Wow. What a week.
I just got back from a seminar led by Rutgers University professor Dr. Alan Robock on his new research into nuclear winter. He started out by stating that “This is worse than global warming.”
Yikes! Just what I needed to hear, another disaster scenario to add to the list!!
In almost every essay we feature at World Climate Report, our focus is on climatic phenomena and the general disagreement between observations and what numerical models of climate tell us should be happening given the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. We draw heavily from the professional scientific peer-reviewed literature, and our journals of choice range from highly specialized journals in the climate community to far more generalized, but very highly respected journals such as Science and Nature.
A recent article in Science really caught our eye with the title “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change.” This article is not going to be well received by a lot of people given 1000s of websites telling us to switch to biofuels in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – it looks like those darn “unintentional consequences” are about to bite another great-sounding idea squarely in the butt.
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) recently released its new and improved “position statement” on global warming. Andy Revkin of the New York Times featured the AGU’s release on this DotEarth blog site and asked AGU members to chime in on their opinions of the statement that was developed by the AGU’s ruling Council. While there were definitely members who expressed dismay at the position statement, a majority of commentors gave it their hearty endorsement. Apparently, most of the endorsers have not given a very in depth consideration of all that is contained in the AGU’s statement, for otherwise, (we would hope anyway) that they would have been a bit more reserved.
For instance, the AGU’s position statement includes the following sentence: “If this 2 degrees Celsius warming [above 19th century levels] is to be avoided, then our net annual emissions of carbon dioxide must be reduced by more than 50 percent within this century.” This is akin to stating “If pigs had wings, they could fly.” Sure, you could endorse the statement, but to do so would seem a bit foolish. First off, pigs don’t have wings, and it would take nothing short of a miracle for them to acquire them, and secondly, even if they had wings, it is not guaranteed that they could fly. The most pig-shaped bird we can think of—the penguin which is large and rotund and flopping around on its belly a lot of the time—has wings, but can’t fly. Thus even if the impossibility of pigs sporting wings was overcome, it wouldn’t insure a successful flight.
The same is true of the AGU’s statement about a 50% CO2 reduction this century and its impacts on global temperature. First off, it will take nothing short of a miracle for the 50% reduction to take place, and secondly, it probably wouldn’t stop the temperature from rising 2ºC above “natural” levels. Endorse it if you want, but it doesn’t reflect well on your scientific reasoning skills.
The U.K.’s Hadley Center has issued a forecast that 2008 will come in as one of the top 10 warmest years in its 150+ year record of global average temperature. While this forecast is about as risky as predicting that the next box of a dozen doughnuts you buy will contain twelve of the one-holed wonders, the press seems enthralled by it, as virtually all major news wires ran the story under with some variant of the headline “2008 to be among hottest years on record.”
Three bills have been introduced to Congress which have as a goal to slow the rate of global temperature rise, and in doing so, avert some type of putative global climate catastrophe. They propose to do so by reducing U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases.
At the requst of Senators Bingaman and Spector, the EPA has analyzed the effectiveness these bills as measured by the net impact each will have ameliorating the rise of global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations (and thus global climate change) by the end of this century. What they found was certainly not encouraging, at least for anyone who thinks that the U.S. alone can have any impact on global climate via new regulation of emissions.
The findings by the UK judge announced last week that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth failed to tell the whole truth on more than a few occasions received a fair degree of press coverage and, of course, a great deal of outcry from Gore defenders worldwide.
Now, “the Gore Team” has come to its own defense on a Washington Post blog site. In running down the list of supposed “errors” in An Inconvenient Truth, it is the basic contention of the Gore team that the scientific issues that Gore was trying to get a cross to a lay audience were far more complex than he had the time (or desire?) to adequately explain in a 90-minute feature film (or in the accompanying 328 page book; hint, use a smaller, albeit less dramatic, typeface next time).
For instance, concerning Gore’s use of the glacier recession on Africa’s Mt Kilimanjaro (through a series of historic photographs and flowery language) to illustrate the effects of global warming, despite the fact that the majority of scientific evidence is that factors other than temperature (such as exposure, humidity, and precipitation) are primarily responsible to the loss of ice atop the mountain, the Gore Team justifies that, well, global warming is undoubtedly making things worse there.
This sentiment, that, well, even though it may not be the primary cause, anthropogenic global warming is making things worse, is used in their justification of the Gorey pictures of the damage from Hurricane Katrina (even though we showed picture after picture of the damage from Katrina we never “ascribe any single weather event to climate change”), destruction of coral reefs, drowning polar bears, the drying of Lake Chad, and the flooding of low-lying Pacific islands.
Ultimately, the Gore Team has the following to say, acting dismayed at the state of media coverage these days, “To conclude, it’s unfortunate that news coverage of the UK decision was so sensational and, once again, directed conversation away from a broader and much-needed discussion and debate about solutions to the climate crisis.”
So sensational?!
Apparently showing photo after photo of current and potential future environmental catastrophe (carefully ignoring instances of similar catastrophes in the past) while talking and writing in grave tones about climate change and mankind’s role in it, but never admitting that many other factors are also at play and in many cases are the dominant ones, is a perfectly acceptable way of conveying issues to the public. But, pointing out that this is what is going on is “sensational.”
It seems to us, that the Gore Team is just a bit miffed that someone stole a page out of their playbook and successfully ran it against them.
The other week the busy little bees who are working on Nobel Al’s new book… what, you didn’t know Gore was working on a new book? Yep, apparently in the works is a book on climate change and its solutions, supposedly titled “A Path to Survival” in which Gore lays out, well, you can probably figure that out. As we have detailed previously Gore is more than just a little out there when he starts talking about the climate change threats to human’s survivability on Earth. So, we don’t yet know whether his new title will be shelved in the science or science fiction section.
But, as we were saying, the other week the busy little bees who are helping out on Al Gore’s new book sent a call out looking for photographs or other particularly useful information that could be used to illustrate the impacts of melting permafrost and changes to the environment that may result. The request was for images or charts that could be incorporated in a chapter on “permafrost melting” (as a technical point, because we’re sure that Gore will be paying more attention to the details this time around, permafrost—any type of soil that spends most of its time below freezing, whether or not any water is present—doesn’t ‘melt’ but rather, it ‘thaws’). And although it wasn’t specifically mentioned, we’re sure they meant “The more dramatic the better!”
Always interested to help out, we thought that we’d offer up a few images that we recently came across in our on-going effort to compare current conditions in the Arctic with conditions earlier in the 20th century.
Coming soon to a state near you: global warming carpetbaggers who care not a whit about any discussion of global warming science.
That’s about as charitable thing as can be said about the Center for Climate Strategies (CCS), an offshoot of the radical Pennsylvania Environmental Council, a group famous for environmental scaremongering.
CCS is fanning teams of “facilitators” nationwide, presenting itself as some neutral body promoting a “consensus” on global warming policy, and specifically instructing the states that they are not to discuss global warming science when talking about climate change policy.
As Al Gore continues his global warming crusade, he apparently is finding it necessary to invent scarier and scarier scenarios (no doubt to keep the press and his audience interested) and in doing so, does not feel limited to reality.
For instance, Al Gore’s latest theme is that anthropogenically-induced climate change will threaten the very existence of the human species. Wow. What can be more frightful than that!? (Maybe Gore is going after his next Academy Award in the horror category).
Last night (Thursday April 19, 2007) Laurie David’s self-professed brainchild (dreamed up over lunch with her rockstar girl friend Sheryl Crow), the “Stop Global Warming College Tour” blew into town. Apparently the previous stops on the tour must have seemed like global warming love-ins when compared to what Ms. David encountered here in Charlottesville. Maybe it was because Sheryl Crow wasn’t around for support, or that the crowd that was attracted to see Sheryl Crow’s replacement (a free concert by Robert Randolf and the Family Band) was less inclined to get a stern talking to about how they were destroying the environment, than are the followers of Ms. Crow. Or perhaps it was the copious beer. Or maybe it was that the temperature was about 15ºF below normal and a light rain was falling. But whatever the case, it didn’t go so well.
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