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.
The CFCs must be dropping because of the regulations that were enacted to deal with the ozone hole problem (these regulations are an example of how we *can* take a positive step to control our own future! The ozone hole seems to be repairing itself). I would love to have some references to why methane is dropping – is it a natural effect, or is it also due to regulations on methane emissions due to human activity. The point at least in the case of the CFCs is that we *did* something to solve the problem, rather than denying either that it exists, or claiming that we couldn’t do anything about it without harming the economy.
I think the consensus is that the increase in CO2 is due to human activity. The increase is an observation, not a model. Are you saying that biosphere feedback will take in more CO2 only in the future, and whatever mechanism you propose is not active now?
Not sure whether you are in Chicago but we’ll try to see if we can organize a Cafe Scientifique with a real climate scientist so these questions can be asked. They also seem to respond in detail to well-posed questions on the realclimate.org site. I am not a climate expert (just trying to educate myself too) so I suggest you try asking there.
> Are you saying that biosphere feedback will take in more CO2 only in the future
I would assume it will take in more as the CO2 rises. As Freeman Dyson has pointed out, simple changes in agriculture etc. could make a huge difference. Of course methane depends on farming …
No I am not from Chicago.
Yes, there have been significant recent regulations on methane emissions and the US has been able to cut its anthropogenic emissions.
re: feedback. The increase we measure is what is left *after* all natural processes that counteract the anthropogenic emissions have had their effect. So the present biofeedback is already taken into account. So you have to postulate some new mechanism which will only kick in when the CO2 levels have increased even further. I have no knowledge of this so I suggest asking at the realclimate site.
> Yes, there have been significant recent regulation
So I guess we can agree that my statement was correct and your response #73 was not. Thank you.
Just to change the pace a bit with “ole arguments of glaciers” which resurface under new experimental data?
How would this change your conversation?
There is evidence of bug infestations in the north, that winters have not taken care of, killing Pine trees in vast tracts of forest lands, all now a very colorful red.
IN concert then with temperature values and location? Is this a cyclical condition?
Thales,
according to Lubos Alaska had record low temperatures this year. This might take care of the bug problem. I do not know anything beyond that about it and will really tune out of this thread now.
Indian livestock emitted an estimated 10 Teragrams of methane in 1994.
http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/jan102005/119.pdf
Indian rice cultivation emitted an estimated 3 Teragrams of methane in 1994.
http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/dec102005/1904.pdf
The US estimate for this quantity was 38 Teragrams, more than 10 times the Indian estimate.
US emissions in 2000 as per Hiranya’s link was 28 Teragrams.
Here is the news source of the claim of the 7% per year shrinkage of the Tibetan glaciers:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-05/02/content_582103.htm
Wolfgang,
The bugs leave a ring around the outside of the wood that protect it from the cold weather. A dead tree after infestation, has no bark left.
If it is warm, they will survive. If the temperatures do not drop to -30 celcius or below, for a three week period or longer, they will live because of ths anti-freeze they inject, which gives it this “blue coloring” when you cut the dead tree down.
#80: Um – the whole point is that the greenhouse gases that have gone down have done so because we have reduced emissions. You seem to assert that they are going down on their own due to some natural process. Make up your mind what you are arguing for. There is a logical fallacy in saying we should not cut CO2 emissions because other greenhouse gases have decreased because of steps/regulations humans have taken to reduce them. Your statement was misleading.
#69 Hiranya,
Thanks for the pointer, but I was aware of that webpage. On that page, the RealClimate team defends the result of their own research by maintaining that their result can be obtained even if they use principal component analysis in a slightly different way and even if they don’t use principal component analysis at all. But this is not a convincing rebuttal of McIntyre’s criticism. McIntyre’s main points, as I understand them, are the following:
(i) Mann et al. (=the RealClimate team) applied a nonstandard way of normalization to their data (i.e. subtraction of the 20th century mean rather than the overall mean), with the result that their principal component analysis gave undue emphasis on the North American bristlecone pine data. (This is the point explained at length in the article I linked to at #7.)
(ii) The North American bristlecone pine data cannot sensibly be regarded as reflecting temperature. (This point is also touched on in the article I just mentioned, and McIntyre has a new blog entry on this point at http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=697 )
So, when the RealClimate team says “Only if you remove significant portions of the data do you get a different (and worse) answer.”, they are ignoring point (ii), rather than answering it. Also, the fact that their result can be obtained even without the use of principal component analysis is irrelevant, as long as the new method also allows the bristlecone pine data to dominate. (I actually don’t know if the RealClimate team’s new method really allows the bristlecone pine data to dominate just as their original method does. But according to McIntyre, it does, and I don’t think the RealClimate team has responded to this criticism.)
I also wanted to correct another misleading statement made in #56. According to sources in Wikipedia, “CO2 has a variable atmospheric lifetime (approximately 200-450 years for small perturbations). Recent work indicates that recovery from a large input of atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels will result in an effective lifetime of tens of thousands of years.”
s.y., I have no knowledge at all about anything to do with the bristlecone pine data, sorry 🙁 What I took away from the realclimate page was that McIntyre was misusing PCA techniques in a very obvious way.
Hey Hiranya ,
just wondering if your last name was Peiris ?
Denis
Hey Denis, yes its me, guilty as charged! Are you writing from the South Pole?? I recently had great fun looking at some Aurora Australis pictures of yours and reading your blog! You are so lucky to get the chance to have that experience!
Hey Hiranya,
yes, indeed writing from the South Pole. I try to read as much of this eminently interesting blog during the short hours that we have an internet connection to teh outside world. I really enjoy your responses and your enthousiasm for responding. I have to say I would not be as pastient as you are. Where are you now ?
We have a NOAA station here at South Pole making the same measurements as those from the Mona Loa plot so there are a couple scientists with whom to discuss some of these issues. I wonder if “the Inconvenient thuth” is going to make it to the internet. Otherwise, I’ll have to wait anotehr 6 month to see it.
cheers,
Denis
Hi Denis, I am at Chicago now and its really great being here! I feel compelled to respond because maybe it will galvanize someone somewhere to do something about this problem 🙁 But my patience has its limits and my cosmology is being mildly neglected 🙂 It is amazing what sort of disinformation is out there (and very depressing too, the short-termism and the denial). I hope you get to see the movie one day 🙂
PS: Would be great to hear the points of view of your NOAA scientists. Can you get them to post here?
> You seem to assert that they are going down on their own due to some natural process.
I did not make such an assertion.
> There is a logical fallacy in saying we should not cut CO2 emissions
I did not suggest we should not cut CO2 emissions.
And I do not need to ‘make up my mind’ what I am arguing, since my opinion is pretty simple to understand: CO2 is growing slower than exponential, which is
significant because CO2 forcing is proportional to ln(C) and other greenhouse gases are ‘flattening’ even more. Thats all.
And since I explained my opinion more than enough already, I really think there is no need to discuss this further.
Wolfgang, ok, bye bye 😉
Old thoughts, new and improved factual ideas, of measure? Imagine, Weighing Water? 🙂
So?
Nice picture here from “page 2” of Weighing Water.
#89 Hiranya, thanks for the response. It’s not obvious to me, though, that McIntyre is misusing principal component analysis in any way. I appreciate your effort to educate me, and I respect the professional climate scientists’ effort to advance our empirical knowledge, but I’m still not convinced that Sean’s statement that “the only ones left on the other side are hired guns and crackpots” is justified.
s.y.: The alleged PCA misuse was in not using enough eigenmodes to make the reconstruction insensitive to the number of eigenmodes used. I am afraid I have managed to enlighten you at all 🙁 I can’t find any references to the pine data misuse other than sites which appear to be linked to McIntyre. I don’t (yet) know how to search the professional climate science literature directly, but if I find something, I will post it!