Tood, outstanding article! I have always enjoyed the hikes in and around Many Glaciers and the walk from the top of Logan Pass to the Many Glaciers Hotel.
Regarding global warming, I caution against straight line projections of futurescapes based on conditions today. In my opinion, the better view is to recognize the cyclical nature of warming periods versus ice sheets and the impact of volcanic eruptions of creating mini iceages. There is a Russian scientist actually predicting an extended cooling period about to occur based on his study of sunspot activity. My own guess is that it has to do with the ever changing ocean salinity and currents. More fresh water laying on top of the cold salt water eventually overcoming the thermal barrier and forcing the cold salt water to the surface and thereby spawning a new chillier trend to the cycle. I guess we'll see if we live long enough.
You mentioned being helpless against factories in the People's Republic of China. Yet we, as Americans, consume vast amounts of the goods those factories produce. We are not helpless, rather we are so blinded by our creature comforts we don't recoginize our own culpability in foriegn pollution.
Think hard. Think very hard.
Todd correctly asks where conservation fits in with a changing climate. Indeed, what can the conservation community do?
About some things, the correct answer is nothing at all. Some genies are out of the bottle.
Even if the whole world had quit burning fossil fuels and liquidating forests yesterday, the planet is going to be under a new climate with higher temperatures for at least one century. And climate scientists I trust say that warm temperatures are in the pipeline for the next "few" centuries.
None of which means that conservationists have no options One major option is increasingly clear, even mandatory, and the following three excerpts set out the broad outlines of what has become the conservation community's imperative.
Imperative is the keyword here. Whether we operate in the Rockies, or anywhere else in the world, the passage below set out policies that are no longer optional.
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1 - Glacier National Park Biodiversity Paper #7
"Each 1 degree C of global warming will shift temperature zones by about 160 km (100 miles). In the northern hemisphere this means that if the climate warms 3°C species may have to shift northward as much as 500 km (300 miles) in order to find suitable habitat under the new climatic regime. They may also have to shift more than 500 m (over 1600 ft) upward in elevation (when you go up 500 m in elevation, you experience the same 3°C cooling as you would by moving 250 km towards the poles)."
"Global warming may make a mockery of our attempts in all nature reserves, including Glacier National Park, to preserve natural communities and rare, threatened, and endangered native species."
"Perhaps many of Glacier's species will be able to survive farther north, in the Banff-Jasper area. Protection of corridors linking the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, and parks in the Canadian Rockies may provide critical avenues for species dispersal."
2 - In its "Managing Mountain Parks," the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization says:
" The major challenges for the twenty-first century are:
"To link together the isolated existing mountain protected areas by conservation corridors along the mountain ranges. This not only increases effective size, but provides migration corridors for gene flow and species movement. As the climate changes, poleward migration corridors in north-south ranges (e.g. the Andes) will better accommodate temperature change, and migration along the east-west
ranges (e.g. the Western Tien Shan) will be a response to rainfall changes.
3 - Repeating the same basic theme, the United Nations Environment Programme recently said:
"Forest management responses to climate change should focus on maintaining species diversity on national or continental scales through facilitating the processes of species migration, rather than by solely preserving specific reserves. Refugia and migration corridors may be best maintained by reducing habitat fragmentation and locating reserves near north-south running mountain ranges (boreal and temperate regions) or along precipitation gradients (tropical regions)."
Lance Olsen has been writing about the atmosphere and following atmospheric research since 1981. He is project director of the Missoula-based Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers. He can be reached at .
I agree that the mantra shouldn't be "Be Afraid," but should be "Think Hard."
The implications of global warming are staggering, as ecosystems move up in elevation and northward. That means the Sonoran Desert (or vestiges of it) will move into Colorado and Kansas. Instead of a Buffalo Commmons on the plains, we may have desert antelope -- certainly, groundwater-based irrigation will vanish, as will the towns based on that economy.
The great mountain forests of lodgepole and spruce will give way to juniper and scrub oak.
Since we'll lose our snow-pack reservoirs, we'll engage in a futile spate of dam construction, only to realize that evaporation from reservoirs swamps our efforts to store water. (Recharging deep aquifers might be worth exploring, however.)
Conservationists will have to see whether we can transplant entire ecosystem webs, intact, hundreds of miles north, not trusting that plants, insects and animals will be able to find their way without a complete unraveling.
Factor in Peak Oil scenarios and regions will have to figure out how to feed themselves locally, because Imperial Valley vegetables and Florida oranges will become faint memories to those of us in the Northern Rockies.
By all means, think hard, think very hard.
I have asked this question on other environmentalist type forums.
Are you willing to cut your driving to that absolutley necessary, foregoing vacations, just a spin around town, etc?
Are you willing to drive 55mph to cut your fuel consumption? Are you willing to switch to one of the little cars like the Focus or Aveo?
If not do you REALLY believe in global warming?
How many barrels of oil do you think went into the making of Al Gore's movie? And how many into promoting it? And how many in going to see it? Don't all of these things have an impact?
Thumbs Up Todd!! Yes it is reality the global warming and when the oceans rise they will realize that it indeed a revelation in our changing world. The heat will bring many new comers from the south to the Treasure State to live..Just like the Trail Drives..go north young man there opportunity in them Northern Lights!!
:)
Todd
This is a masterful account of what is facing us. I am looking forward to your book on Ted Turner.
My own travels around the world as an Army officer, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, and my own life and experiences here in the West since leaving military service fifteen years ago, have proven to me without a shadow of a doubt that the changes we human beings are now facing are unprecedented in human experience since the end of the Pleistocene approximately 10,000 years ago and the subsequent rise of civilization with agriculture and its descendants, industrialism and what I call binomial reality.
My only caution is to avoid falling into the civilzed fallacy of thought that humans are captains of their fate and masters of the earth's future. They are not. The fundamental fallacious assumption of civilization is that not only can nature be controlled, it should be controlled, for our sole benefit.
This is the great folly, the absurd ideology of civilization. It is the idea that has led to untold disasters of war, commerce, and society over the last several millennia.
How many civilzations have fallen over the last several millennia, and how many have survived? The least familiarity with human history will indicate that the number of the former is in the tens, and the latter number is zero.
Let me repeat, Zero.
What is unprecedented is that in the past, the rise and fall of civilizations has been regional and continental. Now, what we are facing is global in nature, and I think the collapse of the present civilzation will be global in scope, just as the changes that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene were global in scope. Except this time, the global change is due to the activity of one species out of billions--us.
My conclusion after the last thirty years of adult life, and what I am working on and thinking deeply about now, is to face these coming changes with another assumption in mind--not that our culture of technology and unjustified faith in the progress of civilzation will pull us through, but that our evolutionary history and our biology will pull us through. To take this approach is to adopt a completely different mindset from that which both conservatives and progressives share--that we are not human beings without civilization. I disagree with that assumption and our evolutionary history bears me out.
The mindset I advocate begins with the notion that first and foremost we are natural beings, and that culture reflects, not opposes, that fact.
The first thing we have to do is learn to think differently so that we can learn to act differently.
We have to learn to become uncivilzed.
Best,
Robert
Robert writes, "...the changes we human beings are now facing are unprecedented in human experience since the end of the Pleistocene approximately 10,000 years ago..." Back in the Middle-Ages there was the Medieval Warm Period which occured from about the 10th century to about the 14th century. This was followed by the Little Ice Age which lasted up to the 19th century. Khabibulo Absudamatov, a scientist with the Russian Sciences Academy Observatory, has studied the correlation of sunspot activity with the earth's warming and cooling periods. He predicts that a cooling period may begin in 2012 and followed by a much colder conditions beginning in 2035.
There may be debate as to what peoples constitute a continuing civilization, but aboriginal people in Australia have been around for several thousand years and continue today.
Can those of you who believe in man caused global warming explain how we went from global freezing (according to scientists at the time) to global warrming in a mere 30 years? Did the environmentalists who were calling for changes to head it off cause it?
If folks truly believed in global warming, they would be changing their lifestyles, not just wring long articles, producing movies, etc. So far I have seen no indication that those screaming the loudest actually intend giving up something themselves. They want to force others to do what they themselves are unwilling to do. When I see global warming advocates cutting their consumption of fossil fuels, then I will begin to be impressed.
By the way some parts of the world had record breaking cold winters this year, with many freezing to death in those places. How do you explain that?
Critics of human-caused global warming often argue that if environmentalists haven't personally renounced automobiles, electricity, central heating, etc., then they're just a bunch of hypocrites.
In reality, people rarely fit within such narrow, either-or dimensions. People are changing their lifestyles, either because of sticker-shock at the pump, or more mindfully, because they want to contribute, however incrementally, to a solution.
For example, I recently purchased a lawn-mower -- not a Lazy-Boy on wheels, but an old-fashioned rotary mower, where the motive power is me, myself and I.
If I have an errand downtown or a short shopping trip, I might hop on my bicycle--good exercise for me and I'm saving both money and energy. This morning, I drove my car to the grocery store for two reasons -- it was getting hot and I needed to bring home a 50-lb. sack of dog food. Does that make me a hypocrite? I don't think so--I simply made a choice.
Re: the global freezing controvery a few decades ago--that didn't have anywhere near the solid concensus of science behind it that human-caused global warming has today. It was simply a hypothesis based on limited data, and over time, it was discredited by data pointing to human-caused global warming. There's no conspiracy here -- just science at work.
I would also point out to Marion the difference between weather and climate. Weather is what you experience day-to-day and it is widely variable, ranging from record-setting heat to record-setting cold. Climate is what happens over a longer term, as air and water warms up consistently over time. (During ice ages, it has done the reverse.) Climate change does NOT prevent such variability as Marion mentioned -- indeed, weather can be regarded as an energy machine that is constantly seeking equilibrium. As more energy is trapped inside the world's atmosphere and oceans, that energy machine is going to act more, not less, energetically, so we can expect more variability, not less.
Forty-six years ago, Michigan State researcher Milton Rokeach wrote in "The Open and Closed Mind," that people face two tasks: (1) they seek to learn more about the world, and (2) they wish to protect themselves from the world -- especially from information that might prove unsettling.
Marion seems to have a belief system wherein it is difficult, indeed frightening, for her to distinguish between various camps within the environmental movement, or even among the scientists themselves. It is far more comfortable to label those with whom she disagrees as an extremeist or "environmental whacko" than to examine the issue of global warming with an open mind. The issue, the scientists, the environmentalists, the oil companies, are a very complicated and multi-faceted story and deserve better than either-or allegations that defeat objective analysis, but contribute only to extreme positions.
Brodie, there is more of a disagreement than a consensus of opinion on global warming. According to Dr. S. Fred Singer, former director of the National Weather Satellite Center and atmospheric scientist from George Mason University, there were something like 17000 scientists that signed a petition opposing the Kyoto Protocol while about 2000 scientists worked on the UN global warming report. Of course real science is not about democracy and the greater number of votes, it's about facts. You can read his interview on the subject here: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=19633
Dennis T. Avery, previously a senior analyst for the Department of State and a a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., is highly skeptical of Al Gore's claims and points to the work of P.J. Polissar of the University of Massachusetts and the study of Andean glaciers. See his opinion piece here: http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=21733&catcode=13
I would like to update the information provided by the references cited by Craig Moore, particularly the one that cites an interview of Fred Singer. This argument of the troposphere not getting warmer but cooler, thus refuting the surface temperature rises that have been observed, has been used by every skeptical group trying to refute global warming. Climate modeling indicates that there should be a correlation. Unfortunately, the satellite data of John Christy’s group at Alabama (this is the data skeptics use) had to be corrected because satellite drift was not taken into account. Christy himself now agrees that the troposphere has warmed. The amount of warming has a large degree of uncertainty so that there might now be a good correlation of surface temperatures with troposphere temperatures. For up-to-date references see http://www.uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=4253; Nature, 436, 896 (2005)
Craig Moore cites Fred Singer as an authority, so I suppose it's only fair to cite Singer's own words:
"The injection of large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the past few decades has been extremely sudden in relation to important natural time scales....Precise measurements by Charles D. Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have established that
the carbon dioxide content increased by six parts per million between 1958 and 1968."
"The most widely discussed matter related to these increases is the possibility that they will lead to a worldwide increase in temperature. The molecule of carbon dioxide has strong absorption bonds, particularly in the infrared region of the spectrum at wavelengths of from 12 to 18 microns.
This is the spectral region where most of the thermal energy radiating from earth to space is concentrated. By increasing the absorption of this radiation ... the carbon dioxide reduces the amount of heat energy lost by earth to outer space."
"In 1956 Gilbert N. Plass calculated that a doubling of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere would result in a rise of 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit at the earth's surface. In 1963 Fritz Moller calculated that a 25 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would would increase the average temperature by one to 7 degrees F..."
Singer concluded that "it would be incautious" to assume that "the heat being put into the atmosphere as a result of human energy consumption can be neglected."
Source. Singer, Fred S. "Human Energy Production as a process in the biosphere," Scientific American, September 1970.
There are two very interesting things about Singer's excellent 1970 analysis. First, it is now the consensus within the climate science community. Second, Singer himself has rejected it, and it is all but impossible to find sound scientific reason for his rejection of what he once seemed to understand so well.
S. Fred Singer is a member of the following organizations:
Editorial Advisory Board
The Cato Institute
Adjunct Scholar
National Center for Policy Analysis
Adjunct Fellow
Frontiers of Freedom
Advisory Board Member (2002)
American Council on Science and Health
Now pay attention to where those organizations get funding:
The Cato Institute received $55,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
The National Center for Policy Analysis received $105,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
The Frontiers of Freedom organizations received $282,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
The American Council on Science and Health received $35,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
So is Mr. Singer an honest scientist, or is he a paid shill?
To borrow a phrase from Fox News:
We Report. You Decide.
Regarding Singer read his interview and you decide. His knowledge in 2000 based on satellite findings is 30 years later than his 1970 work. Science does advance based on better data gathering techniques. Attacking him personally rather than responding to his research and findings is a drive-by smear. His research found that atmospheric temperature has only increased over population centers and not the whole of the planet. If you dispute his findings cite your source. By the way here is a fellow from Harvard who seems to be unconvinced about global warming as well. Read his work and the following comments especially about the contribution of CO2 by man. http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/09/quantifying-climate-uncertainty.html
Regarding assertions that climate change is not human induced, I would direct readers to a story which appeared May 3, 2006, in the Washington Post written by Juliet Eilperin.
It is titled: "Study Reconciles Data In Measuring Climate Change" and is Eilperin's coverage of a report that made headlines around the world. Here's the link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/02/AR2006050201677.html
Eilperin's opening paragraph states: "A government study released yesterday undermines one of the key arguments of climate change skeptics, concluding there is no statistically significant conflict between measures of global warming on the earth's surface and in the atmosphere."
In addition, the fourth paragraph of the story reads: "The report also concluded that humans are driving the warming trend through greenhouse gas emissions, noting in the official news release, 'the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, nor by the effects of short-lived atmospheric constituents such as aerosols and tropospheric ozone alone.'
Except for a relatively small handful of scientists, some of whom have very close professional relationships with the energy industry and/or free-market think tanks, the science of climate change is clear: Most of the planet is warming. Carbon dioxide emissions have been a catalyst. Some regions may actually cool, but the consensus and expert opinion of most peer-reviewed scientists who far outnumber the Fred Singers (et. few), is that Earth is getting hotter, glaciers (which serve as barometers) are melting, and the phenomena can't be explained away simply by saying it's due to increased solar activity.
First I don't recall any name calling of wackos of any kind.
I just have trouble getting real excited about a "climate change" that has taken such a dramatic turn around in less than 30 years. the biggest mistake the freezer had was putting a time on it that most would live to see. The warmers aren't making that mistake they are predicting all of the dire consequences in about a hundred years. Does anyone really know when this switch occurred or have any explanation for it? On top of that is a few years actually adequate to determine a "climate cahnge" one way or another?
As for credentials are all scientists associated with environmental organizations to be dismissed also? I would think a scientists studies are more important than theri affiliation....or does that only apply to those one disagrees with?
Notice the resignation of Dr Chris Landsea at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over the perceived pro-warming bias.
In my opinion, we are at that moment of awareness where unk unks come to play. We now know we know nothing about things we don't know--yet!
Craig, thank you for that excellent article. I am amazed at the number of people who swallow the story that "every" scientist believes the man caused global warming theory. That seems to be a point that was made by Al Gores film, and folks think it is true.
It is really too bad that we cannot even trust scientific journals to print facts instead of only those that support their theories.
Marion, Dr. William M. Gray the often touted ultimate guru of hurricane forecasting is another skeptic. To some degree (pun intended) the debate may be media enhanced as it has had alternating bouts of freeze versus melting predictions for over a 100 years. Man may quicken or retard the earth's natural cycles, but I doubt seriously that it can change them. To me the debate is akin to the Miller Lite beer commercial, "tastes great, less filling." To argue one versus the other gets us to the same beer. Dino fuel has its limits and its drawbacks. Syntheic fuels and biofuels seem the logical replacement. The synbios have less polluting aromatics and tend to be renewable. Whether the "greens" and the skeptics march down the same path while singing a different song, they will arrive at the same place and the world will benefit. In that regard see the recent study by the Worldwatch Institute. http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=2773
Meanwhile Mother Earth will dance to her own beat and on her own time.
Craig correctly recognizes Dr. William M. Gray as a recognized guru of hurricane forecasting. And he scores another bull's-eye when pointing out that Gray is a skeptic about global warming as a factor behind hurricane frequency and intensity.
Gray has devoted a career to understanding the natural variability of hurricanes. And I've seen no serious science disputing that natural variability is a player.
Trouble is, there's more than one kid on this block. While natural variablity is a shoo-in, and in many more ways than a driver climatic fluctuation, it's not alone.
Global warming has come to join it, specifically in the form of warming sea surface temperatures.
So, while Gray is on undisputed ground when pointing to natural fluctuations, he's been running into some stormy waters when peristing in attributing hurricane variability to natural cycles alone.
Like other skeptics, (e.g., Christy, Lindzen) Gray has (inadvertently?) done a service to the science of global warming by forcing his colleagues back to their drawing boards. The net effect has been a strengthened body of evidence that 1- sea surface temperatures are on the way up and that 2- they too play a role in hurricane formation and intensity.
The tricky part of this is that science does not get to pick and choose between natural variablity and greenhouse-forcing. Instead, what's been happening is increasingly sophisticated calculations of how big a role each of them is playing. And the greenhouse-forcing signals are coming through loud and clear for the majority of scientists who have been sorting out the pieces of the puzzle.
I don't know why Gray persists in insisting that it's all a matter of natural variation. But the trend of evidence is lining up against that interpretation.
"As a boy, I remember seeing articles about the large global warming that had taken place between 1900 and 1945. No one understood or knew if this warming would continue. Then the warming abated and I heard little about such warming through the late 1940s and into the 1970s.
In fact, surface measurements showed a small global cooling between the mid-1940s and the early 1970s. During the 1970s, there was speculation concerning an increase in this cooling. Some speculated that a new ice age may not be far off.
Then in the 1980s, it all changed again. The current global warming bandwagon that US-European governments have been alarming us with is still in full swing.
Not our fault
Are we, the fossil-fuel-burning public, partially responsible for this recent warming trend? Almost assuredly not.
These small global temperature increases of the last 25 years and over the last century are likely natural changes that the globe has seen many times in the past.
Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes
This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood.
Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential.
There is a negative or complementary nature to human-induced greenhouse gas increases in comparison with the dominant natural greenhouse gas of water vapour and its cloud derivatives.
It has been assumed by the human-induced global warming advocates that as anthropogenic greenhouse gases increase that water vapour and upper-level cloudiness will also rise and lead to accelerated warming - a positive feedback loop.
It is not the human-induced greenhouse gases themselves which cause significant warming but the assumed extra water vapour and cloudiness that some scientists hypothesise.
Negative feedback
The global general circulation models which simulate significant amounts of human-induced warming are incorrectly structured to give this positive feedback loop.
Their internal model assumptions are thus not realistic.
As human-induced greenhouse gases rise, global-averaged upper-level atmospheric water vapour and thin cirrus should be expected to decrease not increase.
Water vapour and cirrus cloudiness should be thought of as a negative rather than a positive feedback to human-induced - or anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases.
No significant human-induced greenhouse gas warming can occur with such a negative feedback loop.
Climate debate has 'life of its own'
Our global climate's temperature has always fluctuated back and forth and it will continue to do so, irrespective of how much or how little greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere.
Although initially generated by honest scientific questions of how human-produced greenhouse gases might affect global climate, this topic has now taken on a life of its own.
It has been extended and grossly exaggerated and misused by those wishing to make gain from the exploitation of ignorance on this subject.
This includes the governments of developed countries, the media and scientists who are willing to bend their objectivity to obtain government grants for research on this topic.
I have closely followed the carbon dioxide warming arguments. From what I have learned of how the atmosphere ticks over 40 years of study, I have been unable to convince myself that a doubling of human-induced greenhouse gases can lead to anything but quite small and insignificant amounts of global warming."
I think Dr. Gray nailed it when he mentioned the grants for research, there seems to be big money to be obtained from these grants. Money seems to drive a lot of this stuff.
Environmental groups make money filing lawsuits trying to force others to do this or that to save the ecosystem.
That article said in part:
'The chance of the Gulf Stream, which brings warm waters around the British Isles, being halted, sending temperatures plummeting by more than 5C, is now more than 50%, a scientific conference on climate change was told yesterday.
The conference, called by Tony Blair to inform world leaders about the urgency of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, was told of a series of new research findings which showed that climate change was speeding up and would be worse than hitherto expected.
Only five years ago the scientists on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were confident that Antarctica was a "slumbering giant" and its vast ice sheets so cold that they would not begin to melt for centuries, even if the climate changed elsewhere.
This conference was told "the giant is awakening", and areas of the ice-bound continent melting, causing faster sea-level rise than expected.
Whatever politicians and scientists do, temperatures will rise another 0.6C in the next 30 years, on top of 0.7C in the past century, pushing a number of vulnerable species, such as polar bears and penguins, to extinction.
The 30-year time lag between man putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the Earth responding by becoming warmer meant that we were already committed to further climate change.
Margaret Beckett, the environment secretary, said "My understanding is that this level of temperature rise is already built in for the next 20 to 30 years from the climate change we have already instigated, so a significant impact is already inevitable.
"It will have a different impact in different parts of the world, but we will all have to adapt."
For western Europe and North America the most worrying finding revealed at the conference was the potential collapse of the sea current known popularly as the Gulf Stream and to oceanographers as the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC).
The melting of Greenland and Arctic ice and additional fresh water from rainfall is threatening to shut down the current completely.
Mike Schlesinger, from the Climate Research Group at the University of Illinois, said a 3C rise in temperature this century, which is well within current predictions, would lead to a 45% chance of the Gulf Stream halting by the end of this century and a 70% chance by 2200.
But he said that some sophisticated climate models showed the current halting with as little as 2 to 2.5C rise in temperatures - "and that is what you could call dangerous climate change".
The current, which carries one million billion watts of heat - a "petawatt" - from the tropics past Scotland and northwards to the Arctic is known to be weakening by about 10%, but the chance of it being switched off completely by climate change was previously considered remote.
Professor Schlesinger said that even if politicians imposed stringent carbon taxes to reduce emissions there was still a greater than one in four chance of the current being turned off.
"Waiting 30 years to act increases the odds to more than one in three," he said.
Figures from the Hadley Centre for Climate Change given at the meeting showed that in some places in the North Atlantic the temperature might drop as much as 10C, and over the UK Atlantic coast it would be around 5C, causing a winter freeze up.
Dr Richard Wood produced a map showing what would happen in Britain if the THC shut down in 2049. The cooling effect would be far greater than than the general effect of global warming.
"The resulting climate in the UK for example would be substantially colder than that experienced during the 'Little Ice Age' of the 17th and 18th centuries."
This was a period when ice fairs were held in winter on the frozen Thames.'
Given this concern we can look at Todd's original request to envision the West in 2056 and see an entirely opposite reality occurring.
Gray can say, as Craig quotes him, that he sees no importance in a doubling of the atmosphere's greenhouse gas content. But I've never seen Gray or other skeptics wrestle with the question of what happens to infrared radiation when it runs into these gasses in its way back to space. No amount of quibbling can evade the physics.
But a lot of this quibbling isn't really based in science from the get-go. Not long ago, I composed a little piece for New West about politics and its role as a battler against science and related reporting.
The stakes are high when evidence of science or the economy is shoved aside. And that shoving can come straight out of political struggles over the budget. Or so say I, at this URL:
'Carleton University Professor Tim Patterson (Paleoclimatologist) explains the crucial importance of properly evaluating the merit of Canada's climate change plans: “It is no exaggeration to say that in the eight years since the Kyoto Protocol was introduced there has been a revolution in climate science. If, back in the mid-nineties, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would not exist because we would have concluded it was not necessary.”
Contrary to claims that the science of climate change has been settled, the causes of the past century’s modest warming is highly contested in the climate science community. The climate experts presenting in the video demonstrate that science is quickly diverging away from the hypothesis that the human release of greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide, is having a significant impact on global climate. “There is absolutely no convincing scientific evidence that human-produced greenhouse gases are driving global climate change”, stated climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball. He added that the Canadian government’s plan to designate carbon dioxide as a “toxic” under CEPA is irresponsible and without scientific merit. “Carbon dioxide is a staff of life, plain and simple. It makes up less than 4% of greenhouse gases and it is not a toxic.”
IPCC assertions about the unprecedented nature of the past century's warming, or the widespread beliefs that we are experiencing an increase in extreme weather, accelerated sea level rise and unusual warming in polar regions are also shown in the video to be wholly without merit.
The idea for the video was initiated by the Friends of Science Society, a registered not-for-profit group of geologists, environmental scientists and concerned citizens, “in an effort to make the science of climate change available and understandable to the general public”, stated Dr. Doug Leahey, President of Friends of Science Society. Commenting on his decision to get involved with the video project, University of Calgary’s Professor Barry Cooper stated, “Universities are in the education business. In a democracy like Canada, education and informed discussion of public policy are tightly linked. The public, media and government would benefit by hearing from all sides on this important issue in order to make as informed a decision as is possible.”'
In my opinion, what this demonstrate is that there is anything but consensus in the scientific community. As Dr. Gray has suggested, the argument about consensus is not about science, it's about politics. That also seems to be the point of this editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/06/13/EDGDOILMDO1.DTL
'THERE IS A CONCEIT among the American Left that the American Right cleaves to bad science out of deference to religion, while the left is all-science all-the-time. Former Veep Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," however, shows how unscientific -- and downright faith-based -- the left has become.'
It never ceases to amaze me that those who believe in evolution instead of creation are absolutley determined that they are the ones to say when, where, how much, and even if evolution takes place.
Regardless . . . what's the harm in living our lives in a manner that is more harmonious with nature? And shouldn't we be weaning off of Middle East oil stores in the "name" of national security? Gov. S gave a brilliant speech at UM's graduation this year. Wish I could find it on-line for you to read. We should take his advice and become more energy independent.
As I read throught these comments, what strikes me most is how generally illiterate the majority of people are regarding not only the issues under discussion, but the nature of science itself. We hear that science is not democratic, but about "facts." We hear that facts are true, but theories are "political." Neither of these claims is true. It's clear that people don't know what science is, nor how it works.
There are no facts without the explanatory context of theory, and science is the most democratic of human institutions.
What we know today as science, from the Latin word scienta, or knowledge, began as an epistemological and moral rebellion against the hidebound theology of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, which relegated human knowledge to revelation from God brokered or mediated by priests. At the end of the medieval period, and at the beginning of the Renaissance, modern science made a different claim: that human beings could discover the truth for themselves through experimentation: getting one's hands dirty with the world, as it were. It was a direct challenge to the authority of the Church.
The scientific method began as an empiricist philosophy of the early Renaissance--that what we know comes through the senses, interpreted through the intellect (the wellspring of theory). None of the early scientists (e.g. Galileo) would have eschewed the role of theory; they might as well have denied the existence of their intellects. Indeed, they developed the first scientific theories to explain what they learned from their senses--that, for example, the earth orbits the sun. They created astronomy--a body of theory about celestial mechanics.
We put people in space on the basis not of fact, but of theory.
When we hear that theory is theory and fact is fact, and never the twain shall meet, we hear that the intellect has no place in science; we hear that ignorance is supreme.
Interestingly, Protestantism and modern science came from the same wellspring of rebellion against the Church, with the essence of early Protestantism being that human beings don't need priests to know God. More interestingly, many early scientists were members of the developing and secretive anti-Catholic Masonic order as well as scientific experimenters. Dan Brown uses this historical fact in The Da Vinci Code, which itself has come under ideological fire from churches Catholic and Protestant, which are determined to squelch any debate about the historical nature of Jesus.
As for the claim that democracy is irrelevant to science, it is a claim that is ignorant of how science works. The scientific method--examination of the world by experiment--is democratic to its core. It is a joint process of testing and mutual discussion, argument, and debate among scientists. It's a constant back and forth, in journals and conferences, in classrooms and laboratories, as facts are discovered, hypotheses designed to explain the facts tested and accepted or rejected. Hypotheses that stand the test of experiment and debate become theories. They are not pulled out of the air. They are formed in a crucible of experimentation AND democratic debate.
Theories are explanations of how things work that have met the requirements of rigorous testing AND debate among scientists until a consensus about their validity has been reached. A hypothesis becomes a theory only by a rigorous process of democratic debate, a conflict of intellects.
This is not a pretty process, nor a perfect process, but then no democratic process is. Following Winston Churchill, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
One thing we can be sure of: when science is allowed to work, we get knowledge, not ignorance. Those who prefer ignorance attack science, or attempt to undermine it (e.g., "intelligent design").
The debate over anthropogenic climate change has to be understood as a debate of global scale among thousands upon thousands of scientists. The debate has fired and winnowed fact upon fact, theory upon theory, from a myriad scientific disciplines, many of which have no direct relationship with each other, over the decades.
As a result of that process, we have reached the point where our best human understanding of the matter has reached two conclusions:
1)What we are seeing and experiencing as climate change is primarily of anthropogenic origin, and
2)The consequences of this climate change will be devastating to the human species, not to mention many other species that share this planet as home.
As Todd says at the beginning of this fine article, this isn't chicken little claiming that the sky is falling because some raven poop fell on his head. This is a conclusion that has come about from an unprecedented human effort to understand our world and what's going on.
It's a perfect marriage of theory and fact.
Because science is fundamentally democratic, one has to be alarmed when attempts are made to dictate where science goes, how it is conducted, and what conclusions it makes. The entire climate change debate has been marred by the determination of authoritarian governments and various industries, and their supporting sycophant think tanks--what we might call the modern politico-economic Church--to squelch or falsely spin what has become a tentative but still powerful consensus about anthropogenic climate change.
Among other things, one outcome of the climate change debate is that democracy itself is under attack by those for whom ignorance is a political weapon.
But where there is censorship, you can be sure there is truth.
Kimberly, I agree with you completely, we shoudlall be tring to save fuel. I don't believe flying all over the nation and other countries giving speaches is helping anything, especially when Mr. Gore flies in a private jet. I don;'t believe making a movie to try to make folks believe one's own point of view does much good again when tens of thousands of gallons of fuel are used to produce and promote it.
There are folks who fly and drive into Wyoming to protest the drilling of a well.....and guess what they use to get here. That makes absolutely no sense.
If you could insist that any environmental group that you support spend their money on research, not lawsuits we would reach the goal of alternative fuels much sooner, IMO. I do not know of a single one that is supporting research, do you?
In my opinion, Galileo's finger points the way towards true science, challenging the conventional, consensus wisdom. Always pointing to the "yeah buts" of inconvenient facts that undermine the agenda driven arguments of consensus claimed by the orthodoxy of true believers. Science is apolitical. Democracy describes a political process and political institutions by humankind to make decisions, which may be grounded on valid or faulty science. I believe we have a choice to make as to how we spend our public funds regarding climate. Either develop plans and build infrastructure that works in harmony with Mother Earth's cycles or throw it away in the fruitless attempt to challenge or alter the cyclical pattern of cooling and warming. In my opinion an example of such waste is the rebuilding of New Orleans. All of the flood gates and walls will not hold back rising sea levels when disaster strikes again. We should adapt and work in harmony with our changing environment.
While I would agree that our actions should be in accordance with underlying natural processes, it is simply incorrect to claim science does not function through democratic process. For example, what is peer review if not a process of debate among equals?
Like it or not, science is a human institution not isolated from society. When we call for science to be "apolitical," what we want is for science to proceed according to the scientific method without censorship of its research or results by the powers that be--the powers that represent conventional wisdom because they have a vested interest, political and economic, in the status quo. Science, at its best, is a challenge to the status quo. That is precisely why the Inquisition went after Galileo. We know that church intellectuals actually agreed with Galileo. But he was a threat to Church authority and he had to be forced to recant for the "good" of the Church.
Through the Inquisition, the Church did tremendous damage to itself, yet, through its intransigence, it helped to create the Renaissance and the Reformation.
Science is not a-social; that is an ideology that deliberately isolates science from society. Science is a human institution. What it adds to society however is that it is self-correcting much more rapidly and accurately than society at large is. It welcomes and functions best through dissent and debate. Science has much to teach politics--something with which Thomas Jefferson would have agreed wholeheartedly.
I would strongly advise studying Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which may be the most important book of the 20th century about the nature of science and how it works.
Let's not forget that in the beginning, there was no consensus about climate change and there was much disagreement; we have arrived where we are as a consequence of a long process of experimentation, thought, and intense debate. Scientific consensus--scientific theory--about climate change is not the same as conventional wisdom, which functions in the social realm to allow people to avoid thinking. Scientific consensus reflects the best of human understanding of a problem, and is anything but conventional.
At a much less controversial level, we saw the same problems with the theory of plate techtonics, which had considerable opposition in the beginning. Now it is an accepted theory of geology. It most certainly is NOT conventional wisdom, however.
At a more controversial level, evolution, nearly 150 years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, is still under attack from the modern Inquisition, which is determined to label it as "merely" theory. Actually,it's a damn good theory.
Much of the process of understanding how science works depends upon paying attention to how it actually works rather than to the fundmantalist ideology of those of libertarian or positivist slant, that somehow Science has replaced the Church as the repository of Truth and that Scientists are the Priests of Science, an ideology that was popular throughout most of the 20th century and did much damage. That ideology has has been adopted by government and industry, who have proclaimed themselves as the Church to which modern priests of science must swear allegiance, for which they are paid pretty well. It's dangerous now, as it was 500 years ago, to speak the truth.
Such an ideology would have been anathema to Galileo, who was concerned as much with human freedom as he was with knowledge.
That is what we are ultimately talking about when we talk about science--freedom. That's why government and industry with vested interests in the status quo are determined to deny what science has learned about climate change. They prefer that we live in ignornace, and therefore slavery, no matter the consequences.
Might I remind Mr. Hoskins that no matter how good he thinks Darwin's theory is, it is still a theory and much of it has to be taken on faith. Faith that the "missing links" will be found, faith that carbon testing is accurate, etc.
Back to global warming, what are you willing to do to stop it, you yourself?
One thing I'm doing is actually thinking about it. I highly recommend it to you.
Robert, well agrued and "on point" response to my previous post without the personal rebukes that I found objectionable in your "what is science" reply. Scientific institutions function like any other human created institution. In my opinion, peer review debate is largely my whole point in the discussion. The debate continues by a variety of learned people who believe in global warming projections, who don't accept that global warming is upon us, who believe we are headed towards a deep freeze, who believe that Mother Earth is self-correcting (concerned over the falling flow rate of the Gulf Stream), and who believe we don't have suffient data to say what will happen either way in the next 50 years. Back in the 70's the media and scientific journals were forecasting "the iceman cometh." For over a 100 years there has been reported vacilation over whether the earth was headed towards the greenhouse or the next iceage. Like you I have a problem with tenets of faith being used as trump cards. In that regard neo-Druidic environmentalism has its own mantras and creed that are sung in reverent monotones. I also have a problem with Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvienent Truth," that refuses to discuss inconvenient truths that undermine his premise. I also have a problem with disregarding the carbon buildup in our oceans that create acid and kill the plankton. The later problem is not part of Mother Earth's cycles but seem to be largely man-made and needs attention to keep the food chain from winking out. Refering back to my Miller Lite analogy perhaps we can continue to argue the semantics while we travel the same path towards a common goal. I look forward to reading Todd's book and see whether he dons the Druid cloak and predictable chants, or the glasses, pocket protector, and lab coat of the scientist.
Take care.
As an admirer of Science Under Siege, which describes the kinds of events known to me personally, I have no doubt that Todd's book will be accurate, well-researched, closely-reasoned, and judicious in its conclusions. It would be so even if Todd adopted what you call environmental "druidism" as his context.
Druidism is little more than a throwback to what, as best as we can discover through enthnographic research, the original human hunter-gatherer stance toward the world--that the entire world is alive. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis could be considered druidic. Is it still druidic when we speak instead in terms of supposing that the earth is a metasystem of a myriad functioning sub-systems sustained by negative feedback processes but distorted by positive feedback systems?
I'm providing a link to another article that expains the difference between scientists who disagree with the global warming scenario. They are generally scientists who study the climate on an ongoing basis, The global warming folks genrally study what is going to happen if such and such a scenario occurs.
It is very interesting. http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm
Marion, you should be ashamed of yourself knocking down another stone slab at the Stonehenge chapel. ;)
I hate to interrupt the rhetorical lovefest going on between Craig and Marion, but let's invoke a little reality, shall we? As a note of caution, I would also be very careful, Craig, with how I throw around the word "conceit".
Certainly, skepticism about anything stated to be the gospel truth is healthy. That, after all, is the essence of empirical scientific inquiry. As a journalist, I, too, approached the idea of climate change with initial skepticism when I first began writing about it in the 1990s.
However, to demean the integrity of the many scientists who at first approached the possibility of climate change with suspicion, only to embrace its validity based upon the accumulated evidence, is to impugn the brightest scientific minds in the world who have never been accused of making their conclusions fit personal agendas.
If Craig and Marion have evidence to support their insinuations that climate change is a delusional invention, let us see it.
Craig seems to imply that there is a see-saw balance in the scientific community between those who believe climate change is real and human-caused, and those who hold an opposite view.
Bring together the number of reputable scientists who take climate change seriously and it would fill an auditorium. But gather the credible skeptics and the number could fit inside a small room.
As I was reminded this morning in a chat with a respected politically-conservative scientist who helped coordinate one of the independent regional overviews of likely effects from climate change, the debunkers are few in number and often carry forward hidden political, economic, and religious agendas. Either that, or they're afraid to face reality because it scares them.
William M. Gray is among a small number of skeptics and he has done nothing to debunk the large, multi-tiered preponderant body of evidence, subjected to stringent peer review, that points to climate change as being caused by human-generated carbon dioxide emissions.
To suggest that over 2,000 scientists who disagree with Gray are somehow part of a conspiracy to foist a myth on the world in order to pad their own research budgets is preposterous. As the scientist told me this morning, Exxon Mobil and other energy companies have created several dozen organizations that front as concerned advocacy entities but whose primary mission is to distort and confuse the science.
For those who choose to obfuscate the seriousness (and/or existence) of climate change, they can always cite someone like Dr. Gray to bolster their agnosticism. Just as one can find virtually anything on the internet, Googling a skeptic on climate change isn't hard either.
What's uncanny is the parallel which exists between the current scientific "debate" over climate change and the protracted scientific tragedy which played out over several decades involving tobacco and the health effects (and high economic costs to society) associated with using those products.
Many people died needlessly because an industry—and it's paid executives AND SCIENTISTS WHO FRAMED PUBLIC POLICY— refused to state things as they actually were.
Watching with a moral and ethical callousness as millions of Americans developed lung cancer, the skeptics based their arguments against causality on the supposed abscence of a direct link that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that breathing in burning tobacco and other chemicals in cigarettes was making people sick.
They would march out the rare 90 year olds who smoked two packs a day as proof that smoking wasn't harmful, without mentioning the zillions of others who agonized through horrible, premature deaths.
The last holdouts were those working for the cigarette manufacturers. One wonders: Would those "objective" scientists, knowing what they did in their heart of hearts, have allowed their own children to take up smoking? Would they also have sent their loved ones into the dusty asbestos and coal mines without respirators?
Fred Palmer, president of the Western Fuels Association, has asserted that carbon dioxide is benign and insists (falsely) that there's no proof to say whether greater releases of carbon dioxide are "good" or "bad" for the atmosphere. "Good" or "bad" is subjective. Saying—and proving— that increased levels of carbon dioxide can alter the compositional structure of our atmosphere and affect the systems which sustain life on this planet is not subjective.
Mr. Palmer, of course, wants nothing to stand in the way of developing and burning of more coal. He is, after all, on the payroll and he's paid to be an advocate for his product.
With climate change, as the arguments of skeptics are one by one being picked apart and whittled away, the holdout position now is to deliberately distort the flow of information in order to try and leave the public confused.
Indeed, England and Scandinavia may cool—because of ocean currents that go out of whack— at the same time the U.S. West heats up. But having cooler places does not mean that much of the rest of the Earth, on average, will not be warmer so as to trigger a number of serious consequences— economic, social, and ecological— for humanity.
The most important discussion that should take place is deciding what to do about it.
Here's a passage from Tim Flannery's book, The Weather Makers (page 244) that addresses the acolytes of Fred Singer, Fred Palmer, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma and the special interest groups who insist that global warming is a hoax: "Such gobbledygook is frequently employed to bewilder the general reader, though at times these groups will push it much further. The Leipzig Declaration is a particularly interesting case in point. This document appeared in 1995, penned by Fred Singer, and purported to have the signatures of seventy-nine scientists from leading universities who subscribe to the view that climate change is not a threat.
"On investigation, however, the majority of the signatories were found not to be scientists or had not signed the declaration," Flannery notes. "Skepticism is an indispensable element in scientific inquiry, but when the intention is to mislead rather than clarify, we have not skepticism but deceit."
Flannery adds: "Some industries that oppose action on climate change use tactics reminiscent of those of asbestos and tobacco companies, who by constantly challenging and clouding the outcomes of research into the link between their products and cancer, succeeded in buying themselves a few more decades of fat profits. Asbestos and cigarettes can kill individuals, but CO 2 emissions threaten our planet."
Here's an undisputed fact: There is more, and ever growing peer-reviewed published evidence, to support the conclusion that climate change is happening than there was showing that smoking tobacco is harmful to your health. Craig speaks of "Liberal conceit"?
From Republican Sen. John McCain to a large massing of evangelical Christians, from business people to scholars, and including Righties, Lefties, and inbetweens, the public consensus about climate change is informed by the irrefutable scientific consensus. If one wants to find evidence of conceit, it resides in the claims of those who ignore this compelling reality.
'THERE IS A CONCEIT among the American Left that the American Right cleaves to bad science out of deference to religion, while the left is all-science all-the-time. Former Veep Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," however, shows how unscientific -- and downright faith-based -- the left has become.'
I myself did not use that term. The text that I quoted from the article was my attempt to link it to Dr. Gray and his objection to the pursuit of politics over science. Marion's link to the Canadian article also makes the point that Gore's movie is junk science.
My remark to Marion, was meant for levity, nothing more. That's why I put a ;) on the end. I fail to see where that constitutes a "lovefest" as you put it.
Perhaps at that this juncture a few deep breaths are in order. I look forward to your book.
Craig, for the record: The "article" to which Marion provided a link appeared in a right-wing Canadian newspaper and was actually an op-ed piece written by a paid staffer for a PR/public policy consulting firm whose clients have included energy industry companies, including those that want to develop more coal and the oil sands of Alberta.
Does it really matter if the article was in a "right wing" publication and he was paid. Does it denigrate your work to be paid and/or to have it in a "left wing" paper? He presented facts that I found credible. Was you problem with it A)He got paid to write it, B) It was in what you call a right wing paper, C) He interpretted the facts differently than you did?
You really undermine your credibility when you refer to folks who see things differently than you as having a "lovefest".
It would be a mistake on anyone's part to assume that the Bush administration gives any more than just enough lip service to the Christian right to gain political support to keep the "right" people, as it were, in office. That's Karl Rove's strategy. The Bush administration, following on previous administrations, including the Clinton administration, is committed rather to furthering the policies of multinational corporations in the name of "free-trade" and other imperial policies. The Christian right seems incapable of perceiving this fact and is being sold a bill of goods, except for the preachers on the payroll who are cashing in, as preachers and priests always have, on public gullibility.
The appropriate response to the Bush administration is one I heard from fellow officers during my military service who left the service when I did nearly a decade and a half ago after the Gulf War: "I'm willing to die for my country, but I'll be damned if I'll spend my life for Texaco."
I and far too many of my colleages in conservation have invested considerable intellectual effort to understand how the world works simply to rest our efforts on "faith," whatever that might be. Faith in what? I have no idea what "faith-based" environmentalism is, because the term as used by the right describes nothing in my experience. I do know what science-based environmentalism is. It is neither left nor right. It's a cold-eyed if angry view of what the world has become as a consequence of human action. It goes back to regional ecological devastation by the early civilizations through agriculture and war, the consequences of which in the Middle East and Africa I have seen with my own eyes, to pollution, to desertification (you have to experience the Sahara to know it), to the destruction of myriad species, to disease, to deforestation, to overpopulation, to climate change at the global scale. That these things have been and are occurring is indisputable, even if you have faith in "progress," whatever that is. It is pure obstinence to refuse to acknowledge it.
I can see it here as the glaciers of the Wind River Range slink to the Gulf of Mexico and as the pollution from gasfield development of the Pinedale anticline slips over the Continental Divide; I can see it in the Arctic as the polar ice disappears for the first time in a long time; I can see it as industrial development penetrates the sub-Arctic boreal forest to poison the last wild country of North America.
The question is not whether it is happening; it most certainly is. This has been the process of civilized progress on Earth for the last six or seven thousand years. The question is, can we do anything about it? The answer is, I fear, no. Knowledge does not not necessarily translate to power, and governments and industries, and those committed to their welfare, have too much at stake to take action that would undermine that power. But as Jarrod Diamond comments in his book Collapse regarding the collapse of the immigrant society in Greenland, the only benefit to being rich is that the rich are the last to starve.
The rich (e.g., North American society) are gambling that the poor will starve quickly to leave enough behind so the rich may survive. That seems a risky policy.
For what it's worth, Edmonton Oilers just won the 5th game of the Stanley Cup 4-3 in overtime. Series moves to Edmonton for game 6.
Science is systematically reducing uncertainties regarding the causes and consequences of climate change. This is critical, for it helps us identify the tradeoffs we must make. It is irresponsible and naive to pretend they don’t exist or won’t be difficult.
Crafting effective solutions begins with considering two questions. First, should we care about a warming climate? If the answer is yes (and I believe it is), logic leads us to the second: What sacrifices are we willing to accept in order to do something about it?
Pete, I think there is a third question. Is there anything we can do that actually will make a difference to the problem identfied? We could spend a trillion dollars worldwide to build a teacup to take one scoop from Flathead Lake. The result is that we did lower the lake level, but the gain is hardly worth the pain. Asia is building more and more factories while continuing to devour growing quantities of coal and dino fuel. Trying to revert to 1990 carbon emmission levels is not only not going to happen, that rate won't even begin to drain the carbon pond.
Can anyone tell me what year we switched from global cooling to global warming? And is that enough time to determine a problem and not just a variation?
Answers to the three questions:
1) Yes, there is a serious problem.
2) No, very few people are willing to make sacrifices to deal with the problem, and no, incentives won't make a bit of difference because incentives are bribes, and bribery is notoriously useless in inducing people to do the right thing.
3) Solutions/consequences of climate change will be forced on people in ways that will make them very unhappy. Aber, so geht's das Leben.
Todd, I just wanted to start by saying great article. To the rest, I have been enjoying the discussion.
Originally I had a different response prepared, but most of the comments I was going to contribute to the discussion have already been made. So I figured that perhaps the most valuable issue I could comment on is this ridiculous idea that climate change scientists (including the entire international field of climate science) are working to pull some grand fear based hoax on the rest of the world.
Before stating my point, it is important to remember (as Todd stated) that these accusations grew out of a fictional novel, and the personal agendas of high government officials with vested interests in the petroleum industry and constituencies who for what ever reason appear to disregard science. The unfortunate result of Inhofe’s accusations (and other congressional members who were allied with his point of view), was the harassment via congressional investigation of several of the most visible members of the climate change research community. The tie in here is all this was concurrent with Inhofe’s vehement “hoax” speech that was based upon what amounts to a Star Wars novel. Within the science community (and its organizations) this was viewed as intimidation of individual scientists by high-level elected government officials. Intimidation and science do not mix, and this action made a lot of people here and abroad start questioning the future of science in this country. Not a good thought to wake up to every morning since science is the foundation upon which this countries wealth and power is based.
So the argument of the accusers is that science perpetuates this “grand hoax” of human-induced climate change for ulterior motives. Those motives as stated by the accusers are 1) personal gain (I assume they mean monetary), and 2) Maintaining federal funding for their research programs. The reasons these arguments are so far fetched are rather simple. First, let’s imagine that none of us had ever heard of human-induced climate change. Would there be any reason to study weather and climate? The easy answer is YES; simply because who here doesn’t benefit from the most obvious results of this basic and applied research. Products generated from climate/weather research include weather forecasts, predictions of hurricanes trajectories and intensities, estimates of long-term drought conditions, and a greater understanding of the inherent variability of our water resources. The list of benefits goes on and on, to see for yourself just visit a NOAA, NASA, or USGS website.
The more we learn about the physical drivers of our climate system, the better our predictions and forecasts become. So do you actually believe the scientists who are engaged in climate change research would be out of a job if there was no theory of, or evidence for, anthropogenic climate change? The obvious answer here is NO; they would be onto the next most interesting and relevant questions to research, and would be federally funded to do that work too. Climate research in its essence is the study of a global system that we all depend upon, and as we all know this system can be both extremely beneficial and destructive to human societies.
There is no agenda. There is no logical or monetary reason to for scientists deceive. There is just the objective to provide useful information to society upon which society can make decisions.
On a seperate but related note, we should and do thank the climate change “skeptics” who provide valuable critiques of the science, as well as alternate theories to consider. This is part and parcel of the way science works. However, they are still considered “skeptics” because the data is not supportive of their theories when tested. Besides, every scientist is essentially a skeptic; it’s in the nature of what they do. Scientists are constantly questioning their methods, their data, and their results. That’s why error estimates and uncertainty play such a large role in scientific publications and discussions.
To the casual climate change skeptics, understand that climate change research is not a belief system. All inquiries and results reported on the topic are data based. On occasion there are problems with that data leading to incorrect conclusions as the example of the satellite data on troposphere temperatures demonstrated. Through the process of science, theories and data are tested and retested, and in doing so any errors or data problems are ultimately detected and reported on. That’s what led to the revision of our knowledge on what seemed to be a decoupling between surface and troposphere temperatures.
To Marion and others interested in the history of science and how we know what we know about climate change I have several suggestions. First the answers to your questions lie in the fields of paleoclimatology, climatology, geology, and glaciology. Start your search there. Many fantastic text books exist on the science, and the history of the science, and they provide a good starting point for understanding the science. If the answers provided are still not satisfactory the fantastic thing about science is the paper trail it leaves. In any university library, and even online, you can find copies of all the primary research papers that led the science to the accepted theories of today. These books and primary research articles are a good place to start, and this is where writers like Todd do the majority of their primary research. This allows anyone to read the same articles as Todd and form their own information/data based conclusions. There are other valuable online resources, but I hesitate to suggest these, because there are many professional looking websites that provide biased or intentionally deceptive accounts of the science.
Happy reading
Thank you Greg, but if you can find just when the switch occured, I can't. More than trying to perpetuate a hoax, I think a lot of the two sides depends on interpretation of facts.
A case in point: The polar bears eating each other, global warming believers are sure that is the cause, ESA propnents are sure that means the polar bear needs to be listed as endangered asap. I believe it needs to be looked at, a good count of the bears take place, to me it sounds like there is an overpopulation of polar bears and they are competing for food and space.
Marion, sometimes locating the exact moment a tipping point is reached in intellectual/scientific persuits is difficult. And honestly, I don't know off the top of my head when that point was reached. The scientific discussion on the competing theories you are interested in can be tracked through the journal publications. Two major journals which will highlight the best of this arguement would be Science and Nature. They have a complete archive of the journal accessible on-line.
Regarding the polar bear arguement. Much of what you mention are current best guesses by people and organizations interested (or uninterested) in the survival of the species. Some of those arguements levied by interest groups may be biased or untrue, and any arguements coming from the scientific community would be based on the the best available data. Also, some of those theories, like your own, are not based on data but rather gut feeling. This doesn't make those theories less valuable, it just points towards what you yourself concluded. That is, the best thing we can do right now is task scientists with the job of researching the question further.
This of course is exactly what happened 20-30 years ago with the issue of global climate change. The country invested in researching the question because it was viewed to be important. Ultimately the original research questions were answered, but as with all good reasearch many more interesting and valuable questions have grown out of the original research.
So then what do we do when scientists debate the complexity of the problem (via data based research), and dominant relationships emerge even if some the underlying mechanisms remain unclear? Do we throw the baby out with the bath water, and say because we don't know everything by default that means we must know nothing? What if the conclusions run counter to what people in different interest groups would like to hear? Do we trash the scientists and the research? Or, do we try to create policies and management strategies based on the best available science? Political institutions could imbed the entire approach within an adaptive management framework so as we learn more we could refine our approach. Anyway, there are many parallels here between the two discussions.
Let me remind you that scientists identified the causes and problems associated with a growing Ozone hole. Recomendations were made, international policies and bans were generated, industries adjusted, AND the thinning of the ozone not only slowed but will ultimately rebound.
Really though, you are obviously interested in the science, and you have questions you want answered. So skip any potential for deception and bias and go straight to the scientific source. Read it, look at the data presented and the conclusions made by the researching scientists and form own opnion. I can't change your mind.
One final thought, couldn't your theory that polar bears are in an overpopulation chrises and competing for food and space arise from maintaing a steady population number but reducing the available habitat (i.e. melt the arctic sea ice)? Sattelites have detected a major decline in arctic sea ice. This sea ice is critical habitat upon which the bears hunt their most critical food source. You may be onto something there.
Science, especially science like this, is not ever 100% sure. Gravity, like evolution, is a theory. To call something a theory in the scientific world is one of the greatest compliments you can give. It means people have tried countless times to disprove it, but have never been able to. Thus, it's taken as more or less fact.
The science dealing with climate change rests on probabilities. It's looking at past trends, atmospheric composition and changes, etc and trying to predict the future. Many (not all - but it almost never is) scientists believe that there is an extremely significant probability that climate change/global warming is occuring and is caused by man.
HOWEVER: even if you don't buy into the scientific evidence for it, aren't the possible consequences serious enough to at least merit serious thought?? Have we really become so lazy and dependant on cars that we are so repulsed at the thought of walking or riding a bike instead of driving? Is it that horrible to do little things that add up like turning off lights, using less heat/air conditioning, etc? And (for Marion) yes, I do ride a bike instead of a car. I avoid driving whenever possible. I know not everyone is willing to ride a bike all the time, but how about just part of the time, say one out of every 5 times? In a nation that is growing increasingly fatter, a little exercise wouldn't hurt...
This story from CBC North about US shipping companies exploring the possibility of using a soon to be open Northwest Passage through the Artic itself serves as a kind of comment on the discussion at hand:
Arctic shipping coming soon, U.S. expert says
Last updated Jun 15 2006 01:13 PM MDT
CBC News
U.S. shipping companies are showing such a keen interest in global warming that a White House adviser says Canada should develop a policy with the U.S. on shipping through the Northwest Passage.
Commercial companies are itching to use the Northwest Passage as a preferred route between the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and Asia, George Newton, chairman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, told a conference on Arctic waters on Thursday.
The route would save two weeks in travelling time, an incentive for shipping companies, which have invested $4.5 billion in tankers capable of going through ice. As well, the Polar Research Board in Washington is expected to recommend that the U.S. government buy more icebreakers.
But Newton warned in Ottawa that a lot more work needs to be done before Arctic shipping becomes commonplace.
Canada and the United States need to study the Arctic waters, to demystify them and work out how to safely navigate the treacherous waters. Canada needs an extensive infrastructure to support shipping, and consult with aboriginals and other stakeholders.
"We need search and rescue that fall on those ports," Newton said. "We need voyage repairs, we need the ability to manage traffic in an effective fashion and we need ice breakers."
And Canada's northern people need to be consulted, said John Amagoalik, known as the Father of Nunavut.
"We have to make sure that whatever happens is manageable," Amagoalik said. "We can't allow just anybody to do whatever they want up there. There has to be some sort of management regime."
Robert wrote, "The Bush administration, following on previous administrations, including the Clinton administration, is committed rather to furthering the policies of multinational corporations in the name of "free-trade" and other imperial policies."
The other day President Bush must have slipped his multi-national corporate leash because he designated an area in Hawaii the size of California as a national marine reserve. Commercial and sports fishing will be phased out, removal of animals and minerals is prohibited, and any divers will have to be permitted.
;) ;) ;)
It struck me that the clergy of the neo-modernistic Druidic environmental movement lack a tangible, visible symbol of their commitment to alter global warming. How about a mitre? This new headdress would not be pointed but flat and covered in reflective foil. It's wearing would not be restricted to the leadership but made mandatory for all true believers. However, the symbol needs a slogan. I thought of two. "Save the polar, return the solar." "It's right to reflect the light." I suspect that the first one would have greater acceptance since it doesn't contain the "right" word. The alternative to the mitre would be for people to shave their heads, but the reflective quality is not as great and may require waxing and buffing. Wearing of the tinfoil hats would make a dramatic statement of the truly committed soothsayers like Al Gore.
;) ;) ;) It's Friday.
Tim thanks for the follow-up with the additional science comments. Adding to Roberts comments on the NW Passage and the Arctic region I'd like to point out that the NY Times had a fantastic multi-article spread on the social and economic implications of the thinning arctic ice. Countries have been solidifying boundries and gearing up to begin oil exploration in regions that were previously too harsh and too dangerous to work in. I no longer have the link to those articles, otherwise I'd pass them along.
Craig, I enjoy your humor, I could picture it now. I love the slogan, hats, bald heads and all. So to be "fair and balanced" what should the tangible, visible symbol be for the "hydrocarbon based, maintaining the status quo, troglodytes" be?
I suppose we can debate the reality of global warming, and who/what is to blame until the cows come home, but my guess is we will never all agree, and I wonder if it matters?
Perhaps the more pertinent discussion should focus on questions like:
Is it wrong to recycle?
Is it smart to think about alternative energy sources?
Is any resource infinite?
Should I feel guilty about driving a hybrid?
Despite the tongue in cheek tone, I often wonder if some of our intellecual muscle couldnt be applied in a more practical way; Creating easier ways to recycle, marketing "Green" in a way that is more palatable to the masses.
I think most of us would agree that it makes sense not to "poop" in your own nest, but lets be honest, if it is easier to throw it over the side most of us are going to toss.
Karen, you make a great deal of sense. I do not believe there is any proof of man caused global warming, I think we will all be dead and gone long before there is any definitive evidence one way of the other. The 30 years since the global freezing is a moment of time and not really enough to determine anything.
I do however drive a little car, sneeringly called a little tin can by many, and get about 33 mpg avg by driving 55. I can't afford the extra for a hybrid, so that is my solution, plus driving less. I recycle everything I can.
Then you have the true believers who insist that they are not going to feel guilty because they want a "safe" vehicle, as in larger, they are entitled to vacations of thousands of miles, and besides one person doesn't make any difference.
They insist the president must cause some alternative fuel they approve of to appear, and it better be cheap....and safe. But they themselves do not need to do anything.
There is a lot that can be done without laws and without giving environmentalists any more control over the lives of the rest of us.
Gosh, Mr. Wilkinson, you really brought 'em out of the woodwork with this one. I thought it was a good article and I liked the book you did. You really do a good job with these "how good science gets perverted" kinds of topics, which is why they come out of the woodwork to try so hard to confuse and smother your message. If you weren't any good at it, they wouldn't feel the need to bother. I was raised in a culture that teaches that a man can be judged by the virulence of his enemies. You should be proud.
Greg, the symbol would be the shirt pocket portable air conditioner, a fan. The slogan would be "Being a little 'Kronky' is cool" or "Shut your yap, give it a flap."
The debate is over!!!! The people have spoken. The 'bread and butter' RACs (republicans and conservatives) are more resilient than DILs (democrats, independents, and liberals to pickle disasters. Read it here: http://pos.org/latestnumbers/scifi.doc
Then again over in Europe attention is turning to the revival of Irish pigeon races from France to Ulster. There is growing suspicion by both the Irish and French that the Brits may try to shoot them down before they cross Dover. Historic animosities continue to cause a flap with the appearance of Bird Flu in France.
Marion wrote on June 10th that those talking and writing about global warming are hypocrites unless they take action. While words on confrontation aren't typically constructive, all should know that every little bit can help: using a bike or walking for that short trip to the market, at least once a week; using a bus once a week, consuming fewer imported plastic goods; turning off the light, even if you coming back to the room in ten minutes. It all counts. Don't refrain from taking steps just because you feel as though you can't have an impact. You can. You will.
While I have only skimmed what appears to be an excellent article and need to re-read it in studied detail, I will comment that there seems to be a lack of discussion on all fronts of a critical component of the global warming problem, especially as pertains to the United States as one of two leading contributors of greenhouse gas emissions (The United States and China), and that is POPULATION GROWTH. The United States today grows at rates that, if not slowed soon mean we will, in the 21st century, exactly match India's growth in the 20th century, to become A BILLION AMERICANS by late century. However, there is one qualifier. If the Senate's version of immigration "reform" (hardly) is passed, it will actually increase that all ready high growth rate of growth astronomically, to the point that we may achieve the one billion mark by mid-century or before! (In contrast most industrialized nations have stable populations or lose population (Spain, Ireland, Italy). There are two factors as pertains to environmental issues: population and standard of living or consumption. I say without qualification that Earth may not be able to endure the burden of China's industrialization and increased standard of living, and it most certainly cannot endure the burden of the United States becoming one-billion high-consuming (or even moderate-consuming) Americans. We must allow discussion of population on the table.
Kathleene. You've hit the bull's eye. Population as THE driver of natural resource consumption/depletion and corresponding use of fossil fuels will, if unaddressed, remain the Sisyphean factor in any attempt to slow carbon dioxide emissions. In this country, it is the big elephant in the living room that no one wants to talk about.
And what is driving the US population up? Immigration, both legal and illegal. Do you have a solution to offer? Or even suggest? If you take away fossil fuel, who are you going to prevent using it?
Regarding carbon levels and population Newsweek just published this piece.
>>>
The Real Inconvenient Truth
Thanks to population growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions will likely double by 2050. Are we powerless to stop global warming?
By Robert J. Samuelson
Updated: 3:06 p.m. PT July 5, 2006
July 5, 2006 - "Global warming may or may not be the great environmental crisis of the next century, but—regardless of whether it is or isn't—we won't do much about it. We will (I am sure) argue ferociously over it and may even, as a nation, make some fairly solemn-sounding commitments to avoid it. But the more dramatic and meaningful these commitments seem, the less likely they are to be observed. Little will be done.... Global warming promises to become a gushing source of national hypocrisy.''
—This column, July 1997
Well, so it has. In three decades of columns, I've never quoted myself at length, but here it's necessary. Al Gore calls global warming an "inconvenient truth," as if merely recognizing it could put us on a path to a solution. That's an illusion. The real truth is that we don't know enough to relieve global warming, and—barring major technological breakthroughs—we can't do much about it. This was obvious nine years ago; it's still obvious. Let me explain.
From 2003 to 2050, the world's population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty—and freeze everyone else's living standards—we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.
Just keeping annual greenhouse gas emissions constant means that the world must somehow offset these huge increases. There are two ways: Improve energy efficiency, or shift to energy sources with lower (or no) greenhouse emissions. Intuitively, you sense this is tough. China, for example, builds about one coal-fired power plant a week. Now a new report from the International Energy Agency in Paris shows all the difficulties (the population, economic growth and energy projections cited above come from the report).
The IEA report assumes that existing technologies are rapidly improved and deployed. Vehicle fuel efficiency increases by 40 percent. In electricity generation, the share for coal (the fuel with the most greenhouse gases) shrinks from about 40 percent to about 25 percent—and much carbon dioxide is captured before going into the atmosphere. Little is captured today. Nuclear energy increases. So do "renewables" (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal); their share of global electricity output rises from 2 percent now to about 15 percent.
Some of these changes seem heroic. They would require tough government regulation, continued technological gains and public acceptance of higher fuel prices. Never mind. Having postulated a crash energy diet, the IEA simulates five scenarios with differing rates of technological change. In each, greenhouse emissions in 2050 are higher than today. The increases vary from 6 percent to 27 percent.
Since 1800 there's been modest global warming. I'm unqualified to judge between those scientists (the majority) who blame man-made greenhouse gases and those (a small minority) who finger natural variations in the global weather system. But if the majority are correct, the IEA report indicates we're now powerless. We can't end annual greenhouse emissions, and once in the atmosphere, the gases seem to linger for decades. So concentration levels rise. They're the villains; they presumably trap the world's heat. They're already about 36 percent higher than in 1800. Even with its program, the IEA says another 45 percent rise may be unavoidable. How much warming this might create is uncertain; so are the consequences.
I draw two conclusions—one political, one practical.
No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming. Still, politicians want to show they're "doing something." The result is grandstanding. Consider the Kyoto Protocol. It allowed countries that joined to castigate those that didn't. But it hasn't reduced carbon dioxide emissions (up about 25 percent since 1990), and many signatories didn't adopt tough enough policies to hit their 2008-2012 targets. By some estimates, Europe may overshoot by 15 percent and Japan by 25 percent.
Ambitious U.S. politicians also practice this self-serving hypocrisy. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a global warming program. Gore counts 221 cities that have "ratified" Kyoto. Some pledge to curb their greenhouse emissions. None of these programs will reduce global warming. They're public relations exercises and—if they impose costs—are undesirable. (Note: on national security grounds, I favor taxing oil, but the global warming effect would be trivial.) The practical conclusion is that if global warming is a potential calamity, the only salvation is new technology. I once received an e-mail from an engineer. Thorium, he said. I had never heard of thorium. It is, he argued, a nuclear fuel that is more plentiful and safer than uranium without waste disposal problems. It's an exit from the global warming trap. After reading many articles, I gave up trying to decide whether he is correct. But his larger point is correct: Only an aggressive research and development program might find ways of breaking our dependence on fossil fuels or dealing with it. Perhaps some system could purge the atmosphere of surplus greenhouse gases?
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.
<<<
Craig, you once said that "optimism is contagious." You said you couldn't share my pessimism about human actions. Was that all a lie? And in my opinion, it is both a moral and an engineering problem. The 'collateral damage' of our actions is far too great to simply dismiss.
Any pessimism in the article that I quoted is that of the author's, not mine. On our parallel discussion on the other thread I mentioned the population driver there. I also mentioned the 1500 year climate cycle that doesn't give a wit about humankind and its carbon emissions. That is my optimism about the Earth's self-correcting mechanisms. Possibly there should be a conference like Kyoto about population and what Mother Earth can safely handle.
We concentrate on limiting CO2, which as the writer suggests is a non-starter in both a political and engineering sense. The other way to go is to ask what sort of CO2 'sponges' can we created to remove the buildup? Genetically engineered plantlife, seaweed and kelp?? What can we do to reflect the solar radiation that diminishing ice and snow no longer can do? Require every vehicle and building rooftop to be painted white? Embed some sort of charcoal filtration in road surfaces to absorb vehicle CO2? A much greater concern on my radar is the growing acidity from absorbed CO2 in our seas that is killing the coral which begins the food chain for all animals.
Agreed - population increase (we seem to be multiplying with no limit and some scientists say we have already bypassed the truly sustainable limit) is the underlying cause of a lot of our problems. Welcome to neo-malthusianism. That conference has been proposed, but (for obvious reasons) rejected by most.
Shouldn't we also focus on limiting our CO2 output? Shouldn't that be even more important since the population is going to increase so much? If we only try to sequester it, we'll need more and more and more ways to do it. That growing need will be lessened (but not eliminated) if we decrease CO2 output. Why try to heal the symptoms but not affect the cause? Any such attempts, because the sources are not affected, will ultimately fail.
As for the increasingly acidic oceans, wouldn't it make the most sense to BOTH limit CO2 output as well as attempting to sequester it? Also, increasing ocean temperatures play a part in the coral deaths.
Since you brought up Earth's mechanisms, here's a BBC article about James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis. His points and opinions seem relevent.
Professor Lovelock, although well intentioned, strikes me as someone who is very comfortable of spending other peoples' money on hopeless causes. He recognized the very point that the carbon genie will not go back into the bottle given political considerations which are driven by economics and population. Notice that he doesn't touch upon the carbon magnet approach but rather only insists on nuclear power to replace carbon fuel which is a non-starter in the US because of the environmental lobby. Greens have to learn to prioritize and make choices or accept the fanciful Lovelock speculation of woulda, coulda, shoulda, maybe, mightbe of magic wand waves.
"Greens" are not all unified under one organization or one opinion. There may be a common goal, but the reasons, emphasis, and action plans are not all the same. Carbon sequestration would be such an incredibly large project, it seems (though who knows) to be nearly impossible. Check out Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers for detailed reasons why. The amount that would have to be taken out of the atmosphere is an amount beyond my personal comprehension. On a side note, have you changed your opinion about climate change, Craig?
>>>>There is also little dispute regarding natural climate change. Climate has never been static. Over the last few million years the climate has changed particularly dramatically and rapidly. Ice caps have developed in North America and Europe, melted, and then grown again 15 to 20 times. The ice takes about 90,000 years to grow, and 5,000 years or so to melt. The warm periods between glaciations last about 10,000 years. Ours has already lasted for this long. If the natural cycles of the past prevail, the climate should soon quite suddenly cool (over a few years or decades, although the climate switch may initially flicker). The North American ice cap will then expand to cover Canada, and reach Ithaca in about 50,000 years. Less dramatic cycles (the Holocene climate optimum, the little ice age, and the current warming) have affected humanity within our interglacial period. Natural climate change is real, rapid, and significant.
What we don't know is the relative magnitude of natural and human-induced climate change. The academy presidents of 11 countries quoted in the “Global warming is real” (Guest column, June 14) do not take a stand on this issue, saying only “It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activity,” which leaves open the possibility that natural cycles could control climate change despite human inputs. The situation is complex. Ice ages may start when warming melts ice in the Arctic and Greenland, and the meltwater turns off the haline convection that helps keep Europe warm. Global warming may thus cause global cooling, and human greenhouse gases may hasten the arrival of the next ice age. The sun, ocean circulation, and a host of “tipping points” make the future difficult to predict, and here there is no consensus at all...
<<<<<<<<<
>>>>>According to Lambda-Omega-Lambda (LOL), a simultaneous jump by 600 million people in the Western Hemisphere would cause a shock great enough to alter the Earth's orbit around the sun. The new orbit, the group claims on its website (http://www.worldjumpday.org), would result in a reversal of global warming by a full centigrade degree by the year 2020, at which point the Earth's climate would stabilize.<<<<<
;)
I thought folks would enjoy reading how hard Mr. Gore is working to eliminate his use of fossil fuels, and help the envirnoment.
With all these comment I just want to put one of the Hippie Power Generators here and read the book of Hebrews...Out with the old weather and in with the new...O them Hybred cars are like cloning..You just dont get what you asked for..You gotta love a cowboy!! Where my Blogger?...Gittup..:)
Hi, good morning to all of you... Nice Guestbook ;-) !!!r
m187k
al gore writes a book of doom about the enviroment and he's handed the nobel prize for doing nothing more then what?,while it takes many years of tiring efforts by a few well educated people to recieve this honor for doing somthing worth while!i find this kind of pandering most disturbing at the highest level of stupidity ever combined!do you think if some person wrote a good blog he or she could recieve the nobel prize for the same thing,doing nothing to earn it!
Comments
Regarding global warming, I caution against straight line projections of futurescapes based on conditions today. In my opinion, the better view is to recognize the cyclical nature of warming periods versus ice sheets and the impact of volcanic eruptions of creating mini iceages. There is a Russian scientist actually predicting an extended cooling period about to occur based on his study of sunspot activity. My own guess is that it has to do with the ever changing ocean salinity and currents. More fresh water laying on top of the cold salt water eventually overcoming the thermal barrier and forcing the cold salt water to the surface and thereby spawning a new chillier trend to the cycle. I guess we'll see if we live long enough.
Think hard. Think very hard.
About some things, the correct answer is nothing at all. Some genies are out of the bottle.
Even if the whole world had quit burning fossil fuels and liquidating forests yesterday, the planet is going to be under a new climate with higher temperatures for at least one century. And climate scientists I trust say that warm temperatures are in the pipeline for the next "few" centuries.
None of which means that conservationists have no options One major option is increasingly clear, even mandatory, and the following three excerpts set out the broad outlines of what has become the conservation community's imperative.
Imperative is the keyword here. Whether we operate in the Rockies, or anywhere else in the world, the passage below set out policies that are no longer optional.
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1 - Glacier National Park Biodiversity Paper #7
"Each 1 degree C of global warming will shift temperature zones by about 160 km (100 miles). In the northern hemisphere this means that if the climate warms 3°C species may have to shift northward as much as 500 km (300 miles) in order to find suitable habitat under the new climatic regime. They may also have to shift more than 500 m (over 1600 ft) upward in elevation (when you go up 500 m in elevation, you experience the same 3°C cooling as you would by moving 250 km towards the poles)."
"Global warming may make a mockery of our attempts in all nature reserves, including Glacier National Park, to preserve natural communities and rare, threatened, and endangered native species."
"Perhaps many of Glacier's species will be able to survive farther north, in the Banff-Jasper area. Protection of corridors linking the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, and parks in the Canadian Rockies may provide critical avenues for species dispersal."
See the full Glacier Park report at:
http://www.nps.gov/glac/resources/bio7.htm
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2 - In its "Managing Mountain Parks," the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization says:
" The major challenges for the twenty-first century are:
"To link together the isolated existing mountain protected areas by conservation corridors along the mountain ranges. This not only increases effective size, but provides migration corridors for gene flow and species movement. As the climate changes, poleward migration corridors in north-south ranges (e.g. the Andes) will better accommodate temperature change, and migration along the east-west
ranges (e.g. the Western Tien Shan) will be a response to rainfall changes.
full FAO report at:
http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/x0963E/x0963e06.htm
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3 - Repeating the same basic theme, the United Nations Environment Programme recently said:
"Forest management responses to climate change should focus on maintaining species diversity on national or continental scales through facilitating the processes of species migration, rather than by solely preserving specific reserves. Refugia and migration corridors may be best maintained by reducing habitat fragmentation and locating reserves near north-south running mountain ranges (boreal and temperate regions) or along precipitation gradients (tropical regions)."
full UN report at:
http://www.unep-wcmc.org/forest/flux/executive_summary.htm
Lance Olsen has been writing about the atmosphere and following atmospheric research since 1981. He is project director of the Missoula-based Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers. He can be reached at .
The implications of global warming are staggering, as ecosystems move up in elevation and northward. That means the Sonoran Desert (or vestiges of it) will move into Colorado and Kansas. Instead of a Buffalo Commmons on the plains, we may have desert antelope -- certainly, groundwater-based irrigation will vanish, as will the towns based on that economy.
The great mountain forests of lodgepole and spruce will give way to juniper and scrub oak.
Since we'll lose our snow-pack reservoirs, we'll engage in a futile spate of dam construction, only to realize that evaporation from reservoirs swamps our efforts to store water. (Recharging deep aquifers might be worth exploring, however.)
Conservationists will have to see whether we can transplant entire ecosystem webs, intact, hundreds of miles north, not trusting that plants, insects and animals will be able to find their way without a complete unraveling.
Factor in Peak Oil scenarios and regions will have to figure out how to feed themselves locally, because Imperial Valley vegetables and Florida oranges will become faint memories to those of us in the Northern Rockies.
By all means, think hard, think very hard.
Are you willing to cut your driving to that absolutley necessary, foregoing vacations, just a spin around town, etc?
Are you willing to drive 55mph to cut your fuel consumption? Are you willing to switch to one of the little cars like the Focus or Aveo?
If not do you REALLY believe in global warming?
How many barrels of oil do you think went into the making of Al Gore's movie? And how many into promoting it? And how many in going to see it? Don't all of these things have an impact?
:)
This is a masterful account of what is facing us. I am looking forward to your book on Ted Turner.
My own travels around the world as an Army officer, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, and my own life and experiences here in the West since leaving military service fifteen years ago, have proven to me without a shadow of a doubt that the changes we human beings are now facing are unprecedented in human experience since the end of the Pleistocene approximately 10,000 years ago and the subsequent rise of civilization with agriculture and its descendants, industrialism and what I call binomial reality.
My only caution is to avoid falling into the civilzed fallacy of thought that humans are captains of their fate and masters of the earth's future. They are not. The fundamental fallacious assumption of civilization is that not only can nature be controlled, it should be controlled, for our sole benefit.
This is the great folly, the absurd ideology of civilization. It is the idea that has led to untold disasters of war, commerce, and society over the last several millennia.
How many civilzations have fallen over the last several millennia, and how many have survived? The least familiarity with human history will indicate that the number of the former is in the tens, and the latter number is zero.
Let me repeat, Zero.
What is unprecedented is that in the past, the rise and fall of civilizations has been regional and continental. Now, what we are facing is global in nature, and I think the collapse of the present civilzation will be global in scope, just as the changes that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene were global in scope. Except this time, the global change is due to the activity of one species out of billions--us.
My conclusion after the last thirty years of adult life, and what I am working on and thinking deeply about now, is to face these coming changes with another assumption in mind--not that our culture of technology and unjustified faith in the progress of civilzation will pull us through, but that our evolutionary history and our biology will pull us through. To take this approach is to adopt a completely different mindset from that which both conservatives and progressives share--that we are not human beings without civilization. I disagree with that assumption and our evolutionary history bears me out.
The mindset I advocate begins with the notion that first and foremost we are natural beings, and that culture reflects, not opposes, that fact.
The first thing we have to do is learn to think differently so that we can learn to act differently.
We have to learn to become uncivilzed.
Best,
Robert
There may be debate as to what peoples constitute a continuing civilization, but aboriginal people in Australia have been around for several thousand years and continue today.
If folks truly believed in global warming, they would be changing their lifestyles, not just wring long articles, producing movies, etc. So far I have seen no indication that those screaming the loudest actually intend giving up something themselves. They want to force others to do what they themselves are unwilling to do. When I see global warming advocates cutting their consumption of fossil fuels, then I will begin to be impressed.
By the way some parts of the world had record breaking cold winters this year, with many freezing to death in those places. How do you explain that?
In reality, people rarely fit within such narrow, either-or dimensions. People are changing their lifestyles, either because of sticker-shock at the pump, or more mindfully, because they want to contribute, however incrementally, to a solution.
For example, I recently purchased a lawn-mower -- not a Lazy-Boy on wheels, but an old-fashioned rotary mower, where the motive power is me, myself and I.
If I have an errand downtown or a short shopping trip, I might hop on my bicycle--good exercise for me and I'm saving both money and energy. This morning, I drove my car to the grocery store for two reasons -- it was getting hot and I needed to bring home a 50-lb. sack of dog food. Does that make me a hypocrite? I don't think so--I simply made a choice.
Re: the global freezing controvery a few decades ago--that didn't have anywhere near the solid concensus of science behind it that human-caused global warming has today. It was simply a hypothesis based on limited data, and over time, it was discredited by data pointing to human-caused global warming. There's no conspiracy here -- just science at work.
I would also point out to Marion the difference between weather and climate. Weather is what you experience day-to-day and it is widely variable, ranging from record-setting heat to record-setting cold. Climate is what happens over a longer term, as air and water warms up consistently over time. (During ice ages, it has done the reverse.) Climate change does NOT prevent such variability as Marion mentioned -- indeed, weather can be regarded as an energy machine that is constantly seeking equilibrium. As more energy is trapped inside the world's atmosphere and oceans, that energy machine is going to act more, not less, energetically, so we can expect more variability, not less.
Forty-six years ago, Michigan State researcher Milton Rokeach wrote in "The Open and Closed Mind," that people face two tasks: (1) they seek to learn more about the world, and (2) they wish to protect themselves from the world -- especially from information that might prove unsettling.
Marion seems to have a belief system wherein it is difficult, indeed frightening, for her to distinguish between various camps within the environmental movement, or even among the scientists themselves. It is far more comfortable to label those with whom she disagrees as an extremeist or "environmental whacko" than to examine the issue of global warming with an open mind. The issue, the scientists, the environmentalists, the oil companies, are a very complicated and multi-faceted story and deserve better than either-or allegations that defeat objective analysis, but contribute only to extreme positions.
Dennis T. Avery, previously a senior analyst for the Department of State and a a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., is highly skeptical of Al Gore's claims and points to the work of P.J. Polissar of the University of Massachusetts and the study of Andean glaciers. See his opinion piece here: http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=21733&catcode=13
"The injection of large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the past few decades has been extremely sudden in relation to important natural time scales....Precise measurements by Charles D. Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have established that
the carbon dioxide content increased by six parts per million between 1958 and 1968."
"The most widely discussed matter related to these increases is the possibility that they will lead to a worldwide increase in temperature. The molecule of carbon dioxide has strong absorption bonds, particularly in the infrared region of the spectrum at wavelengths of from 12 to 18 microns.
This is the spectral region where most of the thermal energy radiating from earth to space is concentrated. By increasing the absorption of this radiation ... the carbon dioxide reduces the amount of heat energy lost by earth to outer space."
"In 1956 Gilbert N. Plass calculated that a doubling of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere would result in a rise of 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit at the earth's surface. In 1963 Fritz Moller calculated that a 25 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would would increase the average temperature by one to 7 degrees F..."
Singer concluded that "it would be incautious" to assume that "the heat being put into the atmosphere as a result of human energy consumption can be neglected."
Source. Singer, Fred S. "Human Energy Production as a process in the biosphere," Scientific American, September 1970.
There are two very interesting things about Singer's excellent 1970 analysis. First, it is now the consensus within the climate science community. Second, Singer himself has rejected it, and it is all but impossible to find sound scientific reason for his rejection of what he once seemed to understand so well.
Editorial Advisory Board
The Cato Institute
Adjunct Scholar
National Center for Policy Analysis
Adjunct Fellow
Frontiers of Freedom
Advisory Board Member (2002)
American Council on Science and Health
Now pay attention to where those organizations get funding:
The Cato Institute received $55,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
The National Center for Policy Analysis received $105,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
The Frontiers of Freedom organizations received $282,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
The American Council on Science and Health received $35,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
So is Mr. Singer an honest scientist, or is he a paid shill?
To borrow a phrase from Fox News:
We Report. You Decide.
It is titled: "Study Reconciles Data In Measuring Climate Change" and is Eilperin's coverage of a report that made headlines around the world. Here's the link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/02/AR2006050201677.html
Eilperin's opening paragraph states: "A government study released yesterday undermines one of the key arguments of climate change skeptics, concluding there is no statistically significant conflict between measures of global warming on the earth's surface and in the atmosphere."
In addition, the fourth paragraph of the story reads: "The report also concluded that humans are driving the warming trend through greenhouse gas emissions, noting in the official news release, 'the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, nor by the effects of short-lived atmospheric constituents such as aerosols and tropospheric ozone alone.'
Except for a relatively small handful of scientists, some of whom have very close professional relationships with the energy industry and/or free-market think tanks, the science of climate change is clear: Most of the planet is warming. Carbon dioxide emissions have been a catalyst. Some regions may actually cool, but the consensus and expert opinion of most peer-reviewed scientists who far outnumber the Fred Singers (et. few), is that Earth is getting hotter, glaciers (which serve as barometers) are melting, and the phenomena can't be explained away simply by saying it's due to increased solar activity.
I just have trouble getting real excited about a "climate change" that has taken such a dramatic turn around in less than 30 years. the biggest mistake the freezer had was putting a time on it that most would live to see. The warmers aren't making that mistake they are predicting all of the dire consequences in about a hundred years. Does anyone really know when this switch occurred or have any explanation for it? On top of that is a few years actually adequate to determine a "climate cahnge" one way or another?
As for credentials are all scientists associated with environmental organizations to be dismissed also? I would think a scientists studies are more important than theri affiliation....or does that only apply to those one disagrees with?
Notice the resignation of Dr Chris Landsea at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over the perceived pro-warming bias.
In my opinion, we are at that moment of awareness where unk unks come to play. We now know we know nothing about things we don't know--yet!
It is really too bad that we cannot even trust scientific journals to print facts instead of only those that support their theories.
Meanwhile Mother Earth will dance to her own beat and on her own time.
Gray has devoted a career to understanding the natural variability of hurricanes. And I've seen no serious science disputing that natural variability is a player.
Trouble is, there's more than one kid on this block. While natural variablity is a shoo-in, and in many more ways than a driver climatic fluctuation, it's not alone.
Global warming has come to join it, specifically in the form of warming sea surface temperatures.
So, while Gray is on undisputed ground when pointing to natural fluctuations, he's been running into some stormy waters when peristing in attributing hurricane variability to natural cycles alone.
Like other skeptics, (e.g., Christy, Lindzen) Gray has (inadvertently?) done a service to the science of global warming by forcing his colleagues back to their drawing boards. The net effect has been a strengthened body of evidence that 1- sea surface temperatures are on the way up and that 2- they too play a role in hurricane formation and intensity.
The tricky part of this is that science does not get to pick and choose between natural variablity and greenhouse-forcing. Instead, what's been happening is increasingly sophisticated calculations of how big a role each of them is playing. And the greenhouse-forcing signals are coming through loud and clear for the majority of scientists who have been sorting out the pieces of the puzzle.
I don't know why Gray persists in insisting that it's all a matter of natural variation. But the trend of evidence is lining up against that interpretation.
Dr. Gray is reported to have said:
"As a boy, I remember seeing articles about the large global warming that had taken place between 1900 and 1945. No one understood or knew if this warming would continue. Then the warming abated and I heard little about such warming through the late 1940s and into the 1970s.
In fact, surface measurements showed a small global cooling between the mid-1940s and the early 1970s. During the 1970s, there was speculation concerning an increase in this cooling. Some speculated that a new ice age may not be far off.
Then in the 1980s, it all changed again. The current global warming bandwagon that US-European governments have been alarming us with is still in full swing.
Not our fault
Are we, the fossil-fuel-burning public, partially responsible for this recent warming trend? Almost assuredly not.
These small global temperature increases of the last 25 years and over the last century are likely natural changes that the globe has seen many times in the past.
Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes
This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood.
Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential.
There is a negative or complementary nature to human-induced greenhouse gas increases in comparison with the dominant natural greenhouse gas of water vapour and its cloud derivatives.
It has been assumed by the human-induced global warming advocates that as anthropogenic greenhouse gases increase that water vapour and upper-level cloudiness will also rise and lead to accelerated warming - a positive feedback loop.
It is not the human-induced greenhouse gases themselves which cause significant warming but the assumed extra water vapour and cloudiness that some scientists hypothesise.
Negative feedback
The global general circulation models which simulate significant amounts of human-induced warming are incorrectly structured to give this positive feedback loop.
Their internal model assumptions are thus not realistic.
As human-induced greenhouse gases rise, global-averaged upper-level atmospheric water vapour and thin cirrus should be expected to decrease not increase.
Water vapour and cirrus cloudiness should be thought of as a negative rather than a positive feedback to human-induced - or anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases.
No significant human-induced greenhouse gas warming can occur with such a negative feedback loop.
Climate debate has 'life of its own'
Our global climate's temperature has always fluctuated back and forth and it will continue to do so, irrespective of how much or how little greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere.
Although initially generated by honest scientific questions of how human-produced greenhouse gases might affect global climate, this topic has now taken on a life of its own.
It has been extended and grossly exaggerated and misused by those wishing to make gain from the exploitation of ignorance on this subject.
This includes the governments of developed countries, the media and scientists who are willing to bend their objectivity to obtain government grants for research on this topic.
I have closely followed the carbon dioxide warming arguments. From what I have learned of how the atmosphere ticks over 40 years of study, I have been unable to convince myself that a doubling of human-induced greenhouse gases can lead to anything but quite small and insignificant amounts of global warming."
Environmental groups make money filing lawsuits trying to force others to do this or that to save the ecosystem.
That article said in part:
'The chance of the Gulf Stream, which brings warm waters around the British Isles, being halted, sending temperatures plummeting by more than 5C, is now more than 50%, a scientific conference on climate change was told yesterday.
The conference, called by Tony Blair to inform world leaders about the urgency of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, was told of a series of new research findings which showed that climate change was speeding up and would be worse than hitherto expected.
Only five years ago the scientists on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were confident that Antarctica was a "slumbering giant" and its vast ice sheets so cold that they would not begin to melt for centuries, even if the climate changed elsewhere.
This conference was told "the giant is awakening", and areas of the ice-bound continent melting, causing faster sea-level rise than expected.
Whatever politicians and scientists do, temperatures will rise another 0.6C in the next 30 years, on top of 0.7C in the past century, pushing a number of vulnerable species, such as polar bears and penguins, to extinction.
The 30-year time lag between man putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the Earth responding by becoming warmer meant that we were already committed to further climate change.
Margaret Beckett, the environment secretary, said "My understanding is that this level of temperature rise is already built in for the next 20 to 30 years from the climate change we have already instigated, so a significant impact is already inevitable.
"It will have a different impact in different parts of the world, but we will all have to adapt."
For western Europe and North America the most worrying finding revealed at the conference was the potential collapse of the sea current known popularly as the Gulf Stream and to oceanographers as the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC).
The melting of Greenland and Arctic ice and additional fresh water from rainfall is threatening to shut down the current completely.
Mike Schlesinger, from the Climate Research Group at the University of Illinois, said a 3C rise in temperature this century, which is well within current predictions, would lead to a 45% chance of the Gulf Stream halting by the end of this century and a 70% chance by 2200.
But he said that some sophisticated climate models showed the current halting with as little as 2 to 2.5C rise in temperatures - "and that is what you could call dangerous climate change".
The current, which carries one million billion watts of heat - a "petawatt" - from the tropics past Scotland and northwards to the Arctic is known to be weakening by about 10%, but the chance of it being switched off completely by climate change was previously considered remote.
Professor Schlesinger said that even if politicians imposed stringent carbon taxes to reduce emissions there was still a greater than one in four chance of the current being turned off.
"Waiting 30 years to act increases the odds to more than one in three," he said.
Figures from the Hadley Centre for Climate Change given at the meeting showed that in some places in the North Atlantic the temperature might drop as much as 10C, and over the UK Atlantic coast it would be around 5C, causing a winter freeze up.
Dr Richard Wood produced a map showing what would happen in Britain if the THC shut down in 2049. The cooling effect would be far greater than than the general effect of global warming.
"The resulting climate in the UK for example would be substantially colder than that experienced during the 'Little Ice Age' of the 17th and 18th centuries."
This was a period when ice fairs were held in winter on the frozen Thames.'
Given this concern we can look at Todd's original request to envision the West in 2056 and see an entirely opposite reality occurring.
But a lot of this quibbling isn't really based in science from the get-go. Not long ago, I composed a little piece for New West about politics and its role as a battler against science and related reporting.
The stakes are high when evidence of science or the economy is shoved aside. And that shoving can come straight out of political struggles over the budget. Or so say I, at this URL:
http://www.newwest.net/index.php/main/article/science_politics_and_the_budget/
I guess that's the main knock on Al Gore's film.
This is what is being said in Canada:
http://www.dobmagazine.nickles.com/columns/pulse.asp?
article=magazine/columns/060612/MAG_COL2006_UC0000.html
http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?ide=3
'Carleton University Professor Tim Patterson (Paleoclimatologist) explains the crucial importance of properly evaluating the merit of Canada's climate change plans: “It is no exaggeration to say that in the eight years since the Kyoto Protocol was introduced there has been a revolution in climate science. If, back in the mid-nineties, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would not exist because we would have concluded it was not necessary.”
Contrary to claims that the science of climate change has been settled, the causes of the past century’s modest warming is highly contested in the climate science community. The climate experts presenting in the video demonstrate that science is quickly diverging away from the hypothesis that the human release of greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide, is having a significant impact on global climate. “There is absolutely no convincing scientific evidence that human-produced greenhouse gases are driving global climate change”, stated climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball. He added that the Canadian government’s plan to designate carbon dioxide as a “toxic” under CEPA is irresponsible and without scientific merit. “Carbon dioxide is a staff of life, plain and simple. It makes up less than 4% of greenhouse gases and it is not a toxic.”
IPCC assertions about the unprecedented nature of the past century's warming, or the widespread beliefs that we are experiencing an increase in extreme weather, accelerated sea level rise and unusual warming in polar regions are also shown in the video to be wholly without merit.
The idea for the video was initiated by the Friends of Science Society, a registered not-for-profit group of geologists, environmental scientists and concerned citizens, “in an effort to make the science of climate change available and understandable to the general public”, stated Dr. Doug Leahey, President of Friends of Science Society. Commenting on his decision to get involved with the video project, University of Calgary’s Professor Barry Cooper stated, “Universities are in the education business. In a democracy like Canada, education and informed discussion of public policy are tightly linked. The public, media and government would benefit by hearing from all sides on this important issue in order to make as informed a decision as is possible.”'
In my opinion, what this demonstrate is that there is anything but consensus in the scientific community. As Dr. Gray has suggested, the argument about consensus is not about science, it's about politics. That also seems to be the point of this editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/06/13/EDGDOILMDO1.DTL
'THERE IS A CONCEIT among the American Left that the American Right cleaves to bad science out of deference to religion, while the left is all-science all-the-time. Former Veep Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," however, shows how unscientific -- and downright faith-based -- the left has become.'
There are no facts without the explanatory context of theory, and science is the most democratic of human institutions.
What we know today as science, from the Latin word scienta, or knowledge, began as an epistemological and moral rebellion against the hidebound theology of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, which relegated human knowledge to revelation from God brokered or mediated by priests. At the end of the medieval period, and at the beginning of the Renaissance, modern science made a different claim: that human beings could discover the truth for themselves through experimentation: getting one's hands dirty with the world, as it were. It was a direct challenge to the authority of the Church.
The scientific method began as an empiricist philosophy of the early Renaissance--that what we know comes through the senses, interpreted through the intellect (the wellspring of theory). None of the early scientists (e.g. Galileo) would have eschewed the role of theory; they might as well have denied the existence of their intellects. Indeed, they developed the first scientific theories to explain what they learned from their senses--that, for example, the earth orbits the sun. They created astronomy--a body of theory about celestial mechanics.
We put people in space on the basis not of fact, but of theory.
When we hear that theory is theory and fact is fact, and never the twain shall meet, we hear that the intellect has no place in science; we hear that ignorance is supreme.
Interestingly, Protestantism and modern science came from the same wellspring of rebellion against the Church, with the essence of early Protestantism being that human beings don't need priests to know God. More interestingly, many early scientists were members of the developing and secretive anti-Catholic Masonic order as well as scientific experimenters. Dan Brown uses this historical fact in The Da Vinci Code, which itself has come under ideological fire from churches Catholic and Protestant, which are determined to squelch any debate about the historical nature of Jesus.
As for the claim that democracy is irrelevant to science, it is a claim that is ignorant of how science works. The scientific method--examination of the world by experiment--is democratic to its core. It is a joint process of testing and mutual discussion, argument, and debate among scientists. It's a constant back and forth, in journals and conferences, in classrooms and laboratories, as facts are discovered, hypotheses designed to explain the facts tested and accepted or rejected. Hypotheses that stand the test of experiment and debate become theories. They are not pulled out of the air. They are formed in a crucible of experimentation AND democratic debate.
Theories are explanations of how things work that have met the requirements of rigorous testing AND debate among scientists until a consensus about their validity has been reached. A hypothesis becomes a theory only by a rigorous process of democratic debate, a conflict of intellects.
This is not a pretty process, nor a perfect process, but then no democratic process is. Following Winston Churchill, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
One thing we can be sure of: when science is allowed to work, we get knowledge, not ignorance. Those who prefer ignorance attack science, or attempt to undermine it (e.g., "intelligent design").
The debate over anthropogenic climate change has to be understood as a debate of global scale among thousands upon thousands of scientists. The debate has fired and winnowed fact upon fact, theory upon theory, from a myriad scientific disciplines, many of which have no direct relationship with each other, over the decades.
As a result of that process, we have reached the point where our best human understanding of the matter has reached two conclusions:
1)What we are seeing and experiencing as climate change is primarily of anthropogenic origin, and
2)The consequences of this climate change will be devastating to the human species, not to mention many other species that share this planet as home.
As Todd says at the beginning of this fine article, this isn't chicken little claiming that the sky is falling because some raven poop fell on his head. This is a conclusion that has come about from an unprecedented human effort to understand our world and what's going on.
It's a perfect marriage of theory and fact.
Because science is fundamentally democratic, one has to be alarmed when attempts are made to dictate where science goes, how it is conducted, and what conclusions it makes. The entire climate change debate has been marred by the determination of authoritarian governments and various industries, and their supporting sycophant think tanks--what we might call the modern politico-economic Church--to squelch or falsely spin what has become a tentative but still powerful consensus about anthropogenic climate change.
Among other things, one outcome of the climate change debate is that democracy itself is under attack by those for whom ignorance is a political weapon.
But where there is censorship, you can be sure there is truth.
There are folks who fly and drive into Wyoming to protest the drilling of a well.....and guess what they use to get here. That makes absolutely no sense.
If you could insist that any environmental group that you support spend their money on research, not lawsuits we would reach the goal of alternative fuels much sooner, IMO. I do not know of a single one that is supporting research, do you?
Like it or not, science is a human institution not isolated from society. When we call for science to be "apolitical," what we want is for science to proceed according to the scientific method without censorship of its research or results by the powers that be--the powers that represent conventional wisdom because they have a vested interest, political and economic, in the status quo. Science, at its best, is a challenge to the status quo. That is precisely why the Inquisition went after Galileo. We know that church intellectuals actually agreed with Galileo. But he was a threat to Church authority and he had to be forced to recant for the "good" of the Church.
Through the Inquisition, the Church did tremendous damage to itself, yet, through its intransigence, it helped to create the Renaissance and the Reformation.
Science is not a-social; that is an ideology that deliberately isolates science from society. Science is a human institution. What it adds to society however is that it is self-correcting much more rapidly and accurately than society at large is. It welcomes and functions best through dissent and debate. Science has much to teach politics--something with which Thomas Jefferson would have agreed wholeheartedly.
I would strongly advise studying Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which may be the most important book of the 20th century about the nature of science and how it works.
Let's not forget that in the beginning, there was no consensus about climate change and there was much disagreement; we have arrived where we are as a consequence of a long process of experimentation, thought, and intense debate. Scientific consensus--scientific theory--about climate change is not the same as conventional wisdom, which functions in the social realm to allow people to avoid thinking. Scientific consensus reflects the best of human understanding of a problem, and is anything but conventional.
At a much less controversial level, we saw the same problems with the theory of plate techtonics, which had considerable opposition in the beginning. Now it is an accepted theory of geology. It most certainly is NOT conventional wisdom, however.
At a more controversial level, evolution, nearly 150 years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, is still under attack from the modern Inquisition, which is determined to label it as "merely" theory. Actually,it's a damn good theory.
Much of the process of understanding how science works depends upon paying attention to how it actually works rather than to the fundmantalist ideology of those of libertarian or positivist slant, that somehow Science has replaced the Church as the repository of Truth and that Scientists are the Priests of Science, an ideology that was popular throughout most of the 20th century and did much damage. That ideology has has been adopted by government and industry, who have proclaimed themselves as the Church to which modern priests of science must swear allegiance, for which they are paid pretty well. It's dangerous now, as it was 500 years ago, to speak the truth.
Such an ideology would have been anathema to Galileo, who was concerned as much with human freedom as he was with knowledge.
That is what we are ultimately talking about when we talk about science--freedom. That's why government and industry with vested interests in the status quo are determined to deny what science has learned about climate change. They prefer that we live in ignornace, and therefore slavery, no matter the consequences.
Back to global warming, what are you willing to do to stop it, you yourself?
Take care.
Druidism is little more than a throwback to what, as best as we can discover through enthnographic research, the original human hunter-gatherer stance toward the world--that the entire world is alive. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis could be considered druidic. Is it still druidic when we speak instead in terms of supposing that the earth is a metasystem of a myriad functioning sub-systems sustained by negative feedback processes but distorted by positive feedback systems?
It is very interesting.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm
Certainly, skepticism about anything stated to be the gospel truth is healthy. That, after all, is the essence of empirical scientific inquiry. As a journalist, I, too, approached the idea of climate change with initial skepticism when I first began writing about it in the 1990s.
However, to demean the integrity of the many scientists who at first approached the possibility of climate change with suspicion, only to embrace its validity based upon the accumulated evidence, is to impugn the brightest scientific minds in the world who have never been accused of making their conclusions fit personal agendas.
If Craig and Marion have evidence to support their insinuations that climate change is a delusional invention, let us see it.
Craig seems to imply that there is a see-saw balance in the scientific community between those who believe climate change is real and human-caused, and those who hold an opposite view.
Bring together the number of reputable scientists who take climate change seriously and it would fill an auditorium. But gather the credible skeptics and the number could fit inside a small room.
As I was reminded this morning in a chat with a respected politically-conservative scientist who helped coordinate one of the independent regional overviews of likely effects from climate change, the debunkers are few in number and often carry forward hidden political, economic, and religious agendas. Either that, or they're afraid to face reality because it scares them.
William M. Gray is among a small number of skeptics and he has done nothing to debunk the large, multi-tiered preponderant body of evidence, subjected to stringent peer review, that points to climate change as being caused by human-generated carbon dioxide emissions.
To suggest that over 2,000 scientists who disagree with Gray are somehow part of a conspiracy to foist a myth on the world in order to pad their own research budgets is preposterous. As the scientist told me this morning, Exxon Mobil and other energy companies have created several dozen organizations that front as concerned advocacy entities but whose primary mission is to distort and confuse the science.
For those who choose to obfuscate the seriousness (and/or existence) of climate change, they can always cite someone like Dr. Gray to bolster their agnosticism. Just as one can find virtually anything on the internet, Googling a skeptic on climate change isn't hard either.
What's uncanny is the parallel which exists between the current scientific "debate" over climate change and the protracted scientific tragedy which played out over several decades involving tobacco and the health effects (and high economic costs to society) associated with using those products.
Many people died needlessly because an industry—and it's paid executives AND SCIENTISTS WHO FRAMED PUBLIC POLICY— refused to state things as they actually were.
Watching with a moral and ethical callousness as millions of Americans developed lung cancer, the skeptics based their arguments against causality on the supposed abscence of a direct link that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that breathing in burning tobacco and other chemicals in cigarettes was making people sick.
They would march out the rare 90 year olds who smoked two packs a day as proof that smoking wasn't harmful, without mentioning the zillions of others who agonized through horrible, premature deaths.
The last holdouts were those working for the cigarette manufacturers. One wonders: Would those "objective" scientists, knowing what they did in their heart of hearts, have allowed their own children to take up smoking? Would they also have sent their loved ones into the dusty asbestos and coal mines without respirators?
Fred Palmer, president of the Western Fuels Association, has asserted that carbon dioxide is benign and insists (falsely) that there's no proof to say whether greater releases of carbon dioxide are "good" or "bad" for the atmosphere. "Good" or "bad" is subjective. Saying—and proving— that increased levels of carbon dioxide can alter the compositional structure of our atmosphere and affect the systems which sustain life on this planet is not subjective.
Mr. Palmer, of course, wants nothing to stand in the way of developing and burning of more coal. He is, after all, on the payroll and he's paid to be an advocate for his product.
With climate change, as the arguments of skeptics are one by one being picked apart and whittled away, the holdout position now is to deliberately distort the flow of information in order to try and leave the public confused.
Indeed, England and Scandinavia may cool—because of ocean currents that go out of whack— at the same time the U.S. West heats up. But having cooler places does not mean that much of the rest of the Earth, on average, will not be warmer so as to trigger a number of serious consequences— economic, social, and ecological— for humanity.
The most important discussion that should take place is deciding what to do about it.
Here's a passage from Tim Flannery's book, The Weather Makers (page 244) that addresses the acolytes of Fred Singer, Fred Palmer, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma and the special interest groups who insist that global warming is a hoax: "Such gobbledygook is frequently employed to bewilder the general reader, though at times these groups will push it much further. The Leipzig Declaration is a particularly interesting case in point. This document appeared in 1995, penned by Fred Singer, and purported to have the signatures of seventy-nine scientists from leading universities who subscribe to the view that climate change is not a threat.
"On investigation, however, the majority of the signatories were found not to be scientists or had not signed the declaration," Flannery notes. "Skepticism is an indispensable element in scientific inquiry, but when the intention is to mislead rather than clarify, we have not skepticism but deceit."
Flannery adds: "Some industries that oppose action on climate change use tactics reminiscent of those of asbestos and tobacco companies, who by constantly challenging and clouding the outcomes of research into the link between their products and cancer, succeeded in buying themselves a few more decades of fat profits. Asbestos and cigarettes can kill individuals, but CO 2 emissions threaten our planet."
Here's an undisputed fact: There is more, and ever growing peer-reviewed published evidence, to support the conclusion that climate change is happening than there was showing that smoking tobacco is harmful to your health. Craig speaks of "Liberal conceit"?
From Republican Sen. John McCain to a large massing of evangelical Christians, from business people to scholars, and including Righties, Lefties, and inbetweens, the public consensus about climate change is informed by the irrefutable scientific consensus. If one wants to find evidence of conceit, it resides in the claims of those who ignore this compelling reality.
'THERE IS A CONCEIT among the American Left that the American Right cleaves to bad science out of deference to religion, while the left is all-science all-the-time. Former Veep Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," however, shows how unscientific -- and downright faith-based -- the left has become.'
I myself did not use that term. The text that I quoted from the article was my attempt to link it to Dr. Gray and his objection to the pursuit of politics over science. Marion's link to the Canadian article also makes the point that Gore's movie is junk science.
My remark to Marion, was meant for levity, nothing more. That's why I put a ;) on the end. I fail to see where that constitutes a "lovefest" as you put it.
Perhaps at that this juncture a few deep breaths are in order. I look forward to your book.
You really undermine your credibility when you refer to folks who see things differently than you as having a "lovefest".
The appropriate response to the Bush administration is one I heard from fellow officers during my military service who left the service when I did nearly a decade and a half ago after the Gulf War: "I'm willing to die for my country, but I'll be damned if I'll spend my life for Texaco."
I and far too many of my colleages in conservation have invested considerable intellectual effort to understand how the world works simply to rest our efforts on "faith," whatever that might be. Faith in what? I have no idea what "faith-based" environmentalism is, because the term as used by the right describes nothing in my experience. I do know what science-based environmentalism is. It is neither left nor right. It's a cold-eyed if angry view of what the world has become as a consequence of human action. It goes back to regional ecological devastation by the early civilizations through agriculture and war, the consequences of which in the Middle East and Africa I have seen with my own eyes, to pollution, to desertification (you have to experience the Sahara to know it), to the destruction of myriad species, to disease, to deforestation, to overpopulation, to climate change at the global scale. That these things have been and are occurring is indisputable, even if you have faith in "progress," whatever that is. It is pure obstinence to refuse to acknowledge it.
I can see it here as the glaciers of the Wind River Range slink to the Gulf of Mexico and as the pollution from gasfield development of the Pinedale anticline slips over the Continental Divide; I can see it in the Arctic as the polar ice disappears for the first time in a long time; I can see it as industrial development penetrates the sub-Arctic boreal forest to poison the last wild country of North America.
The question is not whether it is happening; it most certainly is. This has been the process of civilized progress on Earth for the last six or seven thousand years. The question is, can we do anything about it? The answer is, I fear, no. Knowledge does not not necessarily translate to power, and governments and industries, and those committed to their welfare, have too much at stake to take action that would undermine that power. But as Jarrod Diamond comments in his book Collapse regarding the collapse of the immigrant society in Greenland, the only benefit to being rich is that the rich are the last to starve.
The rich (e.g., North American society) are gambling that the poor will starve quickly to leave enough behind so the rich may survive. That seems a risky policy.
Crafting effective solutions begins with considering two questions. First, should we care about a warming climate? If the answer is yes (and I believe it is), logic leads us to the second: What sacrifices are we willing to accept in order to do something about it?
1) Yes, there is a serious problem.
2) No, very few people are willing to make sacrifices to deal with the problem, and no, incentives won't make a bit of difference because incentives are bribes, and bribery is notoriously useless in inducing people to do the right thing.
3) Solutions/consequences of climate change will be forced on people in ways that will make them very unhappy. Aber, so geht's das Leben.
Originally I had a different response prepared, but most of the comments I was going to contribute to the discussion have already been made. So I figured that perhaps the most valuable issue I could comment on is this ridiculous idea that climate change scientists (including the entire international field of climate science) are working to pull some grand fear based hoax on the rest of the world.
Before stating my point, it is important to remember (as Todd stated) that these accusations grew out of a fictional novel, and the personal agendas of high government officials with vested interests in the petroleum industry and constituencies who for what ever reason appear to disregard science. The unfortunate result of Inhofe’s accusations (and other congressional members who were allied with his point of view), was the harassment via congressional investigation of several of the most visible members of the climate change research community. The tie in here is all this was concurrent with Inhofe’s vehement “hoax” speech that was based upon what amounts to a Star Wars novel. Within the science community (and its organizations) this was viewed as intimidation of individual scientists by high-level elected government officials. Intimidation and science do not mix, and this action made a lot of people here and abroad start questioning the future of science in this country. Not a good thought to wake up to every morning since science is the foundation upon which this countries wealth and power is based.
So the argument of the accusers is that science perpetuates this “grand hoax” of human-induced climate change for ulterior motives. Those motives as stated by the accusers are 1) personal gain (I assume they mean monetary), and 2) Maintaining federal funding for their research programs. The reasons these arguments are so far fetched are rather simple. First, let’s imagine that none of us had ever heard of human-induced climate change. Would there be any reason to study weather and climate? The easy answer is YES; simply because who here doesn’t benefit from the most obvious results of this basic and applied research. Products generated from climate/weather research include weather forecasts, predictions of hurricanes trajectories and intensities, estimates of long-term drought conditions, and a greater understanding of the inherent variability of our water resources. The list of benefits goes on and on, to see for yourself just visit a NOAA, NASA, or USGS website.
The more we learn about the physical drivers of our climate system, the better our predictions and forecasts become. So do you actually believe the scientists who are engaged in climate change research would be out of a job if there was no theory of, or evidence for, anthropogenic climate change? The obvious answer here is NO; they would be onto the next most interesting and relevant questions to research, and would be federally funded to do that work too. Climate research in its essence is the study of a global system that we all depend upon, and as we all know this system can be both extremely beneficial and destructive to human societies.
There is no agenda. There is no logical or monetary reason to for scientists deceive. There is just the objective to provide useful information to society upon which society can make decisions.
On a seperate but related note, we should and do thank the climate change “skeptics” who provide valuable critiques of the science, as well as alternate theories to consider. This is part and parcel of the way science works. However, they are still considered “skeptics” because the data is not supportive of their theories when tested. Besides, every scientist is essentially a skeptic; it’s in the nature of what they do. Scientists are constantly questioning their methods, their data, and their results. That’s why error estimates and uncertainty play such a large role in scientific publications and discussions.
To the casual climate change skeptics, understand that climate change research is not a belief system. All inquiries and results reported on the topic are data based. On occasion there are problems with that data leading to incorrect conclusions as the example of the satellite data on troposphere temperatures demonstrated. Through the process of science, theories and data are tested and retested, and in doing so any errors or data problems are ultimately detected and reported on. That’s what led to the revision of our knowledge on what seemed to be a decoupling between surface and troposphere temperatures.
To Marion and others interested in the history of science and how we know what we know about climate change I have several suggestions. First the answers to your questions lie in the fields of paleoclimatology, climatology, geology, and glaciology. Start your search there. Many fantastic text books exist on the science, and the history of the science, and they provide a good starting point for understanding the science. If the answers provided are still not satisfactory the fantastic thing about science is the paper trail it leaves. In any university library, and even online, you can find copies of all the primary research papers that led the science to the accepted theories of today. These books and primary research articles are a good place to start, and this is where writers like Todd do the majority of their primary research. This allows anyone to read the same articles as Todd and form their own information/data based conclusions. There are other valuable online resources, but I hesitate to suggest these, because there are many professional looking websites that provide biased or intentionally deceptive accounts of the science.
Happy reading
A case in point: The polar bears eating each other, global warming believers are sure that is the cause, ESA propnents are sure that means the polar bear needs to be listed as endangered asap. I believe it needs to be looked at, a good count of the bears take place, to me it sounds like there is an overpopulation of polar bears and they are competing for food and space.
Regarding the polar bear arguement. Much of what you mention are current best guesses by people and organizations interested (or uninterested) in the survival of the species. Some of those arguements levied by interest groups may be biased or untrue, and any arguements coming from the scientific community would be based on the the best available data. Also, some of those theories, like your own, are not based on data but rather gut feeling. This doesn't make those theories less valuable, it just points towards what you yourself concluded. That is, the best thing we can do right now is task scientists with the job of researching the question further.
This of course is exactly what happened 20-30 years ago with the issue of global climate change. The country invested in researching the question because it was viewed to be important. Ultimately the original research questions were answered, but as with all good reasearch many more interesting and valuable questions have grown out of the original research.
So then what do we do when scientists debate the complexity of the problem (via data based research), and dominant relationships emerge even if some the underlying mechanisms remain unclear? Do we throw the baby out with the bath water, and say because we don't know everything by default that means we must know nothing? What if the conclusions run counter to what people in different interest groups would like to hear? Do we trash the scientists and the research? Or, do we try to create policies and management strategies based on the best available science? Political institutions could imbed the entire approach within an adaptive management framework so as we learn more we could refine our approach. Anyway, there are many parallels here between the two discussions.
Let me remind you that scientists identified the causes and problems associated with a growing Ozone hole. Recomendations were made, international policies and bans were generated, industries adjusted, AND the thinning of the ozone not only slowed but will ultimately rebound.
Really though, you are obviously interested in the science, and you have questions you want answered. So skip any potential for deception and bias and go straight to the scientific source. Read it, look at the data presented and the conclusions made by the researching scientists and form own opnion. I can't change your mind.
One final thought, couldn't your theory that polar bears are in an overpopulation chrises and competing for food and space arise from maintaing a steady population number but reducing the available habitat (i.e. melt the arctic sea ice)? Sattelites have detected a major decline in arctic sea ice. This sea ice is critical habitat upon which the bears hunt their most critical food source. You may be onto something there.
The science dealing with climate change rests on probabilities. It's looking at past trends, atmospheric composition and changes, etc and trying to predict the future. Many (not all - but it almost never is) scientists believe that there is an extremely significant probability that climate change/global warming is occuring and is caused by man.
HOWEVER: even if you don't buy into the scientific evidence for it, aren't the possible consequences serious enough to at least merit serious thought?? Have we really become so lazy and dependant on cars that we are so repulsed at the thought of walking or riding a bike instead of driving? Is it that horrible to do little things that add up like turning off lights, using less heat/air conditioning, etc? And (for Marion) yes, I do ride a bike instead of a car. I avoid driving whenever possible. I know not everyone is willing to ride a bike all the time, but how about just part of the time, say one out of every 5 times? In a nation that is growing increasingly fatter, a little exercise wouldn't hurt...
Arctic shipping coming soon, U.S. expert says
Last updated Jun 15 2006 01:13 PM MDT
CBC News
U.S. shipping companies are showing such a keen interest in global warming that a White House adviser says Canada should develop a policy with the U.S. on shipping through the Northwest Passage.
Commercial companies are itching to use the Northwest Passage as a preferred route between the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and Asia, George Newton, chairman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, told a conference on Arctic waters on Thursday.
The route would save two weeks in travelling time, an incentive for shipping companies, which have invested $4.5 billion in tankers capable of going through ice. As well, the Polar Research Board in Washington is expected to recommend that the U.S. government buy more icebreakers.
But Newton warned in Ottawa that a lot more work needs to be done before Arctic shipping becomes commonplace.
Canada and the United States need to study the Arctic waters, to demystify them and work out how to safely navigate the treacherous waters. Canada needs an extensive infrastructure to support shipping, and consult with aboriginals and other stakeholders.
"We need search and rescue that fall on those ports," Newton said. "We need voyage repairs, we need the ability to manage traffic in an effective fashion and we need ice breakers."
And Canada's northern people need to be consulted, said John Amagoalik, known as the Father of Nunavut.
"We have to make sure that whatever happens is manageable," Amagoalik said. "We can't allow just anybody to do whatever they want up there. There has to be some sort of management regime."
http://www.cbc.ca/north/story/passage-expert.html
The other day President Bush must have slipped his multi-national corporate leash because he designated an area in Hawaii the size of California as a national marine reserve. Commercial and sports fishing will be phased out, removal of animals and minerals is prohibited, and any divers will have to be permitted.
It struck me that the clergy of the neo-modernistic Druidic environmental movement lack a tangible, visible symbol of their commitment to alter global warming. How about a mitre? This new headdress would not be pointed but flat and covered in reflective foil. It's wearing would not be restricted to the leadership but made mandatory for all true believers. However, the symbol needs a slogan. I thought of two. "Save the polar, return the solar." "It's right to reflect the light." I suspect that the first one would have greater acceptance since it doesn't contain the "right" word. The alternative to the mitre would be for people to shave their heads, but the reflective quality is not as great and may require waxing and buffing. Wearing of the tinfoil hats would make a dramatic statement of the truly committed soothsayers like Al Gore.
;) ;) ;) It's Friday.
Craig, I enjoy your humor, I could picture it now. I love the slogan, hats, bald heads and all. So to be "fair and balanced" what should the tangible, visible symbol be for the "hydrocarbon based, maintaining the status quo, troglodytes" be?
Perhaps the more pertinent discussion should focus on questions like:
Is it wrong to recycle?
Is it smart to think about alternative energy sources?
Is any resource infinite?
Should I feel guilty about driving a hybrid?
Despite the tongue in cheek tone, I often wonder if some of our intellecual muscle couldnt be applied in a more practical way; Creating easier ways to recycle, marketing "Green" in a way that is more palatable to the masses.
I think most of us would agree that it makes sense not to "poop" in your own nest, but lets be honest, if it is easier to throw it over the side most of us are going to toss.
I do however drive a little car, sneeringly called a little tin can by many, and get about 33 mpg avg by driving 55. I can't afford the extra for a hybrid, so that is my solution, plus driving less. I recycle everything I can.
Then you have the true believers who insist that they are not going to feel guilty because they want a "safe" vehicle, as in larger, they are entitled to vacations of thousands of miles, and besides one person doesn't make any difference.
They insist the president must cause some alternative fuel they approve of to appear, and it better be cheap....and safe. But they themselves do not need to do anything.
There is a lot that can be done without laws and without giving environmentalists any more control over the lives of the rest of us.
Then again over in Europe attention is turning to the revival of Irish pigeon races from France to Ulster. There is growing suspicion by both the Irish and French that the Brits may try to shoot them down before they cross Dover. Historic animosities continue to cause a flap with the appearance of Bird Flu in France.
http://www.newwest.net/index.php/main/article/9136/C396/L396
>>>
The Real Inconvenient Truth
Thanks to population growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions will likely double by 2050. Are we powerless to stop global warming?
By Robert J. Samuelson
Updated: 3:06 p.m. PT July 5, 2006
July 5, 2006 - "Global warming may or may not be the great environmental crisis of the next century, but—regardless of whether it is or isn't—we won't do much about it. We will (I am sure) argue ferociously over it and may even, as a nation, make some fairly solemn-sounding commitments to avoid it. But the more dramatic and meaningful these commitments seem, the less likely they are to be observed. Little will be done.... Global warming promises to become a gushing source of national hypocrisy.''
—This column, July 1997
Well, so it has. In three decades of columns, I've never quoted myself at length, but here it's necessary. Al Gore calls global warming an "inconvenient truth," as if merely recognizing it could put us on a path to a solution. That's an illusion. The real truth is that we don't know enough to relieve global warming, and—barring major technological breakthroughs—we can't do much about it. This was obvious nine years ago; it's still obvious. Let me explain.
From 2003 to 2050, the world's population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty—and freeze everyone else's living standards—we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.
Just keeping annual greenhouse gas emissions constant means that the world must somehow offset these huge increases. There are two ways: Improve energy efficiency, or shift to energy sources with lower (or no) greenhouse emissions. Intuitively, you sense this is tough. China, for example, builds about one coal-fired power plant a week. Now a new report from the International Energy Agency in Paris shows all the difficulties (the population, economic growth and energy projections cited above come from the report).
The IEA report assumes that existing technologies are rapidly improved and deployed. Vehicle fuel efficiency increases by 40 percent. In electricity generation, the share for coal (the fuel with the most greenhouse gases) shrinks from about 40 percent to about 25 percent—and much carbon dioxide is captured before going into the atmosphere. Little is captured today. Nuclear energy increases. So do "renewables" (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal); their share of global electricity output rises from 2 percent now to about 15 percent.
Some of these changes seem heroic. They would require tough government regulation, continued technological gains and public acceptance of higher fuel prices. Never mind. Having postulated a crash energy diet, the IEA simulates five scenarios with differing rates of technological change. In each, greenhouse emissions in 2050 are higher than today. The increases vary from 6 percent to 27 percent.
Since 1800 there's been modest global warming. I'm unqualified to judge between those scientists (the majority) who blame man-made greenhouse gases and those (a small minority) who finger natural variations in the global weather system. But if the majority are correct, the IEA report indicates we're now powerless. We can't end annual greenhouse emissions, and once in the atmosphere, the gases seem to linger for decades. So concentration levels rise. They're the villains; they presumably trap the world's heat. They're already about 36 percent higher than in 1800. Even with its program, the IEA says another 45 percent rise may be unavoidable. How much warming this might create is uncertain; so are the consequences.
I draw two conclusions—one political, one practical.
No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming. Still, politicians want to show they're "doing something." The result is grandstanding. Consider the Kyoto Protocol. It allowed countries that joined to castigate those that didn't. But it hasn't reduced carbon dioxide emissions (up about 25 percent since 1990), and many signatories didn't adopt tough enough policies to hit their 2008-2012 targets. By some estimates, Europe may overshoot by 15 percent and Japan by 25 percent.
Ambitious U.S. politicians also practice this self-serving hypocrisy. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a global warming program. Gore counts 221 cities that have "ratified" Kyoto. Some pledge to curb their greenhouse emissions. None of these programs will reduce global warming. They're public relations exercises and—if they impose costs—are undesirable. (Note: on national security grounds, I favor taxing oil, but the global warming effect would be trivial.) The practical conclusion is that if global warming is a potential calamity, the only salvation is new technology. I once received an e-mail from an engineer. Thorium, he said. I had never heard of thorium. It is, he argued, a nuclear fuel that is more plentiful and safer than uranium without waste disposal problems. It's an exit from the global warming trap. After reading many articles, I gave up trying to decide whether he is correct. But his larger point is correct: Only an aggressive research and development program might find ways of breaking our dependence on fossil fuels or dealing with it. Perhaps some system could purge the atmosphere of surplus greenhouse gases?
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.
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We concentrate on limiting CO2, which as the writer suggests is a non-starter in both a political and engineering sense. The other way to go is to ask what sort of CO2 'sponges' can we created to remove the buildup? Genetically engineered plantlife, seaweed and kelp?? What can we do to reflect the solar radiation that diminishing ice and snow no longer can do? Require every vehicle and building rooftop to be painted white? Embed some sort of charcoal filtration in road surfaces to absorb vehicle CO2? A much greater concern on my radar is the growing acidity from absorbed CO2 in our seas that is killing the coral which begins the food chain for all animals.
Shouldn't we also focus on limiting our CO2 output? Shouldn't that be even more important since the population is going to increase so much? If we only try to sequester it, we'll need more and more and more ways to do it. That growing need will be lessened (but not eliminated) if we decrease CO2 output. Why try to heal the symptoms but not affect the cause? Any such attempts, because the sources are not affected, will ultimately fail.
As for the increasingly acidic oceans, wouldn't it make the most sense to BOTH limit CO2 output as well as attempting to sequester it? Also, increasing ocean temperatures play a part in the coral deaths.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5150816.stm
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008626
He writes:
>>>>There is also little dispute regarding natural climate change. Climate has never been static. Over the last few million years the climate has changed particularly dramatically and rapidly. Ice caps have developed in North America and Europe, melted, and then grown again 15 to 20 times. The ice takes about 90,000 years to grow, and 5,000 years or so to melt. The warm periods between glaciations last about 10,000 years. Ours has already lasted for this long. If the natural cycles of the past prevail, the climate should soon quite suddenly cool (over a few years or decades, although the climate switch may initially flicker). The North American ice cap will then expand to cover Canada, and reach Ithaca in about 50,000 years. Less dramatic cycles (the Holocene climate optimum, the little ice age, and the current warming) have affected humanity within our interglacial period. Natural climate change is real, rapid, and significant.
What we don't know is the relative magnitude of natural and human-induced climate change. The academy presidents of 11 countries quoted in the “Global warming is real” (Guest column, June 14) do not take a stand on this issue, saying only “It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activity,” which leaves open the possibility that natural cycles could control climate change despite human inputs. The situation is complex. Ice ages may start when warming melts ice in the Arctic and Greenland, and the meltwater turns off the haline convection that helps keep Europe warm. Global warming may thus cause global cooling, and human greenhouse gases may hasten the arrival of the next ice age. The sun, ocean circulation, and a host of “tipping points” make the future difficult to predict, and here there is no consensus at all...
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>>>>>According to Lambda-Omega-Lambda (LOL), a simultaneous jump by 600 million people in the Western Hemisphere would cause a shock great enough to alter the Earth's orbit around the sun. The new orbit, the group claims on its website (http://www.worldjumpday.org), would result in a reversal of global warming by a full centigrade degree by the year 2020, at which point the Earth's climate would stabilize.<<<<<
;)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-09-gore-green_x.htm