I would say it is a good guess we will have greater temperatures in the next hundred years. Considering we are coming out of a cold period.
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.
But that isn't true. It's not omitted AT ALL -- the positive water vapor feedback in GCMs is a fundamental part of them. Were it not for the positive water vapor feedback, it would not be possible to predict global warming above 1-1.5 degrees C for doubled CO2. (And not that the positive water vapor feedback for a long time was a theoretical construct that has only in the past couple of years received observational confirmations.)
This claim is attributable to a recent inaccurate characterization from a source named Bob Carter.
A picture is worth a thousand words
Now, the only problem would be if an inconsiderate volcano like Merapi went big and cooled things off for a couple more years, confusing the ignoranti.
I would say it is a good guess we will have greater temperatures in the next hundred years. Considering we are coming out of a cold period.
Sorry, I responded to someone else making a similar point. In this case, the author adopts a bad-case perspective. He isn't necessarily right. Number one, presuming this is Centigrade, the majority of the models converge around 2-3 C for warming by 2100. (I actually happen to think that the quote is for Fahrenheit degrees, because the maximum - highly unlikely - predictions are 6 C or 10 F.
Review this long thread, and look for responses regarding James Hansen's alternative scenario.
Furthermore, there have been discussions of carbon sequestration, which could help. But the main determinant is economic trajectories and energy use.
Yes, change is coming. Action now and soon might be able to prevent the more serious detrimental changes. However, if plans aren't made now to enable actions in a few years (like increased use of biofuels), then the window for effective action will get smaller and smaller.
The market is driving some of these changes. That's a start.
Yes I know that.
The slay of figures has got you cogitator. Its like watching people getting duped by a shell game.
And he proceeds to not list any data.
His books and church groups are all mere knee-jerk political statements, and fluff.
I would be more worried about the sunspot activity decline being predicted...
Okay, so we can run around doing drastic things now that MIGHT prevent SOME things... or we can be a little more sanguine and realize that:
1) Scientific models are famous for being inaccurate and
2) Climate change happens so slowly, humanity will probably adapt to it just fine.
Sorry, I'm still going with my scenario: it is more reasonable to adapt than to flail about struggling to prevent. Especially if our attempts at preventing the inevitable will create all sorts of unintended crises that will then have to be dealt with. Now, if we want to develop alternative methods of fuel etc to free us from the Middle East, I'm all for it. But that's not one of those "narrow window, hurry hurry" things.
You seem to have everything almost 180 degrees backward. Turn around.
The CO2 level has been FAR HIGHER than 550 ppm, and yet global temperatures weren't signficantly higher.
Do you have a source for this? Thank you.
Gas taxes might be a better method, provided they are actually set so that there is a resonable relationship between the revenues they raise and the money spent on roads.
You do of course know that it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get out of it.
I sometimes think that I'd go to New Jersey more than I do if it weren't for the bridge tolls.
And I've often been stuck in the toll booths at entrance to I-476.
And I really don't want to get EZPass.
Do you have a source for this? Thank you.
Post #196
You surely aren't missing much.
This helps with post 196
The only thing Al Gore could ever convince me of is that he is completely insane. Long ago, the alleged "science" and "data" that "flipped" Shermer and many other simpleminded leftist was shown to be distortion and deception. No matter. Just keep repeating it, over and over, and add a bit more urgency as time goes on.
Like a "Wizard taking away the sun" during a solar eclipse, the vast unwashed mob of the easily-led are made to believe that what the Wizard says MUST be true! They saw it with their own eyes, just as we see proof of receding glaciers and "data" that "confirms" what Al Gore screams in his feverish delusion. "Man is doing this! And we must stop it now!" CO2 is the culprit. End of debate. Yet...
Yet, no mention of the fact that CO2 is but a tiny percentage of what is considered "Greenhouse gases" in our atmosphere. And of the CO2 that is there, only a tiny percentage of that is the result of human activity. So much more data and scientific fact MUST be left out and ignored to even begin to build a case for "man made global warming" that any standard of scientific research ethics would dismiss the entire tortured concept of "MMGW" for lack of credible evidence, much less its totally faulty logic.
No, my friends, science has little to do with it at this stage, rational scientific debate, even less. To finish my argument, I ask you all to ask of a "Global Warmer", "Just what do we do then, to avert this impending doom for all of Mankind?" There is no answer, short of the virtual shutdown of the world's industrial economies. Drastic reduction in all combustion, not just fossil fuel, will be necessary, to even affect the CO2 levels by a tiny amount, and that would be difficult to measure even then. They have no "solution", short of human extinction, really, since no nation would simply sit by and die an economic death and collapse for the sake of the insane policies of leftist environmentalists. And I guarantee there are loonies out there in leftist Academe that are building a case for that too!
To be honest, there are studies showing that levels of CO2 has risen over the past 1000 years. A sharp rise is seen in the rightmost part of the graph, suggesting that CO2 has risen significantly after the industrial revolution. graph from intergovernmental panel of climate change.
Also this graph from the National Energy Information Center (NEIC) shows an increase in CO2:
Or when they stop focusing only on American contributions to this worldwide problem. A relative just arrived home from a 3-week tour of China. He couldn't believe the air pollution levels there and his rather liberal "New Yorker"-formed assumptions were shaken to the core by the reality of what he saw.
The average mass of the atmosphere is about 5000 trillion metric tons.
Therefore, the only thing your chart proves is that 380-280=100.
"From what I can see, though, global temps ARE rising and the only remaining debate is about causes."
From what I can see, though, is that the glaciers DID start melting at the end of the Pleistocene. And the only remaining debate is about causes.
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