Posted on 05/12/2008 1:37:03 PM PDT by shrinkermd
I did not listen to Rush’s entire show. The part I did here, was a “look-down-your-nose-sneer” at Senator McCain’s concern and proposals about climate change. I know this is problematical with those believing we are on the edge of a catastrophe and those who feel this is all hokum.
Seemingly, faith has replaced all reason in assessing the problem.
In actual fact the problem is really quite simple. What the European and other governments want to do is to hold the concentration of carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million. Presently, it is 380 ppm. At the beginning of the industrial age it was 280 ppm. As far as I can tell these are facts. My source is a recent article by Fred Pierce in the New Scientist. That link is: here.
The actual problem is not clearly a scientific problem and there are disputes as to the meaning of the rise of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. A few excerpts from the above article include the following:
”…European governments are pressing for an agreement that would keep atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide below 450 parts per million. This compares with pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm and current levels of 380 ppm. This, they argue, will prevent warming by more than 2 °C, and so avoid "dangerous" climate change.
”Yet many climate scientists wince at this. First, because the European governments like to claim that the IPCC backs these targets, when in fact the IPCC goes out of its way to say that setting targets is a job for politicians. And second, because nobody knows either whether 450 ppm will hold warming below 2 °C, or whether this amount of warming will turn out to be safe. "It's horrifying when you see things boiled down to simple terms like a 2 °C warming. That will mean hugely different things for different places," Palmer says.
One reason the IPCC's official reports are slow to bridge this gap is the panel's policy of only considering published peer-reviewed research that is available when its review process gets under way. This means the current report, published last year, takes no account of research published after early 2005.
An increasingly scary debate about the state of the Greenland ice sheet is almost entirely absent in the 2007 report, for instance (see "What if the ice goes?"). Other recent research suggests that warming may be accelerating beyond IPCC predictions: first, because higher temperatures are releasing greenhouse gases from forests, soils and permafrost; and second, because the ocean's ability to absorb CO2 seems to have declined in the past decade.
"An increasingly scary debate about the state of the Greenland ice sheet hardly figures in the IPCC's 2007 report"
Equally worrying is the fact that climatologists are losing confidence in the ability of existing models to work out what global warming will do to atmospheric circulation - and hence to local weather patterns like rainfall. The most recent IPCC report made a number of regional predictions. It felt able to do so because it was generally assumed that if most models agreed on future climate in, say, the Amazon rainforest or western Europe, then they were probably right.
From my perspective Rush is more interested in pandering to his base with oversimplifications and relying on ridicule as argumentation.
I frankly, don’t know how serious this problem is, but there is a problem—within the lifetime of many reading this post atmospheric carbon dioxide will double. As cited in this article:
One of these unknowns was highlighted last month in the preprint of a paper James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has submitted to the journal Science (www.arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126). Looking back 50 million years, to a time when falling CO2 levels in the atmosphere reached 425 ppm - a level we are likely to reach within two decades - he says that was the moment Antarctica got its ice cap. This suggests that the planet may have a tipping point at around that level, give or take 75 ppm, and that by going above it we could render Antarctica ice-free once again. That would raise sea levels by around 60 metres.
I think Senator McCain’s interest in this subject is based on factual considerations. What we don’t know, we don’t know but now is not the time to close off all reasonable consideration and debate.
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