Climate change / global warming

[shapenaji]

ok...
CO2 level can not rise forever.
there are forces that will lower the level as it rises.

This is precisely the problem, those forces either:

1) Do not exist
2) Exist, but are being removed by ocean acidification and man-made development
3) Are weaker than other accelerating factors

That's the issue, people seem to assume that the earth's atmosphere will come back to equilibrium on a timescale that is short enough not to bankrupt humanity. And there's simply no guarantee of that.

[pwaldron]

One the things that I have always wondered not being an expert myself, is exactly how does CO2 relate to higher temperatures given that the earth is not a closed container. My expectation is that the primary factor in the raise in temperature is just the weight exerted as force of CO2 + H2O compared to Oxygen and Nitrogen etc and that trapping/radiating energy has little to do with the perceived temperature other than causing heavier compounds to be in gaseous form. My reasoning is that if there was more energy in the atoms the atmosphere would merely expand, minus the difference in mass of CO2, and that for the most part the temperature of the earth is related to the mass of the planet exerting gravitational force on the gasses. Maybe there is more to it.

Nothing you've said here is correct.

[shapenaji]

Even with minimal mitigation, none of that is capable of flooding Manhattan let alone Hawaii, especially if you consider the time scale

This is what I see as the primary damage caused by well-meaning folks on the left side of the political spectrum, Disaster predictions in stories like "Waterworld" or "The Day after Tomorrow" have created strawmen that have become the basis of arguments.

There may be disasters, but the entire world flooding is difficult to support and shouldn't be the primary reason why someone believes/does not believe in global warming.

The pacific island nations are going to have to deal with flooding. But the larger issues are uncertain weather patterns as a result of the new chemistry of the atmosphere and destruction of land/ocean habitats via species migration/acidification.

Coral die-offs are becoming increasingly common. Phillipe Cousteau is a friend and I saw him give a talk on this in Abu Dhabi. You don't have to go further than diving off of Florida to see the massive changes that are hitting our oceans. He showed film of the same dive, separated by 30 years, and the effects are startling. He further pointed out that folks who had dived in the same area in the 60's had broken down and cried in the 80's when they saw the footage that was the "Before" in his talk.

I'm not scared of walls of water 100-feet high. I'm scared that we're re-ordering how our environment will function without any idea as to the long-term consequences.

[aokun]

Looking up sea level trends was one of the early "aha" moments I had; in the past I also pictured New York or the Netherlands under water in 2050 based on the information I was fed. I remember starting to wonder about what was actually happening, and whether we shouldn't be seeing effects already, and this was one of the first pieces of data I checked.

You don't think we're seeing effects already? There are a lot of effects in evidence all over the place. Around here, aside from temperature and weather anomolies, there are plant and animal ranges marching north and seasonal markers like blooms and migrations changing schedule. Not to mention the occasional storm. Speaking of which, it isn't 2050 yet and you saw New York under water. The scientists you've been deriding for lack of integrity, of course, are careful to say they can't attribute any one event to climate change any more than their colleagues can attribute any single case of cancer to cigarettes, so we can't say Sandy was due to climate change at all. Of course, they did predict it. And it did happen. Just saying.

(The tobacco angle prompts me to say ... if you're wondering why those of us with opinions are just a tad rough about it ... recall that public policy advocates in the climate change area have not been met with skepticism, questions or challenge. They've been met with an appalling river of mendacity, invented by charlatans to delay and confuse.)

The radiation physics argument that predicts the greenhouse effect is persuasive, so I think we can expect a certain level of warming from an increase in CO2. To my knowledge, the basic calculation, using just that effect, predicts a warming of 1.2K per doubling of CO2 (we have not yet achieved a doubling, and another doubling will be correspondingly harder to achieve).

Interesting. The Phil Jones' of the world, by the way, have to deal, a lot, with people who have been told by allegedly reputable leaders and scientists that none of that is true. You may think I am sheeplike in taking Al Gore's flood footage at face value, but the drivel pouring out on the denier side of this is unbelievable. I've read that CO2 is going down, that its rise is due to natural emissions, that it is an insignificant portion of the atmosphere, that it cannot be trapping heat at all because the 2nd law of thermodynamics bars that, that whatever CO2 is doing, temperatures are going down, that the rise in temperatures is not attributable to CO2 and also that the rise due to CO2 is inevitable and can't be stopped. And that's before getting to the feedbacks.

AFAIK climate science predicts a higher value of around 3K due to feedbacks that are assumed based on model calculations. I am not convinced that this has scientifically (in the real meaning of the word) been demonstrated to be realistic. Bill said "statistics prove nothing"; if we accept that, then we must also accept that we have no real evidence that CO2 has an effect at all in the real world. It could be true, or not, I think we have no way of knowing for certain at this stage.

Well, I'll disagree with Bill about statistics. They tell us a lot and without them, our complex modern lifestyle would come apart with an agonizing screech. But about the feedbacks... they are not "assumed based on model calculations." They are theorized directly based on already understood science or are observed. They are then _included_ in the models because the model should take them into account. One of the feedbacks, for example, is the albedo effect of Arctic Ice. Ice floating in the Arctic Ocean is white. Water is dark blue. White reflects a lot more light back into space than dark blue. This is known science and can be observed. As the Arctic warms the 1.2K you graciously acknowledge it can with a doubling, the portion of the year that the Arctic is inabsorbent white will go down and the heat-gathering dark blue will increase. This too is measurable. Arctic sea ice extent is, indeed, going down each year. That needs to be in the models as a feedback. All of the feedbacks are perfectly realistic scientifically, AFAIK ... methane emissions from permafrost melting ... forests dying and burning due to range shift ... increased precipitation in other places darkening previously light places. There are plenty of negative feedbacks, too, like increased plant growth sucking up more CO2, but the balance is positive. Are there other feedbacks? Maybe ... Roy Spencer has some cloud thing I don't understand ... but they've tried to think of a lot, and what they get from the models is amplification.

I have serious problems with the media coverage, and the behaviour of some of the scientists involved: I think there are deplorable exaggerations, well-meaning perhaps to induce the public to form the "right" opinion, but ultimately misguided. The painting of doomsday scenarios makes for good headlines, even if they are not realistic. Eventually people catch on if they are misled and it will do damage to the credibility of science as a whole, and the perception of ecological issues in particular. I find it highly dubious that the media coverage focuses on negative impacts only while there's no reason to believe that there wouldn't be positive effects as well. When you do find an example of reporting about benefits such as http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8150415.stm they're amusingly qualified as a "small, barely measurable" to keep the world view intact. On the other hand, there are quite real risks to carbon-reducing measures like these http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/pressroom/pressrelease/2012-09-17/europes-thirst-biofuels-spells-hunger-millions-food-prices-shoot-up, so it is far from clear that inaction = death for millions while prevention = saved lives are correct equations.

Far from clear indeed. I'm no fan of biofuels policy at the moment. Perhaps if we had taken seriously the mandate to research ways of replacing fossil fuels when we should decades ago, we wouldn't have indulged in this ham-handed stuff. But we didn't. We were persuaded there wasn't a problem. It's not the whole story, though; it's not most of the story. The effect of climate change on agricultural production is already in evidence; one estimate ... which I can't vouch for but it's out there ... is that food production would be 5% higher today, ceteris paribus, without the climate change we've already had. The problem is that when climate zones and rainfall shift, the people, the agricultural capital, the land ownership patterns and the transportation infrastructure are in the wrong places. If, as seems possible, rainfall is just different in Australia now, then there are a whole lot of farms, farmers, equipment, roads and silos in the wrong place. We can adapt to some of this ... which is why intelligent skeptics argue for adaptation ... but it will be expensive to retool and retrain everybody, rich and poor world alike, from their traditional practices.

5% is a lot.

Contrary to the common belief (stated by several people in this thread) that global warming is worse than predicted and accelerating, actual temperatures seem to trend towards the low end of projections (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/02/2011-updates-to-model-data-comparisons/), despite the fact that CO2 emissions have risen faster than expected in recent times.

You're doing apples and oranges again. I'm one of the ones who said "worse than predicted" and I didn't say or mean "temperatures are rising faster." I said the predicted changes are happening faster, and it's true, many in the area of those deleterious feedbacks. Arctic ice area is decreasing faster than is in the models. Antarctic ice and Greenland ice are shedding faster. Permafrost emissions are greater. Range migration and exinction rates are faster.

Part of the change in my thinking is also due to the realization that we're not going to do anything about the problem in a directed way. So it doesn't matter what I or anyone else thinks; we're either making the experiment or we're running out of fossil fuels, either way Nature will render a verdict in the end. So since preventing further carbon dioxide emissions is politically a futile goal since the countries that matter aren't going to sign off on it, my wish would be primarily to keep the institution of science intact, since, if applied properly, it is still the best tool we have to cope with whatever is coming.

This bothers me a lot. We are perfectly capable of doing significant things about it in a directed way. We've done other seemingly impossible things before. I cannot take having it counseled to be impossible at the same time and by the same people as it is argued that there is no problem and no need to try. It is not a distant impossibility; it is something for which the US is essential and in the US we have suffered a series of political losses, not least the loss of the 2000 election by Gore and six or seven years later, the loss of the GOP, wholly, to climate deniers. These were simple political defeats, not the inevitable tide of history, and without them, there was plenty of chance for significant action.

[aokun]

ok...
CO2 level can not rise forever.
there are forces that will lower the level as it rises.

what evidence do you have to support this? I don't think any exists.

I think it is called the carbonate-silicate cycle. Takes a couple of million years.

[Bill Spight]

AFAIK climate science predicts a higher value of around 3K due to feedbacks that are assumed based on model calculations. I am not convinced that this has scientifically (in the real meaning of the word) been demonstrated to be realistic. Bill said "statistics prove nothing"; if we accept that, then we must also accept that we have no real evidence that CO2 has an effect at all in the real world. It could be true, or not, I think we have no way of knowing for certain at this stage.

Well, I'll disagree with Bill about statistics. They tell us a lot and without them, our complex modern lifestyle would come apart with an agonizing screech.

crux did not understand what I said about statistics.

[gogameguru]

Before I get started on this (probable rant), I'd like to say this is a really interesting book, regardless of what your opinion of climate science is...

...This book called Reinventing Fire is really worth reading.

The author makes a compelling argument for introducing efficiency measures throughout society, primarily because it will save money. I mean, just for starters, how much money have western nations combined spent on projecting their power and fighting wars in oil rich countries (without Googling ).

My background is in Chemistry and risk assessment (which involves computer modelling). I don't work in climate science.

In my experience, if you have a relevant and well established scientific theory (i.e. one that's withstood many serious attempts to falsify it, by scientists who - by the way - are working hard to further their own careers) and you have some good data, you can usually answer the majority of questions on the back of an envelope (as Andy's already pointed out).

It's the policy makers who always ask for more and more sophisticated models, even when that's sometimes a bit of a waste of time and money.

The problem is that most people don't deal well with probability. That's one reason why people gamble. Politicians and policy makers (or their bosses) want absolute certainty, but no self respecting, real scientist can give you that, because that sort of certainty just doesn't exist. Maybe a pet scientist would provide that sort of service though, if you keep them on the payroll and give them good benefits...

The argument about certainty is a straw man. For people who think about such things carefully, even basic questions like "does New York exist?" can't be answered with absolute certainty, even if you live there. Absolute certainty is called faith.

I agree that the problem is almost entirely political at this point. It's also a more interesting and worthwhile discussion to have, so let's talk about that.

I think the way western societies are setup to allow free speech and open debate on issues is, overall, a big strength because it allows all ideas to be tested, challenged, and sometimes replaced with better ones. We have certain 'rules' and social norms that usually facilitate that.

It seems to me that we as a civilization have come to a point where we're almost getting too clever for ourselves though. There are plenty of people (usually fairly rich ones) who view the rules as optional, as a weakness and an opportunity to be exploited for profit. So we get vested interests hacking the market and hacking the political process in the same sense that a (bad type of) computer hacker might seek to exploit vulnerabilities they find for profit.

So much money seems to go into lobbying, investing in bogus research and think tanks, discreetly supporting the lunatic fringe, encouraging anti-intellectualism, manipulating public opinion, astroturfing online and so on... Creating fear, uncertainty and doubt simply because maintaining the status quo suits the short term economic interests of a small group of people.

For me, this sort of behavior is captured nicely by the Chinese phrase 小聪明 (a literal translation is 'small smart'), which describes a person as very clever, but not wise.

I don't know what can be done about this state of affairs, but I find it very unsettling. I've thought for a long time about what can be done about it, and I'm sure many other people have too. In my case, I partially gave up on doing anything directly and made Go Game Guru instead . Some may view that as a cop out. What I like about Reinventing Fire, which I mentioned above, is that the guy is looking for a positive step to take that everyone should be able to agree on. And he's a scientist by the way.

What will be interesting though, is to see whether these ideas for saving money are just as unpalatable as climate science seems to be to some vested interests. Unfortunately, I imagine they will be.

Oh, and just because someone mentioned vaccinations, here's an amusing (and slightly relevant) article about that, that someone showed me a few days ago: http://www.dailylife.com.au/life-and-lo ... 2cko9.html

EDIT: Changed spelling of discreetly from the mathematical one to the subtle one. Duh...

[Bill Spight]

So much money seems to go into lobbying, investing in bogus research and think tanks, discretely supporting the lunatic fringe, encouraging anti-intellectualism, manipulating public opinion, astroturfing online and so on... Creating fear, uncertainty and doubt simply because maintaining the status quo suits the short term economic interests of a small group of people.

Gee, sounds like you have been to America.

[SmoothOper]

One the things that I have always wondered not being an expert myself, is exactly how does CO2 relate to higher temperatures given that the earth is not a closed container. My expectation is that the primary factor in the raise in temperature is just the weight exerted as force of CO2 + H2O compared to Oxygen and Nitrogen etc and that trapping/radiating energy has little to do with the perceived temperature other than causing heavier compounds to be in gaseous form. My reasoning is that if there was more energy in the atoms the atmosphere would merely expand, minus the difference in mass of CO2, and that for the most part the temperature of the earth is related to the mass of the planet exerting gravitational force on the gasses. Maybe there is more to it.

Nothing you've said here is correct.

So you are saying you don't believe in gravity, as a force that maintains atmospheric pressure?

[speedchase]

So you are saying you don't believe in gravity, as a force that maintains atmospheric pressure?

Did you say that gravity as a force maintains atmospheric pressure?

[gogameguru]

So much money seems to go into lobbying, investing in bogus research and think tanks, discretely supporting the lunatic fringe, encouraging anti-intellectualism, manipulating public opinion, astroturfing online and so on... Creating fear, uncertainty and doubt simply because maintaining the status quo suits the short term economic interests of a small group of people.

Gee, sounds like you have been to America.

Don't worry Bill, you don't need to go to America to see any of that stuff . I did have the pleasure of visiting late last year though (during the election campaign).

[shapenaji]

One the things that I have always wondered not being an expert myself, is exactly how does CO2 relate to higher temperatures given that the earth is not a closed container. My expectation is that the primary factor in the raise in temperature is just the weight exerted as force of CO2 + H2O compared to Oxygen and Nitrogen etc and that trapping/radiating energy has little to do with the perceived temperature other than causing heavier compounds to be in gaseous form. My reasoning is that if there was more energy in the atoms the atmosphere would merely expand, minus the difference in mass of CO2, and that for the most part the temperature of the earth is related to the mass of the planet exerting gravitational force on the gasses. Maybe there is more to it.

Nothing you've said here is correct.

So you are saying you don't believe in gravity, as a force that maintains atmospheric pressure?

Our planet is not an adiabatic system.

[crux]

You don't think we're seeing effects already? There are a lot of effects in evidence all over the place. Around here, aside from temperature and weather anomolies, there are plant and animal ranges marching north and seasonal markers like blooms and migrations changing schedule. Not to mention the occasional storm.

This is another thing that bothers me. Unusual weather and storms have been occurring forever, and only selective perception makes people think that recent instances are unusual. It should be easy to find more links like these two I googled just now:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/storms/10-biggest-snowstorms.htm
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/the-10-biggest-storms-in-recorded-history.htm
What I object to is the overselling of global warming, this desperate need that some people feel to make the case and grasping at everything that could be used to scare people and attributing it to global warming. That is what turns people like me into skeptics once they catch on.

Speaking of which, it isn't 2050 yet and you saw New York under water. The scientists you've been deriding for lack of integrity, of course, are careful to say they can't attribute any one event to climate change any more than their colleagues can attribute any single case of cancer to cigarettes, so we can't say Sandy was due to climate change at all. Of course, they did predict it.

From what I've seen I'll agree with you, the scientists do seem to say that, and there was apparently even an IPCC report saying that no connection between extreme events and climate change has been convincingly demonstrated. Again, however, the media tell a different story, and the public believe in the heat wave = global warming or Sandy = global warming meme. Does this systematic disinformation not bother you?

You may think I am sheeplike in taking Al Gore's flood footage at face value, but the drivel pouring out on the denier side of this is unbelievable.

And Al Gore's flood footage is not drivel? Is this not a layman with an agenda trying to manipulate the masses? (Bill, your comments?) The problem is that judging by the responses here, he actually has an influence on public opinion - people, even highly intelligent people, believe his stuff even when there's no evidence for it. The various crackpot ideas you quoted are just held by a few. I think it is dangerous to accept the spreading of obvious untruths for the sake of a good cause.

Far from clear indeed. I'm no fan of biofuels policy at the moment. Perhaps if we had taken seriously the mandate to research ways of replacing fossil fuels when we should decades ago, we wouldn't have indulged in this ham-handed stuff.

So what should we have done? (Let's assume we'll have electric cars that actually work so we can focus on power generation). We can't turn off our electricity supply because that cure would be worse than the disease, and if we seriously believe that CO2 is a problem for us, there is only one working alternative that could realistically be a replacement: nuclear. But that is unpalatable to the green faction, and I can't say I really disagree - a few Chernobyl/Fukushima events could together be just as bad as the effects we can expect from global warming. There are some suggestions that Thorium reactors could be built and would be safe, but I don't know whether that is technically feasible, and politically it will still have the "nucular" label. So what is our hope? Lucking into workable fusion?

But we didn't. We were persuaded there wasn't a problem.

At least, speaking for Europe, this isn't true. Public opinion in Germany is such that even conservative states elect Green prime ministers (governors? not sure what you'd call them) now. The country has made a huge effort, subsidizing solar industry, mandating better building standards for houses, etc. The problem? None of that is going to change CO2 concentrations by any measurable amount since our little country is, essentially, insignificant. However, rising prices of electricity seem to be causing pressure for low-income groups. There's another problem: fossil fuels are (at the moment still) cheap, and higher energy costs caused by actions to combat CO2 emissions will again affect first and foremost the poorer population which we're purportedly trying to help by limiting global warming.

It's not the whole story, though; it's not most of the story. The effect of climate change on agricultural production is already in evidence; one estimate ... which I can't vouch for but it's out there ... is that food production would be 5% higher today, ceteris paribus, without the climate change we've already had.

On the other side there's a rather huge positive impact that the use of fossil fuels has on food production. Stop using fossil fuels and food production plummets (random googled link which may or may not be accurate: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html). These problems are not simple.

You're doing apples and oranges again. I'm one of the ones who said "worse than predicted" and I didn't say or mean "temperatures are rising faster." I said the predicted changes are happening faster, and it's true, many in the area of those deleterious feedbacks. Arctic ice area is decreasing faster than is in the models. Antarctic ice and Greenland ice are shedding faster.

And at the same time, Antarctica had a record ice extent last year which is inconsistent with this theory. This again was under-reported in the media; fear of diluting the message leads to dishonest reporting. Source: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=79369

Permafrost emissions are greater.

Are you speaking of methane? The draft of the next IPCC report has a nice figure (1.7 on page 1-42) showing previous projections of methane concentrations. These have been revised downwards in every revision, and real data is outside the range of all of the projections, on the low side. Again, the "it's worse than we thought" meme appears not to be based on facts.

This bothers me a lot. We are perfectly capable of doing significant things about it in a directed way. We've done other seemingly impossible things before. I cannot take having it counseled to be impossible at the same time and by the same people as it is argued that there is no problem and no need to try. It is not a distant impossibility; it is something for which the US is essential and in the US we have suffered a series of political losses, not least the loss of the 2000 election by Gore and six or seven years later, the loss of the GOP, wholly, to climate deniers. These were simple political defeats, not the inevitable tide of history, and without them, there was plenty of chance for significant action.

There is no political will to do anything in any of the countries where it matters. The US is only part of the problem, emerging economies like China and India and whichever are behind them are not going to stop industrializing. For them, the equation is a different one: stop industrialization and keep most of your population in poverty, or try to become a modern society and if there really is fallout from global warming, try to deal with it.

In fact, from what I read about the pollution caused by their factories, I think the example of China is one where we have vastly more pressing ecological problems than CO2 emissions. That is where we should focus our energies.

[shapenaji]

Crux, I think you're strongly misrepresenting that NASA report... How about presenting the rest of it, you know, the part where they said that the Antarctic gains are dwarfed by arctic losses and that it's likely due to changes in atmospheric circulation?

[crux]

Crux, I think you're strongly misrepresenting that NASA report... How about presenting the rest of it, you know, the part where they said that the Antarctic gains are dwarfed by arctic losses and that it's likely due to changes in atmospheric circulation?

Well, I posted the link, and I'm doing so in the hope that people read them. If you wish to quibble about such things I could also point out that Arctic ice loss in 2012 wasn't solely driven by temperature but also by a mere weather event: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-seaicemin.html.

EDIT: let me also point out again that historically, variations in Arctic temperature and sea ice are not a new phenomenon. In addition to the two newspaper links I posted earlier, here are a few more:
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/42667524
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/23668813
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/40934044
and going back furthest I could find so far, http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-11-0589a.pdf

I'll quote some of that report, from 1922: "[...] it is of interest to note the unusually warm summer in Arctic Norway and the observations of Capt. Martin Ingebrigtsen, who has sailed the eastern Arctic for 54 years past. He says that he first noted wanner conditions in 1915, that since that time it has steadily gotten warmer, and that to-day the Arctic of that region is not recognizable as the same region of 1865 to 1917. Many old landmarks are so changed as to be unrecognizable. Where formerly great masses of ice were found there are now often moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended far into the sea they have entirely disappeared." But please do go and read the whole thing, then compare to the reports we are currently worrying about.