The Flipping Point (global warming conversion of skeptic Michael Shermer)

Scientific American ^ | June 2006 | Michael Shermer

[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.

[Chaguito]

Evangelical preachers are always the last to adopt whatever weird crap has been in the popular culture. And they do it about 30 years late. Francis Schaeffer noted this years ago in The God Who Is There.

Perfect. I read that and I wish I had pointed it out.

[Steve Van Doorn]

elvisabel78: Again for your process of elimination you have more variables to over come.

Here are a number of possibilities that could be taking place right here:
Mantle of the earth

We are just now very recently (first time viewed in 1997) been learning the Mantle has currents much like our oceans. This means the mantle is a large body of liquid that is moving which has different pressures and temperatures.

More information I found here:

http://www.geophysics.harvard.edu/geodyn/nasa_report/NASA_Final_Report.html

[Gail Wynand]

Total Volume of Earth Atmosphere = 5000 TRILLION metric tons.

Proportion that is CO2 = .03%

Proportion of Earth's Annual CO2 output that is human sourced = 2.5%

Actual caclulated Global temperature increase over last 100 years = 1 degree (F)

Proportion of Atmosphere contributing to Greenhouse effect which moderates earth temperatures, constituted by water vapor (H2O) = up to 4%

# of years it took earths atmosphere to evolve from Helium-Hydrogen to its present Nitrogen - Oxegen composition =
about a Billion.

# of years Earth has been in a warming trend = 18000 (since last ice age)

[elvisabel78]

The IPCC says:

However, over the Northern Hemisphere land areas where urban heat islands are most apparent, both the trends of lower-tropospheric temperature and surface air temperature show no significant differences.
You might be overestimating the impact of urban heat islands.

[TChad]

spend more time listening to Rush and less to these environmentalist Wackos.

As a Rush fan you might remember Rush's great caller "Peter the Lawyer" during the Clinton impeachment. Peter Mulhern (as he was later identified) said that conservatives sometimes forget that some of what appears in the New York Times is actually true.

Same thing here. Just because an environmentalist wacko cries wolf, that does mean that there is no wolf. Sure, Kyoto is a economically disastrous non-solution, the IPCC temperature projections are highly speculative, and Algore is a buffoon. Yet CO2 levels ARE rising, almost certainly due to human activity, and that might turn out to have real, bad, consequences.

Rush does not even seem to favor studying this as a potential problem. He flatly states that humans cannot affect the climate. I have plenty of respect for Rush, but here his opinion appears to be grounded in politics, not science.

[Steve Van Doorn]

If these environmentalist are right and CO2 levels are rising at an ALARMING rate then why don’t they pull their money together and farm Plankton which we already know gives us the majority of our Oxygen.

Why would they want to destroy our lives rather then benefit it?

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

Probably more the latter.

[Steve Van Doorn]

Off the top of my head; I believe if a dedicated group wanted to compensate for the CO2 created by man they could do it for $10 to $20 million plus maybe $1 million per year expenses farming already known plankton.

All they would need to do is feed the already known spawning areas.

[Steve Van Doorn]

Another thing.. we do know in one of the largest spawning areas for plankton there is Volcanic activity creating warm waters in the area which is very bad for Plankton. I personally believe this is what is creating the higher CO2 in recent years. Only one study has been done on this but it was largely ignored.

BTW - it is fascinating how much Oxygen we get from Plankton. It is better you look that up yourself, few people believe it until they read it themselves.

[TChad]

Why would they want to destroy our lives rather then benefit it?

You really want for me to try to describe the convoluted motivations of liberals, and to explain why they are not part of the reality-based community? Before dinner?

[Gail Wynand]

"Yet CO2 levels ARE rising"

depends on what baseline you select. And, so what if they are rising? Variation is a natural and ongoing part of the atmospheric process. Otherwise we might still be in the ice age.

"almost certainly due to human activity"

based upon what? The 2.5% of annual CO2 output that is attributed to human activity? What makes you think the other 97.5% of CO2 production arises from static phenomena? Why cant they be responsible for CO2 level variations? Does anyone think that natural C02 output worldwide is being accurately measured?


"and that might turn out to have real, bad, consequences."

or it might not. What is your basis for considering it something to be concerned about? Since the reltionship of global temperature to CO2 increases are known to be logarithmic it is far more likely it will have no consequences at all if CO2 continues to increase above the level at which its impact on global temperature is likely to plateau. (not much warmer than it is now) see:www.junkscience.com


Antrhopomorphic Global Warming is a non-scientific hoax cloaked in techncal jarjon by pretentious psuedo scientists and political con men like Al Gore. It is rubbish. Total B.S. Their con game, succeeds however any time a regular citizen is persuaded to start hedging his bets and thinking they should waste $20 on a light bulb that has a built in transformer and ballast to be discarded every time it burns out well short of the promised 10,000 hour life (if used less than 3 hrs at time a coating wears off due to the frequence of on/off cycles) or an underweight overpriced automobile that has both an internal combustion system and a battery electric drive system (a good diesel motor in a similiar weight car gets just as many miles per gallon)

Or, oh yeah, lets get on the inefficiency bandwagon (lead by the same folks that brought you MBTE) by paying more to burn more costly and less powerful alcohol based fuels (ethanol) all because of the Global Warming boogeyman and political mandates ordered by enthusiatic bureaucrats and legistlatures.

[aruanan]

However, over the Northern Hemisphere land areas where urban heat islands are most apparent, both the trends of lower-tropospheric temperature and surface air temperature show no significant differences.

Lower tropospheric temperatures aren't affected by urban heat islands. It's the land-based thermometers that used to be way out in the country that are now surrounded by city with, sometimes, up to 7 or more degrees higher temperatures than the surrounding non-urban area.

[aruanan]

Perfect. I read that and I wish I had pointed it out.

I remember seeing in our church magazine in the Sandinista days some absolutely stupid articles written by people who had visited Nicaragua and effused about how close to the Lord they felt. Some of these same morons went on and on about how they deprived themselves of all sorts of common everyday pleasures and spiritualized their denial. It was warmed-over 60's radicalism but it seemed so pathetic because it was so obviously behind the times.

[elvisabel78]

Your words here approximate the truth more than those from your earlier post, because you now focus on local urban areas, and not on global land-based temperature records represented in the graphs that we've seen, and that originated this discussion. You first stated:

The land-based temperature records are an artifact caused by urban heat islands.

But the IPCC found that this urbanization heat has had a minimal effect in these records:

Extensive tests have shown that the urban heat island effects are no more than about 0.05°C up to 1990 in the global temperature records used in this chapter to depict climate change. Thus we have assumed an uncertainty of zero in global land-surface air temperature in 1900 due to urbanisation, linearly increasing to 0.06°C (two standard deviations 0.12°C) in 2000. link

[elvisabel78]

And it has also been found that:

• "Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures." link

• The trends in urban stations for 1951 to 1989 (0.10°C/decade) are not greatly more than those for all land stations (0.09°C/decade).

• Simlarly the rural trend is 0.70°C/century from 1880 to 1998, which is actually larger than the full station trend (0.65°C/century) link

[aruanan]

Thus we have assumed an uncertainty of zero in global land-surface air temperature in 1900 due to urbanisation, linearly increasing to 0.06°C (two standard deviations 0.12°C) in 2000.

Yes, but global land-surface temperatures are extremely spotty outside the developed world. It's in the developed world where there are the most extensive and long-running records that are plagued by the effect of urban heat islands. Besides, the IPCC (especially the political arm of the IPCC) has already demonstrated that it's not an objective, neutral participant in all this.

[elvisabel78]

Again, you spoke about land-based record without exceptions at first. And like i said, any heat due to urbanization has had a negligible impact in global land-based temperature, which is the issue here, since we are discussing global warming. As for the IPCC, The NAS panel commissioned by Bush issued a strong opinion, which in essence, confirmed that of the IPCC. The American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest organization of earth scientists, has also released a strong statement describing human-caused disruptions of Earth’s climate.

[Gail Wynand]

CO2 GW adherents reported parts per million = 380

CO2 PPM that arise from human sources, according to GW theory = 11.4 and possibly growing (but which does not/ can not forecast technological improvements/change, other than as a gross assumption)

Atmospheric PPM not related to Anthropomorphic Global Warming = 999,988.6

Atmospheric H20 (water vapor PPM involved in Greenhouse (earth temperature moderation effect = up to 4000

Ability of pro GW research models to account for local weather variations/localizations = 0

Influence of local weather variations on data points for measuring average earth temperatures = 100% (all data is local)

% of gross C02 production conceded by GW theorist to be absorbed naturally by earth - at least 97.5%

[TChad]

I believe if a dedicated group wanted to compensate for the CO2 created by man they could do it for $10 to $20 million plus maybe $1 million per year expenses farming already known plankton.

Sounds great. Do you have a link or two?

[Steve Van Doorn]

as i said earlier few people realize how much Oxygen we get from Plankton and I believe it is something you need to look up yourself.