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.
My ancestors living on the edge of civilization in a wild and untamed wilderness on an unexplored continent every night before bed prayed to God that the wild animals that preyed on them and their crops and that the dangerous environment out their window full of disease and sudden unexpected death, would be drastically changed (even gone) when their children reached adulthood. I'm glad I don't have to worry about a sudden outbreak of smallpox killing me or fearing that a pack of wild wolves will suddenly appear and tear me apart while I'm out plowing the back 40 with my mule.
Your Freudian Slip is showing.
Because that is the time that climate allowed humans to create civilization. Prior to that we were living in caves running around clad only in bearskins and leaves. Is civilization not important to you?
Because you happen to be here?
Of course. It makes it a heck of a lot more important than the year 522,435 BC.
They have kept it well hidden behind a screen of attacks on all types of science for at lest the last fifty years (in my experience) and the last few hunderd (from what I have read.)
But it's not clear that this will happen. The models for a future with more CO2 are all over the place (regardless for what Gore says.)
One could easily get a Sahara Earth, or a Sauna Earth, or a have the poles freeze (due to more rainfall) and the equatorial areas either bake or boil (depending on the rainfall details.)
The tricky part is that increased "warming" (more calories, not necessarily higher temperatures) most likely lead to more evaporation and more ice melt. Thus more rainfall (or more snowfall, causing polar glaciation?) A change in the dynamics of ocean currents could lead to a hot equator and frozen Europe. It's not easy to predict. One might just get roughly the same as now but with more storms.
The best indicators of warming are the northward movement of the polar bear, elk, walrus, fish, etc. ranges. Likewise, the growing season in northern climes has lengthened. Mountain glacier destruction and creation seem to dyanmic (at least to me) to be reliable indicators.
The toll booth delays can be ameliorated by just tracking everyone by GPS and automatically charging their bank account.
I assume you are just kidding here.
Predicting "global warming" or "the greenhouse effect" (or whatever) isn't like predicting weather anyway. It's like pointing that summers are hotter than winters on the average. Or predictin that July 2050 will be mostly warmer (in New York City) than January 2051.
See post 11 in this thread:
They do have an agenda -- to try and correct a lot of the incorrect science that has been promulgated by organizations, groups, and individuals opposed to any type of action on global warming. But... they also have a lot of good perspectives on climate science, all in one place. Certainly you can cherry pick biased statements. But if you want to see why climate chance research is not based on wild speculations and scanty data, keep reading.
First Volcanoes contributes from 130 to 230 million tons/year of CO2 not 110 million. Sulfur dioxide is the problem with Volcanoes and warming effects on the earth not CO2. If you factor in what Sulfur Dioxide does, Volcanoes contributes considerably more to global warming then what man does per year.
Second why don't you just say how much man contributes instead of adding in other numbers to what man creates?
Of the 186 billion tons of CO2 that enter earth's atmosphere each year from all sources, only 6 billion tons are from human activity.
again even if the earth doubled the total amount of CO2 we would have a temperature increase of around 1.2 Deg C.
What was the claim?
Only from CO2. Positive feedbacks can increase the warming, negative feedbacks can decrease it. While increasing water vapor is a definite positive feedback, clouds could be strongly positive, weakly positive, neutral, weakly negative, or strongly negative -- and that's a critical area of research right now.
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
An excellent discussion of greenhouse gasses.
Summary page:
Anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 contributions cause only about 0.117% of Earth's greenhouse effect, (factoring in water vapor). This is insignificant!
Adding up all anthropogenic greenhouse sources, the total human contribution to the greenhouse effect is around 0.28% (factoring in water vapor).
Sulfur dioxide (provided it enters the stratosphere in significant quantities) COOLS the global temperature.
Of the 186 billion tons of CO2 that enter earth's atmosphere each year from all sources, only 6 billion tons are from human activity.
The quantities on the left are the anthropogenic contributions. Add up the natural contributions into the atmosphere and out of the atmosphere and see what you get.
The answer indicates why atmospheric CO2 concentrations are increasing.
” I assume you are just kidding here “
NO I am not
“Predicting "global warming" or "the greenhouse effect" (or whatever) isn't like predicting weather anyway. It's like pointing that summers are hotter than winters on the average.”
Tell me what the average temperature is going to be 10 million years from now or a million years?
The time period is to long? how about 10000 years from now or 1000 years?
you can’t predict the weather.
BTW- notice the CO2 was over 12x higher then the CO2 we have today and the temperature was cold 550 million years ago?
You just don't listening.
oopos 450 million years not 550 million.
MonroeDNA had asserted a steady-state global temp for the past eight years.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1638148/posts?page=38#38
I figured perhaps that might be possible under some specific measurement scheme, though I'd have to see what that scheme entailed.
From what I can see, though, global temps ARE rising and the only remaining debate is about causes.
This is what I'm trying to say too. The resources required to adapt to change are no more significant, from what I can see, than the resources required to try and prevent the change. Especially one that, according to this very article, is NOT PREVENTABLE.
This is what bothers me, and what cogitator never responded to when I brought it up the first time: According to this article, "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."
Okay, we aren't going to be able to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 70%. We'd have to stop every mammal on Earth from farting. Good luck with that. So what's the point? Change is coming. Learning to adapt seems more practical than trying to hold back the tide with a broom.
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