Last Bastion For Climate Dissenters Crumbling

Layzej writes "The New York Times reports: 'For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.' Initially they claimed that weather stations exaggerated the warming trend. This was disproven by satellite data which shows a similar warming trend. Next, solar activity was blamed for much of the warming. This looked like a promising theory until the '80s, when solar output started to diverge from global temperatures. Now, climate contrarians are convinced that changes in cloud cover will largely mitigate the warming caused by increased CO2. The New York Times examines how even this last bastion for dissenters is crumbling. Over the past few years, Several papers have shown that rather than being a mitigating factor, changes in cloud cover due to warming may actually enhance further warming."

Comments

Re:Last bastion

[buchner.johannes]

I find it quite interesting to compare this to other historic debates such as

  - whether the universe has always existed or came into existence (steady-state vs big bang)
  - whether the milky way is the only galaxy
  - whether earth is the center / only place with life
  - whether humans are different in any distinctive way compared to (other) animals

The common theme is "can something come from nothing" and "is this place special". Some resistance in the debates comes from "it has always been like this". There seems to be some attractive simplicity to the idea that things never change and that there is only one of something.

The world seems to be consistently contradict our intuition on that principle.

Read Feyerabend's treatment of Galileo

[brokeninside]

I realize that it was Einstein being discussed. But I think the same point about Einstein can be made about Galileo.

We see that Galileo's view of the origin of Copernicanism differs markedly from the more familiar historical accounts. He neither points to new facts which offer inductive support to the idea of the moving earth, nor does he mention any observations that would refute the geocentric point of view but be accounted for by Copernicanism. On the contrary, he emphasizes that not only Ptolemy, but Copernicus as well, is refuted by the facts, and he praises Aristarchus and Copernicus for not having given up in the face of such tremendous difficulties. He praises them for having proceeded counterinductively. [Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. Verso (London and New York): 2010. Pages 77-88]

Galileo's observations, even the ones with the telescope, were arguments against his own heliocentric theory just as much as they were evidence against some forms of geocentrism (keep in mind that Tycho Brahe created a form of geocentrism that worked quite nicely). It wasn't until Kepler that a form of heliocentrism fit the observed facts any better than geocentrism. Despite the observed facts telling him his theory could not be correct, Galileo continued to pursue his theory. He did so by means of a propaganda campaign that sought to promulgate his (quite wrong) theory of optics, its accompanying technology (his telescopes), and his metaphysics. Eventually, he got other scientists to look at the world from a different point of view and, once he did that, new facts could come to light and enable such men as Kepler to develop theories to account for those facts.

In the end, I'm not certain that distinguishing between `honest' and `dishonest' dissent is very fruitful. Whether honest or not, dissent is important to prevent falling into a morbid state of what Feyerabend calls ``conceptual conservatism.''

This does not mean that one can't make the argument that most climate change deniers aren't kooks. It just means that when making policy decisions, it can be profitable to look at their analysis and examine what has to hold for it to be an accurate analysis and what would be the end result if it is accurate. This can be compared to the consensus view and a reasonable decision arrived at. And it will be a stronger, more reasoned decision than if the kooks were just ignored.

Re:Last bastion

[jd]

True, but it took millions of years to reach that point and millions more to change to a more hospitable environment. This time, it has taken around a century to do what would normally have taken hundreds of millennia to achieve. That's a huge difference. Atmospheric oxygen was also much, much higher during periods like the Cretaceous (the figures I've seen have been in the vicinity of 35%) but no such rise has occurred here. It is this rise in oxygen that allowed for massive insects.

The current imbalanced rise in CO2 is much more troubling because studies show that plants do NOT like massive levels of CO2 unless they come combined with massive levels of O2. CO2 rises alone, without any other alteration to the environment, will cause plant growth to decline and is eventually toxic. As such, it is very unlike the majority of historic events, which have tended to be balanced in some way. (PETM, for example, is linked to a massive increase in vulcanism. Volcanic ash contains superb nutrients for plants and algae, which meant that once the volcanoes stopped, things were ideally positioned for the CO2 released to be locked away on a much shorter order than it would have otherwise taken.)

This means that the potential exists for the end result to be far worse than for PETM. There's no introduction of a compensating variable, so even if industry stopped tomorrow, you would NOT see a rapid recovery as happened with PETM. Instead, things would worsen for a long time and - since chaotic systems leap from one orbit to another in dramatic and unpredictable shifts - a catastrophic switch could still occur at any time. The reason we've not seen the originally predicted shifts is that climate ISN'T linear, it's chaotic and Strange Attractors act in a manner analogous to quantum states -- systems don't change much until they leap from one state to another (the "quantum leap").

Natural climate shifts have built-in mechanisms that prevent quantum leaps, but this shift does not. If we want such mechanisms, we'll have to add them via geo-engineering of some kind.