Posts Tagged ‘Global Warming’
Does CO2 Lead to Global Warming or Vice Versa
Science Daily recently reported on a “viewpoint” published in the American Chemical Society’s Chemical Innovation by Robert Essenhigh, the E.G. Bailey Professor of Energy Conservation in Ohio State’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, that illustrates just how much debate there is about the global warming hypothesis.
Essenhigh suggests that rather than increase levels of manmade CO2 and other greenhouse gases causing an increase in global temperatures, that increases in world temperatures may be causing increases in atmosphere CO2.
Essenhigh writes,
Many scientists who have tried to mathematically determine the relationship between carbon dioxide and global temperature would appear to have vastly underestimated the significance of water in the atmosphere as a radiation-absorbing gas. If you ignore the water, you’re going to get the wrong answer.
Essenhigh hypothesizes that the world is simply at the peak of a natural warming point which has resulted in more water vapor and hence more CO2.
I am not endorsing Essenhigh’s views but relay them merely to point out that what we don’t know about global climate change is far greater than what we do know at this point.
Source:
Global warming natural, may end within 20 years, says Ohio State University researcher. Science Daily, June 15, 2001.
Tags: Global Warming
Does NAS Report Put Bush on the Hot Spot with Global Warming?
Much of the mainstream media coverage of the recent National Academy of Sciences report about global warming saw the report as a slam dunk against George W. Bush’s skeptical view of the problem. An editorial from the Minnesota Star Tribune offers a typical example,
Take the request concerning work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that has issued three voluminous and increasingly dire reports on world scientific consensus. Global warming “skeptics” — quibblers is a better word — assert that IPCC’s summaries not only simplify the underlying research but intensify its conclusions. The academy reviewers, who included a prominent global-warming dissenter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found otherwise.
This sort of nonsensical claim makes sense only if you assume that whoever wrote this editorial didn’t actually bother to read the NAS report. The concern from skeptics about the IPCC report has never been the voluminous scientific reports, but rather the brief “Summary for Policymakers” that the IPCC issues which contain claims that go far beyond what has been established by the scientific reports.
The NAS report concludes that while the summaries are consistent with the underlying scientific data, they essentially remove all of the uncertainties to make global warming claims appear stronger and more certain than they actually are. Page 22 of the NAS report, for example, concludes among other things that,
Confidence limits and probabilistic information, with their basis, should always be considered as an integral part of the information that climate scientists provide to policy- and decision-makers. Without them, the IPCC ‘Summary for Policymakers’ could give an impression that the science of global warming is ‘settled’ even though many uncertainties still remain. [Emphasis added]
Even if they did not have time to read the entire report, certainly the folks at the Minnesota Star Tribune could have taken the time to read the first page of the report where they would have found the following,
Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments upward or downward.
In fact the NAS report makes clear that though there is cause for concern about human impacts on global warming, there are also enormous uncertainties and unresolved issues which need to be taken into account when crafting public policy on this issue. Pretending those uncertainties exist only in the minds of “quibblers” is not an reasonable way to proceed when deciding how to proceed.
Source:
Report gives Bush no new weasel room. Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 10, 2001.
Tags: Global Warming
The Problem with Media Coverage of Global Warming
A recent study by British scientists related to climate change illustrates the problematic way in which the media cover issues that touch on global warming. The study itself was very interesting, but the media coverage tended toward sensationalism.
First, the study. Using satellite data, a team of British researchers demonstrated that the amount of infrared light emanating from the Earth’s surface back into space appears to be declining. As the level of manmade greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide increase, more infrared radiation is being trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Most newspapers covering this story went with a headline similar to the one chosen by CNN, “Report: Satellite data proves greenhouse effect.” CNN chose to run a rather long story about the study, but many papers simply ran short blurbs that included the quote that CNN repeats with lead investigator John Harries saying, “We’re absolutely sure, there’s no ambiguity: This shows the greenhouse effect is operating and what we are seeing can only be due to the increase in the gases.”
Does this, therefore, mean additional evidence for views put forth by groups like the International Panel on Climate Change that average planetary temperature is going to increase dramatically in this century? Actually, no.
Don’t take my word for it, though — that’s according to Harries and the other researchers. According to CNN, “the study did not tackle the question of whether Earth’s surface temperature is actually increasing. In fact, whether this greenhouse effect will lead to global warming or global cooling is unclear, the study scientists said.”
According to Harries the problem with extrapolating from increased infrared to global warming is a lack of knowledge about how cloud cover plays into the equation. “The effects of clouds on the planet is very complex, and frankly we don’t understand it,” Harries said.
And yet people who continue to question the validity of computer climate models because of the problem with modeling cloud behavior are marginalized as anti-environmentalists who are ignoring all of the scientific evidence in favor of the global warming hypothesis.
I don’t know if manmade gases are causing an increase in global temperatures, but I certainly want to see much more reliable information than currently available before going along with the drastic changes required to have any dent in any hypothetical warming.
Source:
Report: Satellite data proves greenhouse effect. CNN, March 14, 2001.
Tags: Global Warming
Does Global Warming Necessarily Mean More Disease?
A much hyped claim about global warming — that it will lead to an increase in infectious disease — is simply not true. Or more precisely, there is a decided lack of evidence to demonstrate the hypothesis according to a recent National Academy of Sciences report.
Donald Burke, professor of international health for John Hopkins School of Public Health, headed the panel and said that, “The potential exists for scientists one day to be able to predict the impact of global climate change on disease, but that day is not yet here.”
Climate conditions do certainly play a role in how diseases are distributed, but today housing conditions, vaccination, and sanitation systems play an enormous role in the spread of disease. As many commentators have noted, malaria was an enormous problem in North America well into the 20th century. The disease was eradicated in the United States and Canada thanks to a large public health intervention to rid the continent of the disease.
Climate change could cause some changes in infectious diseases, but it is more likely that socioeconomic factors would play the key role in the spread, or lack thereof, of disease.
Source:
GLobal warming, disease spread link uncertain-panel. Reuters, April 2, 2001.
Tags: Global Warming
A Leftist Opposed to the Global Warming Treaty
Since topic of global warming and the Kyoto Treaty which is designed to ameliorate the effects of global warming have become a topic of discussion here, it was interesting to see that British climatologist Mick Kelly attacked the West’s obsession with global warming, and the Kyoto Treaty in particular, as part of the free market’s war on the poor in the developing world.
Now obviously I disagree with Kelly’s anti-capitalist rhetoric, but it is good to see someone besides right wing nuts like myself noticing that the Kyoto Protocol would cause enormous damages to developing countries to combat what Kelly calls a “comparatively nebulous threat.” Besides which even if the most extreme claims about global warming are accepted, the rather Draconian proposals in the Kyoto Protocol would by the International Panel on Climate Control’s own estimate lower the projected warming by only 0.06 degrees Celsius.
The main point where Kelly is wrong is the so-called “flexibility mechanisms” that allow for markets in the trading of a pollutant — in this case carbon dioxide. Were global warming a legitimate long term threat that could be ameliorated through moderate reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, a global trading scheme would make sense. This is especially the case since the Kyoto treat effectively excludes the developing world from its carbon dioxide emissions limits. The transfer of income and technology to developing countries would be a boon so long as the income and technology actually wound up in the hands of individuals and small groups rather than governments and large corporations, as well as promoting private research into less polluting industrial methods.
Kelly also choose poorly in suggesting the world should be combating famine in Africa rather than global warming; actual famines in the African continent are, unfortunately, largely immune to the sort of interventions Kelly likely has in mind. A better example would have been to point out that more than 1.5 million children will die this year in the developing world from dysentery, most of whom could be saved at very little cost, while developed nations spend all their time selling such countries weapons and worrying about amorphous environmental threats.
Source:
Climate treaty ‘robs the poor’. Alex Kirby, The BBC, November 6, 2000.
Tags: Global Warming
Feeling the Heat
One of the most amusing parts of the 2000 presidential campaign was watching Republican candidate George W. Bush question global warming orthodoxy, which might have been interesting if it weren’t obvious that he didn’t know what he was talking about (as Cathy Young recently wrote in an article generally supportive of Bush, he couldn’t make a halfway decent argument for celebrating Mother’s Day.)
On the other hand liberal and left journalists have jumped all over Bush, and Gore to some extent, for not taking global warming seriously. Bob Herbert is typical of this crowd (though to be fair he is relatively even handed in presenting Bush and Gore’s respective policies on the matter). In Warmer and Warmer, Herbert insists that a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report establishes once and for all that human beings are causing the world to get warmer and warmer as he puts it, and asks, “Is anyone paying attention?”
Unfortunately, journalists such as Herbert as just as mind numbingly stupid as Bush, basically never getting past the two page press release summaries of the IPCC’s heavily politicized summary of its own findings. Can the IPCC really reliably predicted a 2 to 11 degree warming? Of course not. Don’t take it from me, though — the IPCC report itself concedes that computer climate modeling is still more guesswork than science. In the conclusions to its summarization of the scientific facts on global warming, the draft IPCC report notes:
In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-liner chaotic system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate state is not possible.
Of course that doesn’t quite pack the same punch as “the world is warming, the world is warming.” Average global temperatures clearly increased slightly in the 20th century and are likely to increase slightly in the 21st century, but the cause and the upper bound of future temperature change are both questions about which there is still far more heat than light.
Tags: Global Warming
What Is Stephen Hawking Talking About?
Stephen Hawking is being quoted in a German paper as writing in an upcoming book that the Earth may become uninhabitable thanks to high temperatures within the next millennia. The paper quotes him as saying, “I fear that the atmosphere becomes ever hotter than it is presently. If this occurs, it may reach a Venus-like state of bubbling sulfuric acid. I focus many of my concerns around the greenhouse effect.” Assuming this isn’t a mistranslation, what is Hawking talking about? Even the worst case global warming scenarios don’t support this sort of absurdity. When originally proposed, the global warming hypothesis maintained that additional carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by human beings would warm the planet by 3 to 6 degrees Celsius over the next 100 years. The most current models, which still have to leave out the enormous complexities such as the role that clouds play in regulating global temperatures, have cut the amount of warming in half — based on current evidence, the climate is going to warm by anywhere from 1.0 to 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Although infrequent, such warming has occurred several times within recorded human history — a similar warming period was responsible for a vast expansion in agriculture during the early medieval period.
But nobody is predicting we’re going to turn the Earth into Venus. That’s something I’d expect from a third grader trying to understand climate issues, not somebody with Hawking’s intelligence (which just goes to show that even the brightest scientists are often complete morons when they start talking about things outside their field).
Tags: Global Warming