Climate in Crisis

Prof. Walter Wolfe, horticulture, like many scientists who study climate change, thought there would be more time. “I always thought it would be more toward the end of my career that we saw signs of global warming,” he said. But as the science of climate change becomes increasingly complex, these early signs may raise more questions than they answer.

President Barack Obama diagnosed the social and biophysical climate during his January 20 Inauguration speech to three million onlookers huddled in the freezing cold. “Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet,” he said. Though the government supports the theory of warming, critics believe this theory represents a gross misrepresentation of data, and that the world may instead be at the start of an extended period of global cooling.

On January 28, former Vice President Al Gore warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about “the dangerous and growing threat of the climate crisis,” amidst an unexpected blizzard. Just days before the inauguration, on Jan. 13, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs hosted a scientific debate on his cable program. Scientists from NASA and other government institutions defended the theory of global warming against its opponents in the scientific minority.

Proponents of global cooling challenge the common assessment that increasing levels of atmospheric carbon fuel a trend of global warming, suggesting instead that temperatures will decrease in the coming decades. A vocal minority even suggests that the Earth may be headed for a new ice age.

Supporters of the cooling theory attribute temperature changes in recent years not to carbon dioxide, but rather to natural variations in the earth’s axial tilt, orbital shape (eccentricity) and axial direction (precession). The Milankovitch cycles, as they are known, create successions of warm and cool periods that may last for 100,000 years. Within these larger trends, other variations cause shorter climate shifts, producing “little ice ages” that may last 15,000 years.

“It just seems silly to not recognize that the earth’s climate is driven by the Sun,” said Jay Lehr, science director of conservative public policy think tank The Heartland Institute. “It’s really arrogant to think that man controls the climate.”

According to Lehr, the Sun’s output relies greatly upon the presence or absence of sunspots — areas of lower temperature on the Sun’s surface that emerge due to magnetic fluctuations. Sunspot activity ebbs and flows in periods of 11 years. For the past decade, the Sun has had few sunspots. As a result, Lehr believes, the Sun produced higher temperature radiation and higher global temperature.

Supporters of cooling cite historical observations from the last century — a time when, according to warming theory, global temperatures continually rose due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases. Lehr and others suggest that skewed data sets created false indications of warming.

“Those global data sets are contaminated by the fact that two-thirds of the globe’s [climate data] stations dropped out in 1990. Most of them rural, and [the remaining stations] performed no urban adjustment,” explained Joseph D’Aleo, co-founder of the Weather Channel. “It’s a lot colder in rural areas than in the city,” he said — D’Aleo believes this bias could have exaggerated the trend of global warming.

Proponents of warming believe that the emission of greenhouse gases — most notably carbon dioxide — contribute substantially to the warming of Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases absorb and emit the Sun’s thermal infrared radiation. When the Sun’s radiation enters the Earth’s atmosphere, the gases either reflect it back to earth or into space. However, as gas emission increased during the past century, the gases reflected increasing amounts of radiation toward Earth — this is known as the Greenhouse Effect.

Most scientists continue to support the Greenhouse Model of global warming. According to Gavin Schmidt of NASA, “The long term trend is clearly toward warming, and those trends completely dwarf any changes due to the solar cycle.”

But debate still exists as to the extent of this trend. A 2008 article in Nature, titled “Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector,” examined the possibility of a cooling trend by studying recent oceanic activity.

“The Pacific Ocean is telling us — as it has told us 10 times in the past 400 years — you’re going to get cooler,” said Dennis Avery, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.

For the study, a team of German scientists created a new model of oceanic activity by compensating for oceanic variations in temperature, hurricane activity and general precipitation. Like solar activity, oceanic activity varies in 10-year cycles. As warmer water moves into cooler regions, it causes variations in regional climates. By accounting for these variations, the team created a new forecast model.

“Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming,” the team said in a 2008 Nature article. The report suggests that global temperatures may remain constant or even decrease over the next decade.

“I think it’s important that people realize what this [article] says,” added Prof. Natalie Mahowald, earth and atmospheric sciences. “This doesn’t mean global warming is gone.”

The experiment suggests only a natural fluctuation, Mahowald explained, but global warming will remain a definite issue due to the presence of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.

However, the next decade will represent a cooler period within a much larger warming trend.

Prof. Arthur DeGaetano, earth and atmospheric sciences, explained how such trends hide the full effect of global climate change. “Superimposed upon global warming are all these other things,” he said.

DeGaetano said that global warming will inevitably “dominate” the cooling trend, but other scientists are not so sure.

“This is the issue — we can’t run experiments,” Mahowald insisted. “The first thing you do is lots of observation, but that can only give hypotheses … Then, you have to argue that your model is an accurate representation of the world.”

A model, DeGaetano explained, is “a bunch of calculus … [we use] to replicate the physics of the atmosphere to the best of our abilities.”

Mahowald, DeGaetano and others attempt to construct realistic representations of the global climate, but the strength of their theories ultimately rests on the strength of their models. Climate modeling demands the integration of vast amounts of data, including temperatures, precipitation patterns, greenhouse gas concentrations, volcanic activity and solar emissions, DeGaetano said. To judge the effectiveness of a model, he added, is to judge the relevancy of data.

DeGaetano directs the federally funded Northeast Regional Climate Center, which actively circulates climate information to policy-makers and practitioners throughout the Northeast.

Scientists expect this warming trend will have dire consequences. In October 2006, DeGaetano and Wolfe contributed to an article for the Union of Concerned Scientists, titled, “A Report of the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment.” The report predicted — contrary to cooling theories — an increase in temperatures throughout the Northeast over the next century, using three different climate models.

The report states that global models “are able to reproduce key features of climate and regional change already observed across the Northeast.”

“Most of our models suggest we will raise the global temperature by 10 degrees in the next 100 years,” Wolfe said. The report suggests temperatures will rise anywhere from 3.5 to 12.5 degrees in the Northeast by 2100.

What this means, according to the report, is a drastic rise in sea level and more extreme weather events, including bigger, more intense storms. However, it suggested only minor changes in the amount of precipitation. With rising temperatures, this means that the regularity of drought will most likely increase during the century.

“All the analyses seem to point to the developing world as the ones who are going to get hit the hardest,” Wolfe explained. But, he added, “We aren’t isolated from the effects of global warming.”

According to Wolfe, the interruption of ecosystem by species migration, flooding and drought will greatly impact all people, creating “environmental refugees and wars of water.” In some regions, flooding may become commonplace. Elsewhere, the landscape may dry up entirely. Such a scenario would aggravate already massive problems for both agriculture and biodiversity conservation.

If droughts and extreme weather events become severe enough, Mahowald mused, an ice age might be a relief. “The new ice age will come, but not soon enough to save us,” she said. Mahowald added, “There’s a lot of inertia in the system, and the carbon dioxide we’re producing will stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.”

“This cooling is only going to last a few years, and then we’re going to have the same problem [of global warming],” asserted DeGaetano. “We’re due for another ice age, but not in our lifetime.”

According to Wolfe, warming is a foregone conclusion. “We’re beyond the point of no return for significant warming, even if were to make significant changes,” he said, adding, “but it’s the difference, you know, between a climate change we can manage and a ‘draconian’ change.”

Wolfe alludes to the brutal Greek legislator, Draco, who scribed the first constitution of law onto wooden tablets. He displayed his model of law in public forums, informing all the citizens about the deadly consequences of their crimes. Draco allowed each person to determine his or her own future with a simple — and dire — choice: to fear the possible death penalty or to risk the consequences of their crime.

For the past decade, the Sun has had few sunspots. As a result, Lehr believes, the Sun produced higher temperature radiation and higher global temperature.

The author makes no sense with that statement. There been no warming since for over a decade. It's been cooling over a year at least. At least the author tried to present both sides, although the conclusion indicates the hypothesis favored by the author.

Sunspot cycle 24: Smallest cycle in 100 years?

There are several serious errors in this article. Firt,

For the past decade, the Sun has had few sunspots. As a result, Lehr believes, the Sun produced higher temperature radiation and higher global temperature.

This is backwards. When the sun displays fewer sunspots, it is less active and solar radiation declines.

Although CO2 levels rose continuously during the last century, most of the century's warming took place before 1940. Then, while CO2 was still increasing, temperature fell for 30 years between 1940 and 1970. Around 1980, temperatures rose again for about 20 years and have been declining since 1998. We are now back to 1980 temperatures.

Greenhouse gases absorb and emit the Sun’s thermal infrared radiation. When the Sun’s radiation enters the Earth’s atmosphere, the gases either reflect it back to earth or into space. However, as gas emission increased during the past century, the gases reflected increasing amounts of radiation toward Earth — this is known as the Greenhouse Effect.

This is a completely wrong description of greenhouse gas theory. The greenhouse effect does not operate by reflecting or absorbing solar radiation. The theory is that the continuum radiation from the sun easily passes through the atmosphere and heats the surface of the Earth. Then it is proposed that the narrower band of infrared radiation emitted by the warm Earth is what gets absorbed by the greenhouse gases. Not the sun's radiation.

The article also reveals its bias by labeling the scientists who disagree with man-made global warming as a "minority" or a "conservative institute."

Geez Louise....we've only had weather pattern data for about a hundred years, data for sea temps and currents for half that time. We've had computer models for weather and sea current variables for about a decade or so which have been notoriously unreliable if not downright wrong. We've studied the sun and the planets for centuries, sun spot activity and its radiation for half a century and have searched for the Northwest Passage and El Dorado since the discovery of the New World.

It was 38 degrees in Miami, ice storms in Kentucky, snow in Foggy Bottom and the Northeast. London is snow covered and the sprinkles on Berliners ain't candy. It's called winter.

There have been reports of rising temps in Australia, ice melts in Antarctica and rising tides in the Southern Hemisphere lately. It's called summer down there.

Weather and climate data has been manipulated, fabricated and politicized. Weather data as such has become a commodity which can be bought and sold ....mostly sold...and sold short..Global Warming arguments are as cyclical as circular reasoning.

What you said!

This related gem, also:

According to Lehr, the Sun’s output relies greatly upon the presence or absence of sunspots

Uh, no; according to astrophysicists, sun spot cycle relative activity, and cycle peaks and minimums are a visible indicator of solar activity. It is an association, not a 'cause' of increased or descreased solar output. Either Lehr expressed it poorly, or the writer totally misunderstood what he was told.

Next up:

When the Sun’s radiation enters the Earth’s atmosphere, the gases either reflect it back to earth or into space. However, as gas emission increased during the past century, the gases reflected increasing amounts of radiation toward Earth — this is known as the Greenhouse Effect. .

No comment.

To judge the effectiveness of a model, he added, is to judge the relevancy of data.

This seeming says that if the model isn't "effective", then the data used in it isn't relevant. OTOH, it is actually a statement on the correctness of the model; data is data.

That's it. Can't go on.

There was a time that journalists had an education, and were expected to be versed in science if they were "science writers".

Pretend that this was a sports story, written by someone displaying an equivilent knowlege of sports as this writer displays of science (and writing, for that matter) and then ask yourself if the editor would have accepted it for publication.

So let me get this straight. The temperature will increase, which will increase evaporation from rivers, lakes, and oceans, BUT very little change in the amount of precipitation.

Just where is all that extra moisture going to go?

Evaporation and precipitation BOTH contribute to COOL the planet, and I guarantee that if the temperature increases, so will precipitation.

This guy is either a fool, or a government tool, but he sure ain't no scientist....

Around 1980, temperatures rose again for about 20 years and have been declining since 1998. We are now back to 1980 temperatures.

The 1998 temperatures are by all accounts an outlier and should be heavily discounted, putting the most recent peak in temperatures at about 2004, thus the warming phase we have been in has lasted ~26 years. Temperatures have declined down to the vales of the early 90's but over the next 15+ years should decline to similar temps as the late 70's early 80's.

Much of this has been posted at Climateaudit.org and Wattsupwiththat.com. Sorry I do not have the charts and links handy to demonstrate that you are overstating your case.

Here's one. It is no surprise that different people can see different things, especially if you want to start discounting so-called outlying data. For instance, how should we treat those outlying(?) lows in the early 90's? The warming phase of 26 years you refer to has ten-year holes in it! Clearly no 26 years of warming. Yes, we're down to those mid 90 temps. But since there is a lot of up and down variation in temperature, we're not at temperatures that correspond to just one particular set of years. Our temperatures are also clearly in the 1980's range. In fact, one can legitimately argue that we are down to the temperatures of 1910. One thing is unavoidably clear. The short-term warming trend of the past two decades is gone without a trace. I would argue that calling the recent warming a 26 year trend is grossly overstating the case.

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