Jan 30 2007
Science Says Global Warming A Natural Phenomena
The problem with the “Man-Made” Global Warming crowd has always been their ADMITTED lack of hard evidence. They supposed Global Warming was tied to human activity and ran from there – demonstrating a complete lack of the scientific method and making all their predcitions and assumptions no more scientifically based than an episode of Star Trek – feasible but not real.
Drudge is reporting what many of us engineers and scientists knew already, that Global Warming can be demonstrated to be a natural, recurring phenomena:
Two powerful new books say today’s global warming is due not to human activity but primarily to a long, moderate solar-linked cycle. Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, by physicist Fred Singer and economist Dennis Avery was released just before Christmas. The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark and former BBC science writer Nigel Calder (Icon Books), is due out in March.
Singer and Avery note that most of the earth’s recent warming occurred before 1940, and thus before much human-emitted CO2. Moreover, physical evidence shows 600 moderate warmings in the earth’s last million years. The evidence ranges from ancient Nile flood records, Chinese court documents and Roman wine grapes to modern spectral analysis of polar ice cores, deep seabed sediments, and layered cave stalagmites.
These books are now on my must read list and maybe I wil have some time to blog about them. But the fact is if there evidence is this broad and consistent then their conclusions or many times more solid than fantasies that have been in the news to date. A goog theory is supported by the evidence, the historical record, and can predict some future outcomes. The “Man Made” theorists have to ignore conflicting data and records, and are not able to predict a damn thing. But when you see evidence confirming something from all these diverse and independent records you can be confident in your conclusions. The truth is when you see a record temperature it is always ‘since 19xx’ or ‘since ’18xx’. And since we STILL do not have accurate global records of temperature going back more than 20 years or so we should be wary of any conclusions that are solely based on that data.
If we want to address the challenges of the higher temperatures then address ways for society to adapt. Like saving the rain forest in South America and extasblishing a new one in the sub Sahara desert through desalination plants and terra forming. Let’s reclaim some of the endless (and useless) deserts. That would cost much less and produce much more benefits.
There was published on another site yesterday a very interesting graph. It was a plot of the average sunspot number plotted over average world temps. The tracking between the two was amazingly in step. The site is down right now so I won’t provide a link but will when it comes back up.
Solar activity has been pretty high over the past 40 years or so. What is interesting is that solar cycle 25 (the one after next) is looking like it is going to be one of the weakest ever seen if the leading indicators that scientists use to predict activity are correct. What that basically means is that we may have one more decade of warm temps followed by significant cooling.
And global cooling is a much worse disaster than global warming. Every tenth of a degree of cooling means shorter growing seasons, less food, more energy consumption. Add the fact that corn is being used to produce ethanol to burn up in cars to shorter growing seasons and failed harvests and you could see world food prices skyrocket. What’s that mean? More dead poor people from cooling than from warming.
What also amazes me is people somehow equate warming with drought. The opposite is generally true. A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor. The climate is either warm/wet or cool/dry. You generally get increased rainfall and abundant crop production with warming and drought with cooling.
Global cooling would be a real disaster.
I might also add that the thermometer was discovered and came into use at the end of the “Little Ice Age”. So it is perfectly normal that temperature readings should show a historical increase and glaciers recede as the climate recovers from that colder spell. We still have not yet recovered to what temperatures were around 1400 during the Medieval Warm Period. We had warm climate followed by significant cooling (LIA) and now we are in a period of recovery to warmth.
Might want to look up the Roman Warm Period too. We were in a warm phase when the Roman Empire was expanding and cold phase when it collapsed (what we call The Dark Ages) was a period of colder climate, failed harvests, famine, plagues, and population migrations into Southern Europe from the steppes of Eurasia where the climate would have been cooling to the point of making life very difficult.
A Solar cause would also help explain the shrinking of the Martian Polar ice caps. Well at least since we have been able to measure and record such ;-/. Blaming humans for most everything dreadful is pretty much the easy way out. It requires less research.
Joe Buzz,
Excellent observation. If it is a solar system wide phenomena then it clearly is not Man Made. It is not OUR fault the Martian Ice Caps have disappeared (and they would go first given our atmospheric and EM field cushion against radiation, etc.
Good point.
The American power utilities are planning to sequester CO2 in their new power plants. They have accepted the reality of global warming and the inevitability of dealing with it, despite the costs involved. For practical people who have to deal with realities, the scientific battle is over with.
It will always be possible to raise doubts about climate change and its causes, especially if you are addressing people who neither understand the basic science involved or how the sciences work; but the kind of skepticism reflected on this blog is an ideological exercise rather like Creationism or the Intelligent Design movement. One can address global warming from a leftist, centrist, or rightist point of view, but address it you eventually must because it is part of nature, not part of politics.
Actually, if you google you will find that Jupiter, Triton (satellite of Neptune), Pluto, and Neptune itself are, in addition to Mars, undergoing “global warming”. I fail to see how Al Gore intends to slow global warming on Triton from changes in US or even Earth political policies.
Here is a link to the graphic I mentioned earlier in the thread.
The yellow line is a reconstruction of temperature by Mann et al in 1999 using proxies such as tree ring studies. The plots below that are plots of past solar activity using ice core proxy information (solar activity can be inferred from various carbon and oxygen isotopes in the ice cores from the water and trapped carbon dioxide).
As you can see, while there were ups and downs, the gradual trend in both solar activity and temperature is toward reduction/cooling respectively until about 1750 when things begin to turn around in both temperature and solar activity.
If you put that in perspective with this from NASA you might get the impression that “global warming” might be in for a significant turnaround soon, Al Gore’s actions notwithstanding.
Honestly, I fear global cooling more than global warming.
Jeez Louise, Strata –
Even Bush cops to man-made GW being a reality and crucial problem. And whattabout the scientific consensus that there’s higher than 90% probability that GW is in major part man-made?
Some get their kicks on Rte. 66, and some get’em from the tooth fairy. Sail on, oh ship of contrarianism ~ S.S. Strata.
Jim Harrison,
Just saying so doesn’t make it so. and I can ascribe several motives to the utilities besides a “bolt of truth” moment.
Is your “idealogy” science based or Media based?
“Even Bush cops to man-made GW being a reality”
What? When did he say that? Making up facts isn’t good for your argument.
DGFX,
Nobody better dare question “scientific consensus.”
dennisa
State of the Union address, 2007, for one. Jeez.
dgfx,
There is no consensus in the scientific community about the man made aspect of GW. In fact, if you go to those epxerts on the man made bandwagon the ADMIT (note I said this already) that they do not have scientific proof of a connection to man’s activities or how much it drives GW. They are absolutely clear and honest about this.
And Bush acknowledged global warming – only a few mindless folks equate that with man made GW. Just like only a few people equate “stem cells’ with embryonic stem cells. Communications is necessarily a precise tool, precision which eludes liberals.
dgfx,
There is no consensus in the scientific community about the man made aspect of GW. In fact, if you go to those epxerts on the man made bandwagon the ADMIT (note I said this already) that they do not have scientific proof of a connection to man’s activities or how much it drives GW. They are absolutely clear and honest about this.
And Bush acknowledged global warming – only a few mindless folks equate that with man made GW. Just like only a few people equate “stem cells’ with embryonic stem cells. Communications is necessarily a precise tool, precision which eludes liberals.
The easiest way to “sequester” CO2 is to send telephone books to the landfill and bury them instead of recycling. Paper recycling is probably responsible for a lot of CO2 remaining in the air and not being removed.
1. Forests are not cut down for paper as a general rule. The vast majority of trees cut for paper are farmed. They were planted specifically to be cut for paper. The wood from those trees has little value for any other purpose (not good enough quality to be used for lumber but fast growing and can be cut for paper in 15 to 20 years).
2. Recycling paper reduces the demand for virgin pulp. This does not mean fewer trees will be cut. You aren’t “saving” any trees by recycling paper. It means fewer trees will be PLANTED. Paper manufacturing is the largest planter of trees. Trees are a crop to them. If there is less demand for that crop, less of it will be planted. The crop already planted will be harvested anyway because it has practically no other use but it will not be replaced. Recycling paper will REDUCE the number of trees faster than not recycling because existing stands of pulp timber will not be replanted.
3. A stand of maturing pulp timber is a carbon sponge. It is taking CO2 out of the air and converting it to cellulose from which paper is made. Your phone book is about 99% carbon that was taken out of the air. The CO2 was taken in by the tree, split, and the carbon used to build biomass. Some of the oxygen is used to metabolize sugars produced by photosynthesis but the rest is released back into the air as waste. Once a forest reaches full maturity it is no longer a net carbon sponge. It becomes neutral. As biomass dies it decomposes releasing the CO2 back into the air. By planting massive plots of trees and cutting them when they have reached the bulk of their size, paper manufacturers have created a huge carbon dioxide sponge that takes CO2 out of the air and turns it into paper.
3. If you send that phone book to the landfill it will decompose only slowly and is likely to combine with other materials and produce methane gas and over a longer period of geological time, coal, if conditions are right. A very easy way to sequester huge amounts of CO2 is to create special landfills for paper and bury it. That way the CO2 is taken out of the air, serves a useful purpose as paper, and when no longer needed, buried to keep the CO2 out of the air for a long time.
4. Every pound of paper buried offsets a pound of coal mined. Pound for pound, I believe the carbon content of paper is even higher than coal. So while we extract the fossil fuel and burn it to release the CO2, we can bury paper to put the CO2 back in the ground. In fact, old coal mines would be a great place to put waste paper. Recycling paper doesn’t offset any CO2 from fossil fuel nor does it in any way reduce the fossil fuel that is mined. As you recycle more paper you reduce the CO2 taken from the air but you do nothing to reduce the CO2 being put into the air so over time you cause a net increase in atmospheric CO2.
5. Land currently in paper product, if not needed will be sold to developers. Developers will build things on this land that DO come from the destruction of natural forest. So you have a situation where land that had been in use for paper production is now being built on with wood from hardwood trees increasing the demand for the cutting of more forest.
Recycling paper kills trees and increases atmospheric CO2. Pulp trees are a crop. You don’t cut a redwood forest to use for paper. Sending that phone book to the landfill keeps CO2 that was in the air out of the air fro a long time.
Global Warming is not a “religion”. It isn’t something to be “believed in”.
Nobody disputes that the climate is warming. In fact, the climate is ALWAYS warming or cooling. It is never “stable” for any period of time. Yes, it has been warming since the period when accurate records were kept. As the glaciers of the alps retreat want to know what is being exposed? Wood! Where there are glaciers now there was once forest and that wood is carbon dated to about 5000 years ago. So in 3000BC, about the time the people in Mesopotamia were inventing agriculture and writing, the area where we now have alpine glaciers was forest. Oh, and what is now the Sahara was much wetter then as was the area we now call Iraq.
As the cognitive psychologists will tell you, people who are ignorant about something are typically also ignorant about their ignorance. While individuals who have genuine knowledge about a subject tend to underestimate their understanding, individuals who lack knowledge tend to overestimate it. Boy do you guys overestimate your knowledge of climatology!
I’ve been reading the technical literature about climate change for something like twenty years now. Indeed, as a technial writer, I’ve written up some of this stuff myself. A long and hotly contested debate preceded the current consensus on global warming. These conclusions don’t hang by a thread; they are supported by what is now a very thick cable and don’t depend upon any single result. Some blogger who half remembers having read something somewhere about natural cycles or the weather on Titan is not much of a challenge to people who work with the science and have been considering the confounding effects of natural cycles all along.
I guess one could imagine that tenured professors dare not question “scientific consensus,” but the utilities are unlikely to care about political correctness. They would be very happy indeed if global warming proved to be a chimera. A 600 MW coal-fired plant without CO2 sequestration nets out about 450 MW with CO2 sequestration. That’s a big deal. You don’t plan on taking that kind of hit to your bottom line simply for the PR benefits.
JH,
I work on NASA and ESA programs dedicated to earth observation and measuring the GW characteristics.
While you are a Tech Writer I help the scientists build and operate their instruments and I understand how they work.
Don’t try and compare your editorial skills to my science and engineering background. Your ignorance of your ignorance is showing.
— Hailing S.S. Strata
“The main international scientific body assessing causes of climate change is closing in on its strongest statement yet linking emissions from burning fossil fuels to rising global temperatures, according to scientists involved in the process.
In fresh drafts of a summary of its next report, the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that it is more (than 90 percent likely that global warming since 1950 has been driven mainly by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and that more warming and rising sea levels are on the way. * * * ”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/20/world/20climate.html?pagewanted=print)
see, also, e.g. , http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2193672.ece
And re GWB’s mention of GW as a serious challenge to which US policy response is limiting greenhouse gas emissions, you see that as a simple acknowledgement of “global warming” in the most neutral of senses? Why does that not surprise me? Yet as GWB has said –
“* * * Well, if you’re really interested in global warming and climate change [as is this Administration], then it seems like to me that we ought to promote technologies to advance the development of safe nuclear power. It’s a renewable source of energy, and at the same time has no emissions to it. * * *
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7065633)”
And of course, . . . but why bother, eh? ‘Slike talking to an up-ended kayaker.
JH,
Why do you need a cognitive psychologist to tell you that people don’t always know what they don’t know?
Environmental science is a “soft” science, being a combination of several “hard” sciences and as such, environmental hypotheses are more difficult to prove. It’s smart to be skeptical of theories that can only be approximately modeled.
Nobody doubts that A: the climate is warming (but it is not warmer now than it has been in human history) and that B: CO2 is increasing.
What is at argument is if CO2 is the CAUSE of the warming. So while one side seems to want to show that CO2 increases tracking temperature change is “proof”, the other side is saying that yes the CO2 is increasing but one isn’t the cause of the other.
Let me give you an example.
When you increase the temperature of the atmosphere by 1 degree, it now holds BILLIONS more tons of water vapor. So even at the same relative humidity, you increase the absolute amount of water vapor. Water vaport is about 100 times more efficient of a greenhouse gas than CO2.
The points are that A: the greatest increase in warming doesn’t coincide with the greatest increases in CO2 but they DO coincide with increases in solar activity.