Science Friday: climate special
May 18, 2007
This has been a week to find really interesting articles about climate – except for one that I found several weeks ago and have been waiting for an occasion to post:
- With the passing of Jerry Falwell, it is worth noting that Evangelicals split on global warming – a schism for which Falwell himself bears quite some responsibility. After all in the Christian legend, sustainable stewardship of the Earth was the very first instruction of God to man, right before “stay away from that tree”.
- Given the amount of denialist misinformation there is floating around on climate issues, I’m thrilled to see New Scientist magazine has a compendium of answers to global warming myths in “Climate Change: a guide for the perplexed”. Useful enough that I’m putting it in my permanent science links in the sidebar.
- The South Polar Ocean has stopped absorbing carbon dioxide, forty years ahead of the time predicted by various climate models. For anyone still unclear on the concept, this is a bad thing even if you are pleased by flaws in climate models.
- For a good example of why we need to present the case as clearly as possible in a way that will be accessable, look no further than Senator James Inhofe spewing the same old FUD on climate as if a political agenda were the same thing as truth. It’s painful to watch, but instructive.
- One common climate canard is that “it was warmer during the time of the dinosaurs”. Which has exactly nada to do with how things are today, and the Climate Blog explains why. (From LCA)
- …speaking of whom, Don at Life Cycle Analysis features a documentary movie, The Plough That Broke The Plains about the North American high plains and the dust bowl. The 1936 style is slower, more measured, and far less polemical than the documentaries that are made today – which is interesting in itself.
- And while this isn’t really a climate link, Deep Sea News reports explorers have found a half-billion dollars in colonial-era gold and silver coins, 17 tons worth. Be sure to check out the picture – wow. What can I say, but “Yarrgh! Shivver me timbers!!! But in a painfully predictable move, a lawsuit has been filed by Spain, claiming “Yarrgh! The booty be ours!”
‘Til next week, which will be either neurology frontiers or astronomy (because I’ve been running into a lot of cool articles on both). Unless I can figure out a way to combine the two. 
Updates:
- Just to make things interesting, one source of ambiguity in the data and early climate models is that global warming effects are partially masked by global dimming, which (due to particulate matter in the atmosphere from incomplete fossil fuel combustion) reduces the sunlight reaching the ground. Thing is, fuel-saving jet engine design results in less particulate matter high in the atmosphere, which is a good thing and all… except then the dimming effect reduces and the greenhouse-warming effect slingshots. The embedded video in the link is sensationalistic media stuff but the article also has a Wiki link that is very good.
Categories: Friday, Science & Technology
typo schism
Thanks rodch – I fixed it.
What I find strange about this whole “global warming” act is that when I was in high school the so called experts were warning of an ice age based on the scientific evidence. I won’t deny that the climate is changing, change is the very nature of this planet, but I am tired of the crying wolf act from so called experts who have a financial incentive to prove their latest grant work correct. The Al Gore’s of this word do little to actually convince anyone when a minor checking of his background proves he doesn’t believe the bile he is spilling. Give me some facts, show me the proof, they can’t not enough data background , it based on assumptions that can be read in a variety of ways.
It won’t surprise you to know that the media was comprised of idiots in the 1970’s just like now. Some scientists suggested that was a possibility, a couple thought it was a strong possibility, and the media said “GLACIERS COMING NEXT WEEK!!!” A handy excuse to ignore the much larger and better-studied body of data that exists today.
Thanks for the plug for my blog. Of course, the original content in this case came from Pare Lorentz (The Plow That Broke The Plains) and theclimateblog –
http://theclimateblog.livejournal.com/
Let’s assume that average temperatures and CO2 levels were much higher in the age of the dinosaurs (which seems to have been true). Does it follow that it would be *good* if we returned to that climate. Those average temperatures would melt a lot of glaciers, raising sea levels—potentially displacing *hundreds of millions of people* and causing *massive economic damage*. Even if human influence on the climate doesn’t take it that far away from natural extremes over geological time, that doesn’t mean that natural extremes are good. Indeed, one needs only look back about 15,000 years to find a fairly common ice age, which would have been disastrous for humanity now.
James: Just because things make it into the news, that doesn’t make them authoritative. (Al Gore’s hadjob of a documentary notwithstanding, he is not a scientist, and should not be treated as one in anyone’s mind.) Obviously the climate is an incredibly complex nonlinear system—that makes it hard to predict. Does that mean that scientists don’t know anything at all about it? Basically what you’re saying is that because a few scientists put out one speculative theory decades ago which now differs from a much better supported theory (described in great detail in the UN report on climate change), that you see no reason to listen to what they say.
OK, so by that logic, you shouldn’t believe anything in modern science—almost every theory currently in use usurped a previous theory. You should not believe that continents move, that gravity is caused by curviture of spacetime, that DNA polymer is the basis of hereditary information, that light is made up of discrete particles, and that blood circulates through the body. All of these theories were disbelieved by prominent scientists at the time.
As for the financial incentive of climatologists, I see no reason why that would push their results towards global warming. If you look at who benefits from good climate modelling, you see that insurance companies have the most to gain from good information about the risks of climate change. Indeed, a number of large reinsurance companies have changed their assessment of risk in the future to incorporate an assumption of global warming. They would not do this if they did not believe that global warming was real, and insurance companies hire very intelligent people whose job is to find the *right* answer for risk assessment, not the politically expedient answer.
I suggest you read a summary report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change. It’s only 18 pages long, not particularly technical, and contains lots of the evidence you claim to want:
http://www.ipcc.ch/WG1_SPM_17Apr07.pdf
Great sources
thanks