Due West: Column by Dan Whipple

Does A Hot 2006 Seal the Deal for Global Warming Debate?

By Dan Whipple, 1-10-07

2006 was the warmest year on record, according to data released this week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We can proudly boast that the interior West led the charge with average temperatures “much above normal” in every Western state from Mexico to Canada.

California, Oregon and Washington were only “above normal.” Hah!

New Jersey was the nation’s hottest spot, setting a record for average warmth. Not a single state in the entire U.S.A. was near normal or below for the year. The average temperature for the nation was 55.01 degrees Fahrenheit. This is 2.2 degrees F above the mean average for the 20th century and a little warmer than the previous warmest year, 1998.

In the West, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming had the warmest years. The first four were nip and tuck with New Jersey for having record years -- and you don’t hear that combination of states mentioned in the same sentence with the word “record” very often.

According to NOAA’s data base, which has kept records for the past 112 years, 12 of the 25 warmest years have occurred since 1990

This news comes as a surprise here in Denver, where lots of snow remains on the ground, with more forecast for this weekend. But NOAA thought of that objection. They said in their release, “Even in Denver, which had its third snowiest December on record and endured a major blizzard that brought the city to a standstill during the holiday travel season, the temperature for the month was 1.4 degrees F warmer than the 1971-2000 average.”

Now for those of us already convinced of the reality and importance of climate change, this comes as no surprise. We were ready for it, and fully expect 2007 to be warmer still.

But what about those diehards who are atheistic or agnostic about global warming? Is this the smoking gun? Will they finally throw up their hands and say, “Don’t shoot, sheriff. Ya’ got me.” Does it mean that global warming is real?

One of the problems with climate change is that the lead times for its effects to be felt are so long -- in some cases centuries -- that nobody who is arguing the points now will be around long enough to utter the most satisfying words in the English language, “I told you so.”

There is climate ... and there is weather. And last year was influenced by weather. A National Weather Service meteorologist chimed in on cue to say that climate change is not the culprit here. It’s El Nino which has changed weather patterns and brought lots of warm dry air. NOAA -- of which the NWS is a part -- has been reluctant in the past to credit warming for anything.

But in fact a single warm year -- even a whole slew of warm years -- do not prove climate change. My friends over at the website Real Climate said, “Peculiar weather precipitates immediate blame on global warming by some, and equally immediate pronouncements by others (curiously, quite often the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in recent years) that global warming can't possibly be to blame. The reality, as we've often remarked here before, is that absolute statements of neither sort are scientifically defensible. Meteorological anomalies cannot be purely attributed to deterministic factors, let alone any one specific such factor.”

But peculiar weather does tend to persuade people that climate change is happening. This is a case of coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons, a logical fallacy which I’m sure has some long Latin name, but which escapes me at the moment.

When hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Louisiana coast in 2005, a lot people were brought over to the pro-climate change side of the debate. There are good scientific reasons to be concerned about global warming and storm intensity. But it is impossible to assign a single cause to an anomalous weather event, a hurricane or a record warm year.

An event like Katrina is an anecdote to a scientist. Properly deconstructed, the anecdote becomes a data point. Pile up enough data points and you get a data set. After you analyze your data set, maybe you can say something meaningful about causes.

But people being people, they say, “Record hurricanes, record warm years, must be global warming.” This annoys some people and gratifies others. But there is little doubt that the tenor of the debate about global warming has changed in the U.S. to a greater willingness to address the issue with some activity.

Why is that? It’s unlikely they have been persuaded by a calm analysis of the scientific evidence. More likely it’s Al Gore’s movie, or noticeably warmer weather in their part of the world, or Hurricane Katrina.

One that’s clear is that people don’t have their own opinions about climate change, they have somebody else’s opinion, which they parrot as their own. Public opinion polls, for instance, show a pretty strong correlation about climate with which political party a person belongs to.

Democrats are activists on the issue, Republicans more laissez faire. This opinion is seldom seems to be based on any scientific understanding. Here in Denver, for instance, you’ll hear it said that all this snow must be a strike against support for global warming. But a scientist will be quick to try to explain that climate change can bring just these kind of unusual results. One possible result in the Rockies is wetter weather.

Global warming is a result of human beings expelling vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These emissions are clearly the result of industrial activity, and they continue virtually unabated. Once the CO2 is in the air, atmospheric physics takes over and the enhanced greenhouse effect is born. There is no dispute about these essential facts.

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle a couple of years ago, I heard Harvard geochemist Dan Shrag lay this out in easy to understand terms. Even if aggressive and successful, efforts to limit human-caused carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will stabilize those CO2 levels above 400 parts per million, he said. Without any restrictions, CO2 levels in the atmosphere will reach 1,000 ppm.

“This is an experiment that hasn’t been done in a long time,” Shrag said. “Atmospheric CO2 has never been higher than 300 ppm in the last 400,000 years, and probably not in the last 30 million years,” Shrag said.

Thirty million years ago, there were palm trees growing in Antarctica. Had they been keeping records at the time, NOAA probably would have had 30 million B.C. among the top 25 of record warm years.

Dan Whipple is a guest columnist for New West writing from Broomfield, Colorado. Find his "Due West" columns at www.newwest.net/duewest.

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