"In 2000, conservative pollster Frank Luntz famously penned a memo that recommended ways for President Bush and his allies to discuss global warming in a manner that cast doubt on the science. Among his suggestions, Luntz recommended the following key point: 'The scientific debate remains open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community.'posted by ericb at 1:04 PM on June 27, 2006
Nearly six years later, Bush is still adhering closely to Luntz’s talking points. But the author himself has since backed away from his advice, believing the scientific issues are now settled. In a documentary that first aired on BBC, and was broadcast last night on Canadian television, Luntz said he accepts that humans are affecting the climate, and he distanced himself from the administration’s repudiation of global warming science." Watch it.
[British social scientist, Benny] Peiser’s work – and Lindzen’s reliance on it — is an embarrassment. Here’s why:posted by ericb at 1:27 PM on June 27, 20061. Peizer misunderstands the point of Oreskes study. The point was not that every article about climate change explicitly endorsed the IPCC conclusions. The point is that if there was real uncertainty there would be “substantive disagreement in the scientific community” that would be reflected in peer reviewed literature. There wasn’t.Peiser has admitted that his work included errors. But ultimately, it doesn’t make a difference. The point of activity like this isn’t to be right, it’s simply to provide fodder to people like Lindzen to create the appearance of uncertainty.
2. Peiser didn’t find any peer reviewed studies that oppose the scientific consensus. Peiser claimed that 34 papers “reject or doubt” the consensus view. Tim Lambert got Peiser to send him the abstracts of those 34 papers. The vast majority of these papers express no doubt whatsoever about the consensus view. Only one paper, by the Association of Petroleum Geologists, cited by Peiser actually rejects the consensus view and it “does not appear to have been peer reviewed outside that Association.”
At one point in the interview Gore states in an ‘Archie Bunker-esque, Gee Sammy Davis Jr. you’re one of the good ones!’ tone of voice that Mos is exemplary because of ”[t]he way you communicate in multiple media…You’ve chosen things with integrity.” The editing makes it seem as if Gore’s next statement was cut off as he added, “You act, you “rap happy”...you’re like a 50 Cent I’d let my daughter bring home to dinner!”posted by prostyle at 2:36 PM on June 27, 2006
In order to arrive at an effective policy we can project two different scenarios concerning climate change. In the business-as-usual scenario, annual emissions of CO2 continue to increase at the current rate for at least fifty years, as do non-CO2 warming agents including methane, ozone, and black soot. In the alternative scenario, CO2 emissions level off this decade, slowly decline for a few decades, and by mid-century decrease rapidly, aided by new technologies.Hansen argues that the alternative scenario shouldn't be impossibly difficult to achieve:
The business-as-usual scenario yields an increase of about five degrees Fahrenheit of global warming during this century, while the alternative scenario yields an increase of less than two degrees Fahrenheit during the same period. ...
The business-as-usual scenario, with five degrees Fahrenheit global warming and ten degrees Fahrenheit at the ice sheets, certainly would cause the disintegration of ice sheets. The only question is when the collapse of these sheets would begin. The business-as-usual scenario, which could lead to an eventual sea level rise of eighty feet, with twenty feet or more per century, could produce global chaos, leaving fewer resources with which to mitigate the change in climate. The alternative scenario, with global warming under two degrees Fahrenheit, still produces a significant rise in the sea level, but its slower rate, probably less than a few feet per century, would allow time to develop strategies that would adapt to, and mitigate, the rise in the sea level.
The alternative scenario I have been referring to has been designed to be consistent with the Kyoto Protocol, i.e., with a world in which emissions from developed countries would decrease slowly early in this century and the developing countries would get help to adopt "clean" energy technologies that would limit the growth of their emissions. Delays in that approach—especially US refusal both to participate in Kyoto and to improve vehicle and power plant efficiencies—and the rapid growth in the use of dirty technologies have resulted in an increase of 2 percent per year in global CO2 emissions during the past ten years. If such growth continues for another decade, emissions in 2015 will be 35 percent greater than they were in 2000, making it impractical to achieve results close to the alternative scenario.
Both the Department of Energy and some fossil fuel companies insist that continued growth of fossil fuel use and of CO2 emissions are facts that cannot be altered to any great extent. Their prophecies become self-fulfilling, with the help of government subsidies and intensive efforts by special interest groups to prevent the public from becoming well-informed.b_thinky: Here's what SourceWatch has to say about Lindzen. Ross Gelbspan, journalist and author, wrote a 1995 article in Harper's Magazine which was very critical of Lindzen and other global warming skeptics. In the article, Gelbspan reports Lindzen charged "oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; [and] his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC."
In reality, an alternative scenario is possible and makes sense for other reasons, especially in the US, which has become an importer of energy, hemorrhaging wealth to foreign nations in order to pay for it. In response to oil shortages and price rises in the 1970s, the US slowed its growth in energy use mainly by requiring an increase from thirteen to twenty-four miles per gallon in the standard of auto efficiency. Economic growth was decoupled from growth in the use of fossil fuels and the gains in efficiency were felt worldwide. Global growth of CO2 emissions slowed from more than 4 percent each year to between 1 and 2 percent growth each year.
This slower growth rate in fossil fuel use was maintained despite lower energy prices. The US is still only half as efficient in its use of energy as Western Europe, i.e., the US emits twice as much CO2 to produce a unit of GNP, partly because Europe encourages efficiency by fossil fuel taxes.
The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.posted by russilwvong at 3:02 PM on June 27, 2006
... Loyalty to [existing beliefs] is the first principle--in most cases it is the only principle; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
.posted by darkstar at 3:31 PM on June 27, 2006
His opinions are expressed here, he writes, 'as personal views under the protection of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.'
I have become very impatient with my own tendency to put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously.... [E]very time I pause to consider whether I have gone too far out on a limb, I look at the new facts [on the environment crisis] that continue to pour in from around the world and conclude that I have not gone far enough.... [T]he time has long since come to take more political risks--and endure more political criticism--by proposing tougher, more effective solutions and fighting hard for their enactments.Dude totally just wants to get Bush and the Republicans!
...I think its ok to not believe in global warming.posted by darkstar at 7:04 PM on June 27, 2006
Lines of thinking converged to emphasize the importance of the greenhouse effect. For decades geologists had been puzzled by a calculation that astrophysicists insisted was undeniable: the Sun had been dimmer when the Earth was young. Billions of years ago the oceans would have been permanently frozen, if not for high CO2 levels. Astrophysical theory showed that as the Sun had consumed its nuclear fuel it had gradually grown brighter, yet somehow the Earth's temperature had remained neither too cold nor too hot to sustain life. The best guess was that CO2 acted as a thermostat for the planet. Volcanoes presumably put the gas into the atmosphere at a fairly constant rate. But chemical processes run faster at higher temperatures, so on a warmer Earth the weathering of rocks would take up CO2 faster. As the rocks erode, rivers carry the soil into the seas, where the carbon eventually winds up in compounds deposited on the seabed. Thus a rough self-sustaining balance is maintained among the forces of volcanic emissions, greenhouse warming, weathering, and ocean uptake. To be sure, the system might take thousands if not millions of years to stabilize after some great disturbance.posted by russilwvong at 10:47 PM on June 27, 2006
Such great disturbances — even a totally glaciated "snowball Earth" — were not a fantasy of oversimplified models. Geologists turned up evidence that more than half a billion years ago the oceans had actually frozen over, if not entirely than mostly. That seemed impossible, for how could the Earth have escaped the trap and warmed up again? There was at least one obvious way (but it was only obvious once someone thought of it, which took decades). Over many thousands of years, volcanoes would have continued to inject CO2 into the atmosphere. There the gas would have accumulated, since it could not get into the frozen seas. Eventually a colossal greenhouse effect might have melted the ice. All this was speculative, and proved little about recent climates. But it added to the gathering conviction that CO2 was the very keystone of the planet's climate system — a system by no means as cozily stable as it appeared.
During the 1990s, further ice core measurements indicated that during past glacial periods, temperature changes had preceded CO2 changes by a few centuries. Was it necessary to give up the simple hypothesis that had attracted scientists ever since Tyndall in the 19th century — that changes in CO2 were a simple and direct cause of ice ages? Some scientists doubted that the time lag could be measured so precisely, and pointed to data suggesting that the level of the gas had changed ahead of temperature after all. There were many ways the gas level could interact with climate. Perhaps variations of temperature and weather patterns had caused land vegetation to release extra CO2 or take it up... perhaps the oceans were involved through massive changes in their circulation or ice cover... or through changes in their CO2-absorbing plankton, which would bloom or decline insofar as they were fertilized by minerals, which reached them from dusty winds, rivers, and ocean upwelling, all of which could change with the climate... or perhaps there were still more complicated and obscure effects.As I understand it, there's positive feedback loops. For example, if the earth starts warming and the Arctic ice starts melting, open water absorbs more heat than ice, so the process accelerates. There might be a similar positive feedback loop with warming and CO2--as the average temperature rises, trees and plants die and later release more CO2, causing further warming?--but it sounds like there isn't consensus on this yet.
A key point stood out. In the network of feedbacks that made up the climate system, CO2 was a main driving force. This did not prove by itself that the greenhouse effect was responsible for the warming seen in the 20th century. And it did not say how much warming the rise of CO2 might bring in the future. What was now beyond doubt was that the greenhouse effect had to be taken very seriously indeed. Joining the chorus was a 1992 analysis of ancient climates that found a "climate sensitivity"— the response of temperature to a rise in the CO2 level — in the same range as computer models were predicting for future greenhouse warming. The authors concluded that continued emissions would produce a temperature rise of several degrees during the coming century, "a warming unprecedented in the past million years, and... much faster than previously experienced by natural ecosystems..."
At least three careful ice core studies have shown that CO2 starts to rise about 800 years (600-1000 years) after Antarctic temperature during glacial terminations. ...There's a further parenthetical comment:
Does this prove that CO2 doesn't cause global warming? The answer is no.
The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.
The 4200 years of warming make up about 5/6 of the total warming. ...
It comes as no surprise that other factors besides CO2 affect climate. Changes in the amount of summer sunshine, due to changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun that happen every 21,000 years, have long been known to affect the comings and goings of ice ages. Atlantic ocean circulation slowdowns are thought to warm Antarctica, also.
From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a "feedback", much like the feedback that results from putting a microphone too near to a loudspeaker.
In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway.
The 800-year lag is about the amount of time required to flush out the deep ocean through natural ocean currents. So CO2 might be stored in the deep ocean during ice ages, and then get released when the climate warms.posted by russilwvong at 1:13 PM on June 28, 2006
If the US had accepted the Kyoto Protocol, it would have been possible to reduce the growing emissions of China and India through the Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, by which the developed countries could offset their own continuing emissions by investing in projects to reduce emissions in the developing countries. This would have eased the way to later full participation by China and India, as occurred with the Montreal Protocol.From Hansen's article, it sounds like there's still enough of a difference between the business-as-usual scenario and the alternative (Kyoto) scenario that it's worth doing.
The business-as-usual scenario, with five degrees Fahrenheit global warming and ten degrees Fahrenheit at the ice sheets, certainly would cause the disintegration of ice sheets. The only question is when the collapse of these sheets would begin. The business-as-usual scenario, which could lead to an eventual sea level rise of eighty feet, with twenty feet or more per century, could produce global chaos, leaving fewer resources with which to mitigate the change in climate. The alternative scenario, with global warming under two degrees Fahrenheit, still produces a significant rise in the sea level, but its slower rate, probably less than a few feet per century, would allow time to develop strategies that would adapt to, and mitigate, the rise in the sea level.posted by russilwvong at 10:44 PM on June 28, 2006
« Older Coming soon to a crowded sidewalk near you: the E... | Arif Mardin... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by caddis at 1:00 PM on June 27, 2006