The litany
"We simply cannot afford to gamble against this possibility by ignoring it. We cannot risk inaction. Those scientists who say we are entering a period of climatic instability (ie unpredictability) are acting irresponsible. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonable ignored."
This is a page of links to various articles that discuss the state of the world. Is the world really on the brink of the disaster than the media and a lot of environmental scientist claim? I'm no expert but it does seem to me that they have been chanting "The end of the world is nigh" for a long time and it hasn't happened yet. I can understand a link between human activity and global warming. Understand a link between global warming (and it's not a lot really), sea temperatures and storms. Melting ice. But Greenland was green, not white, just a few centuries ago. But then Earth has never been in stasis; sort pollution, yes but overreact to a perceived warming threat, I'm less sure. Swings and roundabouts?:
You might want to read The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg who as a statistician reviewing the data source the environmentalists use (or don't use), pretty much damns their arguments.
That set off Scientific American who orchestrated 4 environmentalists to defend their position and gave them 11 pages of the magazine in Jan 02 to rebutt Bjorn Lomborg, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC5880000
claiming that science was now defending itself as if that's news! Big hearts that they are, they gave Bjorn Lomborg ONE page to reply: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000001E0-157B-1CD4-B4A8809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=2&catID=2
and then tried to play big brother by threatening to sue him for copyright infringement when he published his enhanced defence on his own web site, which you can now read at:
http://www.greenspirit.com/lomborg/
Now this moved beyond the framework of technical journals into the Economist which came up with this editorial: http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=965718 and this article: www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=965520 and this large survey: http://www.economist.com/surveys/showsurvey.cfm?issue=20020706
More recently:
Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit
The sun is warmer now than for the past 11,400 years - Monkton
Wrong problem, wrong solution - Monkton
At stake is nothing less than the survival of human civilisation - Gore
Ohps, no global warning trend over the last decade:
It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally, James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was forced to revise his influential record of US surface temperatures showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were in the 1930s.
The save-the-world zealots would have us believe a number of things but mostly their data doesn't support their conjectures. Like that wonderful info that burning aviation fuel triples the amount of carbon in the air. Well, this sort of pseudo-science is typical of the environmental community's half baked science that aims to agitate through scare tactics. This info is broadly similar to a cook saying that, on being baked in the oven, the 2 cups of flour in her fruit cake recipe has miraculously better than doubled to give a cake approaching 3 times the weight. It totally neglects the other ingredients in the initial state.
A hydrocarbon in kerosene will be of the form C(n)H(n+2), so we are looking at something like C12H26; this "weighs" 170. If we ignore the bi-products, we get 12 carbon dioxide molecules "weighing" 12 times 44 or 528 - a pleasing factor of better than 3 if we ignore the 24 oxygen atoms that must have been there at the start and would have "weighed" 384. Of course we are also left with all those hydrogen molecules that have also combined with oxygen to form water.
An ideal combustion for kerosene looks like: N2 + O2 + C12H26 + S -> CO2 + H2O + N2 + O2 + SO2 what you need to do now is figure how many molecules of each are needed. So let's pause there and look at the combustion of a simple hydrocarbon, propane: C3H8 + (5)O2 -> (3)CO2 + (4)H2O Again we have the environmentalists dream of propane "weighing" 44 being converted into a total atomic weight of 132 carbon dioxide molecules. Who cares about the oxygen we burned or the water we produced, if can scare people with that 3 times multiple?
Aviation hydrocarbon combustion is more complex than this with bi-products of NOx, SOx and unburned hydrocarbons. A peek through the window in HK says that there are serious pollution issues to be addressed but pseudo-science like this takes us nowhere. Does it make one iota of difference that we have produced molecules of a higher atomic weight? By all means show that CO2 is more damaging to the environment in the upper air than C12H26 but let's do real science in future!
A couple of interesting quotes: "In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible." IPCC Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis p744 "Natural climate variability on long time-scales will continue to be problematic for CO2 climate change analysis and detection." IPCC Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change p330 When the three IPCC Summary for Policymakers were approved, they were re-written by government-appointed scientist. From the previous IPCC report, the most important statement would be about the human culpability in global warming: "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." There was considerable discussion over the wording of the new report. In April 2000, the text was expected to read "there has been a discernible human influence on global climate." In the October 2000 draft, it read "it is likely that increasing concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases have contributed substantially to the observed warming over the last 50 years." Finally, in the official summary, the language was further strengthened to state that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations." When asked about the scientific background for this change by New Scientist, the spokesman for the UN Environment Program, Tim Higham, responded very honestly: "There was no new science, but the scientists wanted to present a clear and strong message to policy makers." “We have to get rid of the mediaeval warm period”: Deming (1995)
Considering the total mass of the atmosphere, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is estimated at 3000 billion tonnes which means that there's 800 billion tonnes of carbon up there. The world's oceans contain about 39,000 billion tonnes of carbon, soils, vegetation and humus contain about 2000 billion tonnes, carbonate rocks contain 65,000,000 billion tonnes of carbon.
All the data used is available on the web and you
could do worse than browsing:
A guide to the scientific
uncertainties
Aviation and the Global Atmosphere
1999
IPCC
Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage
Carbon Dioxide
Emissions
Chris
Booker
CO2
Science
Economist
Sep 2006 Survey of Climate Change
Hadley
Centre Climate Change
HK temp over the last century
How to clean coal
How to spend $50 billion to make the World a better place
Ice
Sheets
More from
Scientific American
NASA environmental
overlays for Google Earth
NASA Goddard Surface
Temperature Analysis
Renewables
Global Status Report
Union of Concerned Scientists
Watts up
Worldbank
WWF's Living Planet Report
2002
WWF's Living Planet Report 2004
WWF's
Living Planet Report 2006
Will the Atlantic Gulf Stream - Thermohaline Circulation - stop because of Global Warming? Here's a neat explanation from Woods Hole. On the other hand: No, according to Carl Wunsch here why:
A hot topic
SIR – One of the reasons the discussion of
climate change is so frustrating is the continued dissemination of a basic error
(A survey
of climate change, September 9th). Your statement that “The Gulf Stream is
driven both by the rotation of the Earth and by a deep-water current called the
Thermohaline Circulation” is false. The Gulf Stream is a wind-driven phenomenon
(as explained in a famous 1948 paper by Henry Stommel). It is part of a current
system forced by the torque exerted on the ocean by the wind field. Heating and
cooling affect its temperature and other properties, but not its basic existence
or structure. As long as the sun heats the Earth and the Earth spins, so that we
have winds, there will be a Gulf Stream (and a Kuroshio in the Pacific, an
Agulhas in the Indian Ocean, etc).
Shut-off would imply repeal of the law of
conservation of angular momentum. The primary mechanism of heat transport in the
ocean is the wind-forcing of currents that tend to push warm water toward the
poles, cold water toward the equator. Widely disseminated and grossly
oversimplified pictures showing the ocean as a “conveyor belt” have misled
people into thinking ocean circulation is driven by a sinking motion at high
latitudes. A comprehensive literature shows that with no wind, heating and
cooling could produce a weak flow, but one not at all resembling the observed
circulation.
If the sinking motion at high latitudes were
completely stopped, by covering that part of the ocean by sea ice for instance,
there would still be a Gulf Stream to the south, and maybe an even more powerful
one as the wind field would probably then become stronger. If the sinking were
stopped by adding fresh water (a deus ex machina often invoked to change the
climate), the Gulf Stream would hardly care except in so far as the wind system
changed too. The amount of heat transported by the system would shift, but could
not become zero.
Many writers, including scientists, toss around
the words “Thermohaline Circulation” as though they constituted an explanation.
In the ocean, most of the movement of heat and salt, the real Thermohaline
Circulation, is driven directly and indirectly by the wind field. Thus the Gulf
Stream, and hence the wind, rather than being minor features of oceanic climate
are best regarded as the primary elements. Many real climate change effects
exist and require urgent attention; focusing on near-impossible Gulf Stream
failure is an unproductive distraction.
Carl Wunsch
Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Sep 28th 2006
From
Economist.com
The subject of the quote at the top of the page was global climate cooling, made by Lowell Ponte in his 1972 book The Cooling.
And while on the subject of litanies, here are 2 interesting
rebuttals. The first concerns the dubious existence of
God and the second concerns the weird American
attitude to
evolution.
And an interesting idea from
Sam Harris: "the most sexually repressive people found in the world today -
people who are stirred to a killing rage by reruns of Baywatch - are
lured to martyrdom by a conception of paradise that resembles nothing so much as
an al fresco bordello."
Isn't the Catholic church mantra to "Leave no child's behind" so inclusive?
I claim no credit for either work!
My old school connections: The King's School, Canterbury Oriel, Oxford
Home CX stuff Computing This Project Jokes
Friday, 09 July 2010