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.
That presumes a lot.
I am a long way from accepting the passive role of "... just state conclusions that were all already accepted as self-evident by her audience."
There is nothing self evident about either anthropogenic CO2 or accepting the ability of man to affect the climate trajectory and its underlying causes, one way or the other...
Boy, if I ever hear this one again...
1998 was an El Nino year, and El Nino years are years with higher-than-average global warmth. The next year was a La Nina year, and it was colder. In the ensuing years, the global temperature anomaly has been between the 1998 record and the 1999 subsequent minimum, and (with variability), the years have gotten warmer -- to the point that 2005 was almost as warm (some analyses indicate "as warm") as 1998, without an El Nino event. This last datum indicates that the warming trend is still ongoing.
I don't read Skeptic Magazine - and given this article on how he arrives at conclusions, I ain't about to start. I would expect more convincing stuff from Art Bell!
I've been following this debate from the start and I have yet to see a single convincing fact, theory or argument in support of "global warming".
Every argument and theory I have seen has been nothing but notional fantasy and conjecture. Most of it is mathematically flawed and illogical. Basically, every global warming argument I have seen without exception has been based on extrapolation way beyond the data. Worse, the extrapolation does not merely assume present conditions into the future, but worse, none of the data on which the extrapolations are based is statistically significant. The extrapolations are worse than guesses. They are more akin to witchery.
This stuff is pure poison.
And I'm concerned that we don't have enough confidence in our children to deal with problems when they occur without us nitwits posturing as though only we have the secrets of the universe and once we pass the world will be bereft.
Remember the Ecosphere? We actually thought we could recreate a mini-atmosphere and make it balance; the CO2 levels went berserk and it was years after they were forced to shut this bizarre exercise in sophomoric sequestration before the principals admitted what every heating and air-conditioning company in the area already knew, which was they had been pumping fresh air in to "slow" the disaster that was obvious to all involved.
The irony is that as they left the building and it began to be disassembled they remained convinced that with just a tweak here and a twist there the whole enterprise would have led the way to a better and more beneficial world.
Arrogance and hubris have no bounds.
The global (or U.S.) economy does not have to suffer; in fact, I think recent events indicate that our dependence on foreign oil and the tightness of energy supplies is far more important to economic health. There are measures that can certainly be taken that can reduce our dependence on foreign oil, increase the "robustness" and flexibility of the economy's energy sector without inducing an economic crisis or downturn.
And if we don't do something (or somethings) serious about energy, economic malaise might be wished for as a best-case scenario.
640,000 years of static CO2 levels.
I think this is reasonable. I also think technology will bail us out of this one if necessary. Speaking of biofuels, I think this is a great "conservative" cause. What better issue than something that would help domestify our energy needs, and also help the American farmer? Conservatives and most freepers are missing the boat, we can jump on this issue, cautiously and conservatively.
And anyone who expects that man can maintain a fortuitous circumstance by dint of will and fumbling is a fool.
Only if you believe that the earth is 6000 years old.
Do you have a grasp of what 6 billion years is?
What percentage is 10,000 of 6 billion?
On what basis can the last 10,000 years be deemed more critically important to the debate than the previous 5,999,990,000?
Because you happen to be here?
What?
If co2 is a problem, carbon sinks might be the answer. It might get ugly, like planting fast growing trees and filling up the grand canyon with them, but I think the co2 problem is manageable if it is manageable at all.
If we don't burn it, it will become in short supply and plastics can be made from soybean oil
ALL carbon based fuels : C + O2 = CO2 regardless of starting form of carbon.
Agreed
Yes, but with biofuels, the C02 source is the existing CO2 in the air. Thus there is no net increase in CO2. Fossil fuels, however, increase the CO2.
So what that means is that even extreme activism won't help, assuming the models are right.
It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
Fool.
On reflection, I believe the nitwits actually named their failed enterprise, the Biosphere.
I'm with you there. That speaks to my priorities.
For me it's security first, economy second, environment a distant third because let's face it: a bomb means immediate damage and mayhem. A depression, well, we know full well what a depression can entail. But gradual rising of the seas over 100 years? Okay, so the landscape slowly changes. Some land is covered by water as other land is uncovered by thawing ice. So? By that time, most edifices built along the coastline will be old and crumbling anyway. So move inland. Like I said, we've got decades and decades to do it in.
Look at it this way: if the warming were real but had NOTHING TO DO with human activity, what attitude would we take? Cope, that's what. Deal with it. Adapt. So if there is ever any question of choosing between the economy and the environment, bye-bye New Jersey, hello warm Minnesota. That's my stance.
CO2 dissolves in water. It is food for algae, coral etc. Virtually all aqauatic lifeforms exist based on the availability of CO2.
A higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause a higher concentration in water. Life will flourish.
This is also true of all growing things on the surface. More food!!!
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