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 world ran out of coal a few years after WWII. Remember? Book em Dano. Pure scam/B.S.!!! Are these turds being lead to acceptance of world-wide genocide to "save' the earth???
Even such noted climate scientists as James Hansen believe that technology and the economics of energy will go a long way toward determing the future climate trajectory. But I think that the time has come to accelerate things that might help slow down the increase in atmospheric CO2, like converting to biofuels (ethanol, biodiesel, etc.)
He cites Jared Diamond's "Collapse". That should suffice to show he isn't a serious thinker.
Oh wait...he also says, "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."
Ah yes, those climatological experts, "86 leading evangelical Christians". So why am I not convinced?
Chart, please.
There is something unsettling about a person so ignorant and naive as to make this statement, specially with a subject that no one can make any certain statements about...
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.
He lost me right there. Anyone who expects a static climate after a 6-billion year history of constant changes, is too stupid to take seriously.
According to me, Flannery is an ass.
Well I'm impressed - NOT!! Where's the barf alert!
Let's see, he got his mind changed by the Evangelical Christians (I wonder if he now believes in Intelligent Design also), Algore (the inventor of the internet), an archaelogist, a journalist, and a biologist - all objective climate experts, I'm sure...
And who the hell is Shermer and why should I care what he thinks??
Anyway, looks like their anxiety should be significantly eased by the fact that they also believe we're finally (to their great delight) reaching "peak oil".
"Dr. Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine and author of the bestseller Why People Believe Weird Things, isn't just skeptical about pseudoscience, junk history, and the paranormal. He's apparently also skeptical about government, since he's a libertarian.
Shermer made his political beliefs clear in the November 2004 issue of Reason magazine. While discussing who he planned to support in the presidential election, Shermer said, "I'm a libertarian" -- albeit one who planned to vote for Democrat John Kerry because "Bush's foreign policy is making the world more dangerous and more precarious..."
Part of the problem is the climate system's own inertia; it may be that only now are we starting to see definable and recognizable changes. The majority of the more severe effects probably won't happen while I'm alive. However, I'm concerned enough (and hopefully informed enough) about this issue to think that my children and my grandchildren will be experiencing some of these more severe effects, and that bothers me. I also am concerned that there will be significantly less wildlife (globally) and coral reefs -- that the things they see now in aquariums and zoos and know that these animals and environments still are "in the world" may be drastically changed (even gone) by the time that they reach adulthood.
Of what?
If we don't burn the crude oil in the supply stream there will be no profit motive in maintaining the infrastructure and it will be shut down to preserve economic stability; if allowed to atrophy it will be lost as a backup strategy and we will be in a new crisis of supply as our demand for alternative fuels outpaces our accessibility and there will be hundreds of stories written about the "Sludge Belt" where old oil fields are slowly turning to tar pits.
Although I consider myself literate in most of the sciences, I must defer to the experts-without-an-agenda on this.
When were the vostok cores gathered and for what purpose?
Aren't these the ones that were demonstrated to be totally useless because they were not specifically gathered to measure gases with the proper safeguards to prevent almost certain contamination?
As I recall, a rspected member of the Russian Academy of Sciences wrote a comprehensive analysis on this subject.
Anybody who doesn't understand that the last 10,000 years have been an unusually stable global climate (as underscored by Fagan's book) isn't really taking the issue seriously.
The planet certainly appears to be getting warmer. It's always either getting warmer or colder. Part of the debate is whether getting warmer is good or bad for civilization. But the larger part of the debate is whether human activity is the major, or even a minor, cause for the current trend.
He doesn't address these debates, so what exactly is his flipping point?
See post 28.
Regarding crude oil: I happen to think it's a pretty valuable resource (plastics!), and we shouldn't be just burning it.
The average temperature of the earth has not warmed over the past 8 years.
Personally, I'm not willing to drive the world into an economic malaise so that someday my grandkids can see a coral reef on vacation.
Research, I believe.
Aren't these the ones that were demonstrated to be totally useless because they were not specifically gathered to measure gases with the proper safeguards to prevent almost certain contamination?
I believe that a few threads ago you posted me a "research" paper on the validity of the Vostok ice core data. I don't know if I posted back to you a massive, comprehensive refutation of it. If you can find the link again, I can do the search I did then, and post the refutation back to you.
The bottom line is that the "attack" on the Vostok ice core data is baseless.
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.