So global cooling predictions in the 70s amounted to media and a handful of peer reviewed studies. The small number of papers predicting cooling were outweighed by a much greater number of papers predicting global warming due to the warming effect of rising CO2.posted by Bangaioh at 3:26 AM on June 20, 2010 [29 favorites]
You're not qualified to "agree" or disagree. Sorry, I know that's so elitist, but it's the case.excuse me, but what the fuck, orthogonality? if we all had to have advanced degrees to have an opinion on something, each post would get about 2 legitimate comments--possibly from experts in the field who may well disagree with each other--and the rest of the thread would be pinheads arguing about qualifications. and for the record, i have an advanced degree in assholism, and i can spot 'em when i see 'em.
You don't get to "agree" or "disagree" unless you have a graduate degree or the equivalent in a relevant discipline. I mean you can, just like you can "disagree" about the curvature or lack thereof of the Earth, or what 7 + 8 equals, and just as usefully.
Obviously, we depend on fossil fuels for power and transport. But we already have the technology to solve the problem. Battery technology has improved fast enough that plug-in hybrid vehicles are already here. We know how to generate additional electricity without emitting more carbon: hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, coal-burning power plants with carbon sequestration, renewables.We're not talking about drastic lifestyle changes; do you really care if your car is powered by an internal combustion engine or an electric motor? Or if your electricity comes from burning coal or from nuclear power?
We can minimize the cost by replacing old equipment as it wears out. Scrapping a two-year-old car is expensive; scrapping a ten-year-old car isn't. The best policy to achieve this shift is a rising tax on fossil fuels, phased in over ten years or so. [British Columbia, where I live, has already done this.] To avoid slowing economic growth, the revenue from this tax can be offset by matching cuts in other taxes, or refunded directly as a dividend.
The atmosphere is global, while any individual country can only set national policy. Therefore, we need agreement that each of the major industrialized countries will either bring in a carbon tax at comparable levels, or have some equivalent policy (like the European cap-and-trade system).
Of course politics is a slow process: it takes time to resolve conflicts between interests and to bring public opinion on board. What should individuals do in the meantime? We can behave as though a carbon tax were already in place. If gas prices were higher than they already are, and you know they were going to keep going up, what would you do? The next time you buy a car, you'd look at smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, or even a hybrid. The next time you need to move, you'd think about finding a place where you don't need to drive as much. If you run a business, you'd anticipate rising fuel prices. Etc.
How much does temperature change for a given radiative forcing? This is determined by the planet's climate sensitivity. The more sensitive our climate, the greater the change in temperature. The most common way of describing climate sensitivity is the change in global temperature if atmospheric CO2 is doubled. What does this mean? The amount of energy absorbed by CO2 can be calculated using line-by-line radiative transfer codes. These results have been experimentally confirmed by satellite and surface measurements. The radiative forcing from a doubling of CO2 is 3.7 Watts per square metre (W/m2) (IPCC AR4 Section 2.3.1).posted by russilwvong at 8:34 AM on June 20, 2010 [2 favorites]
So when we talk about climate sensitivity to doubled CO2, we're talking about the change in global temperatures from a radiative forcing of 3.7 Wm-2. This forcing doesn't necessarily have to come from CO2. It can come from any factor that causes an energy imbalance.
How much does it warm if CO2 is doubled? If we lived in a climate with no feedbacks, global temperatures would rise 1.2°C (Lorius 1990). However, our climate has feedbacks, both positive and negative. The strongest positive feedback is water vapour. As temperature rises, so too does the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. However, water vapour is a greenhouse gas which causes more warming which leads to more water vapour and so on. There are also negative feedbacks - more water vapour causes more clouds which can have both a cooling and warming effect.
What is the net feedback? Climate sensitivity can be calculated from empirical observations. One needs to find a period where we have temperature records and measurements of the various forcings that drove the climate change. Once you have the change in temperature and radiative forcing, climate sensitivity can be calculated. Figure 1 shows a summary of the peer-reviewed studies that have determined climate sensitivity from past periods (Knutti & Hegerl 2008).
I remember when I was a kid and everybody talked about global cooling and the TV man said that everything would be cold but now everything is hotSeriously? People have known about global warming since the 1950s. I was born in the 1980s (in 1980 exactly) and all I've ever heard about was global warming. I think this 1970s global cooling hysteria is something of a conservative retcon, so to speak. Maybe one or two people mentioned it, I know there was an article in TIME, but beyond that I think it's mostly B.S. People were much more worried about the potential for global warming in the 1970s. As they were in the 1960s and 1950s and so on.
I'm an environmentalist who doesn't buy the global warming ideas. Does that make me bad?Uh, yes?
When Group A fails, as it often does*, to explain the issue in the way a genuinely curious layperson can understand and instead resorts to in-group shortcuts and even occasionally a derisive dismissiveness of those who don't "get it," both groups retrench.The problem is group 'a' as opposed to group 'A'. Lowercase instead of uppercase. Who tell people that there are going to be huge sacrifices and that are actually innumerate themselves who create this false sense of doom. They are also unhelpful. The worst are the people who run around saying "oh, it's already to late we can't do anything now". The truth is putting solar panels on your roof, driving a hybrid or electric car, using renewable instead of coal, and so on are not huge lifestyle sacrifices. Otoh, rising ocean levels will be.
we will probably be well on the way to understanding complex planetary systems and will be able to terraform planets to our liking.
What technical facts prove anthropogenic warming?
His argument is that we need to better understand the relationship between carbon reserves(organic biomass) and the atmosphere.
"Lindzen clearly relishes the role of naysayer. He'll even expound on how weakly lung cancer is linked to cigarette smoking. He speaks in full, impeccably logical paragraphs, and he punctuates his measured cadences with thoughtful drags on a cigarette"The world is full of contrarians, even those with degrees. I don't mean to shoot the messanger, and perhaps Lindzen has some things to add to the debate, but keep in mind his MO is to take an extreme contrary position on many topics, Global Warming being just one. Lindzen's graduate students describe him as "fiercely intelligent, with a deep contrarian streak." This is actually what most of the deniers are, contrarians - it's a useful and important position, sort of like market bears, sometimes they get it right, most of the time not. I hope he doesn't die of lung cancer, but don't your life bet on it.
It doesn't. Idiots who can't subtract simple numbers in their head and so are willing to watch the planet burn as a result make people angry.Yeah, the planet's not going to burn. Maybe you should calm down.
I propose a mass housing exchange, “skeptics” can pair up with a buddy in Bangladesh and swap houses, nothing to worry about sure? Unbelievable.To be fair, there's basically no climate scenario that would make living in Bangladesh seem attractive.
Just as there is a rough consensus among climate modelers about the likely trajectory of temperatures if we do not act to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases, there is a rough consensus among economic modelers about the costs of action. That general opinion may be summed up as follows: Restricting emissions would slow economic growth — but not by much. The Congressional Budget Office, relying on a survey of models, has concluded that Waxman-Markey "would reduce the projected average annual rate of growth of gross domestic product between 2010 and 2050 by 0.03 to 0.09 percentage points." That is, it would trim average annual growth to 2.31 percent, at worst, from 2.4 percent. Over all, the Budget Office concludes, strong climate-change policy would leave the American economy between 1.1 percent and 3.4 percent smaller in 2050 than it would be otherwise.Whenever the status quo is unsustainable, it takes a long time to convince people that things need to change. (Lord Salisbury: "The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.") But the longer we delay, the more painful it will be to change.
And what about the world economy? In general, modelers tend to find that climate-change policies would lower global output by a somewhat smaller percentage than the comparable figures for the United States. The main reason is that emerging economies like China currently use energy fairly inefficiently, partly as a result of national policies that have kept the prices of fossil fuels very low, and could thus achieve large energy savings at a modest cost. One recent review of the available estimates put the costs of a very strong climate policy — substantially more aggressive than contemplated in current legislative proposals — at between 1 and 3 percent of gross world product.
From a geologic point of view, carbon dioxide is irrelevant to climate. This is because the CO2 will simply accelerate silicate weathering, drawing it out of the atmosphere and eventually precipitating it as carbonate.If you are going to sit here and claim that 150 odd years of industrialization can compare to 500,000-1,000,000 years of two separate supervolcano complexes pumping CO2 into the atmosphere then go right ahead.
While there may be transient effects, the timescale of those effects is too fine to resolve geologically, so they aren’t worth worrying about.
As for the effects of climate on the biota, that too is irrelevant. Species go extinct all the time, and when they do, something else radiates into their niche.
So from the planetary perspective, this whole CO2 thing is just another blip like the PETM. In a few million years, it will be nothing but a curiosity. Narrow-minded activists interested in the survival of particular subgroups such as ice-dwelling pinnipeds or bipedal primates might complain, but to what end? We’re all headed for the fossil record eventually, so changing the extinction time of a particular group by a few tens of kiloyears isn’t going to be detectable in the long run.
Over the entire eruptive period, up to 11 000 Gt of carbon was released by the Siberian Traps (assuming a volume of 2.3 × 106 km3 and degassing of 0.6 wt% CO2). The total CO2 released is equivalent to addition of ca. 5000 ppm CO2 to the atmosphere (cf. modern-day value of 370 ppm), although the protracted period of release and the activity of CO2-drawdown mechanisms means that the volcanism probably led to an approximate doubling of atmospheric CO2 (this assumes release over only 200 kyr, see Berner (2002)).According to this page on the carbon cycle, there's 5 000 Gt of carbon locked up in conventional fossil fuels, and we're releasing it at a far faster rate than the Siberian Traps.
A look at this table (and at figure 1) shows that if we were to burn all the world's fossil fuel reserves in a short period of time, atmospheric CO2 would rise by about a factor of eight. The air around us would then hold almost ten times more CO2 than in pre-industrial times, when for millennia the concentration held relatively steady at 280 ppm.Again, our best estimate is that each time we double atmospheric CO2, average temperature increases by 3 degrees Celsius.
So when we talk about climate sensitivity to doubled CO2, we're talking about the change in global temperatures from a radiative forcing of 3.7 Wm-2. This forcing doesn't necessarily have to come from CO2. It can come from any factor that causes an energy imbalance.posted by russilwvong at 12:26 PM on June 25, 2010 [5 favorites]
To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology. ...Which seems perfectly reasonable to me; but assuming that it'll be successful would be counting our chickens before they're hatched.
We do not know whether intelligent land-management could increase the growth of the topsoil reservoir by four billion tons of carbon per year, the amount needed to stop the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. All that we can say for sure is that this is a theoretical possibility and ought to be seriously explored.
The eruptions are estimated to have produced an immense volume of basalt lava, with estimates ranging from 2 to 4x10^6 km3,In other words, the volume estimates are already taking erosion into account.
although only 4x10^5 km3 remain (Courtillot et al. 1999).
Most troubling, however, is the question of whether our species has anything to fear from this mechanism in the future: If it happened before, could it happen again? Although estimates of the rates at which carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere during each of the ancient extinctions are still uncertain, the ultimate levels at which the mass deaths took place are known. The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 parts per million (ppm). At the end of the Triassic, CO2 was just above 1,000 ppm. Today with CO2 around 385 ppm, it seems we are still safe. But with atmospheric carbon climbing at an annual rate of 2 ppm and expected to accelerate to 3 ppm, levels could approach 900 ppm by the end of the next century, and conditions that bring about the beginnings of ocean anoxia may be in place. How soon after that could there be a new greenhouse extinction? That is something our society should never find out.posted by russilwvong at 4:28 PM on June 28, 2010 [1 favorite]
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Ok, so I read this book by the Jurassic Park guy and it had some graphs and stuff which said global warming was made up and also that one scientist said he lied in the emails and thats just like evilution which scientists also believe in.
So global(ist) warming is not happening but if it is happening we didn't cause it because of sunspots and if it is happening it will also be good for the economy because we can grow oranges in Canada but it's not happening.
I remember when I was a kid and everybody talked about global cooling and the TV man said that everything would be cold but now everything is hot and why can't these scientists make up their minds its because they need grant money to live on because scientists don't have real jobs like me I'm currently in between jobs (used to work at the paper mill but got closed down 8 years ago and went to China) but thats because of Obummer and socialism.
I don't get why people love spotted owls more than Americans God gave us dominion over the animals not the other way around. We love owls more than human babies that we murder in the womb so think about that liberals.
Also its colder than a witches teat over here in Sparkplug, MO so I don't get what everybody is saying about global warming it all sounds like a bunch of crazy atheist talk and read the 5,000 Year Leap it's about freedoms.
posted by Avenger at 1:38 AM on June 20, 2010 [187 favorites]