I had the great pleasure last night of meeting Melissa of Shakespeare’s Sister fame and some of the great cast of characters she has assembled over at her blog, including Mr. Shakes, Litbrit, Paul the Spud, and others. The occasion was a visit to our northern suburb of Evanston to catch Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. In fact I had already seen the movie, but was more than willing to see it twice. I am quick to admit that I am not a Gore fan, and the thought of paying hard cash to see a movie that consists mostly of him giving a Keynote presentation (there was plenty of Apple product placement) falls somewhat below “drinks at Clooney’s villa in Tuscany with the gang” on my list of exciting ways to spend an evening.
But it turns out to be a great film, oddly compelling, with at least one priceless joke about gold bars. It’s not a science documentary — many graphs have no labels on their axes (much less error bars), and much of the evidence adduced is anecdotal and aimed at the gut rather than the brain. But what anecdotes they are. It’s hard to see pictures of Russian fishing boats stranded in a barren sandy landscape that once was a major lake bed without thinking that something needs to be done.
There isn’t any scientific controversy over whether or not climate change is happening, or whether or not human beings are a major cause of it. That argument is over; the only ones left on the other side are hired guns and crackpots. But the guns are hired by people with an awful lot of money, and they’re extremely successful at sowing doubt where there shouldn’t be any.
Their task is made easier by the fact that the atmosphere is a complicated place, and the inherent difficulties in modeling something as messy as our climate. But climate models are not the point. The point is not even the dramatic upward trend in atmospheric temperature in recent years. The actual point is made clear by the plot of atmospheric CO2 concentration as a function of time, which I just posted a couple of days ago but will happily keep posting until I save the planet.
Here is the point: We are taking an enormously complex, highly nonlinear, intricately interconnected system that we don’t fully understand and on which everything about our lives depends — the environment — and repeatedly whacking it with sledgehammers, in the form of atmospheric gasses of various sorts. Statements of the form “well, we don’t really know what that particular piece of the system does, so we can’t be rigorously certain that smashing it with a sledgehammer would necessarily be a bad thing” are, in some limited sense, perfectly true. They are also reckless and stupid. The fact that there are things we don’t understand about the environment isn’t a license to do whatever we like to it, it’s the best possible reason why we should be careful. And being careful won’t spell the doom of our economic system, bringing global capitalism crashing to the floor and returning us all to hunter-gatherer societies. We just have to take some straightforward steps to mimimize the damage we are doing, just as we very successfully did with atmospheric chloro-fluorocarbons to save the ozone layer. And the best way to ensure that those steps are taken is to elect leaders who are smart and determined enough to take them.
I am not sure how I would fit this line.
Looks like you handily decided to ignore data before 1955.
Hiranya, you can’t win. They don’t care that the data are obviously not linear, even if you only look at the last century or so; through the miracle of Taylor expansions, they will always look linear if you cherry-pick a short enough interval.
http://planetebleue.canalblog.com/images/Image1.jpg
What they care about is distracting people into minutiae of log vs. linear plots and curve-fitting, when the point is that we have been dumping obscene amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, raising the concentrations way way outside their natural range, which is reckless and stupid.
Hiranya,
I did not ignore anything; this is the Mauna Loa data.
The relevant hypothesis is that economic growth will lead to exponential growth of CO2 concentration. The data does not support this, as far as I can see. (This indicates a negative feedback by the way, e.g. oceans absorbing more CO2 than expected …)
Sean,
> raising the concentrations way way outside their natural range, which is reckless and stupid.
can you tell us what the natural range is and why?
Sean, you’ve expressed my thoughts perfectly. Has anyone thought of the idea of making a part of income tax proportional to one’s “carbon footprint” (especially for businesses) as an incentive to adopt more climate-friendly practices?
Wolfgang, I will continue this argument with you when you’ve had a refresher course on hypothesis testing and modelling data.
Sean,
in order to answer my own question:
This chart shows that abrupt changes in CO2 (and temperature) are not uncommon during the long history of the atmosphere.
Now we add CO2 on top of it due to human activity. This additional amount follows a linear trend as is pretty clear from the Mauna Loa data.
Hiranya,
you have no reason to discuss with me since you (liek many others) have already made up your mind. Also, it is pretty clear that this is not the place to discuss climate science.
Be scared everybody! Actually, be very scared …
The idea of a carbon tax is a very serious one, that Gore has been pushing for a while. Brad DeLong (who served in the Clinton administration) gives some of the background:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/05/why_oh_why_cant_13.html
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/06/greg_mankiw_ask.html
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/06/those_who_forge.html
Thanks, Wolfgang. The chart you point to:
http://carto.eu.org/article2481.html
makes it completely obvious that increasing CO2 by about 100 ppm is correlated with an increase in atmospheric temperature of about 10 degrees Celsius. And also that it has never gone above 300 ppm in the last 400,000 years. Today we’ve pushed it up to 375. Which side are you on, again?
Sean,
> makes it completely obvious that increasing CO2 by about 100 ppm leads to an increase in atmospheric temperature of about 10 degrees Celsius.
non-linear laws such as ln(C) are not easy to understand.
Increasing CO2 from 200ppm to 300ppm does not have the same effect as increasing it from 300ppm to 400ppm.
The additional CO2 can only absorb radiation that is not already absorbed…
By the way, the variation of temperatures in the past is much larger than the increase due to human activity (about 0.6C).
> Which side are you on, again?
I am on no side; I just try to understand something.
… and for Hiranya and others.
Looking at the long-term chart makes it pretty obvious that the data before 1950 fall very well within the natural behavior. Thus you can only use the more recent data to estimate the (future) human contribution to CO2 concentration.
(We simply did not produce enough before 1950 to have a clear signal.)
And this trend is linear, when the assumption is that is is exponential.
Wolfgang, check out this article and others on that site. And do you actually understand what Sean meant by his comment “through the miracle of Taylor expansions, they will always look linear if you cherry-pick a short enough interval.”? I would actually be happy to talk with you if I actually believed you were genuinely interested in understanding something, I am also, and I would be overjoyed if it turned out all the climate scientists were wrong and we weren’t facing a scary and uncertain future. But so far you have acted just like a troll.
> And do you actually understand what Sean meant by his comment “through the miracle of Taylor expansions, they will always look linear if you cherry-pick a short enough interval.”?
Thank you for asking.
If you want to know what exponential growth looks like, take the (global) stock market and look at a chart *with linear scale* from 1950 to now.
Compare this chart with the Mauna Loa data in the same time frame and tell me what difference you see.
Both charts are supposedly proportional to economic growth.
> check out this article and others on that site.
I did. Thank you. I read realclimate.org on a regular basis, as well as climateaudit.org (after all I live on an island.)
It is obvious that the increase from 300ppm to 350ppm is due to human activity. But it is also clear (to me) that the increase is less than exponential (lets put it this way). Combined with the fact that the CO2 forcing is proportinal to ln(C) this means IMHO that one does not have to be as scared as Sean suggests. Thats all.
Have a nice day and feel free to be as scared as you want.
I have heard Gore holds up China as having better emission standards than the United States. This is a joke.
China is an environmental disaster and it is not because of its laws. It is because of the lack of enforcement of the laws. China’s car emission laws may be better than the United States’, but that is basically irrelevant because there are a huge number of cars there whose emissions would probably not meet anyone’s standards.
Wolfgang, thanks – I wasn’t awaiting your permission to be scared. And you don’t need mine to go back to your comforting echo chamber.
Hiranya and Sean,
it is really encouraging to see that discussions with scientists are so much more informative. Always about the facts and without personal attacks or strawman arguments. This really is a great blog!
I think one needs to look at this as well:
http://capitalistimperialistpig.blogspot.com/2006/05/dr-houghton-has-question.html
Arun, PK:
What you’ve pointed out is all part of the cost assessment. I simply disagree in principle with halting programs/technologies which are clearly beneficial, l but whose environmental costs are not yet known because the effect is intricate.
In particular, I don’t agree with Sean that it was “reckless” to dump CO2 in the atmosphere. Most large scale human activities have a significant impact (heat in water and water vapor from industrial and residential cooling, methane from agriculture, etc. etc.). We’ve learned that CFCs and CO2 are problematic, so we curb those, but overall if we’ve had to ask permission for everything we wouldn’t be anywhere. This would affect 3rd world countries as well, who are particularly reliant on “dirty” technologies.
Research is good, and we will learn how to optimize our activities as the knowledge is accumulated.
Sourav,
Who is calling for a halt to production or anything? After all, e.g., India will be able to afford to mitigate its greenhouse gas emissions if and only if it is growing economically.
To raise a trivial point, India could recap the US telecom history and lay millions of miles of copper wire, or India could (and is) leap-frogging into a wireless + fiber optic age. After stagnating at one phone per 100 people for decades, India will reach a teledensity of 50 (mobile) phones per hundred within the next few years. This was because technology was developed. We can hope that similar trajectories are possible with energy consumption. But it requires technology to be developed.
-Arun
Soarav says: We’ve learned that CFCs and CO2 are problematic, so we curb those
We’re not curbing anything! We set up a CO2 market to buy credit from poor countries that meet the Kyoto criteria trivially, and in the mean time the CO2 levels are still rising.
I do agree that, with a bit of direction and foresight, current and near future technology can stop this trend. In fact, it will most likely create a whole new industry and will be good for the economy. Unfortunately, the energy industry at large wants to race the same horse until it drops dead from exhaustion.
Arun:
Again, it is Sean who suggests that it was ‘reckless’ to have dumped so much CO2 in the atmosphere, and I think it’s not a reasonable judgment even in hindsight. At the price of CO2 there was tremendous economic growth throughout the world, and it was the right decision at the time.
***
PK:
Yes, well, there will be political problems 😉
For example: indeed, the private sector is interested in alternative energy sources and media for storage apart from gasoline, but it’s a research horizon for them as long as crude is dirt cheap and the external costs of carbon are not fed back in.
Sean – I believe that global warming is a serious threat, but your statement that: increasing CO2 by about 100 ppm is correlated with an increase in atmospheric temperature of about 10 degrees Celsius. is quite silly. Climate sensitivity is hotly debated in the scientific community bu no one believes an increase of less than 50% in CO2 could make it warmer by 10 C. The IPCC TAR estimates 1.5 to 4.5 C for each doubling.
Hiryana and Sean – Wolfgang may not agree with any of us on global warming, but I assure you that he knows more statistics than any of us.