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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Faith is believing in what you know not to be true Mark Twain
or "not believing in what you know to be true"
FG
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Sep 18, 2010 - 06:00pm PT
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great news! there is NO MORE GLOBAL WARMING...according to barry, that is
now, we face "global climate disruption"
question: if it's true, and the science is final, and the debate is over, why do they keep changing the name?
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Sep 19, 2010 - 05:48pm PT
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Relevant op-ed in this morning’s New York Times, Aren’t We Clever? by Thomas Friedman.
“. . . the totally bogus ‘discrediting’ of climate science has had serious implications. For starters, it helped scuttle Senate passage of the energy-climate bill needed to scale U.S.-made clean technologies, leaving America at a distinct disadvantage in the next great global industry. And that brings me to the contrast: While American Republicans were turning climate change into a wedge issue, the Chinese Communists were turning it into a work issue.
‘There is really no debate about climate change in China,’ said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. ‘China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time ...’”
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Sep 19, 2010 - 06:08pm PT
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Many posters have pointed out that there is natural variability in climate. Yes, there is, but we can explain much of the past variability. To explain the increased temperatures over the past century, especially the past half-century, we have to incorporate the infrared absorption by higher concentrations of carbon dioxide.
In a conversation last Friday with Henry Pollack of the University of Michigan, and author of the wonderful book A World Without Ice, he posed the following point:
Were there forest fires on Earth before humans existed?
Of course. Lightning existed before we did, and the sediments contain charcoal.
So . . . are all today’s forest fires natural?
Of course not. We still have lightning and natural fires, but fires in the chaparral are almost all from humans, and many forest fires result from human activity.
The point is that human effects on climate are significant, and so are natural processes, but, like with fires, we can identify the causes and their magnitudes.
A World Without Ice received a nice honor last month, making the short list for the 2010 Royal Society Prize for science books.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Sep 27, 2010 - 02:36pm PT
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True science is never "final." It's all simply a tentative model subject to modification if new information warrants. That's what differentiates science from faith.
John
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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Sep 30, 2010 - 07:30pm PT
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I think we should fine every "Global Climate Change" Denier $1250
They have only screwed all of uis in thsi scerade, and ended up subisudizing billionaires, Coal, Oil and Gas Companies (and another huge list of NON-Productive Royalists)
Hope you pay up, out of the guilt and shame
I will tell you were to send the checks!!!!!!!!!1
Fortunately no one really cares what you think--we have this thing called the 1st Amendment that allows us to express our beliefs--including unpopular/ out of fashion ones--without getting fined by you would-be fascist thought police.
Anyway, yeah, maybe there is a little GCC going on. That doesn't mean it's bad thing. Thought all you Obama supporters wanted a little change (and now you're all bent out of shape that you ain't getting any).
I have challenged anyone to cite to any evidence that GCC will cause global biomass to decline, rather than to increase. I haven't had any takers.
With the increasing population, we're going to need all the biomass (that is, food), that we can get.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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The post by ‘blahblah’ above posits the possibility that warmer global temperatures and more atmospheric CO2 are good. Indeed some areas may be more pleasant and better support agriculture if they were a little warmer, and increased CO2 might enhance fertilization, for which there is some evidence at high elevations where photosynthesis is limited by the low partial pressure of CO2.
Several problems with this proposition argue that we ought to be more cautious. While increased photosynthesis by the biosphere would indeed be a negative feedback to increased CO2 (a negative feedback counters the increased temperature), the best ecosystem scientists identify some positive feedbacks (which enhance the temperature increases that atmospheric CO2 induces). Examples include decreased albedo from new forests, CO2 and CH4 emitted from thawing permafrost, and more wildfires. And the future distribution of precipitation is uncertain.
A good, recent paper about the ecosystem response to climate change is:
Field, C. B., D. B. Lobell, H. A. Peters, and N. R. Chiariello (2007), Feedbacks of terrestrial ecosystems to climate change, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 32, 1-29, doi: 10.1146/annurev.energy.32.053006.141119.
Additional issues are:
- The Precautionary Principle would say that you shouldn’t carry out a huge global-scale experiment until you better understand the likely consequences. Continuing to add more CO2 is indeed a huge experiment, which we cannot carry out in the clinical-trial fashion that the pharmaceutical industry uses. We have just one Earth.
- A neglected effect in this Forum is the increasing acidity of the ocean, a decrease of about 0.1 pH over the past half-century.
No one is arguing that a long-term preindustrial CO2 value of 600 ppm and much warmer temperatures would have prevented the development of civilization. Agriculture would have grown up but in different locations, fish and shellfish in the ocean would be different but we would still find sea creatures to eat, sea level would be higher and the major ports would be in different locations, Yosemite wouldn't be much of a climbing locale, and we wouldn’t know about skiing. The issue is the current pace of climate change because the modern human infrastructure does not adapt quickly enough, and some migratory animals are constrained by our infrastructure.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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New very short paper in Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union provides a synopsis of climate change over the last 1000 years. The figure below synthesizes some graphs from a 2006 National Research Council report.
The figure presents several records of past temperatures:
(i) For times before the mid-19th century, temperatures are estimated from proxy records: tree rings, corals, and sediments, and from observations and inferences of glacier length changes. Note that the different estimates start to converge around 1600 because the availability of data grows.
(ii) Direct measurements of subsurface temperatures measured at regular intervals within boreholes, the idea being that heat at Earth’s surface diffuses slowly into the subsurface. By estimating the rate of temperature diffusion, we get a smoothed record of past surface temperatures.
(iii) Since 1850, the instrumental record.
At the right side of the graph, several IPCC projections of future temperature growth are presented. Perhaps the scariest of the projections is the lowest one, C3, the estimate warming if we stabilize CO2 at the current concentration. Satellite measurements from the CERES instrument indicate that Earth is absorbing about 2 Watts per sq m more from the Sun than it is emitting to space. To achieve steady state, Earth would have to warm.
The 2006 NRC report unequivocally describes the record over the last 1000 years. John Christy, sometimes portrayed in this forum as disagreeing with the degree of warming that has occurred, was a member of the committee that produced the report. In these NRC committees, members who disagree with the majority consensus may write minority reports that are published as part of the main report. Dr Christy did not take this opportunity.
“Large-scale surface temperature reconstructions yield a generally consistent picture of temperature trends during the preceding millennium, including relatively warm conditions centered around A.D. 1000 (identified by some as the “Medieval Warm Period”) and a relatively cold period (or “Little Ice Age”) centered around 1700....
“It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.”
References
Chapman, D. S., and M. G. Davis (2010), Climate change: Past, present, and future, Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 91, 325-326.
National Research Council (2006), Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, 160 pp., National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Land use change is part of the human influence on climate. Other examples include increased dust from the Colorado Plateau on snow in the San Juans, and increased soot on Himalayan glaciers. Some human activities have cooling effects, the main example being increases in sulfate aerosols which increase Earth's reflectivity.
The figure above (from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce) shows estimates of forcings from the major sources. The net effect is about 2 W/m^2.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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JE: True science is never "final." It's all simply a tentative model subject to modification if new information warrants. Science often provides robust, even very robust, "models", that are far from tentative. They're usually called theories. Many sciences have well-developed theories/paradigms - a new one doesn't replace what was already there, but just better explains what is observed. So Newton's and Kepler's laws do a good job of explaining the celestial mechanics of the solar system, but Einstein's Special and General Relativity do a better job, explaining some discrepancies (Mercury's orbit), and tying things together better.
Major paradigm shifts in science are becoming less common, e.g. physicists discovering the effects of dark energy and dark matter, and trying to figure out what they are, or plate tectonics.
Anthropogenic global warming could be accurately described as a robust theory.
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Cancun, Mexico, on Nov 29 , 2010!!!! Make your reservations now
to attend the next
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change!!!
(UNFCCC)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-10/05/c_13543062.htm
..its just to get the GW scam rolling again so they can skim money
from an already struggling world economy.
Meanwhile the early onset of winter like temperatures
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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We're saved, by bacteria!
From the Sept 9 The Economist
Bacteria and climate change
Invisible carbon pumps
A group of oceanic micro-organisms just might prove a surprising ally in the fight against climate change
Sep 9th 2010 | Shanghai
UNDERSTANDING how the oceans absorb carbon dioxide is crucial to understanding the role of that gas in the climate. It is rather worrying, then, that something profound may be missing from that understanding. But if Jiao Nianzhi of Xiamen University in China is right, it is. For he suggests there is a lot of carbon floating in the oceans that has not previously been noticed. It is in the form of what is known as refractory dissolved organic matter and it has been put there by a hitherto little-regarded group of creatures called aerobic anoxygenic photoheterotrophic bacteria (AAPB). If Dr Jiao is right, a whole new “sink” for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been discovered.
The main way that carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean is through photosynthesis by planktonic algae. These algae are the basis of most food chains in the sea—being eaten by tiny animals that are, in turn, eaten by larger ones. When all these creatures die, their remains (those bits that are not immediately eaten, anyway) sink to the sea floor, where some are eaten and some are buried indefinitely. These remains are known in the jargon as particulate organic matter.
Some of the organic compounds the dead creatures contain, though, dissolve out of them and into the water. This dissolved organic matter was not, until recently, thought to be an important component of the total. But Dr Jiao noticed something odd about its distribution in the sea. It would be expected to correlate with the distribution of planktonic algae—the ultimate drivers of biological productivity. But it does not.
The reason, it turned out, was that previous researchers had been tracking only a small fraction of the total—the portion composed of molecules such as sugars and L-amino acids that can be metabolised easily by living things. They had missed a whole host of molecules that cannot easily be metabolised. These included D-amino acids, which are mirror images of the L-variety normally found in living things, and compounds called porins, lipopolysaccharides and humic acids. Because they are not metabolised, these molecules are referred to as “refractory”. Only when this refractory material is taken into account does the chemical map match the planktonic one.
A refractory puzzle
The reason this matters is that 95% of dissolved organic matter seems to be refractory. Dr Jiao estimates that the amount of carbon stored by the oceans in this way is equal to the amount in the atmosphere, in the form of carbon dioxide.
It was discovered ten years ago that AAPB produce refractory molecules when they metabolise sugars and L-amino acids, but it is only recently that the scale on which they do so has become apparent. That started happening in 2006, when Dr Jiao developed a technique called time-series observation-based infra-red epifluorescence microscopy, or TIREM for short, that is able to measure the amount of AAPB in the oceans accurately.
TIREM has shown that AAPB are ubiquitous, and constitute 7% of the oceans’ microbes. Moreover, they grow up to five times faster than typical bacteria—in part because, as the “photoheterotrophic” in their name suggests, they can both photosynthesise and derive nutrition from the remnants of other organisms. Which is more important to them, though, was not clear until Dr Jiao and his colleagues began their research. After sampling waters from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans at all latitudes, they found that the amount of AAPB in the water is controlled mainly by the level of planktonic algae in the region, rather than by the amount of light. They therefore suspect the main source of food for AAPB is dissolved organic matter released by phytoplankton. The question is, how is some of this converted into refractory compounds?
It is possible that AAPB release such compounds during their normal metabolism. That would be odd, though, since it would be a waste of valuable carbon. Instead, Dr Jiao thinks refractory compounds are made and released by these bugs mainly in response to viral infections. Indeed, he has found that AAPB are particularly prone to such infections and his team have isolated a virus that seems to be specific to this type of bacterium. At the final stage of the infection, the viruses destroy the cells they have infected, a process that provides a rich source of refractory compounds.
Based on these findings, Dr Jiao and his colleagues propose that AAPB, and possibly other, similar microbes, have a predominant role in pumping carbon into a pool of compounds that cannot be turned back into carbon dioxide by living creatures, thereby building up a large reservoir that keeps carbon out of the atmosphere. If that idea is confirmed, it will need to be incorporated into the computer models used to understand the Earth’s carbon cycle and its effect on the climate. But it also raises a more radical thought. The newly discovered microbial carbon pump could provide a novel way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, should that ever be deemed necessary to combat climate change.
At the moment, the most plausible way of making the sea absorb more of the gas is to seed it with iron. A lack of this metal is commonly the brake that stops the growth of planktonic algae. Experiments that add iron to the sea have had mixed success, though, and may cause harmful algal blooms and ocean acidification. If AAPB could be recruited, they would provide an alternative way of getting the sea to lock up CO2. How that might be done is obscure at the moment, for the organisms are still barely understood. Moreover, there would surely be side-effects to stimulating their activity. Those side-effects, though, might be more bearable than the ones associated with iron seeding. Only further research can find that out.
In the meantime, there are many questions to answer. For example, Dr Jiao and his colleagues want to map the abundance, composition and distribution of refractory molecules in more detail. They want to understand what makes such compounds refractory and whether they can be made more or less so. They also want to know exactly how viral infections stimulate production of the molecules.
To address these questions, scientists from China and elsewhere are rushing around the oceans from ice-cold polar regions to the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool, the warmest marine waters in the world. If progress can be made, this curious discovery may turn out to be a powerful ally in the fight against global warming.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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DrDeeg - interesting report. Is it just me or has the IPCC toned down the
scare stories for more scientific jargon of 'could' 'maybe' 'might' and
'perhaps' filling their reports now? The thought of no more funding for their jet-setting ho fests (aka Climate Summits) must have indeed scared them.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/28/kilimanjaros-snow-its-about-land-use-change-tree-cutting/
Corniss Chopper: I finally got around to reading the paper referenced, published in Global and Planetary Change. The website noted above, about Kilimajaro, rather badly misinterprets the conclusion of the paper it discussed. The authors simply point out that deforestation around Kilimanjaro affects the moisture supply to the mountains because of reduced evaporation from the forests. However, they stress that this effect is supplementary to the general warming of the free air at the higher elevations.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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I am a rational scientist, and I do not advocate violence against people who disbelieve human-caused climate change. Nor do I equate them with Nazis. However, the preponderance of evidence shows that climate change is a serious problem. My rationale for participating in this Forum is to try to offer what I hope are rational explanations, and I try to avoid shouting or ridicule.
I also think the problem is solvable. In agreement with Eric Beck, the Stimulus Package should have focused more on energy issues, particularly generation from renewable resources and energy efficiency. The big investors in the present methods of producing energy – oil and coal – have had their day and ought to stop focusing on short-term returns to shareholders and use their expertise in more productive ways.
To try to bring some synthesis to the Forum, I offer here short analyses of the common misconceptions in the community that denies the reality of human-caused climate change. These are the ones I have heard; they are not consistent among themselves; and I would be glad to respond to other suggestions. The ones listed here have been laid to rest, but they keep coming back to life. Perhaps dead horses are meant to be beaten.
1. Temperatures really are increasing. The graph in my earlier post (repeated below) synthesizes the most reliable data we have on climate over the past 1000 years. The reconstructions of data before 1850, prior to the temperature record, are based on independent analyses. They also converge around 1600 because more data are available since then, for example records of glacier extent.
2. The Sun is a factor but not enough to explain the warming. The variations in solar output since 1880 are just too small. The solar forcing since 1880 is slightly less than 0.3 Watts per sq m, integrated over Earth, whereas the greenhouse gas forcing (CO2, CH4, N2O, CFCs, O3) is slightly less than 3 Watts per sq m. The conservation of energy principle has helped us inform explanations for centuries; let’s not abandon it!
3. The extra CO2 is from fossil fuels (~75%) and deforestation (~25%). This explanation is consistent with the progression and spatial variability of the atmospheric measurements, with the changing isotope ratios of atmospheric carbon, and with estimates of the world’s energy production and deforestation. Other explanations -- oceans, volcanic activity -- are inconsistent with the suite of measurements. Oceanic carbon would not account for the trend in isotope ratios. If volcanic carbon were the source, we would see spikes in the atmosphere rather than a steady increase (and neither El Chichón nor Pinatubo significantly increased atmospheric carbon).
4. Atmospheric absorption of CO2 has not saturated. And it is not close to saturating. A linear increase in CO2 would indeed produce a sublinear increase in temperature, but a constant percentage increase in CO2 (which is what is happening) would produce a linear increase in temperature.
5. There are negative feedbacks, for example sulfur aerosols, but none appear likely to prevent significant warming. Richard Lindzen’s “iris” hypothesis, which postulates increasing clear weather over the tropics and therefore more outgoing longwave radiation, does not appear to be what’s happening based on CERES satellite observations, and the cloud properties in his model are different than those we see in the tropics. Similarly, Roy Spencer’s idea that chaotic development of low, high-albedo clouds will ameliorate the warming seems not grounded in atmospheric processes. Earth the Planet does not care what its temperature is. It is not Daisy World.
6. Warming is not a good idea. Finally, the argument that the CO2-induced warming is a good thing, “an unexpected benefit of the Industrial Revolution,” seems too risky to count on. We cannot get the cities out of the way of rising sea level, and the Midwestern farmers are unlikely to move en masse to Canada.
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dirtbag
climber
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Splatter Gate –is the new Climate Gate.
You mean, found out to be a bogus, trumped up "scandal"?
(oh yeah--you think it was real)
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SuperTopo on the Web
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