"Yes, Let's Please have More Conversations about Global Warming."

[Bravus]

Ted is correct that there have been periods warmer than the present, and also periods with much higher carbon dioxide concentrations. There have not, though, as far as I know, been warmer periods in the past 2000 years: I'd like to see evidence on that point. The periods of higher CO2 were tens of millions of years ago, well before humans were on earth (hey, it wasn't me who raised this stuff).

Our current climate is an island of unusual warmth and unusual climate stability about 11,000 years long in a global history of much more radical climate change, so climate change is nothing new for earth. Earth will abide and adapt, no matter what we do to the climate.

The point is, though, that that island of stability has coincided with, and allowed, the rise of human civilisation. Agriculture, cities, writing, all the features of civilisation have arisen within this period, when climate is kind and not too extreme.

Global warming is not simple, uniform warming across the planet. (hehe, nearly wrote 'across the planey'!) If it was, it might be easier to deal with. Rather, it is an increase in the net amount of energy in the global weather system.

That means more extremes in all directions - more extreme heat, but also more extreme cold. Someone has already cited unusual recent cold in this thread as evidence against climate change, but if properly understood it may well be evidence for it. (Or it may just be within natural variations.) It means more and bigger droughts, more and bigger floods, more powerful cyclones and hurricanes.

Over all, it means a less hospitable climate for human beings, and more hunger, privation and natural disasters.

Earth as a whole doesn't need us to take care of it - it will get along OK[1]. But other human beings need us to care about them, not just ourselves. The people in India who will struggle even more than now to get clean, fresh water once the Himalayan glaciers melt. The people in Bangladesh whose country gets the worst of tropical cyclones and floods. The people in America whose homes are destroyed by tornados.

[1] Many here also believe it has God to care for it, and people have God to care for them, but for whatever reasons of His own He seems reluctant to save us from the consequences of our own actions. If we build a bomb, He'll let it go off. If we trash the climate, He'll let it bite back with extreme weather[2].

[2] The main point of this post is not the theological one, though, it's simply explaining why global warming is something to mitigate as much as we can rather than embrace.

[Bravus]

The claim that addressing climate change will destroy the economy is a bizarre one to me. Australia has a carbon tax, moving to a trading scheme, and has *far* lower unemployment and higher economic growth than America. Germany is the country in Europe that has embraced renewable energy the most, and is also the strongest economy in Europe. I'm not saying the renewable energy *caused* the prosperity, but it also did not destroy it. Embracing new energy technologies vitalises economies and protects them from external issues, it doesn't destroy them.

[fccool]

Quote:

Ted is correct that there have been periods warmer than the present, and also periods with much higher carbon dioxide concentrations. There have not, though, as far as I know, been warmer periods in the past 2000 years: I'd like to see evidence on that point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

[JoeMo]

Quote:

The claim that addressing climate change will destroy the economy is a bizarre one to me.

I can't speak for the world economy, but IMO, regulatory mandates associated with attempts to curtail carbon emmissions allegedly responsible for climate change have the potential to multiply budgetary and economic problems in the United States. Bravus, I understand that you are in Austrailia; and things are likely different there. But here in the U.S.:

- Proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations that would limit CO2 emissions from power generating would prohibit the construction of any new coal-fired power plants in the country; and severely constrain the construction of gas-fired power plants above an elevation of about 1200 meters (3500 feet). If applied to existing plants, it could shut down half of the U.S. fossil-fired generation capacity by 2016. IMO, energy production capacity = prosperity.

--------To ce continued - ride home is leaving now ------------

[olger]

What I have never ever had explained to me is this: who determined that global warming is BAD? What if global warming is GOOD and we should be encouraging the process?

[olger]

- Proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations that would limit CO2 emissions from power generating would prohibit the construction of any new coal-fired power plants in the country; and severely constrain the construction of gas-fired power plants above an elevation of about 1200 meters (3500 feet). If applied to existing plants, it could shut down half of the U.S. fossil-fired generation capacity by 2016. IMO, energy production capacity = prosperity.

Spot on, Joe.

[Bravus]

Thanks for that Medieval Warm Period link, fccool. That was my understanding too, that despite some claims the contrary, the best and latest available data say:

"Despite substantial uncertainties, especially for the period prior to 1600 when data are scarce, the warmest period of the last 2,000 years prior to the 20th century very likely occurred between 950 and 1100, but temperatures were probably between 0.1 °C and 0.2 °C below the 1961 to 1990 mean and significantly below the level shown by instrumental data after 1980."

[Bravus]

I agree, energy generation is crucial. But if you focus only on fossil-fueled energy generation, you're artificially limiting the picture. Of course climate regulations would decrease those, but a sensible response to climate change - like Germany's - puts less attention into directly (through legislation) limiting fossil fuels and more into developing alternatives. It seems as though regulation is needed because of human inertia and vested interests, but if the response was proactive instead of reactive, actively pursuing solar, wind, tidal, hydro, geo, nuclear and as many other alternatives as we can think of, that can lead to overall economic growth rather than decline.

[fccool]

My issue with the human-caused global warming debate is that it's very convenient to ignore the overall environmental damage argument. Fossil fuels should be done away with not because the climate is warming, but because these are hazardous to environment. Yet, this message is being drowned by the global warming debate, which makes it a lesser issue.

[olger]

I value energy sources on a cost/benefit ratio, coupled with ROI.

Wind power is not a viable source of energy based on an extremely weak ROI, same for solar. Until battery storage technology improves to the point where we can store excess energy generated by wind and solar, it will not meet the C/B ratio, nor will it stand a chance of satisfying the MW requirements of the American perimeter. Nuclear is the way to go in my feeble opinion.

carry on!

G

[Bravus]

Yes, but fossil fuel technologies have over 100 years of R&D contributing to that, whereas the newer technologies are ... newer. They will get better as they are researched and as they are used.

Given the cost of building new nuclear power stations, the ROI may be questionable there too - though I actually agree that nuclear is likely to be a big part of any combined solution.

[Ted Oplinger]

Thanks for that Medieval Warm Period link, fccool. That was my understanding too, that despite some claims the contrary, the best and latest available data say:

"Despite substantial uncertainties, especially for the period prior to 1600 when data are scarce, the warmest period of the last 2,000 years prior to the 20th century very likely occurred between 950 and 1100, but temperatures were probably between 0.1 °C and 0.2 °C below the 1961 to 1990 mean and significantly below the level shown by instrumental data after 1980."

Not to be picky or argumentative...The Medieval Warm Period, according to several sources I've reviewed, lasted from ~800-900 AD to 1400 AD, giving way to the Little Ice Age of 1400 AD - 1860 AD. The Medieval Warm Period is thought to be preceded by a cooling period whose onset coincided with the onset of Europe's Dark Age.

It has only been 150 years our planet has been rebounding "slowly" to the levels seen 1000 years ago. A rapid rise, yes - but such rapidity in change is not unprecedented, as the temperatures dropped by nearly as much over a comparable time frame during the Little Ice Age.

Greenland was named so for a reason - because the land could be colonized, animals raised, and crops grown. Now that the "permanent" ice sheets are melting away, old settlement structures from those colonies are being found, yet permafrost would still prevent agriculture even with today's "record" warmth. It will have to either grow still warmer - or maintain this warmth for a generation or two - just to restore agriculture to a Greenland considered "normal" for the colonists of that land.

For the climate to be that warm for so long would also mean the Arctic ice sheets would be much smaller - or missing. Simple reasoning gets us to that point - yet today's climatologists and environmentalists are screaming how "bad" it is they are shrinking to "record lows".

In the same manner, these same Viking colonizers discovered North America much earlier than Columbus did. They named the Nova Scotia interior, "Vinland", for the quantity and quality of grapes growing abundantly wild there. It is still not warm enough in Nova Scotia's interior to maintain vineyards - Nova Scotia's vineyards are on the peninsula coast, where the Gulf Stream current moderates the local climate enough to make it the northernmost limit in North America to maintain grapes. With the increased warming, New England vineyards are producing more abundantly - with better quality grapes...getting closer to what the Vikings 1000 years ago considered "normal".

As for the Medieval Warm Period, I am very much aware climatologists considered it a "problem" with respect to making warming an "issue" back in the 90'sand early 00's. Hence, I am quite skeptical of "recent findings" which "more accurately" place the temperature level even slightly *below* current temperatures instead of *above*.

Much is made that there must be a man-made contribution to explain the rapidity of the rise - but these same scientist cannot account for the rapidity of onset for the Little Ice Age, which drove the Vikings from North America and Greenland in less than two generations. Global temperatures dropped from +0.4 degree Celsius above, to -0.5 degree Celsius below, what is now considered "average". From 1500 AD to 1600 AD, global average fell by nearly as much as they have risen over a comparable time frame from 1900 AD to 2000 AD.

For the last 10 years, climate records indicate the temperature rise has stopped, and now is retreating. If it bounces between +0.3 and +0.5 degrees Celsius, it still within what one should expect, looking at a graph of the fluctuation over the last 1000+ years.

For me, when they untether climatology research from the environmentalist religio-political agenda which funds it, I will give it a more serious consideration. So long as that connection remains, I will give the field the same level of skepticism science today gives to Creation Science - as too tethered to a religious-style of agenda to be given serious consideration.

No hostility meant, Bravus - it's just the way I see the issue.

What happened with the East Anglia "Climategate" scandal very much opened my eyes to the kind of "science" conducted to justify global warming as an issue over the period of 1990, leading up to Kyoto a few years ago. The field has not cleansed itself of the kind of thinking that brought on the scandal, and attempted email cover-up following, in the first place.

Yes, senior scientists were let go...but the promoted juniors they picked (and specifically trained) still carry the effort forward.

Blessings,

[JoeMo]

I agree that fossil-fired generation - unless there is some technology breakthrough that drastically increases its efficiency, will need to be eliminated over time, especially as carbon-based resources become increasingly scarce.

But to legislate that they be done away with (or drastically curtailed) in less than a decade is unrealistic and economically devastating.

Bravus, you hold up Germany ( and I will add Denmark) as examples of how renewable energy can be effectively and efficiently used to replace fossil fuels. There are a few of differences between Germany/Denmark and the U.S.:

-Germany and Denmark are densely populated countries. The wind blows and the sun shines relatively close to where people live. Therefore, the incremental cost of building transmission lines from resource to load is low. In the U.S., the loads are a long ways from where the highest potential for renewable energy resources exist, the cost and regulatory hurdles for building long transmission lines is more onerous than building the renewable resources. Do you know what it takes to get permits to build a 300 - 500 mile long EHV transmission line from a mountaintop (where wind blows) or a desert (where sun shines) across the property of possibly hundeds of landowners, most of whom subscribe to the NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) concept? Years, if not decades. It gets exponentially more difficult the closer one gets to population centers.

-Regulatory bodies( like the EPA at state legislatures) are mandating that the switch be made in a very few years. It will cost our company $2 - $3 Billion to do this in the 6 years that the Colorado legislature has given us to develop 250 MW of renewable resources and the transmission facilities required to meet the law. Multiply that times 5,000 - 10,000 if the Colorado model becomes the model for a national RPS, and we would be spending tens of trillions of dollars for renewable resources.

- Neither Germany nor Denmark has inexpensive native fossil alternatives - like coal or gas; those must be purchased from other countries at great expense. OTOH, the U.S. sits on the world's largest deposits of really cheap coal and natural gas. So, where renewable resources are economically competitive with fossil resources in Europe, they are nowhere close to competitive in the U.S. without massive government subsidy.

On a more general note, renewable resources in general are not dispatchable (i.e., wind doesn't necessarily blow harder or the sun shine brighter right when people flip a light switch). Unless there is a huge breakthrough in electric power storage, one cannot count renewable resources as reliable generating capacity; so a utility must build alternate resources to back them up - usually fossil-fired facility with quick-start capability.

Environmentalists can pontificate all they want about the ecological benefits of renewable energy and the dangers of burning fossil-fired fuels. Idealogically, they are correct. But when their energy bills double or triple to pay for renewable resources, while suffering from a degradation in reliability, they, along with everyone else, will squeal and complain about the cost like spoiled children in a toy store. In the end, money talks and BS walks.

This post is already too long. More later.

[Bravus]

Points acknowledged, both of you: and thanks very much for the tone of this discussion, which I'm loving.

I'd say two things in response to your points, JoeMo:

1. Bad regulation is not an argument for no regulation, it's an argument for better regulation. Those laws sound pretty awful and poorly thought through, and I don't support them. But given inertia, status quo is also not good enough. replace poor solutions with better solutions, not no solutions.

2. As I tried to say, regulation should be a last resort in many ways: innovation should be the first line of defense. America should use its smarts and can-do attitude, instead of sticking with (on this issue) a can't-do approach. Create a new energy source the whole world wants to buy, and see the economy come out of the doldrums.

[Bravus]

The response to Ted's post (briefly, because I'm off to see my daughter) is that it confuses local with global climate. Events in the North Atlantic are likely to be very strongly related to the Gulf Stream and other currents (which Ted mentioned), and it may well have been these changes that caused the changes described, which would not have been global.

Would like to look for climate records from elsewhere in the world during the MWP and see, but I'm out the door - maybe later.

[Bravus]

As guessed: http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period-intermediate.htm

[olger]

[Bravus]

Posted before, debunked before.

[Woody]

Thanks for posting this Og. There is so much truth in this.

[Bravus]

Um, I think you mean to say 'there is so much that confirms what I already think in this'.

Certainly there are many lies in it. Preparing for class right now, but here is one example:

The comment 'only the shaded portion to the right of this line were predictions' is simply false. The red shaded areas to the left of the line are the predictions of the model for those years. The fact that they fit the actual data (the black line) is what is used to test the model. The prediction are not created 'post hoc' to fit the data.

So that piece is, if not a lie, a fundamental misunderstanding of the information the graph is based on that is misleading.

There's plenty more, which I'll return with later.

The graph has many things in it, but truth is not one of them. Well, the black line is true...

[Igakusei]

Yeah haha… the "Note" part is completely false, but just looking at everything else reveals that the model is doing pretty damn well.

[olger]

Originally Posted By: olger

Thanks for posting this Og. There is so much truth in this.

You betcha Woody baby.

[Bravus]

'Confidence interval' and 'degrees of certainty' are very, very far from being synonyms. And the graph is of confidence intervals, not 'degrees of certainty' (whatever those might be).

The brighter red band means that the model predicts to a confidence level of 0.75 (75%) that the data are likely to fall within that band. Because the band is tighter, the confidence is lower.

The paler red band means that the model predicts to a confidence level of 0.95 (95%) that the data are likely to fall within that band.

That still means the model predicts a 5% probability - 1 in 20 - that the data will fall outside that band, so the data falling outside that band is by no means disastrous for the model. In fact, on the balance of probabilities, we'd *expect* it to fall outside that band about 1 year in 20...

The slowed warming in the past decade or so is likely to have a number of causes, including the massively increased burning of coal by China and India with the associated shading of the earth by particulates in the air.

The *most* important thing, though, is heating of the oceans in a La Nina phase, particularly unprecedented heating of the deep oceans. The heat energy is still building up on earth, it's just being stored in the oceans instead of the atmosphere. In an El Nino phase that heat will be released from the oceans.

I won't make any silly predictions, because I'm not a climate scientist, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to see a resumption of rapid warming with the next strong El Nino phase.

[Bravus]

Here's a lot of truth for you: http://skepticalscience.com/new-research-confirms-global-warming-has-accelerated.html

[olger]

It sounds like you are in agreement that that warming predictions "missed their mark." Yeah they did.

That is a good time for ACGW devotees to take their worldview into the shop for a complete rebuild, including turning the crank. Most won't. The honest ones will though, if there are any left. Most people seem to be pretty decided at this point, no?

G