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.
"Why are we still debating climate change? How soon will we hit peak oil supply? When politics mix with science, what is being brewed? Join speakers from the left & the right, from the lab & the field, from industry & advocacy, as we air the ongoing debate about whether human activity is actually changing the climate of the planet.
From June 2–4, 2006, the Environmental Wars conference will host scientists, writers, environmentalists, and thinkers from all points along the environmental spectrum at the California Institute of Technology for questions, answers, and opinions.
Special Guests: John Stossel, Michael Crichton
Speakers: Gregory Arnold, Jonathan Adler, David Baltimore, Gregory Benford, Brian Fagan, David Goodstein, Paul MacCready, Chris Mooney, Donald Prothero, Tapio Schneider
Could be fun. Crichton should have a few things to say!
ping
Bump.
Doesn't mean I dont think the greenies aren't exaggerating, but what the heck, going Nuclear is a pretty conservative cause, and it can help solve the problem of global warming, assuming there is one. Its a win/win.
There is an interesting connection between the opening sentences where the author was warned and the closing ones where he now obligingly stands in line.
Oh, his epiphany at the evangelists' hands was also poignant.
Absolute bullshit. The CO2 level has been FAR HIGHER than 550 ppm, and yet global temperatures weren't signficantly higher. The dinosaurs seemed to thrive during the period.
Oh what basis is this moron deciding that 550 ppm is "too warm".
Oh my GOD! I only have 95 years to find a new apartment!! Quickly, let's destroy the economy so that over the next 95 years, the coastline doesn't change!! That way, instead of moving half a billion people, we can just starve them to death!
The same people who believe in global warming also, for the most part, believe that we're soon going to run out of fossil fuels. So, even if it's true, it's only a temporary problem, right?
There are those who have considered that general warming results in increased CO2 but no real studies that I have heard of.
Now, this is certainly evidence that proves something beyond a doubt.
So do I. Nuclear for electricity, ethanol and hybrids for vehicles.
That's all fine and good, but did Gore cite any controlling legal authority? ;)
Nevertheless, data trump politics...
He should have stopped here...
He's servimg his "time out" in the local orchid grower's greenhouse where the ppm averages 1100.
Maybe he actually thought about it and means what he says.
The electricity from Nuclear can be used to generate hydrogen if necessary as well. I don't know why this isn't a more urgent issue. We need a Nuclear Now! Campaign..
If you read the whole thing, Brian Fagan's book and perhaps Diamond's might interest you. The basis for the 180-280 ppm window is the Vostok ice core data going back 640,000 years when CO2 was never out of that range (and it encompassed the full glacial-interglacial climate range).
Climate in prior epochs is not directly comparable to the modern (Pleistocene/Holocene) climate era.
Let's admit one truth, if these predictions of doom and gloom were made to play out in our lifetime none of the crisis mongers would dare bet their own farm.
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