because the company didn't want to immediately fork over the money to alleviate environmental concerns brought on by the government. You should know better, considering you seem to live in the Bay Area.
#4 Even if we are in an ice age (and we really aren't), that doesn't matter one lick. What matters is that there are drastic changes coming to our civilization, which has been built according to the climate variations of the past 300 years. That's going to cost money.
#5 And the rest of your arguments are just total nonsense (long-term norm? glaciers in Europe? a few meters of oceans rising is not a problem?)
Seriously, I'd love to hear a good argument about a) why AGW isn't real, and b) why we shouldn't worry. Instead, I get the worst Monday Morning quarterbacking possible.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I don't know where people get off thinking they can spend 5% of their income on food when throughout history it required practically 100% of their labor.
This is because agricultural productivity was so much lower in the past. It's not that food is artificially cheap today – it's that food is much cheaper and easier to produce now due to advances in technology. Mechanization, chemical research (fertilizers) and more recently biotechnology have all dramatically increased how much food you can get out of an acre of land, and decreased how much labor you need to put in to get it. Just 100 years ago, farmers were about 31% of the workforce in the United States. Nearly one of three Americans was a farmer. Today it's one-tenth that and yet we are producing far more food than ever before.
however, during that same time period, the sea ice in the Antarctic, you know, at the other end of the planet, has been increasing. uh oh.
First of all, it's important that people know what "sea ice" is and its not. It *is* frozen sea water, which in the Antarctic mostly melts in the summer. It is *not* the permanent Antarctic ice sheets, which originate in glaciers (land ice, not sea ice, even though it is on the sea). The ice sheets are losing about 40 gigtons of mass per year[5].
Second, the gain in sea ice in the Antarctic is tiny, and it is not the result of atmospheric temperature decreases. There has been an increase in Antarctic atmosphere temperatures [1], accompanied by a stronger winds blowing cold surface water to the northwest which produces the increase in winter sea ice extent [2]. In the lee of the Antarctic Peninsula, which blocks this surface movement, there has been a dramatic decrease in sea ice [3]. Another factor is that slightly warmer surface temperatures can actually lead to an increase in ice extent by reducing the salinity of water near the edge of ice-formation[6].
Overall, the changes in polar sea ice are consistent with models predicting CO2 induced global warming [2][4], and in any case land ice is a much better indication of antarctic temperature changes, and that has being lost; if the small sea ice increases we've been seeing were due to cooling, we would see an equilibrium or gain in land ice.
CITATIONS:
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7228/abs/nature07669.html
[2] http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/#wintertimeantarctic
[3] http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/seaice.html
[4] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/278/5340/1104.short
[5] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010EGUGA..12.6127I
[6] http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/Pubs/Zhang_Antarctic_20-11-2515.pdf
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