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Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Global warming is real after all
All the major papers have coverage of the new NOAA study confirming that warming trends are real. Apparently they've been having trouble correlating satellite data with ground data (frankly I believe the ground data would be better since it isn't relying on proxies), but now they've got it straightened out and guess what? Yeah, it's real.
Rafe Pomerance, chairman of the Climate Policy Center, a group that advocates mandatory curbs on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to global warming, said the new report settles the scientific debate over humans' role. Regular readers already know how I feel about experimenting with carbon in the atmosphere while we remain on Earth. Short answer, I'm not a fan. But of course, what does the administration that just refused to hike taxes on oil companies (and congress backed off after the oil companies objected) say? (from the times coverage) White House officials noted that this was just the first of 21 assessments planned by the federal Climate Change Science Program, which was created by the administration in 2002 to address what it called unresolved questions. The officials said that while the new finding was important, the administration's policy remained focused on studying the remaining questions and using voluntary means to slow the growth in emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. Of course, it needs more study. I know these guys are motivated by greed and all, but have they come up with Mars dollars or something I don't know about? Where are they going to spend this money in the future? In other news, extinctions are occurring faster than when the dinosaurs died off and hurricane alley is heating up. Yay! |
15 Comments:
If the temperature run up from the mid-70s to now is proof that CO2 causes global warming, shouldn't the drop in temperatures from the 40s to the 70s disprove it?
Just because temperatures fluctuate doesn't mean that the fluctuations are caused by what you want them to be caused by.
12:37 AM, May 04, 2006
Oy vey. I seem to have to answer this goddamn question every time so I'm cutting and pasting.
That climate science came to the wrong conclusion in the 70s, that an ice age might be impending is unfortunate, but that does not mean one should never trust climate science ever again. This is where the superiority of scientific opinions to religious opinions is actually the strongest. We know science works, your TV works, your television works, we can track hurricanes and reasonably predict weather, etc. However, occasionally science comes to the wrong conclusions. The data is still correct, and the data from the 70s is in fact correct, the earth was undergoing a dramatic cooling, but the beauty of the field is what has happened since the 70s and our understanding of climate science hasn't been reversed by those findings but instead has been amplified.
In the 70s we were on the tail end of a cooling phenomenon known as global dimming. The cause was particulate matter from pollution sources increasing the reflection of sunlight back into the atmosphere. Paradoxically, it was the subsequent decreases in particulate pollution from the clean air act, installation of catalytic converters in every engine on the planet etc., (also, not constantly blowing up nuclear weapons probably helped) that seems to have resulted in an end to the dimming trend that started after industrialization and continued for over a century.
The paradox was that particulate pollution was masking warming effects from increases in carbon since industrialization. Since this effect was unmasked, and the data set as shown in this post has been expanded over 750k years, we now see a dangerous correlation between carbon and temperature over nearly a million years.
In the end this data, and all climate data is correlative and based on modeling. We can not force the climate to do what we want, all we can do is study the experiment from inside the test tube. Now the data suggests we might be in for a world of trouble if we continue to dump carbon in the atmosphere, and the conservative argument would be that we should avoid seriously forcing climate systems as much as humanly possible since the risks are so great.
The full post, including the figure showing the correlation over 750,000 years (yes seven hundred and fifty thousand years) is here.
2:09 AM, May 04, 2006
Also it's nice that climate science is predictive.
The evidence is mounting. We can bitch about old misinterpretations of data, or acknowledge the new reality.
2:22 AM, May 04, 2006
Yes, science works. That is how we know that the Michael Mann's hocky-stick temperature plot (which you posted a couple days ago) is wrong. That is also how we know that the 750ky of CO2 and temperature data (that you posted) don't prove what you claimed that they proved.
1:11 AM, May 05, 2006
I seem to have an anti-global warming troll.
I admit it! I'm guilty! I'm not a climate scientist! I'm actually a molecular biologist who just reads about how global warming is proven again and again each week in Science and Nature. I can't explain it as well as the guys at realclimate.
Go troll them, they'll certainly do a better job than I can of rebuffing attacks on climate science. I'm an easy target.
11:50 AM, May 05, 2006
Oh, and they'll make you actually cite things in critiques of their post. I'm just nice and let people just say "wrong!"
11:51 AM, May 05, 2006
I "trolled" here because you try to rational (which IMHO is a rarity among liberal bloggers).
(If you were in doubt, yes, that is a compliment.)
If you really wanted references, I can find them for you.
Regards,
Your Troll
1:31 PM, May 05, 2006
Sorry, I might have jumped the gun, but I've noticed that I get negative replies pretty much only on my global warming posts.
You will have to explain to me how I misinterpreted the Siegenthaler et al. paper here
My reading of this paper, from a non-expert biologist/former physicist point of view was that the authors correlated antarctic carbon to temperature through the measurement of Deuterium as a temperature proxy over the course of about 750 years by sectioning successive layers of ice cores. I remember being really impressed that over the entire time scale deuterium and carbon were so tightly correlated. I'm usually really bitchy about correlative evidence, but this was one hell of a correlation.
4:22 PM, May 05, 2006
I meant 750k years.
4:29 PM, May 05, 2006
Your reading is right but search through that article on the word "lag." It turns out that changes in CO2 generally lag changes in temperature by 600 to 2800 years. This doesn't prove anything but it does seem to suggest that it is temperature changes that cause CO2 changes, not vice versa. Other papers have suggested that warming causes CO2 to be released from the reservoirs (oceans, ice, whatever) and cooling causes the CO2 to be trapped again.
5:59 PM, May 05, 2006
By the way, the hypothesis that CO2 changes may be caused by temperature changes, at least as related to the last three ice ages, is discussed here. Similar to the paper you cited, this paper finds that CO2 changes lag temperature changes (with lags, here, estimated at 400 to 1,000 year).
9:54 PM, May 05, 2006
Hmm,
I still disagree, because the time resolution on these papers, all of them, is several hundred years. The "lag" times are estimated between 600 +/- 400 and 1600 +/- 800. The resolution simply is not good enough to say the lags aren't in shorter periods of time, and further, the carbon according to these studies is released before the temperature increase. If temperature is releasing more carbon, why is the carbon appearing first? If we're going to make a correlative argument, we should at least have the order straight.
11:51 PM, May 06, 2006
I'll agree the error bars are large but, on the other hand, there appear to be four separate papers (Fischer, 1999; Monnin, 2001; Caillon, 2003; Siegenthaler, 2005) reaching the conclusion that CO2 lags temperature.
Where did you see that carbon was released before a temperature increase? From what I read, I saw only one exception to the rule.
P.S. I remain impressed with the intelligence of your blog.
2:29 AM, May 07, 2006
I figured out my error, in figure 4 the x-axis is kyears but since it's in reverse from left to right, I misread the effect. My brain was operating in it's usual left to right means forward in time mode, whereas the figure has left to right going back in time.
11:22 AM, May 07, 2006
I had to do a double-take on that axis also.
4:37 PM, May 07, 2006
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