My blog, my thoughts, my opinions, my comments. I'm am not going to present any scientific evidence. I am not going to try to convince you of anything. I am not going to make a case, one way or another.
Let me tell you where I stand so you can judge my biases. I am personally agnostic as to whether the one degree rise in temperature in the 20th century was do to the 40% increase in CO2 since the dawn of the industrial revolution or not. The noise to signal ratio is too high to draw any conclusions. When following heat flows around the earth and into space, the effect of CO2 is a small fish in a big pond. The AGW advocates say CO2 is the only change, all else being constant. And they could well be right. For a scientific proof, they must exclude all other possibilities to the high degree of precision necessary. That's a tough task.
The earth's climate has ranged from completely coverred with ice in the Precambian to having no icecaps at all in th Jurassic. Just looking at the last half a million years, the ice ages have come and receded four times. Who says climate is stable? The earth seems quite capable of making quite dramatic changes in climate in a short time on her own inclination, at least in my view.
I hate coal. Coal particles kill one to ten thousand people a year in this country. Causes acid rain. It is a major source of mercury and other heavy metals. I have no expertise on the biological effect of parts per billion of mercury but just note coal is a major contributor. Coal kill about 10,000 coal miners a year in China and maybe a million Chinese. And this doesn't count black lung and other chronic diseases.
Oil and natural gas is running out whether AGW is true or not. The only choice we have that I see is whether to mine the tar sands and other such solid hydrocarbons. This stuff is such low grade ore that I think going after it is a sign of desperation. It takes almost as much energy to get at this stuff, then it returns. I got solar panels on my roof. I think the hydrocarbon era is coming to an end, like it or not.
The Duke of Wellington after Waterloo,"Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won". There is one thing that scares me more than the thought that AGW is true. And that is AGW is false. The Earth is stirring all on her own, on her own agenda, and for her own reasons. And we are helpless passengers that can do nothing.
"I want to die calmly in my sleep like grandpa. Not screaming in panic like his passengers."
Seems to me like we are going over a cliff. And arguing about whether or not we are driving.
10 comments on Global Warming
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http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001syr/large/06.01.jpg
It is accepted that the Earth's climate is variable. Scientists are getting a handle on what global warming and cooling components are human caused and what are part of the normal cycle. The Earth's biosphere is increasingly modified by human activities. We are a plague on the biosphere, gobbling up resources and leaving behind pollution in the sea, land, and air. Can the human population survive the type of changes (including climate change) that are occurring? If we are driving something that will lead to our destruction, it would be useful if we understood that and knew how (and implemented) something to curb it.
If we are driving something that will lead to our destruction, it would be useful if we understood that and knew how (and implemented) something to curb it.
If. If we understood. Let's take for example something better understood and incontrovertible. The world is running out of giant fields of light sweet crude. Neither heavy crudes nor biofuels will maintain our current standard of living. I still can't break through the clutter and get people to understand. I think our fundamental problem is that the population is science illiterate. They read your essay and they read Exxon's essay and assign them equal weight. Worse, they read con artists who can make cars run on water.
I'm trying to promote solar power and this field has historically been so saturated with con artists, sloppy contractors, and companies rent seeking the government, that it is hard to educate the general public that things are different now.
http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001wg1/large/11.02.jpg
and compares the consensus (hindcast) modeling results to the data:
http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001syr/large/05.18.jpg
As the former shows, the latest research is in aerosol interactions and understanding the relative carbon fluxes, especially associated with vegetation. The bulk features of the climate data record are modeled already, so the hindcasting works fairly well. The "Keeling Curve" has been added to since 1958, so CO2 has been looked at for quite a while. The small wiggles in the curve are still under investigation.
The radiative forcing chart includes an indicator of the confidence in the error bars and level of understanding across the bottom. The full interactions of aerosols are one of the unknowns that limit the ability to forecast climate. It's a difficult problem, but recent improvements in instruments have allowed better measurements of local aerosol radiative forcing and forcing efficiency and regional aerosol radiative forcing estimates from satellite and airborne platforms, for example. It's not just tweaking some Fortran code but also including new data.
New data from the same government agency that blows car exhaust on their thermometers and claim that it is getting warmer?
I'm done.
Thanks Brad for discussing the science. I don't doubt the Earth is getting warming. I think we only disagree on what "beyond a reasonable doubt" means and degree of skepticism. I hate when issues get politicized. My position is that anthromorphic global warming is "not proven" (maybe it is true) and we have good reason not to burn high polluting coal or expensive imported fossil fluids anyways.