Global Warming and Polar Ice
Hey, remember back in February, when Serr8d used disingenuous graphs to try to argue that melting polar ice wasn’t a problem? And remember how I subsequently pointed out the flaws in his arguments, and noted that the late summer ice levels are what’s important? Well, lookie here:
The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported that the extent of sea ice in the Arctic is down to 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point since 1979 is 1.65 million square miles set last September.
With about three weeks left in the Arctic summer, this year could wind up breaking the previous record, scientists said.
Arctic ice always melts in summer and refreezes in winter. But over the years, more of the ice is lost to the sea and with less of it recovered in winter. While ice reflects the sun’s heat, the open ocean absorbs more heat and the melting accelerates warming in other parts of the world.
…snip…
“We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point,” said center senior scientist Mark Serreze. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now.”
Within a few years — “five to less than 10 years” — the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer, said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally.
“It also means that climate warming is also coming larger and faster than the models are predicting and nobody’s really taken into account that change yet,” he said.
Other scientists, including James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, agreed. Hansen in a Wednesday e-mail said the sea ice “is the best current example of a tipping point.”
Last year was an unusual year when wind currents and other weather conditions coincided with global warming to worsen sea ice melt, Serreze said. Scientists wondered if last year’s melt was an unusual event or the start of a new and disturbing trend.
This year’s results suggest the latter because the ice had recovered a bit more than usual thanks to a somewhat cooler winter, Serreze said. Then this month, when the melting rate usually slows, it sped up, he said.
Of course, these are people who study this sort of thing for a living, so what the hell do they know? Obviously, they’re just politically-motivated alarmist hacks…
Cross-posted at Lean Left.
The disingenuous part of it is blaming mankind for the loss of ice.
Yes, because everyone knows that our actions have no environmental impact whatsoever, just as everyone knows that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.
But again, the moving target of AGW deniers: First, the ice isn’t really going away, and then when it is, it’s not our fault.
Thanks for completely misrepresenting what I said.
I said blaming mankind for the loss of ice is disingenuous, because mankind cannot be solely responsible for the amount of warming we’ve seen.
Which is one of the stupidest things you’ve ever said, because you’re saying that I’m Serr8d, or Serr8d is me, which is not the case. Nor did I ever say what he did, and he hasn’t said what I have.
Makes you wonder who’s holding the rational argument.
CaptainBrainstorm:
Forgive me if I’ve misrepresented a position you hold; it’s just that this is a topic where my patience is unusually short, in large part because I’ve had these debates dozens of times with AGW deniers (Serr8d and Number9 are two of the worst offenders), and patterns like the “moving target” one I alluded to seemingly always emerge. When the evidence doesn’t suit them, they change the subject, or simply disappear, and they never, ever admit they were wrong (as evidenced by the Serr8d post I linked). I apologize for jumping the gun and lumping you in with that group unfairly.
Mankind may not be solely responsible for the warming we’re seeing, but that doesn’t let us off the hook. And indeed, the evidence suggests that by far and away the biggest contributor to warming is increased CO2 concentrations, and that by far and away the biggest cause of the increase is human use of fossil fuels. Almost no one in the scientific community disputes any of this, and those few who do haven’t been able to convince their peers — if anything, their numbers are shrinking rather than growing. Further, many (I’d say most) of those who dispute these facts have serious conflicts of interest (e.g., are literally being paid to promote the contrarian view).
As I’ve said here and elsewhere many times before, I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about this. I’d love to be able to drive a 10mpg Corvette in good conscience (something I can’t do even without global warming, but I digress), and I’d love to not have to worry about energy efficiency in my home for anything other than financial reasons. I’d especially love to learn that my young nieces and nephews have nothing to worry about in this regard. But wanting it to be true doesn’t make it so.
Researching renewable energy resources is a responsible thing to do. Alleviating energy costs should always be a priority, hopefully to a point where we have all neighborhoods running off of local, high-efficiency solar panels (a technology that hasn’t gotten there yet.) One of my research projects actually focuses on using conjugated polymers to absorb solar energy as a circuit rather than as a photoelectric consequence.
However, I disagree that CO2 is the largest contributor to global warming. Al Gore showed a graph in “Inconvenient Truth” that completely mispresented the information contained in the graph. He showed that CO2 concentrations and temperatures follow an almost exact correlation. What he failed to mention was that CO2 concentrations followed temperature increases, and large temperature decreases occurred when CO2 concentrations were at their highest (and continued that way for hundreds of years.
It clearly shows from historical evidence that CO2 concentrations spiked after a temperature increase, and that increased carbon dioxide did not contribute to a warmer climate.
Now, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and if there’s an increase, there will be additional energy trapped by the atmosphere. However, mankind’s contributions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere amount to less than 1% of carbon dioxide. If we are to argue that mankind is contributing to warming, we would have to acknowledge that minute changes in carbon dioxide concentration have the effect of throwing the planet into hot spells and cold spells, regardless of external factors such as solar activity.
There are some plusses to going green. I like the CFC light bulbs, mercury and all. But I also recognize that handicapping the economy because of environmental doomsaying is the height of irresponsibility.
What he failed to mention was that CO2 concentrations followed temperature increases
Which is an entirely disingenuous point to bring up, when you stop and think about it. Because if CO2 contributes to warming — which absolutely nobody disputes that it does — then it doesn’t matter which came first. More CO2 means more warming, period, even if the warming trend initially preceded the CO2 increase. It’s basic physics, and we don’t get to ignore that just because it’s, err, inconvenient. It’s called a feedback loop.
Of course, it is a complex system, and there certainly can be other variables at play. And, in ancient history, there often were. But in modern history, we don’t have the same circumstances. At the end of the day, it boils down to simple arithmetic, and the only thing that comes close to explaining where all the warming is coming from is the CO2 concentration. Solar output doesn’t cut it, natural cycles don’t cut it. The math just doesn’t support these theories, whereas it does support CO2 being the culprit.
Now, if AGW deniers want to claim that something other than CO2 is the primary culprit, that’s all well and good, but they can’t just go all “dark matter” and claim it’s a mystery contributor. They have to tell us what they think it is if they want us to take them seriously, and thus far, they’ve made no real effort to do so. The closest they’ve come to that is with the solar output theory, and that could never explain more than about a quarter (super-optimistically) of the warming we’ve seen, and as the sun has come out of its peak output cycle and started to decline, the warming hasn’t stopped, essentially submarining that theory.
As for the “1% of carbon dioxide,” this is again a great example of how to lie with statistics. 1% doesn’t seem like a lot, but to use an extreme example, a 0.07% dose of arsenic is fatal, so in that case, 1% is an awful lot. With CO2, it’s not quite that dramatic, but consider this: for the last 1,000 years or so, CO2 concentrations have hovered around 270 parts per million, or 0.027%. In the last 150 years, that concentration has increased by fully a third to over 360 parts per million, or 0.033%. Sounds like small potatoes, but when one considers the fact that without that 0.027% the planet would be in a permanent ice age and incapable of sustaining life, it becomes clear that small amounts make a very big difference.
So the question becomes, what are the tolerances for CO2 concentration, how far outside the tolerance are me, and how much of that variance is human-related. Put in those terms, the human impact is actually quite dramatic. Which is why, of course, AGW deniers avoid putting it in those terms at all costs. And as it turns out, virtually all of the increase from 1900 to today can be explained by human use of fossil fuels.
If we are to argue that mankind is contributing to warming, we would have to acknowledge that minute changes in carbon dioxide concentration have the effect of throwing the planet into hot spells and cold spells
On what planet is “increasing the concentration by 33%” a “minute change?”
But I also recognize that handicapping the economy because of environmental doomsaying is the height of irresponsibility.
And this is where we disagree: I don’t think that aggressively encouraging and even mandating green development would “handicap the economy.” On the contrary, while there might be some small short-term pain, and nothing that the economy can’t handle, the long-term benefits would be tremendous, and could very easily make us a dominant player in the energy market on the world stage, in a way we can simply never be with fossil fuels.
??? Um, yes they can. If you come up to me and say there are 300 ft tall radioactive sheep at the center of the universe, and I say, “No there aren’t”, and give you a laundry list of why, you can’t claim your idea is superior simply because I don’t have a rebuttal. Recognition of a bad idea does not require a superior idea.
Um, tgirsch, your absolute lack of scientific training shows through. I said less than 1% of carbon dioxide, not 1% of the atmosphere. That means mankind is contributing less than 2 ppm at current rates, which didn’t “explode” until the late 70’s. So you’re talking between 35-50 ppm max contribution assuming 0% sequesteration of carbon dioxide by the biosphere and geosphere (which is an incorrect assumption). That means there’s still 100 ppm that’s out there that’s unaccounted for from mankind’s emissions.
The counter-argument is that those emissions from mankind have sparked emissions from permafrost and the oceans by nature of the increase in warming. Unfortunately, this cannot be, as that would mean any carbon dioxide increase on the planet would result in a temperature increase, which would then generate more runaway carbon dioxide emissions, which would mean more heating until the earth boiled over because there was a minor increase in carbon dioxide.
Your statement that CO2 is what keeps the planet from becoming a snowball is complete, unadulterated bullshit. Carbon dioxide is not the #1 greenhouse gas on the planet. Water vapor is. The planet’s temperature has been moderated by the heat capacity of the oceans and the heat trapping ability of water in the atmosphere. In fact, water dwarfs any meaningful contribution of energy trapping of carbon dioxide when the humidity reaches over 50% (and that’s more than 3/4 of the planet).
In fact, there’s a stronger correlation of data between El Nino/La Nina cycles than there is between carbon dioxide increases. One of the biggest El Nino’s hit in 1998, and this year we’re still feeling the effects of last year’s La Nina. If there were more El Ninos than La Ninas in a 10 year period, the overall global temperature showed an increase, whereas the opposite showed a temperature decline. The only drawback here is that nobody’s really sure when there’s going to be an El Nino or La Nina because they don’t really know what external forces cause them, so they tiptoe past that monster so they can talk about carbon dioxide.
But we DO have the same circumstances!!!!!! Carbon Dioxide wasn’t different 100 million years ago. And regardless of what you think, the mountains of data of pre-modern systems show a CO2 lag after heating! It’s a no-brainer!
You can’t dismiss all that evidence as a “complex system”, then take another “complex system” and claim absolute certainty of its predictions based on data that totally ignores another data set. It’s absolutely insulting to someone in the scientific field to try and advance such a lame-brained idea.
The icing on the cake is current temperature trend. Every model in 1998-2000 showed warming, maybe even up to a degree, by 2010. However, we’ve seen a slight decline in global temperatures, even as CO2 levels rise. This is a 10 year trend at this point, and it’s turned the entire idea of AGW on it’s head because temperature was supposed to increase. There have been no volcanoes that have accounted for the global dimming in the past 10 years. No nuclear tests. Nada. Just La Nina events that have no relationship to carbon dioxide (however, they have a strong relationship to solar phenomena).
Look, I’m a data guy. You show me the data, and I’ll look at it with a critical eye. I haven’t been convinced, and it’s not because I’m on a payroll of Big Oil (man, I wish). The observations and evidence do not match the current theory, so it means the theory is flawed.
I was watching a show on the Universe with my 4 year old, and I was struck at the marvel of the Copernican system compared to that of the Ptolemic system. Ptolemy’s looping planets idea was a complex, but elegant, tweaking of an Earth-centric solar system that explained planetary motion, but it was totally wrong. The same thing here with global warming. We know the planet is getting warmer, and people are offering up more and more ways CO2 is the culprit, even though more and more evidence is unearthed which says it’s not. There is a reason as to why the planet is warming, but CO2 concentrations do not explain it.
Dare I ask what that “short term pain” would be? Don’t say ethanol– it’s renewable, sure, but we’re still a long way from being able to convert cellulose to ethanol in efficient concentrations. Electric is much better, although battery life is an issue, as is refueling (a trip to a filling station may be cheap, but it would take an hour). And the best current alternative to coal-fired plants is nuclear, something that people fight tooth-and-nail whenever it springs up.
I like T. Boone Pickens, but people are going to hate his guts after they agree to having a wind-farm near their houses. They’re noisy as hell.
And overtaxing the OIl Companies isn’t going to help either. Petroleum sponsors millions of dollars in research a year in renewable energies, and by taxing Big Oil, it’s just reducing the amount of money they’re spending on renewable energy research.
A lot of what’s happening out there is very reactionary, and it’s scary. From “organic” foods to ways to reduce your energy footprint, it seems more and more people are requiring people to conserve. One town in Germany is even requiring people to install solar panels, regardless of income. I’d rather see people embrace new energy technologies, so long as they’re affordable, rather than being mandated by Green Energy Dictators like Al Gore.
Another thing rarely mentioned is that EVERY body in the solar system with ice caps are showing melting ice caps. This could only be the result of solar variations. Here’s the kicker: the VAST MAJORITY of the MMGW models ignore the sun entirely!
Here’s another zinger: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it’s one of the weakest ones and yet those very same computer models give it a pre-eminent role. In fact the solar energy bands that CO2 ‘traps’ are pretty well caught with our current levels of CO2 which means each bit of extra CO2 has LESS impact than the previous bit. The catastrophic GW models require that additional CO2 will act proportionally to stuff already in the atmosphere. (*A more detailed and somewhat boring explanation follows at the end for those with the stomach for it, heh.)
Let’s not forget that all the catastrophic MMGW computer models have enough fudge factors (to make them fit historical data) that any real predictions based on them are no better than chance and probably slightly worse reading chicken entrails. Once you introduce enough of these fudges, you aren’t really doing science.
==== Boring section ====
* You can think of each greenhouse gas as a ‘net’ that can capture heat/energy. Now, each will only capture energy of a certain bandwidth and, hence, heat up the atmosphere. If you start with NO CO2 and gradually introduce it, the amount of heat captured will be fairly linear (it’s a target rich environment, so to speak). As you get more CO2, each additional bit will capture less and less heat. There’s a natural flattening of the curve as you approach the maximum, so there’s no way you can get ‘out of control’ global warming due to CO2 or, frankly, any other greenhouse gas. The ’science’ that claims the heat captured is linear or even exponentially increasing are so wrong on the face of it as to make you wonder if the authors have any knowledge of science or, to be blunt, scientific ethics.
If, by “they can,” you mean “they have a right to,” then I’ve got to agree with you. But that doesn’t mean anyone has to take them seriously. Let’s have a basic refresher course on how science works, shall we? When somebody makes a positive assertion, the burden of proof is on them to provide compelling evidence for that assertion. Once that burden has been met, the assertion becomes the conventional wisdom, until such time as someone presents an alternate proposition which better fits the evidence, or at a very minimum, presents a fatal flaw in the conventional wisdom. In the case of AGW, the former burden has been met, and the latter burden has not. This is how AGW differs fundamentally from your radioactive sheep example.
Have a cite on that? The numbers I have show human activity (mainly the burning of fossil fuels, and deforestation) accounting for a little over 4% of CO2 output (and virtually all of the excess), and after figuring absorption, about 19.4 Gt of extra CO2 per year in the atmosphere as a result of human activity.
Well, this should be self-evident, but the only thing that matters is the amount of CO2 output that exceeds what the environment can absorb. And whether it’s us or something else, it seems clear, based on the data, that more CO2 is being generated than can be absorbed by the environment.
Well, that’s not really what I said. I said that if you took all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, all other things being equal, the planet would be in a permanent ice age, and I believe that’s true. “Incapable of sustaining life” was probably an overstatement, I’ll admit, even if technically true (without CO2, no plants, no carbon cycle, no life, but that has nothing to do with warming).
Another example of how to lie with statistics. Yes, it is true that water vapor has a much more profound greenhouse effect than CO2 does. The problem here is that the atmospheric concentration of water vapor hasn’t changed significantly, whereas the concentration of CO2 (also a greenhouse gas, even if a much less powerful one) has done so. And CO2 accounts for roughly 20% of the greenhouse effect — not insignificant, as your water vapor diatribe would suggest. (Methane also plays a role, but although its levels have increased in modern history, they’ve leveled off of late.)
That’s true, as far as it goes. These cycles do indeed have a much more profound effect, but they can only explain short-term peaks and valleys, not long-term warming trends. It’s rather like the danger of confusing “weather” with “climate.” Anyway, in what seems to be becoming a common underlying theme in our discussion, the fact that other things are stronger or have more profound short-term effects than CO2 does not mean that CO2’s role is insignificant, or that it’s not the culprit. What matters is what’s changed.
Which is why a lot of AGW deniers like to disingenuously use 1998 as a starting point for warming comparisons; 1998 was an anomaly, an unusually warm year. Start from any other year, and the picture looks pretty bad.
I think you misunderstood what I mean by “different circumstances.” I wasn’t saying that we have a different amount of CO2 than ever before, I was saying that the CO2 came from different sources back then than it does now. What I was saying is that unless you can show that the circumstances that led to the increased CO2 concentration are the same now as they were then, it’s not safe to assume that the causes are the same now just because the effect (atmospheric CO2 concentration) is the same now.
AGW deniers are really fond of parroting this talking point, but I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to prove. Sure it proves that CO2 isn’t the only thing that can cause warming, but nobody ever argued otherwise. What it doesn’t prove is that CO2 is in no way responsible for warming. If CO2 is in fact a greenhouse gas (a point which virtually nobody disputes), then an increased concentration of CO2 will lead to an increase in temperature, all other things being equal. Again, this is basic science and basic physics. It doesn’t matter whether or not a warming trend owed to other causes was already underway. In such cases, CO2 was not the initial catalyst, but that does not mean that it has no impact.
And this is what I was talking about when I said that the circumstances are different now. We weren’t already in the midst of a warming trend before CO2 levels started to rise dramatically. So it doesn’t really matter if warming preceded CO2 increases in the distant past, because that’s not the case now. More on this here and here.
What was I saying about using 1998 as a starting point? Never mind… Suffice it to say that if you’re a data guy, you shouldn’t be worried about comparing 1998 to today; you should be worried about moving averages.
Probably so. Most theories are flawed, in fundamental ways. See also, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. But there’s a difference between being flawed (i.e., not perfect), and being fatally flawed (i.e., not feasible). If you can show the latter about climate theory, there’s a guaranteed Nobel prize in it for you.
I don’t claim to have a detailed knowledge of the physics involved in climatology, but in a broad way, the explanations seem to make sense, and the numbers generally seem to work out. Couple that with the overwhelming consensus that exists among people who actually are qualified climatologists, and that’s plenty good enough for me. Does this consensus qualify as “proof?” Of course not, but it’s a pretty good analog for a layperson. There are few fields of scientific inquiry for which the scientific consensus is as strong as it is for CO2 and global warming.
Actually, by and large, they do. And from what I can tell, the people offering up objections that CO2 isn’t really responsible for global warming aren’t much different than the people who object that evolution by natural selection is a myth. They rely on cherry-picked and out-of-context objections, and cry discrimination when they fail to convince others of their point of view.
You’re working too hard for it. The “short term pain” I was referring to was higher energy prices (which we seem to be getting anyway) and some of the inconveniences that inevitably come with that. For what it’s worth, I’m not a proponent of ethanol. (I’m even skeptical about cellulosic ethanol, because it ultimately deprives the soil of nutrients, and thus may prove difficult or impossible to sustain…)
I’m sure they’d much rather have a nuke plant up the road. In any case, this is the sort of pain I was talking about. People will get used to it, and in any case, efforts should be made to put keep wind farms at a distance from residential areas wherever practical.
I don’t want to overtax the oil companies. I just want to stop giving them tax breaks, and have them pay their full share like companies in any other industry. I’m on the fence about a tax on fossil fuels in general; I’m not in love with the idea, but if that’s what’s needed to move forward with non-carbon-based alternatives, I’d be okay with it.
If I’m not mistaken, Germany is heavily subsidizing solar power, so income isn’t terribly relevant there.
In any case, I understand the hesitancy surrounding “reactionary” action, but suppose, just for the sake of argument, that dramatic action really is necessary. Then what? Set aside whatever you might think about ulterior motives for the moment, and assume that the people calling for action genuinely believe that global warming is a serious problem with potentially disastrous effects. Isn’t it for them to call for dramatic action, up to and including mandates? If we wait for people to do this on their own, we’ll be waiting a very long time, especially since such new technologies are considerably more expensive than their traditional counterparts. From that perspective, mandates are necessary.
Which brings me back around to my often-offered-but-never-accepted challenge to conservative/libertarian types: Assume, for the sake of argument, that global warming is real, that it’s caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, and that without drastic action, the effects will be catastrophic. Offer up a viable, market-based solution — one not involving mandates or government subsidies — to address the problem. If there is such an answer, I certainly can’t think of one.
And that, I think, is why those who deny AGW are almost exclusively conservative/libertarian types. Their objection to the theory is primarily political, not scientific. (They then go on a fishing expedition to find bits and pieces of evidence that seem to back up their objections when viewed out of context.) In this way, they are no different than those who deny evolution, except that the evolution-deniers have a primarily religious objection rather than a primarily political one.
Tgirsch -
Just wanted to thank you for keeping up the fight. What I find amazing - although maybe “frustrating” is a better word - about debating with the nanny-nanny naysayers is how the same arguments keep coming up no matter how many times they’ve been refuted and upon being refuted again, as you said, the goalposts get moved.
We all know that today we are facing a lot’s of problem. But the most dangerous problem among them is Global warming. It might be most important environmental problem in the world today. I also agreed that human also has a hand to contribute this problem. There is some effects of global warming down.
(1)Growing incidence of droughts in some areas, floods in others;
(2)The rising temperatures of oceans and the sea level
Now we need to aware on that as fast as possible and Planting trees also helps us to removes carbon from the atmosphere, filters air, and prevents soil erosion.
john
Tennessee Alcohol Addiction Treatment