87 posts tagged “global warming”

Like a mouse to a trap with cheese, a committed local climate follower sprung the hyperlink on Drudge today.

The article was out of Australia discussing a case study of a patient who was suffering from depression.

The utter irony of the situation is that the global warming deniers are really anti-science and for them to quote a scientific journal as further basis to prove that this other science is junk is too funny.  Especially when the cited study is about psychology.  If there is ever a question of modeling and trying to comprehend the unknown -- it is the study of how the mind works.  How convenient...

It also tells another story -- extrapolating one event to prove a bigger phenomenon.  That of taking a medical case study of a person who is obviously experiencing mental problems and concluding that all people who believe the science of climate change are somehow delusional.  That is the antithesis of science.

But the good news in all of this is if we we are willing to accept one side of the spectrum -- those who abnormally interpret how to act with climate change (as described in the journal article) -- then there logically has to be the other side of the spectrum -- those who are stubbornly, unwilling to recognize the scientific advances made in the understanding of how the climate is warming, partially due to humans, and then try to use the guise of rationality to defend their position.

I laugh when I read those who claim that climate science is "anecdotal" or "unproven."  Or that running models and tests are about getting the results you want to see.  As if the peer-review system would let anyone get away with that! 

The mind numbing arrogance about these sorts of thoughts is that this comes from the same people who see only what they want to see; the only difference is that they didn't run a model or a test.  They only claim to have made an observation:

It was cold yesterday -- so much for that global warming thing. 

Or how about this one:

There was this patient in Australia -- so much for that global warming thing. 

Looks like Hawaii is making solar mandatory in all new homes.

Hawaii has become the first state to require solar water heaters in new homes. The bill was signed into law by Governor Linda Lingle, a Republican. It requires the energy-saving systems in homes starting in 2010. It prohibits issuing building permits for single-family homes that do not have solar water heaters. Hawaii relies on imported fossil fuels more than any other state, with about 90 percent of its energy sources coming from foreign countries, according to state data.

And a Republican no less.

This may raise the initial price of housing in Hawaii, but it will save the homeowner money over the long term.  It is just like any other efficiency investment.

Quick.  How do you make a hardcore, Bush-loving, Republican's head explode?

Oh yeah, this way:

Republican John McCain pledged to take the lead in combating global climate change if elected president in a speech that set him apart from the policies of President George W. Bush.

In remarks he prepared to give at a wind technology firm in Portland, Oregon, on Monday, the Arizona senator said he would seek international accords to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and would offer an incentive system to make businesses in the United States cleaner.

"The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington," McCain said in remarks he planned to give at the Vestas Wind Technology plant.

This is also further proof that evolution exists.

Real Climate had a pretty good article a few weeks ago about Edward Lorenz, who recently died.  The article speaks of Lorenz's butterfly effect, atmospheric modeling, and chaotic systems.

The article is definitely worth reading, but I found the last two paragraphs very insightful:

...how can climate be predictable if weather is chaotic? The trick lies in the statistics. In those same models that demonstrate the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, it turns out that the long term means and other moments are stable. This is equivalent to the 'butterfly' pattern seen in the figure above being statistically independent of how you started the calculation. The lobes and their relative position don't change if you run the model long enough. Climate change then is equivalent seeing how the structure changes, while not being too concerned about the specific trajectory you are on.

Another way of saying it is that for the climate problem, the weather (or the individual trajectory) is the noise. If you are trying to find the common signal that is a signature of a particular forcing then averaging over a number of simulations with different weather works rather well. (There is a long standing quote in science - "one person's noise is another person's signal" which is certainly apropos here. Climate modellers don't average over ensemble members because they think that weather isn't important, they do it because it gives robust estimates of the signal they are usually looking for.)

One of the big things skeptics like to push out there is why should they believe in "global warming" when in the 1970s scientists supposedly were pushing "global cooling" and an impending ice age?

Here is that argument...  again:

In 1975, the news media informed us that a new Ice Age was imminent. An article in the Chicago Tribune titled “B-r-r-r-r: New Ice Age on way soon?” noted “It’s getting colder.” The Tribune interpreted a number of ordinary weather events “as evidence that a significant shift in climate is taking place — a shift that could be the forerunner of an Ice Age.” The New York Times chimed in, warning their readers that “a major cooling may be ahead.” Famed science reporter Walter Sullivan announced “the world’s climate is changing … a new ice age is on the way.”

Of course, the understanding of the world around us has significantly increased from those times and those who have made those claims are not making those claims now.

But is it true?  Was science really touting the global cooling mantra in the 1970s?  Or was it just a small minority where their claims made it to media outlets that skeptics are more than willing to show as "evidence"?

Well the only way to know for sure is to survey the scientific literature of that time.

...Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

The study reports, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."

So despite the claims of skeptics that the "consensus of science" in the 1970s that an ice age was on the way, scientists were actually predicting global warming amidst a mild cooling trend.  Did you get that?  Scientists were overwhelmingly writing papers of an impending surge in warming when it was actually colder outside.  And guess what?  They were right.

Thus, contrary to the reasoning that scientists cannot be trusted because they were allegedly wrong, scientists were actually predicting global warming when people were going outside and remarking of how cold it was and when media outlets were reporting on this relative cooling -- searching for some reason behind it.  This smacks in the face the logic I read about all of the time of how cold winters are most certainly disproving the overall trend of global warming.

(Funny how we are so willing to not believe major news outlets today, like the New York Times, because of political bias, yet so willing to believe them 30+ years ago when it serves to somehow defend current skeptical views of the global warming)

Here is one of the latest videos of Al Gore on the "climate crisis":

Gore comes across as this salesman that is looking to save the world with his product, but he does so in a manner where he is Achilles looking for his glory to span the ages.  He is looking for his name to live on in history as the savior of the human race.  Although lefties respond to this rhetoric, I don't see everyday citizens responding favorably.  And he may be why solving the "climate crisis" is at the bottom of the list he presents in his talk.

Here is a quote about 1:13 into the presentation:

Optimism is sometimes characterized as a belief, an intellectual posture, whereas Mahatma Gandhi famously said you must become the change you wish to see in the world.  And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone, except to the extent that the belief brings about new behavior.  But the word behavior is also I think sometimes misunderstood in this context.  I am a big advocate of changing the light bulbs and buying hybrids and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house and dug the geothermal wells and done all of that other stuff, but as important as it is to change the light bulbs, it is more important to change the laws.  And when we change our behavior in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part.  In order to be optimistic about this we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy.  In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis.  And we have one.

This one blurb caught my eye:

...but as important as it is to change the light bulbs, it is more important to change the laws.

While I agree that government has its role in this effort and I agree that the best way we can tackle this problem is with an "Apollo" mission style approach -- industry and government need to work together to solve this issue.  And there needs to be discussion from both sides of the fence.  We didn't get to the moon without private industry -- thus our changes in law, shouldn't all be about slaps on the wrist, but creations of incentives for business if changes in behavior are desired.

It is truly about working hand in hand with those "evil" energy/oil companies, pushing incentives to the average consumer/individual, and setting up realistic transition periods for older energy technologies while setting up realistic phase in periods for newer greener energy technologies.  These are all common sense approaches.  No?

The question I have is if that is the real underlying message of Al Gore?

Looks like there is more scientific evidence that the sun/cosmic ray hypothesis (Svensmark) that skeptics argue is not panning out in data set analysis.

Professor Sloan's team investigated the link by looking for periods in time and for places on the Earth which had documented weak or strong cosmic ray arrivals, and seeing if that affected the cloudiness observed in those locations or at those times.

"For example; sometimes the Sun 'burps' - it throws out a huge burst of charged particles," he explained to BBC News.

"So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun; we saw nothing."

Ted Turner on not taking "drastic action to correct global warming"...

Not doing it will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.

For real Ted?  Seriously?  If in 30 years, we will be *8* degrees warmer... then it is already too late for drastic action.  All of the crops will be gone?  People turning to cannibalism?

Funny, how I did not see that in the latest IPCC report.

We should be addressing global warming... that is a fact.  But this goofy talk that really makes people not believe in anthropogenic warming has got to stop...  You are seriously not helping...

Maybe you should be advocating Y2K bunkers to really close the deal instead...

Over at Powerline there is a short post on the winter in Minnesota entitled Global Warming -- Please!

Where I live, we got five or six inches of snow last night. We've had snow on the ground since December 1; it's been a long, cold winter. Not as cold as some of the epic winters of the early and mid-1970s, but cold enough.

[...]

This is the time of year when Glenn Reynolds usually starts posting pictures of the University of Tennessee campus, with flowers in bloom and kids in tee-shirts. Which seems like the way it should be: yesterday was the first day of spring. But it will be a while before anyone is wearing tee-shirts in Minnesota.

The underlying message here is that the winter in Minnesota has been one that defies the global warming mantra.  And the message is solely based on perception.  The perception of snow on the ground.  The perception is that recent temperatures throw a monkey wrench into the global warming argument.

I read these type of posts all of the time.  A big winter storm blows through a particular area of the country and wham -- posts about how global warming is just a bunch of baloney.

So, first off, does the trend of global warming mean that there will all of a sudden be no snow in the north?  Of course not.  Does the trend of global warming mean that there cannot be cold snaps?  Of course not.  We are talking about weather in particular time windows.  When talking of climate you have to look at a much broader range of weather in a particular region.

What we are talking about are probabilities.  We are talking about the odds of seeing colder weather.  As the earth continues (on average) to get warmer, the odds of colder weather goes down, but not by any stretch completely eliminated.  I guess what I am trying to say is that the skeptical global warming folks seem to operate in simple absolutes. 

The fact that it snowed or if a particular month was a little colder than normal doesn't mean that anthropogenic global warming is a farce.  It just means that skeptics don't understand the complexity of climate or that they are unwilling to give a broader assessment of climate in their particular region.

So, let's look at the Twin Cities' climate (monthly weather summaries) over the last year (this is all I could pull up on NOAA's site):

If the "global warming is bunk" argument is going to be implied by skeptics based on recent history and anecdotal evidence, I think the chart clearly shows that the past year had a super majority of warmer than normal months in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.

I guess all of those above average months in temperature during the past year were conveniently forgotten.

Holy cow?!  Has global warming stopped?

Well, the answer is no.  RealClimate has a great post that talks about short-term variability vs. long-term trend.

...The mean of all the 8 year trends is close to the long term trend (0.19ºC/decade), but the standard deviation is almost as large (0.17ºC/decade), implying that a trend would have to be either >0.5ºC/decade or much more negative (< -0.2ºC/decade) for it to obviously fall outside the distribution. Thus comparing short trends has very little power to distinguish between alternate expectations.

So, it should be clear that short term comparisons are misguided...