Posted on 05/25/2006 9:02:16 AM PDT by cogitator
The Flipping Point
How the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has converged to cause this environmental skeptic to make a cognitive flip
By Michael Shermer
In 2001 Cambridge University Press published Bjørn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I thought was a perfect debate topic for the Skeptics Society public lecture series at the California Institute of Technology. The problem was that all the top environmental organizations refused to participate. "There is no debate," one spokesperson told me. "We don't want to dignify that book," another said. One leading environmentalist warned me that my reputation would be irreparably harmed if I went through with it. So of course I did.
My experience is symptomatic of deep problems that have long plagued the environmental movement. Activists who vandalize Hummer dealerships and destroy logging equipment are criminal ecoterrorists. Environmental groups who cry doom and gloom to keep donations flowing only hurt their credibility. As an undergraduate in the 1970s, I learned (and believed) that by the 1990s overpopulation would lead to worldwide starvation and the exhaustion of key minerals, metals and oil, predictions that failed utterly. Politics polluted the science and made me an environmental skeptic.
Nevertheless, data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming. My attention was piqued on February 8 when 86 leading evangelical Christians--the last cohort I expected to get on the environmental bandwagon--issued the Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for "national legislation requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions" in carbon emissions.
Then I attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Monterey, Calif., where former vice president Al Gore delivered the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard, based on the recent documentary film about his work in this area, An Inconvenient Truth. The striking before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world shocked me out of my doubting stance.
Four books eventually brought me to the flipping point. Archaeologist Brian Fagan's The Long Summer (Basic, 2004) explicates how civilization is the gift of a temporary period of mild climate. Geographer Jared Diamond's Collapse (Penguin Group, 2005) demonstrates how natural and human-caused environmental catastrophes led to the collapse of civilizations. Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006) is a page-turning account of her journeys around the world with environmental scientists who are documenting species extinction and climate change unmistakably linked to human action. And biologist Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) reveals how he went from being a skeptical environmentalist to a believing activist as incontrovertible data linking the increase of carbon dioxide to global warming accumulated in the past decade.
It is a matter of the Goldilocks phenomenon. In the last ice age, CO2 levels were 180 parts per million (ppm)--too cold. Between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, levels rose to 280 ppm--just right. Today levels are at 380 ppm and are projected to reach 450 to 550 by the end of the century--too warm. Like a kettle of water that transforms from liquid to steam when it changes from 99 to 100 degrees Celsius, the environment itself is about to make a CO2-driven flip.
According to Flannery, even if we reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 70 percent by 2050, average global temperatures will increase between two and nine degrees by 2100. This rise could lead to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which the March 24 issue of Science reports is already shrinking at a rate of 224 ±41 cubic kilometers a year, double the rate measured in 1996 (Los Angeles uses one cubic kilometer of water a year). If it and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melt, sea levels will rise five to 10 meters, displacing half a billion inhabitants.
Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
The Role of the Sun in 20th Century Climate Change
Final sentence of the introduction:
"However, assessments of the amount of energy coming from the sun shows no overall change in the second half of the twentieth century."
Read the rest and see if it's informative.
Cause and effect... you observe a data point and then decide it was the cause.. how do you know that 180-280 window was not an effect of less or more solar energy reaching the surface due to lesser solar activity? Or some other action?
Glacial/interglacial can be blamed just as much on the desalinization of the north atlantic and the slowing of the interoceanic flows than it can on any change in atmospheric gas make up.
I personally fail to see any cause-effect correlation. If anything it seems your observation that 180-280 constant still had wild climate changes from glacial to non glacial... so how can one conclude that any amount out of that range has any direct or indirect effect on global temps?
1 Reason for global temp changes... more or less energy from the sun reaching the earth, pure and simple.
I couldn't agree with you more on that! Unfortunately, that is not what most of the global warming hysteria is really about, that isn't its true objective.
Reducing dependence on foreign sources of energy is tangible, the costs of being dependent on foreign sources are provable, etc. The same cannot be said of "global warming".
You need to learn to read. The source says 656 million tons, from the UK alone, per year.
I mean, do the math yourself. If you use 10 gallons of gasoline per week, that's about 30 pounds of gas, or 25 pounds of carbon. That's a little over 1/2 ton of carbon per year or around 2 tons of CO2. Multiply by 250 million Americans, and you get 500 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, just from driving.
Thanks; interesting that the CO2 line follows, rather than leads the temp line especially in the last 10,000 years with the temperature peaking at +2 with a lull of 255ppm CO2 and the temp line has peaks where little movement is shown on the CO2 line, artefact perhaps?
But you tilt, not flip, is this your personal windmill?
YOu can also track back global warming increases to the metor event over siberia which increased water in the upper atmosphere immensely... I'd say that theory holds more weight than any CO2 nonsense.
Earth is a Dynamic system, the idea that CO2 causes global warming is bunk. In the 1970s we were all going to freeze to death due to global cooling... Whatever happened to that one?
Global warming due to human activity is just arrogance and fear mongering. We could blow up every nuke we had and the planet and life on it would still survive.
There are real and true environmental crisises that require our attention and efforts.. unfortunately these REAL issues are lost by the lunacy of nutjobs who want to just fearmonger for political gains.
In my state alone more than 2000 miles of streams are contaminated with acid mine drainage... that's a real tangible problem that humans clearly caused, and we know how to clean up... but instead of eliminating that problem and problems like that around the globe we have communist left overs, and other capitalist haters running around trying to use fear to shut down economic activity.
Has anyone shown that even a miniscule change can be made?
For those worried about the threat of melting ice caps and rising seas and coastal flooding, read 'A new Sea is Born' at http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/start.html?pg=20
"A new ocean is forming in the hottest place on Earth, and it’s putting on one hell of a show.
In the Afar Triangle – a region of northeastern Africa where summer temps hit 131 degrees Fahrenheit and scientists have armed bodyguards for protection against guerrillas – the ground is splitting apart, making room for a sea.
The process usually takes eons, but last autumn several vents suddenly cracked open, spewing hot gases and ash near where geologists were working.
When the dust settled, researchers found a 40-mile-long, lava-filled fissure that hadn’t been there six days earlier"
If the Ocean rises a few feet, chances are a new sea will be formed in the desert wastelands of North Africa.
The area is already 300 feet below sea level, and it can hold a lot of water - after the mountain range in Eritrea is breached.
I just read a recent post on this which was great. And again I'm lucky, I found it:
What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?
Certainly CO2 is not the only thing that affects global temperatures, but it's an important factor.
Let's do nothing drastic; though we may well be in a position to lead in a sensible and workable program to conserve all resources, we still have an obligation to maintain the standard of living we have attained in order to help those still battling ancient diseases, deprivations and despotic rulers whose own needs are met regardless of the hardships they place on those they rule.
I'd rather look at the science, thank you. I hate those enviro-weenies,for several reasons. Having said that, and given that they exaggerate for political purposes, I say that we, as CONSERVATIVES, can do much to address this issue. Things that are GOOD for the US. So what if it makes some loonies happy, it doesn't make it bad.
Knee jerk anti-environmentalism is as stupid as enviro-weenie hand wringing.
The real curse is that with each advance the alarmists make in convincing us that we caused it their agenda of directing the reversal is moved forward.
As though we had all forgotten that reversals of physical processes are always more difficult, expensive or impossible and experience is the core of knowledge; has anyone ever put Humpty Dumpty back together?
For your information, the reason for the 180-280 ppm window is a subject of intense research interest, because models can only reproduce about 2/3 of the variability range. AND... these models are dependent on variability of solar insolation due to Milankovitch forcing. Milankovitch forcing is probably what drives glacial-interglacial variability. CO2 responds to and amplifies the effect: warmer periods mean more CO2, colder periods mean less CO2. I just posted this, but here it is again:
What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?
Glacial/interglacial can be blamed just as much on the desalinization of the north atlantic and the slowing of the interoceanic flows than it can on any change in atmospheric gas make up.
See above. Glacial/interglacial cycles are driven by Milankovitch forcing, with atmospheric CO2 an amplifying factor.
If anything it seems your observation that 180-280 constant still had wild climate changes from glacial to non glacial... so how can one conclude that any amount out of that range has any direct or indirect effect on global temps?
280 ppm was the maximum in the natural variability observed during warm interglacials. We're now at 350 ppm and rising during a warm interglacial. There's a problem in predicting what that will do because there's no precedent for it in the past 640,000 years! Radiative forcing basics indicate that it should have a warming effect, perhaps augmented by positive feedback and perhaps reduced by negative feedbacks. This is still an area where the scientists and modelers are working hard.
Reason for global temp changes... more or less energy from the sun reaching the earth, pure and simple.
This statement is timescale dependent.
You should expect to hear from the lunatic and fanatic communities soon; careful with the insults, this is a family site.
Bump for later napalming.
I agree that global warming is just one of several important environmental issues facing the world today. Some of them deserve/require more immediate attention than global warming. Is it too bold to say that the world needs better environmental policies and practices, overall?
I discovered the secret of the HVAC supplementation quite accidently during a review of trade journals; it wasn't made public until the funding tube was pulled.
Go down the road a few miles and you can buy cigarettes in a wigwam.
Depends on the model and the person.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.