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.

[cogitator]

640,000 years of static CO2 levels.

First, note clearly that ** I ** did not say static. I said that CO2 has been in the 180-280 ppm range for that whole period, and this encompasses the entire range of glacial-interglacial climate variability.

I'm not absolutely sure I can find an on-the-Web chart of the whole 640,000 years data. First, here's the 480,000 year chart (this is just one, there are lots of them available):

Well, I got luckier faster than I thought. The image below is reduced in size; click it to see the full-size one.

[Ingtar]

With current biofuel technology, there is not enough farmland in America to meet her need for fuel.

[Plutarch]

I think it would be prudent to switch to Nuclear energy as fast as possible.

I will believe that global warming is a real threat when I see global warming alarmists advocate nuclear energy. Apparently global warming is an acute danger to humanity, but not so serious a threat as to consider nuclear energy.

[cogitator]

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?

It's such an obvious winner that I can't understand why the Prez and Congress don't seize the reins a lot more forcefully and start pushing -- a stronger effort here could literally alter the election in November.

[MarxSux]

The pursuit of utopia always ends badly.

[Uncle Miltie]

Drive until Greenland is Green again!

[cogitator]

Only if you believe that the earth is 6000 years old.

I don't think you understood what I meant. Fagan's book is one way of noting that civilization as we know it has benefited (indeed, perhaps prospered because of it) from a very stable climate. The Earth's existing ecosystems have become what they are now because of it. Now we have the potential to drastically alter it in decades -- not on the timescales that Milankovitch cycles operate on, 1000s to 10,000s of years.

Paleoclimates of previous eras are very interesting, and no one is disputing that Earth's climate has varied. It's a very enjoyable scientific subject. But the key now is the timescale of rapid change.

[dead]

On reflection, I believe the nitwits actually named their failed enterprise, the Biosphere.

Actually, they were even goofier than that. They named it "Biosphere II" since our lovely planet is "Biosphere I".

Hippies are so silly.

[Paradox]

With current biofuel technology, there is not enough farmland in America to meet her need for fuel.

As you said, "Current". Biofuels are just one of the tools. Nuclear Energy can provide us with plenty of energy, which can then be used for Hydrogen purposes. I figure, its a good start, and it dovetails into some conservative kind of values (domesticate energy needs, help farmers).

[Sicon]

The earth is millions of years old

Billions, actually, which provides an even bigger sample that the enviro-wackos prefer to ignore.

[cogitator]

So what that means is that even extreme activism won't help, assuming the models are right.

Flannery takes a worst-case tack. There is a decent amount of opinion in the scientific community that significantly reducing the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere would be beneficial, but to really have an effect changes in emissions need to start soon (5-10 year horizon).

[cogitator]

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.

Agreed, we would have to cope. But because there are things that we can do (and things that would reduce our vulnerability to terrorism to boot), it's not a realistic or useful position to say "let's do nothing".

[Sicon]

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.

So... based on a whole 7 years worth of "data", you actually feel comfortable in suggesting that this represents a significant "warming trend", and even further, that human activity is somehow responsible?

[epluribus_2]

If you want to go that far, we also have to remember that the continents shifted all over the planet and that had to affect the wobble/orbit and skews locations of core samples.

Milankovich cycles are still my #1 explanation of non-anthropogenetic warming. You can't run from it and it may not stay stable and predictable. We wobble, the orbit wobbles, and the sun wobbles and grows/shrinks/burns erratically. Does not take much in any variable to warm the solar system. We should be checking other planetary objects to check this.

[Sicon]

There is a decent amount of opinion in the scientific community that significantly reducing the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere would be beneficial.

Yes, and back in the 1970's, a "decent amount of opinion in the scientific community" told us that we were heading into another ice age, and that we would overpopulate the planet and starve to death about, oh, 10 years ago...

[Binghamton_native]

So how much CO2 reduction will be the right amount of reduction? If we reduce too much will we cause global cooling? Inquiring minds want to know.

[Sicon]

we also have to remember that the continents shifted all over the planet and that had to affect the wobble/orbit and skews locations of core samples.

Milankovich cycles are still my #1 explanation of non-anthropogenetic warming. You can't run from it and it may not stay stable and predictable. We wobble, the orbit wobbles, and the sun wobbles and grows/shrinks/burns erratically

Right. All of which would seem to give any reasonable person LOTS of reasons to question the validity of the "global warming" alarmist claims that somehow human activity is the cause. Maybe it has something to do with it, or maybe it doesn't, but it is sheer lunacy for people to suggest that they are sure one way or the other, and even more so to suggest that we turn our entire existence upside down because of it, without knowing if it would even make any difference.

[Reeses]

my children and my grandchildren will be experiencing some of these more severe effects, and that bothers me

Obvious solution: don't have children. There is nothing more effective you can do personally for reducing environmental stress than that. Why isn't that ever mentioned? Why is big government paying unwed and unemployed Democrat voters to have multiple kids?

[PeterPrinciple]

A higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause a higher concentration in water. Life will flourish.


Repeat loud and OFTEN that almost all plants are CO2 starved.................

[denydenydeny]

The global warming alarmists need to explain why annual human emissions of CO2 in the 656-ton range are going to destroy civilization, while a CO2 emission of 42 megatons from Mount Pinatubo in 1991 accomplished exactly nothing except giving us a couple of very cold winters.

Anthropogenic global warming is less an environmental or even a political phenomenon than a religious one. Look at Al Gore, who's everywhere on television this week. He's got the lunatic intensity of a religious fanatic.