Global Warming. Let's do it again.

Great Debates
121

That is why in this case it is important for the scientific community to tell us to what degree there is a consensus…and what issues there is a consensus on and what issues there is no clear consensus.

Lomberg is not bullied for querying the consensus but for the manner in which he does it. The way in the scientific community to challenge a consensus is to come up with tight technical arguments, not to publish some broad treatise for the public that selectively deals with the scientific literature.

People are not being denigrated for speaking out. Rather, these people are usually speaking out because their views have not found support in the peer-reviewed scientific community…Or they haven’t even tried to present those views to the scientific community in any sort of precise, careful way.

Richard Lindzen is a good example. When he has presented careful technical arguments in the peer-reviewed literature, they have been taken seriously and tested (and found generally not to be correct). [He might disagree with this characterization, but I think that this is basically just that people don’t like their hypotheses to be shown to be wrong.] When he has written blustering op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, he has been treated somewhat more harshly (see here)…but certainly no more harshly than he has treated the majority of the scientific community who he disagrees with.

It is true that some in the U.S. Senate has recently seemed to believe that they could hold hearings to determine, for example, who was right on the climate of the last couple thousand years as determined by temperature proxies. I think this is pretty arrogant on their part. The job of these committees should be to determine what the expert view is, what the uncertainties are, etc. but not to actually adjudicate the science.

I don’t nessarily buy this. There are plenty of examples to show that they are usually just better at believing those whose scientific opinion aligns better with their pre-conceived views. It amusing what sort of arguments in the global warming debate are completely fallacious scientifically but seem to hold great power with some of the public and politicians.

122

I denigrated him not for “speaking out” but for sweeping under the carpet the absolutely fundamental and undeniable fact, that greenhouse gas concentration has rocketed in mere decades from digging up safely stored stockpiles and burning them. I denigrate anti-evolutionists and Holocaust Deniers similarly, by pointing to the key facts which they weasel out of addressing.

123

Don’t put words into my mouth: I said that it was an article of interest.

For the record, I remain sceptical of AGW, but have yet to be convinced either way. And the way the dissenters are treated makes me really sceptical: it reminds me of the King’s New Clothes.

124

Are you, at least, in agreement on what there is pretty much no dissent about: that if we continue to dig up and release greenhouse gas stores at the rate we are currently doing (eg. +3 ppm per year for CO2), we will reach a dangerous concentration this century?

125

By that logic, you must be one hell of a doubter of evolution.

126

There you go again, attacking the writer not the post. Makes people think your argument must have significant flaws. And it’s a red herring to boot.

127

OK, perhaps you could set out the fundamental distinctions between evolution denial and ACC denial for us, given that only a few scientists ascribe to such denials. Should evolution-deniers be treated any differently to ACC-deniers, in your opinion?

And, just to set my mind at rest, you do agree that dangerous concentrations will be reached this century at present ppm increase rates, yes?

128

I was not attacking you…I was attacking your logic. You know very well that the creationist and ID folks are not treated very kindly by the scientific community…and certainly not by people on this messageboard. Hell, I even end up feeling kind of sorry for someone who comes here and starts a thread questioning evolution. And, in general, the scientific community doesn’t take very well to people who come in and try to peddle ideas through the popular press and such that would simply never fly (or have already not flown) in the peer-reviewed scientific community. Science is a rather cut-throat enterprise.

129

See, this is my first thought as well when I see a blog cited in any context. By anyone. It’s cited as fact when it agrees with you, cited as shiat when it contradicts. And used by both sides of any argument. They’re either valid or they aren’t.

130

Which is why I never cite them except under exceptional circumstances with heavy caveats. Of course, I don’t need to - I can cite international authorities comprising the world’s experts instead.

And I’ll do my echo chamber routine again:

But they do agree, and we keep telling you what they agree on: that a dangerous parts per million concentration will be reached this century without action. What part of this are you unsure about?

131

This I don’t quite understand. I can definitely see the reasonableness of having uncertainties about the exact nature and extent of the mechanisms and effects of AGW—hell, there’s no scientist on the planet who can claim to understand the phenomenon completely—but I don’t understand what it means to be undecided about the entire issue.

Specifically, which part(s) of the AGW phenomenon are you unconvinced about? To wit:

  1. That humans are significantly increasing the atmospheric concentration of CO2? This point, AFAICT, is pretty much beyond serious scientific dispute. We’re measuring rapidly increasing CO2 concentrations that coincide with recent massive industrialization, and we know that that industrialization involves burning huge amounts of fossil fuels and releasing into the atmosphere the carbon stored in them. Not much room for debate there.

  2. That increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2 cause rising global temperatures? As jshore noted above, the basic physical mechanisms giving rise to this hypothesis—CO2 absorbing infrared radiation and thus retaining heat, feedback effects such as decreasing albedo and increasing atmospheric H2O causing the retention of yet more heat, etc.—are also pretty much beyond dispute. There is some question whether there may be counteracting effects that will offset these warming factors, but AFAIK there is no clear evidence for them so far. And, as far as we can tell from the admittedly incomplete global temperature record, the evidence seems to strongly confirm the hypothesis that global temperatures are now rising significantly and rapidly—much too rapidly to be explained by what we know of normal climate cycles. So far, there is no successful scientific explanation for this phenomenon that doesn’t cite the skyrocketing CO2 concentration as a major factor.

  3. That significantly increased global temperatures cause major changes in global climate systems? Again, this isn’t seriously disputed. As was pointed out earlier, the difference between a warm interglacial and a major ice age is a measly five degrees centigrade. If global temperatures rise significantly, climate systems will react quite drastically, at least from the perspective of most living organisms.

  4. That the amount of global temperature increase produced by our CO2 will be significant enough to seriously affect climate systems? This is, AFAICT, the most contested part of the issue, at least as far as it concerns current levels of CO2 concentration. We do seem to be irreversibly headed for a certain amount of anthropogenic warming, but exactly how much will it be, and exactly how much will it affect the global climate? Nobody knows.

As SentientMeat said, though, there is no serious dispute that if we keep increasing atmospheric CO2, we will produce global temperature increases that will be large enough to have a massive impact on climate. There is no question (barring unexpected major counteracting effects of the kind I mentioned in point 2) that we are currently driving on the road that leads over the edge of that cliff. The question is how soon we’ll get there and how far it’s possible for us to change direction.

  1. That major changes in global climate systems will massively impact weather, topography, and ecosystems? Again, not really in dispute. If global climate significantly changes due to rapid warming, we are gonna notice it. It will affect everything from sea levels (and consequently, amounts and placement of habitable land) to precipitation patterns to populations of insects and microorganisms. Most forms of life are strongly adapted biologically (and in the case of humans, economically and culturally as well) to the particular climate system equilibrium that has prevailed for most of the past interglacial period. If that equilibrium is seriously disrupted, the adjustments required for many life forms, including humans, to adapt to the new global climate will not be trivial.

  2. Or finally, that the economic and cultural costs of adapting to significant global climate changes will be greater than the costs of preventing or minimizing them? Much of this issue, of course, is still speculative: we don’t really know how much it will cost to stop increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations, much less how much it will cost to do things like relocating coastal refugees after sea-level rise, coping with more floods, famines, hurricanes, etc. We also don’t know exactly how much offsetting benefits we’ll get in either case: will we save a lot of money from increased energy efficiency and reduced oil dependence in our efforts to minimize climate change? Or if major climate change does occur, will we make up for droughts and floods in temperate areas with increased fertility in warmer sub-polar regions?

However, it seems reasonable to expect that the more major the climate changes are, the more massive the costs will be, and that they could potentially dwarf even the costs of totally halting our carbon emissions. Certainly the insurance companies, for example, are not viewing the prospect of climate change with any complacency.

But as jshore commented, there are plenty of other scientific areas where proponents of the majority view treat dissenters (especially dissenters from outside the field who lack the usual specialist qualifications) with vocal distrust and contempt. These areas include evolution and paleontology (when dealing with claims for creationism and ID) and neurology and cognitive science (when dealing with claims for paranormal phenomena, near-death experiences, etc.), just to name a few.

If we’re going to judge the credibility of scientific disciplines by how politely they treat the people whom the majority of their practitioners consider to be unqualified, ill-informed, and/or charlatans, there will be damn few scientific fields that pass the test.

132

I originally wrote quite a long piece, but it rambled, so here are the essential points:

Vested interests in funding. Nuff said.

Scientists keep changing their minds / crying wolf. Not so long ago, we were all worried about a forthcoming ice age. This comes back to consensus vs proof.

Too selective use of the historical record: the Little Ice Age, the Medeival Warm Period, before the ice age (of which we are in an interglacial)? In a previous interglacial of the current ice age, if a TV program I saw recently is to be believed, London used to be a savannah with lions and leopards and the like. How about if we go back 10s of millions of years?

Inadequate consideration of natural forces: how is the global climate affected by, for instance, vulcanism? Remember Krakatoa. How about the changing Sun?

Is the global climate changing? Of course - it’s never static.

Is the global climate changing for good or ill? Consider the larger picture rather than the smaller one. A sea level rise might inundate London and Venice, but might it make other areas fertile?

Are humans significantly affecting the global climate? I don’t know.

If humans are significantly affecting the climate, are we affecting it for better or for worse? For instance, what brought the Earth out of the Little Ice Age? What took us in to it?

133

And I hit send too soon.

I’m just a layman, but if even such as I can pose questions this difficult, and see them studiously ignored or arrogantly dismissed, why should I have confidence in scientists’ prognostications?

134

The idea that scientists would invent…and be able to perpetrate…a grand conspiracy in order to get funding is frankly pretty silly. As for vested interests in general, many companies like BP, Shell, and Ford with a vested interest in not believing in AGW (and who were initially part of the Global Climate Coalition, a group of businesses dedicted to doubting AGW) have now accepted the science and, in BP’s case, led the way in showing how Kyoto-sized reductions in emissions can be made for negative net cost (i.e., they saved money by doing it).

This is the so-called Global Cooling Myth. So, if the question is, “were there any scientists back in the 70s who expressed concern either about a gradual natural descent from the current interglacial into an ice age or about air pollution causing cooling?” then the answer is Yes. However, was there any consensus that this was going to happen? No. When the National Academy of Sciences was asked to report on the climate issue in the mid-70s , they concluded that, while we understood various effects (e.g., CO2 causes warming, aerosol pollutants cause cooling, natural forces would eventually bring cooling on timescales of thousands to 10’s of thousand of years), it was not possible yet to predict which would dominate and thus more study was needed. Now, 30 years later, they have concluded that we do know enough. That is called the advance of science.

I have no idea what you are saying here. In what way is it being selectively used? Are you saying because things were warmer 10s of millions of years ago, we don’t have to worry about the effect we are having by drastically raising CO2 levels today? [By the way, I am somewhat skeptical in regards to your description of London during a previous interglacial, although certainly if you go much further back there were balmier periods. I believe the previous interglacial to this one was one of the warmest…and we are rapidly approaching

Vulcanism causes short-term cooling (for months to a few years) due to the release of aerosols into the air. In fact, scientists have studied the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo as a test of the climate models. The contribution to CO2 from volcanoes is basically negligible.

There is no evidence that changes in the sun over the last half century could have caused the warming that has occurred. There have been attempts to propose exotic solar mechanisms (such as modulation of intergalactic cosmic rays) but they remain speculative and, at any rate, have not been able to explain the trends in climate at least in the past ~30 years. [See here for more detail.]

While there might be some beneficial effects mixed in with the negative ones for small climate changes, once it gets beyond that, the effects become overwhelmingly negative, at least partly because we are adapted for the climates and sea levels as they currently are.

Just because you can pose questions here does not mean that the answers are not known by the scientists working in the field. I am not claiming that everything is known but the ability to ask questions that you do not know the answer to (or even that those of us here who are not climate scientists either don’t know the answer to) doesn’t indicate much.

As for having confidence in science, do you generally feel that we should go about ignoring the best scientific understanding we have at the time…Or, do you want to selectively decide when or when not to use the scientific understanding according to how well it aligns with your own beliefs and philosophies? Because, I think that either attitude, if followed generally, is a recipe for returning to the dark ages.

135

It is also worth noting that if one wants to explain current changes by solar forcing, one also has to explain why the known perturbation due to increasing levels of greenhouse gases is somehow getting cancelled out. And, there is also lots of evidence at this point that the character of the changes is in line with increasing levels of greenhouse gases rather than a cause like solar. For example, the stratosphere has been cooling while the troposphere warms, which is what is predicted for greenhouse gases but apparently not what would be predicted for solar forcing. [Some of the cooling of the stratosphere is also due to depletion of the ozone layer, but I don’t think this can explain all of it.]

People like to throw out alternate hypotheses to explain the observed warming but at this point there is so many lines of evidence that lead one to conclude that most of the last half century warming is due to greenhouse gases that it really is not enough just to propose some vague mechanism.

136

No, it isn’t. Lots of scientists rely on external funding, and it’s in their interest to talk up their area, and if they can associate it with something grand, so much the better. A bandwaggon effect, if you will. And agin, look at what happens to those who disagree: they don’t get disproven, they get shouted down.

I’m saying that the Earth has been here before.

In documented history, climate change is nothing new: North Africa used to be the breadbasket of the Roman empire. Now it’s largely desert. Post Eleanor of Aquitaine, monasteries had vineyards in medeival England - only in the past 50 years has the weather been sufficiently clement to reestablish them.

They said they’d found bones, and they had a montage of hippos wading in in a pool around Nelson’s Column.

And we’re not even at the maximum temperature of the Medeival Warm Period.

But there are huge amounts of dust and other stuff released into the upper atmosphere. CO2 isn’t the only game in town.

[quote]
There is no evidence that changes in the sun over the last half century could have caused the warming that has occurred. There have been attempts to propose exotic solar mechanisms (such as modulation of intergalactic cosmic rays) but they remain speculative and, at any rate, have not been able to explain the trends in climate at least in the past ~30 years. [See here for more detail.]

So there is a definite link, thank you. But there is far too little data. Part of the problem is that we’ve only had satellites in space for very few years, so we have no record of the real solar output (rather than the amount reaching the ground). The Earth has cycles that are thousands of years long.

Bollocks. Humans are adapted for savannah and jungle. Humans have taken to wearing clothes and using fire and tools so we can survive outside these environments. Humans crossed the English Channel when it wasn’t a channel, ditto the land bridge across the Bering Strait. Humans hunted mammoth on the bottom of the North Sea when it was dry (presumably the upper parts only).

I’ve to see definitive answers to any of them, here or anywhere else, so I will continue to ask. The fact that I can ask and not receive definitive answers means that more work needs to be done.

But is it the best? That’s the $64Bn question. As for ignoring it, no, of course we should listen to it, but until scientists can come up with proof, then we should maintain a healthy scepticism.

137

:eek: :eek: :eek: Jeepers creepers, dude, that certainly is considering the big picture, all right! But by that logic, why shouldn’t we also consider the larger picture when evaluating the economic costs of minimizing anthropogenic impact on climate? Where’s the sense in contemplating the potential destruction of London and Venice with placid equanimity, while simultaneously getting all bent out of shape about internationally negotiated carbon caps?

This is one of the areas in which the typical climate-change-skeptic attitude (and I’m not attributing it to you personally, Quartz, as I can’t really tell yet what you personally think on the issue) seems to me most dysfunctionally short-sighted, if not downright devoid of logic. The skeptics squeal like wounded piglets at the prospect of limiting greenhouse-gas emissions: “Hell no, we can’t do that, it might hurt our economy!” But confront them with the prospect of permanently flooding some of the most important cities on the planet, and it’s “Oh well, let’s not overreact here, I’m sure there would be an up-side.”

:confused: :confused: :confused: This reasoning just makes no freaking sense to me whatsoever. We’re not even talking here about people who deny the possibility that sea level rise and coastal flooding due to anthropogenic climate change may be a serious danger. We’re talking about people who acknowledge the possibility, but say we just shouldn’t worry about it—even as they insist on worrying about much more trivial problems such as the economic costs of reducing carbon emissions. Is this a subtle form of denial, or plain old lunacy, or what?

Could you explain to us a little more clearly which part(s) of this question you’re uncertain about? In particular, which of my first five points in post #131 above, which lay out the major claims of the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change, do you consider inadequately resolved?

138

This is simply not true and seems to echo some of the nonsense that is spouted by partisans of the anti-scientific community.

In the early 1970s, there were a couple of proposals that some of the global warming might trigger paradoxical reversals of climate (à la the movie The Day After Tomorrow). These proposals were leapt upon by the popular press long before they had been throroughly vetted by the scientific community. The results of the peer review process (along with better data, better computer modeling, and more thorough research) were to set the proposals down as fatally flawed. There was never a time when “scientists” kept “changing their minds” much less “crying wolf.” To appeal to what shows up in the popular press as some indication of what “scentists” are doing or saying is to pretty much ignore what scientists are actually doing or saying. (It is very much in line with certain Creationists who have taken out of context the publications of Gould & Eldridge regarding Punctuated Equilibrium and claimed that “scientists” keep “changing their minds” as to whether evolution is or is not a slow process.)

139

Because carbon caps may be hooey. As for potemtial destruction of cities, they’re just things. Americans rebuilt San Francisco, the Japanese rebuilt Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Russians rebuilt Stalingrad and Moscow (twice) etc.

For me, it’s a longer-term, somewhat Canute-ish, view. If an area is going to get flooded, it’s going to get flooded. Just look at the comments made about New Orleans post-Katrina. NO being largely below sea level. If you build your house on a volcano, you can’t be surprised when it gets covered by lava, can you? The same applies.

Coastal change is a constant - coastlines being eroded, shorelines being extended, land rising and land falling as the continental plates still relax and rebound from the last ice age. Look at the Cinque Ports. Some are now quite some distance from the sea.

I’l start with point 1 :slight_smile: The start of industrialisation also coincides with the end of the Little Ice Age. Coincidence? Perhaps it is AGW that’s keeping us from a new ice age? Do we trade sea level rise for not being in an ice age? Or perhaps the end of the Little Ice Age was due to some non-anthropogenic factor which is still affecting us today? Perhaps an increase in sunlight? On the cooling side, what happened to cause the Medeival Warm Period to end and the Little Ice Age to start? Can’t have been Man, can it?

If you can’t prove the basic asertion, you can’t expect people to follow.

140

The basic, proven assertion is that greenhouse gas concentrations have rocketed in mere decades from us digging up and burning safe stockpiles of them, such that we will reach an undeniably dangerous concentration this century. Why do you keep ignoring this fundamental and undeniable fact and speak only of natual processes which take millennia rather than clealy anthropogenic processes which take mere decades?

And for the third time, how do you think anti-evolutionists and Holocaust deniers should be treated in the media?