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.
Thanks, another good point.
There are *so* many other variables that their models don't take into account, it's rather laughable to consider their models anywhere near complete.
Heck, it's been warming since the end of the last ice age.
And, it's all our fault!
Where I live used to be orange groves (in the 19th century). People, including myself, keep citrus trees for a few years at a time, but we have a killer freeze about every ten years. I've been here 60 years, and the coldest days have been since 1989. In 1989 we had five inches of snow.
I realize this doesn't measure climate change, but I have my doubts about actual changes in agricultural zones.
The reason you don't get it is that the majority of climate fluctuations throughout paleohistory are linked to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. That's why I said you were wrong. Yes, there are certainly other influences on global climate, and not all climate variability is caused by changes in atmospheric CO2. But one of the primary factors is and was CO2 in the atmosphere. No matter how hard you want to believe it's not, the scientific understanding is well-established.
And the reason it's important now is because CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are rapidly increasing.
Have a nice holiday.
Nice chart in #278. I'll take todays garden over the icebox 18,000 years ago any ole day.
There's a reason that Gore called his movie "An Inconvenient Truth". For a certain subset of people it could also have been titled "Facts That I'm Forced to Ignore".
I invite you to learn a lot more. But you don't have to, of course.
Climate is a major function of Earths rotation and orbit along with the yellow orb. CO2 contributes as a greenhouse effect but nowhere comparable to the two major functions. Man's contribution to the Greenhouse effect is rounding error. As sure as the sun comes up tomorrow the next little ice age will show up right on time. Now that will be a problem to contend with as growing seasons shorten, glaciers reclaim fertile land and lots of people compete for limited resources.
Any scientific theory/movement that has Al Gore as one of its leading spokesman is has a major credibility issue before the first data set can be examined. More significantly, any scientific theory whose advocates predicate their presentations with claims that the expert consensus in favor of their position is so great that there no longer is any need for debate/examination/justification of its premises, is further implicating its credibility and acquiring classic hallmarks of a con game, which of course is all that GLOBAL WARMING really is.
The central issue in Al Gore's life (Son of rich and powerful U.S Senator, raised in hotel by male "nanny") has been his quest for the accoutrements of accomplishment, without demonstration of any real effort or talent on his part. e.g. Serving in Vietnam via a six week stint as a "journalist"; e.g., going to HARVARD, while suppressing forever his record there of stagering acedemic failure, especially as to his one science course for liberal arts majors, e.g claiming to have invented the internet. Adopting and promoting the psuedo scientific pretensions of the "environmentalists" is only one more in a long chain of manifestations of Gore's innate need to look/"feel" important with no further effort than memorizing the uncross-examined, unrebutted, arguments of global warming theology.
Also, you still havent told us what the temperature in downtown Milwaukee will be on noon a week from next Tuesday.
No we aren't. We are left with the planets energy source as well. What percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is contributed by humans burning petrochemicals?
LOL!! FWIW, I think you and I may be on the same page, on this one: predominant causes of warming aren't anthropogenic. IF we are, in fact contributors, we are only negligibly so, and any effort on our part to stop the overall warming trend will be economically exhausting and, in the final analysis, entirely futile; although it may make some politicians, lobbyists and envirotech firms wealthy over the next 100 years. Ultimately, that last point is why this will continue to be pushed as a top drawer issue.
Right! In fact we should abandon technology almost entirely. After all, when we have to retreat from the coast, mud huts are soooo much easier to reconstruct than frame houses!
25 years ago, climatologists were warning of the coming Ice Age. Well, maybe 30, but close enough.
http://denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
Obviously, I haven’t got that memo yet. /s
”The tilts that cause glacial ages occured in immensly long periods of time. so the warming cannot be attributed to the Milankovitch effect, of course, or to solar output. We are left with Greenhouse emmissions.”
You are omitting hundreds if not thousands of other possibilities in your ‘process of elimination.’
”Google it”
We have an unofficial ban of Google at Freerepublic.
What the global alarmist fail to point out there are other factors involved by the earth where it could produce a great deal more one year vs the next.
Yeah, I know. But human contribution to the greenhouse effect is about 1/10 of 3%, rounding error. If we stopped burning fuel tomorrow, there would be no effect on the climate cycle.
Yet climate has varied greatly over those thousands of years. Take a look at the temperature proxies in these data sets: ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/contributions_by_author/ like this one: ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/contributions_by_author/bard2002/bard2002.txt This is a simple one, but don't let me bias your research by cherry picking. The theme in all the data is that temperature variations are normal although a lot of the proxy measurements are localized and will therefore show more variation than a world-wide average. But it is difficult to get an worldwide average using proxies without averaging out apples with oranges and appending biased measurements to produce hockey sticks.
("Once I believed the other way, now I've changed") is a rhetorical device designed to appeal to a specific audience. Some members of that audience appear to be right here on FR responding to your post
That's the whole idea. The true-believers are not content to post articles with facts, they would rather suck in gullible folks with rhetoric and argue talking points with them then face the scientific challenges.
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