“There is absolutely no question that the Earth is warming up fast … the evidence is now irrefutable: human activities are driving the current period of planetary warming.”
“Notwithstanding a few maverick scientists, oil company representatives, and the president of the world’s greatest polluter, the overwhelming consensus amongst those who have a grasp of the facts is that without a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions things are going to get very bad indeed.”
– A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know, by Bill McGuire, the Benfield Greig Professor of Geophysical Hazards at University College London.
As for those who say we should just “live with it,” he notes that weather will become more extreme; sea levels will rise and threaten coastal cities; hurricanes will increase in number and ferocity; mountain permafrost will melt and cause more landslides and mudflows; crop yields will fall. And McGuire backs up his claims with data showing how increasing temperatures have already affected various parts of the world. He notes, “our children and their descendants are going to find the Earth a very different place.”
I was surprised to even see an ad in Discover magazine this month taken out by Shell Oil which basically says we should stop trying to deal with a smokescreen of those who say we aren’t causing global warming and should do something about it, as they say they are (reducing their emissions to pre-1990 levels).
While global warming seems to be occuring, there is pretty much no relation that can be directly drawn between a hot day, season, year, or even several years and global warming. In fact, it is because the trends and changes are subtle, slow, and evenly spread (for the most part) that the whole process can be considered to be very dangerous.
Surely, the closer metaphor is that we might at least stop smacking that leg with a hammer, thus sending an example to those who might in future assault the other legs?
An even closer one, I might suggest, is a shared school dormitory wherein several children offer to stop spray-painting the walls, but the biggest, most prolific artist refuses even to slow down since many more kids will grow up to be can-artists in future.
Unfortunately I am away from home at the moment. I do have a copy of The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg, which I will try to remember to look at next week. It may have some good leads.
Since I retired last year, I no longer follow the literature within my field. I confess that I have not taken the trouble to sort all the crap I brought home from the office. I know there was a learned paper 10 or 12 years ago supposedly demonstrating that global warming was taking place, but not causing worse hurricanes.
The world has seen cycles in hurricane activity, apparently due to causes other than global warming. We had heavy hurricane activity in the 1950’s and 1960’s, then light hurricane activity until the mid-1980’s. Then we had 10 years or so of heavy hurricane activity. The last few years have been lower than average for hurricanes.
Finding a site about global warming that isn’t alarmist is like trying to find a site about asteriods several miles across crashing into the Earth that isn’t alarmist.
We discussed this point some time ago on this Board. A number of posters agreed that *Scientific American *has unfortunately become quite politicized. Their criticism of The Skeptical Environmentalist is invalid. Some other politicized science organizations also participated in panning Lomborg’s book. Their real problem is that his conclusions were not PC.
BTW, on the fusion thing, it is not that it is not economically viable in the same way that sloar cells might be, it is that it is not thermodyniamically viable yet. The Joint European Torus (JET) did get to the point where marginally more energy was coming out than going in, but only for a short time, and after vastly more energy had been input just to get to that point.
Like all here, I would love to see it work, but it may also become a money pit from which little emerges.
It’s a heck of a lot easier to rely on natural fusion energy (aka The Sun) than to invest lots and lots of money into controlled fusion and hope that we can make it work in time to support our civilization.
Yes, it is true that eventually all countries will have to be included in the effort. That is acknowledged in the current framework. Not to be a broken record, but as I already said, Kyoto is just the beginning. It is a way to try to get us onto a new path. It is completely reasonable to ask those nations that already enjoy the benefits of industrialization, have been responsible for the lion’s share of the emission up to this point, and have the best technology to be the ones that take the lead in starting to develop solutions. The point is that we cannot afford to have the current developing nations follow the same path that we followed and the way to prevent that is to come up with the technology for them to follow a cleaner, more efficient path.
Well, you want to pick your pet winners. Maybe someone else will want to pick theirs. Certainly, I am not opposed to putting some investment into various technologies. But, a more market-based approach is to force the market to acknowledge the costs of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions and then to let the technologies come to fruition themselves in this corrected market.
As for (controlled) fusion, it has been perpetually been 30 years away. 40 years ago, it was 30 years away and now it is still 30 years away. It is a very difficult thing to do and while we may yet make it work, claims that we are already essentially there are not realistic.
december: I’d recommend that instead of looking at Lomborg, you go look at the IPCC reports which clearly represents the current state of the science and is usually one of the first citations that appears in any paper on climate change appearing in a refereed journal like Science or Nature. I think that you are at least partly right…i.e., that the increased severity of hurricanes due to global warming is something that there is not too much confidence that they have actually observed yet; I think it is something that they have more confidence will be observed in the future but I don’t recall how much confidence there is even in this…It may be significantly less than their confidence in some other things.
Yes, it is true that eventually all countries will have to be included in the effort. That is acknowledged in the current framework. Not to be a broken record, but as I already said, Kyoto is just the beginning. It is a way to try to get us onto a new path. It is completely reasonable to ask those nations that already enjoy the benefits of industrialization, have been responsible for the lion’s share of the emission up to this point, and have the best technology to be the ones that take the lead in starting to develop solutions. The point is that we cannot afford to have the current developing nations follow the same path that we followed and the way to prevent that is to come up with the technology for them to follow a cleaner, more efficient path.
Well, you want to pick your pet winners. Maybe someone else will want to pick theirs. Certainly, I am not opposed to putting some investment into various technologies. But, a more market-based approach is to force the market to acknowledge the costs of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions and then to let the technologies come to fruition themselves in this corrected market.
As for (controlled) fusion, it has been perpetually been 30 years away. 40 years ago, it was 30 years away and now it is still 30 years away. It is a very difficult thing to do and while we may yet make it work and make it economically viable, I think claims that we are already essentially there and all that is needed is just a straightforward push to make it economically viabile (as Polycarp seemed to be arguing) are a bit too optimistic.
december: I’d recommend that instead of looking at Lomborg, you go look at the IPCC reports which clearly represents the current state of the science and is usually one of the first citations that appears in any paper on climate change appearing in a refereed journal like Science or Nature. Needless to say, these papers usually do not reference Lomborg. By the way, I think that you are at least partly right…i.e., that the increased severity of hurricanes due to global warming is something that there is not too much confidence that they have actually observed yet; I think it is something that they have more confidence will be observed in the future but I don’t recall how much confidence there is even in this…It may be significantly less than their confidence in some other things.
I’m beginning to think december owns some vacation property in Alaska.
“Only after the last tree has been cut down
Only after the last river has been poisoned
Only after the last fish has been caught
Only then you will find out that money cannot be eaten” -Cree Prophecy
It’s funny how the politics of science get pushed aside until folks find it convenient to recognize it.
That said, show me a peer reviewed journal that will publish Lomborg’s work on this subject. One would be enough. Oh wait, there ALL “PC”? Must be a CONSPIRACY.
Be prepared to make Lomborg’s case for him if you want to use his results. He doesn’t have credentials in the field he commented on. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but the burden of proof is on him and on you if you choose to cite him.
But a ten degree change in temperature would radically change climactic and weather patterns. An awful lot of humans wouldn’t survive the collapse of agriculture and massive ecological change.
Lomborg’s book isn’t a research project, so it wouldn’t be peer-reviewed. It describes and cites the work of gazillions of peer-reviewed stuff. Much of it is interpreted incorrectly by certina environmentalists, according to Lomborg.
You are right that Lomborg doesn’t have credentials in the field of ecology. Neither do most leaders in the environmental movement. E.g., AFAIK Al Gore didn’t take a single science course in college. (Neither did GWB, BTW). Most environmental organizations simply quote results that support their POV. At worst, that’s what Lomborg did, but he has more cites than just about anyone. Frankly, I’m amazed that an individual could read all that material in a single lifetime.
Although his degree is in Statistics, Lomborg has been studying and writing aboiut environmental issues for a long time, so he definitely has an awful lot of knowledge about the field. He knows so much that his book is kind or boring, because it goes into intimate details of many individual studies and reports.
He used to be on the environmentalist side. His thesis in the book isn’t opposed to environmentalism, he says, but opposed to wrong or unsupported beliefs
The Ryan, if your questions are honest curiosities about the science of climate change, here is the link to the IPCC website where you can learn all about the current state of the science, both in terms of what is happening and predicted to happen with the climate and the and the potential effects on humans and the environment: http://www.ipcc.ch/
To address just one of your questions, although I think there have been studies looking at correlations between CO2 levels and temperature both recently and going back a long ways (using various proxies to estimate the temperature), there is also compelling evidence from the climate models which is best summarized in a plot in the IPCC report that shows the match between the surface temperature record over the last ~150 years and the predictions from climate models using the best estimates for:
(1) natural forcings only
(2) anthropogenic forcings only
(3) both together
It clearly shows how neither natural forcings nor anthropogenic forcings alone can explain the temperature record very completely (with natural forcing failing particularly dramatically over the past quarter century when the temperature record has marched steadily upward but the prediction from natural forcings has not). Together, however, both forcings do a remarkably good job of reproducing the major features of the temperature record. [These graphs are on p. 58 of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) Working Group-I (WG-I) Technical Summary available at the IPCC website.]
Of course, this is just one simple answer. There have been many, many papers published on this subject.
By the way, here are links to other threads discussing climate change in the last couple of years:
And, here is an interesting article from the NY Times about the current politicization of the science of climate change in Washington. The ignorance of the statements by Senator Inhofe (Chairman of the Environmental and Public Works Committee) and his aide are just mind-boggling!
