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.
There's a small handful of prosletyzers. The people who know the science are tired of arguing with them because the alarmists are like jello. You push them decisively on one point and they'll go off on another thread and push some other point. Most of their points are copied from people with an agenda.
That IMO is slightly low, but not unreasonable.
The highest projected increase in CO2 (which IMO is unlikely) yeilds another 1 degree C.
You think atmospheric CO2 will top off at 470 ppm? Why?
In your bong, maybe.:-) 0.035% of the normal atmosphere is CO2.
He has it on good authority from the inventor of the Internet.
You left off the Darwinists.
I'm sure it was an innocent oversight.
I corrected your spelling for you. No, mainstream scientists are not anti-scientific. What an odd idea that would be!
Dude, I knew that bong would get me into trouble. I stand corrected.
According to:
http://www.uigi.com/air.html
it is .038%, essentially the same as your claim.
I guess that makes this a case of me being right even when I am wrong. Man's output of CO2 is even less of a potential influence than I said. I am incorrect, but accurate (beat that CBS!)
BTW, the temperature increase is not linear, but logarithmic: see http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/05/climate-sensitivity-and-editorial.html: You should realize that the carbon dioxide only absorbs the infrared radiation at certain frequencies, and it can only absorb the maximum of 100% of the radiation at these frequencies. By this comment, I want to point out that the "forcing" - the expected additive shift of the terrestrial equilibrium temperature - is not a linear function of the carbon dioxide concentration. Instead, the additional greenhouse effect becomes increasingly unimportant as the concentration increases: the expected temperature increase is something like
* 1.5 ( 1 - exp[-(concentration-280)/200 ppm] ) Celsius
By specifically leaving out this 'contextual info' that would prove them wrong, the 'Co2 is killing us' folks have really pulled a good one.
The people who know the science are tired of arguing with them...
Exactly! It has gotten to be beyond tiresome.
There used to be people who posted serious data and analyses but it was just mental floss to the "believers".
I may have heard something but but have no real info on this - it would be very compelling.
Agree completely. The global warming naysayers are wrong to deny that global warming caused by human action exists, but the enviromental activists are equally wrong to think that you can ignore the basic laws of economics the way their opponents ignore the laws of ecology, and that there's an easy quick fix that can reverse the effects of over 200 years of massive emissions of various pollutants.
The positions of the continents have much more to do with the average temperature of the Earth than CO2. 600 million years ago and to a smaller extent, 450 million years ago, all of the continents were locked together with a big portion of them over the South Pole.
Glaciers built up over the poles, spread out over more continental area (glaciers cannot spread out the same way over oceans which why the glacial sheets of Antarctica are more-or-less limited to the continental shelf.)
As more glaciers built up, more sunlight was reflected which made it colder which lead to more ice and so on and so on.
600 million years ago, this process lead to a near complete freezing of the entire planet, even the oceans, and the epoch has been termed as Snowball Earth by geologists.
When continental drift lead enough of the continents off of the South Pole, the climate rewarmed and what we got was the Pre-Cambrian explosion of complex life-forms 580 million years ago.
About 35 million years ago, Antarctica moved far enough South that glaciers took over again. Greenland moved far enough North that glaciers took over about 15 million years ago. 3 million years ago, the North American continent moved far enough North that it became suceptible to climate and glacial oscillations. This has also contributed to the glaciations that Asia and Europe experience.
The poles have always been frozen over whether covered in ocean or continents. Someone mentioned trees growing at the poles (laugh).
The point is, the position of the continents has much more to do with the average temperature of the Earth and climate norms than a measely 0.038 per cent of CO2.
Your link neglects to consider pressure broadening (CO2 in the lower atmosphere has a significant linewidth; as you go up in elevation, it narrows). So while the extinction at the top of each rovibrational line may be close to saturated, that on the flanks will continue to increase with concentration. An absorbtion line with finite linewidth will never give rise to an equation of the form you show, because there will always be regions in the flanks of the lines whose absorbtion continues to increase with concentration.
If Scientific American, a populist science mag, has to address the "inconvenient truth" of real scientists do NOT agree with global warming BS, then it is clear they are on the loosing end of the PR debate.
Remember none of the industrial contries met KYOTO BS protocols.
I don't know what that means.
Not according the most recent, most accurate analyses; plus cellulosic ethanol has a better energy in - energy out ratio.
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