Topic: Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[Target Up]

April 18th, 100 KM North of Edmonton, -2C overnight, ice still on the dugouts.... 'nuff said.

[JBG]

The Great Game Moves North

Summary --
The Arctic is rich in natural resources and lies at the epicenter of a rapidly changing climate -- and it is time the United States paid more attention to the region.

SCOTT G. BORGERSON is Visiting Fellow for Ocean Governance at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Arctic Meltdown
Scott G. Borgerson

Thanks to global warming, the Arctic icecap is rapidly melting, opening up access to massive natural resources and creating shipping shortcuts that could save billions of dollars a year. But there are currently no clear rules governing this economically and strategically vital region. Unless Washington leads the way toward a multilateral diplomatic solution, the Arctic could descend into armed conflict.

Oh really? I don't think so.

[GDawg]

That chart is hard on the eyes. its tough for me to draw a conclusion from it. Apparently more ice melts nowadays, but it mostly bounces back. If we have any resident ice scientists feel free to chime in...

[c_canuk]

I'm not an Ice Scientitst, but it looks to me like 2007 had the most ice melted by fall, but 2008 had less, and judging by 2009's position this spring compared to previous years, 2009 will probably have as little ice melting as 2005 or earlier and that it's all irrelavant since it goes right back to where it started every winter regardless of how much it melted.

it also looks like the worst year, 2007, only deviated from the norm by about 16%:

total max yearly change 15-4=11
 
difference between 2007 and the average 1.8

1.8/11= .1636363636363636




to me it looks like the the global yearly average temperature hasn't changed, but in 2007 and 2008 we had a longer hotter summer offset with sharper winters resulting in no change of actual global temperature judged by actual melting of ice.

I figure this supports my view that "measured" global warming is just statistical noise

[George Wallace]

I figure this supports my view that "measured" global warming is just statistical noise

Too bad there weren't 'Ear Defenders' for that noise.

[GDawg]

We spent centuries wishing we could navigate the northwest passage, and now that we may be able to do so (if but only part of the year) its pretty much the worst thing since Genghis Khan. When the cycle swings back the other way we will lament the good old days when ships could bypass the Panama Canal.

[c_canuk]

Too bad there weren't 'Ear Defenders' for that noise.

not sure if by that noise you are refering to my comment or data that shows a slight trend towards global warming.

GDawg... I think that the graph above is showing that the north west passage isn't really opening up permanantly, just more ice was melted by fall than usual last 2007 & 2008 but it has refrozen back to the same amount every year resulting in no net increase in permanantly melted ice.

[Thucydides]

One thing the climate change alarmists like to use as a carrot are so called "green" jobs. Once real economists turn their attention to this topic, the promised green jobs evaporate like morning mist.....

OF course if imposing and enforcing serfdom on a large portion of the population is the real goal, then it all makes sense:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1358423

Green Jobs Myths

Andrew P. Morriss
University of Illinois College of Law; PERC - Property and Environment Research Center; George Mason University - Mercatus Center

William T. Bogart
York College of Pennsylvania

Andrew Dorchak
Case Western Reserve University Law Library

Roger E. Meiners
University of Texas at Arlington


March 12, 2009

U Illinois Law & Economics Research Paper No. LE09-001
Case Legal Studies Research Paper No. 09-15

Abstract:     
A rapidly growing literature promises that a massive program of government mandates, subsidies, and forced technological interventions will reward the nation with an economy brimming with green jobs. Not only will these jobs improve the environment, but they will be high paying, interesting, and provide collective rights. This literature is built on mythologies about economics, forecasting, and technology.

Myth: Everyone understands what a green job is.

Reality: No standard definition of a green job exists.

Myth: Creating green jobs will boost productive employment.

Reality: Green jobs estimates include huge numbers of clerical, bureaucratic, and administrative positions that do not produce goods and services for consumption.

Myth: Green jobs forecasts are reliable.

Reality: The green jobs studies made estimates using poor economic models based on dubious assumptions.

Myth: Green jobs promote employment growth.

Reality: By promoting more jobs instead of more productivity, the green jobs described in the literature encourage low-paying jobs in less desirable conditions. Economic growth cannot be ordered by Congress or by the United Nations. Government interference - such as restricting successful technologies in favor of speculative technologies favored by special interests - will generate stagnation.

Myth: The world economy can be remade by reducing trade and relying on local production and reduced consumption without dramatically decreasing our standard of living.

Reality: History shows that nations cannot produce everything their citizens need or desire. People and firms have talents that allow specialization that make goods and services ever more efficient and lower-cost, thereby enriching society.

Myth: Government mandates are a substitute for free markets.

Reality: Companies react more swiftly and efficiently to the demands of their customers and markets, than to cumbersome government mandates.

Myth: Imposing technological progress by regulation is desirable.

Reality: Some technologies preferred by the green jobs studies are not capable of efficiently reaching the scale necessary to meet today's demands and could be counterproductive to environmental quality.

In this Article, we survey the green jobs literature, analyze its assumptions, and show how the special interest groups promoting the idea of green jobs have embedded dubious assumptions and techniques within their analyses. Before undertaking efforts to restructure and possibly impoverish our society, careful analysis and informed public debate about these assumptions and prescriptions are necessary.
Working Paper Series

[JBG]

That chart is hard on the eyes. its tough for me to draw a conclusion from it. Apparently more ice melts nowadays, but it mostly bounces back. If we have any resident ice scientists feel free to chime in...

There has actually always been a large ice-melt followed by re-freeze in the winter. That's what happens when you go from 24/7 daylight to 24/7 darkness.

[Thucydides]

The perils of DIY geo engineering. Things are even worse if you do a knee jerk geoengineering project because you "think" climate change isn't a perfectly natural occurance:

http://www.slate.com/id/2217230/

The Politics of Climate Hacking
What happens if one country decides to start geoengineering on its own?
By Eli Kintisch
Posted Wednesday, April 29, 2009, at 4:51 PM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Add this to your list of climate nightmare scenarios: In 2040, facing rising seas, the Qatari government starts polluting the stratosphere in order to cool the planet, precipitating an international crisis and possibly upsetting monsoon patterns.

Freelance atmospheric modification may sound far-fetched, but the potboiler concept was on the agenda last week at an invitation-only, international workshop in Lisbon, Portugal. The private event was the first global powwow designed to explore the political aspects of geoengineering, or the deliberate manipulation of the climate. About 30 scientists and bureaucrats, representing 14 nations, mulled over the implications of global climate control in a wood-paneled conference room. The setting was the verdant grounds of an arts-and-science foundation started half a century ago by Armenian oil baron Calouste Gulbenkian.

The idea that we might solve our climate woes through planet hacking had its political coming-out earlier this month, when White House science adviser John Holdren said geoengineering research has "got to be looked at" by scientists. The work to which he was referring has quietly emerged over the last two years in a steady stream of meetings, a small but increasing number of papers, and substantial ongoing efforts by major science societies. The Lisbon meeting marked the introduction of what had once been the domain of fringe science to the international foreign-policy wonkocracy.

The first presenter, Carnegie Mellon engineer Granger Morgan, began with a review of the geoengineering options at our disposal. Employing a smiling cartoon sun to illustrate the ways radiation might be adjusted in the atmosphere, he rattled them off one by one: carbon-sucking machines, man-made jumbo algae blooms, planetary-scale sunshades to deflect solar rays, brightening clouds to reflect more sunlight. But Morgan's main topic—and the focus for the rest of the meeting—was the concept of spewing aerosol gunk into the stratosphere, known among the geoengineering intelligentsia as the "Pinatubo option." That Ludlum-esque moniker derives from the 1991 volcanic eruption that spewed 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, blocking out a fraction of the sun's rays and cooling the planet by 1 degree Fahrenheit. A Pinatubo approach to geoengineering would involve the deliberate spraying of more sulfur dioxide, or an alternative aerosol, at high altitudes. It's almost certainly the cheapest and most effective method we have for cooling the planet fast. For Morgan and the others, that's exactly what makes it so dangerous.

Modeling studies and data from volcanoes suggest the Pinatubo option could lower global temperatures by 3 degrees or more and compensate for skyrocketing carbon pollution in a matter of months. We wouldn't need any outlandish technology to make it work—just some jet aircraft, naval guns, or aerosol tanks. Reputable studies have suggested that the whole thing wouldn't cost very much, either: To offset the warming caused by all current CO2 emissions would require an outlay of at most $100 billion dollars per year. That's one-five-hundredth of the world's GDP or one-eighth of an economic stimulus package.

"This is not at all hard to do," Granger told the audience, declaring that "a single large nation"—especially a nuclear power, which might act with relative impunity—could easily exercise the option. A run of bad news from the climate scientists might convince a government that the breakup of the Greenland ice sheet was accelerating, and that Earth's low-lying areas were facing an imminent rise of 3 feet or more in sea level. "If, say, a Huckabee administration suddenly woke up and started geoengineering the planet, what could anybody else do about it?" Morgan asked. (One could equally envision a left-leaning, low-lying European nation with the same inclination.) Geoengineering "turns the normal debate over climate change on its head," he and some co-authors wrote recently in Foreign Affairs. Getting nations to agree to cut their greenhouse pollution has proved to be the ultimate free-rider problem, as the biggest nations must all cooperate or the planet will keep getting warmer. The Pinatubo option creates the opposite dilemma: As the discussions in Lisbon made clear, any of a dozen nations could change the global temperature all by itself.

The Pinatubo option could have some very unpleasant side effects, too. An Indian space scientist suggested that deploying the scheme might disrupt various monsoon cycles that provide water to hundreds of millions of people across the world. Granger's graduate student got up afterward and warned the group that computer simulations suggest the technique might lead to a drop in global rainfall. (The aerosols would block solar energy, which drives precipitation systems. She did note that higher temperatures in a world without geoengineering might also yield drier areas.)

Whatever its specific effects, it's easy to see how geoengineering would create confusion and sow international conflict. "If a country like the United States were to do this on their own and China [happened] to go into a decadelong drought, [the Chinese would] want to know what was the cause," explained Ken Caldeira, a geochemist from the Carnegie Institution. "Climate science is not at the point of attributing the cause of weather events." Not every expert at the meeting thought that the unilateral scenario was realistic, but no one downplayed the emerging strategic risk that geoengineering represents. Some mused that rich individuals or corporations—"climate pirates" perhaps?—might even issue their own "Pinatubo ultimatum."

None of the participants were eager to geo-engineer; they'd much rather see humanity stem the problem by ending its greenhouse-gas binge. But they wonder whether it may one day become a necessity. At any rate, it's better to explore it now, they say, so we're as prepared as possible. Everyone at the meeting thought field tests were inevitable fairly soon.

It's not clear how nations would go about regulating such a technology. "There aren't very good analogies," University of Maryland arms-control expert John Steinbruner told me. Treaties that might apply—the Weather Modification Convention, the Outer Space Treaty, the ol' Law of the Sea—wouldn't really cover geoengineering experiments or deployments, he said. Participants wondered whether the U.N. Security Council or a new international treaty might eventually regulate geoengineering, but to cover experiments on the shorter term, scientific societies, national science academies, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were each proposed as possible venues for some sort of geoengineering accord.

Or is it too early to be discussing the Pinatubo option at all? Just under the surface of the Lisbon workshop lurked the ever-present worry among scientists that exploring geoengineering could dissuade the public from aggressive and expensive emissions-cutting measures—the risk of moral hazard. In a way, one might hope that the geoengineering alternative weren't available at all, said University of Calgary physicist David Keith. He asked us to imagine one could open a box ("call it Pandora's box") to find out for certain whether it would work. "Which do you wish for?" If it does work, it's going to be a colossal mess, he said. "But on the other hand, if it really serves to be a method of reducing the climate risk, and the climate risk is the essential thing. …" Later, he e-mailed me: "We should wish it works," he wrote.

Eli Kintisch edits Science magazine's Science Insider blog and is writing a book on geoengineering.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2217230/

Of course you yourself can do some geoengineering by painting your driveway and roof white, and planting additional trees in your yard. (If everyone in a city were to do that, the "urban heat island" effect could be greatly reduced by reflecting away solar energy).

[Old Sweat]

From the Don't Have Enough to Do department, here is an analysis showing that global temperatures track the increase in US postal rates since 1880:

http://joannenova.com.au/2009/05/03/shock-global-temperatures-driven-by-us-postal-charges/

[Thucydides]

heh:

http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/graph.html

[Brad Sallows]

>What happens if one country decides to start geoengineering on its own?

Sink their ships.  Shoot down their air and space craft.  Sabotage their engines.  Shun their trade.  Assassinate their leaders and proponents of geoengineering.

Advocates of geoengineering DO NOT know and CAN NOT predict what all the effects of their meddling will be.  What they propose is to gamble with the lives and wellbeing of all life on this planet, not to undertake risk.

[Thucydides]

Sadly, humans have already been geoengineering for about 5000 years. Should we consider reforestation a hostile act (since that is a form of geoengineering?). What action would you take against a nation or principality that banned the use of ashpalt as a paving material?

A large part of the climate change program is a hostile act designed explicitly to cripple western free market economies and provide for massive transfers of wealth to regimes like Russia. Perhaps we should consider the proper response to the proponents of ideas like Kyoto and "cap and trade".....

[Brad Sallows]

My point of aim is not the incremental "geoengineering" of people going about their lives.  What is at stake are grand schemes to jolt the climate.

[GDawg]

Here is a nifty link.

http://www.surfacestations.org/

I know from reviewing some websites and films from climate change skeptics that the urban heat island effect could have a considerable impact on historic climate observations, and that effect would only grow more profound over time. The above link seems to prove the significance of urban sprawl and that climate change numbers have been blindly collated and published without a true adherence to the scientific process by ensuring some degree of uniformity in observations.

I also wonder about the observations that are often cited from before the 20th century and how accurate those thermometers were...

[Dennis Ruhl]

May 10, 2009 near Edmonton and there are no leaves on the trees - none, the latest I recall.  They are a week or two late.  The last two winters have been wicked.  So how do we explain the global cooling that comes after global warming?

[Haletown]

Cooling air temps, cooling oceans, very, very quiet sun, expanding polar ice . . . .  Ya, Al Gore got is soooooooooooo  wrong saying a trace atmospheric gas drives teh climate system. 

Buy long underwear, we are going to need 'em to saty warm.

[JBG]

May 10, 2009 near Edmonton and there are no leaves on the trees - none, the latest I recall.  They are a week or two late.  The last two winters have been wicked.  So how do we explain the global cooling that comes after global warming?

Both are natural cycles, driven in my view by a 30 year Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). We dont' need any geniuses like Gore, or their opposites back in the 1970's who wanted to pour carbon black on the polar ice caps, trying to muck with the climate.

[ACEC]

Cooling air temps, cooling oceans, very, very quiet sun, expanding polar ice . . . .  Ya, Al Gore got is soooooooooooo  wrong saying a trace atmospheric gas drives teh climate system. 

Buy long underwear, we are going to need 'em to saty warm.

A friend of mine had an interesting pointed question that i think suits this thread:

How long does the earth have to cool before those who are not scientists stop declaring war on anthropogenic global warming?

[Haletown]

A friend of mine had an interesting pointed question that i think suits this thread:

How long does the earth have to cool before those who are not scientists stop declaring war on anthropogenic global warming?

Since they have changed the narrative to "Climate Change",  I'd say the rent seeking scientists will do everything and say anything to keep the gravy train rolling and the public spotlight focused on them for as long as possible, probably many more years.

All those nice trips to Bali to chat about Climate Change, interviews on TV and radio, adoring fans . . . it is a much preferable situation to being unknown professors in forgotten Departments in scattered University campuses and Government labs.  ya, they'll keep it going as long as possible and then some.   

Now if their pensions were tied to the accuracy of their forecasts. . . . it would be all over tomorrow..







 

[Dennis Ruhl]

May 10, 2009 near Edmonton and there are no leaves on the trees - none, the latest I recall.  They are a week or two late.  The last two winters have been wicked.  So how do we explain the global cooling that comes after global warming?

Update - May 20 and it has snowed 6 inches in the last couple days.  The trees normally leaf out the 1st week in May and they are still waiting.  At least 3 weeks late.

[Thucydides]

Jerry Pournelle. Personally, I think Dr Pournell is being too generous in his reading of Energy Secretary Chu, political power/rent seeker probably covers the ground exactly...:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q2/view572.html#Wednesday

I wish Rush Limbaugh would find himself a physicist advisor. Or at least someone who took college physics. Some of his political analysis of the environmental movement is correct -- see Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy -- but his rant on painting roofs and roads white or at least a lighter color betrays a rather profound misunderstanding. At least this is a misunderstanding: I doubt it's the willful ignorance we get from many of the global warming alarmists. Rush ought to know better, but many of the global warming alarmists do know better.

He asks where the reflected heat from white roads would go. The answer, of course, is that the UV and visible light components of solar radiation would not be absorbed into the road to be turned in to heat but rather returned to outer space, after which we don't really care where it goes. With darker roads and roofs the UV and visible light components are absorbed and become heat. Now some of that heat is re-radiated toward space. If there is water vapor, methane, or CO2 in the atmosphere over the re-radiating surface, then some or all of the IR radiation will be absorbed as heat; this is the theory of CO2-caused global warming. (It's also how greenhouses work, sort of: visible light and UV come in, are absorbed as heat, and the resulting IR is absorbed by the glass before it can get out. (I say sort of because the insulation and lack of wind in the greenhouse plays a very important part of keeping it warm.)

That theory of CO2-caused warming is known to be flawed: Historically, CO2 levels rise after warming, not before, which isn't astonishing given that the oceans are CO2 sinks, and warm liquids hold less dissolved CO2 than cold ones (as you know from leaving a carbonated drink out to go flat). Freeman Dyson points out that water vapor is so much more efficient as a green-house gas than CO2 that CO2 cannot have much effect in any but cold, dry areas.

Limbaugh is right in saying that many of those on the "climate change" bandwagon are actually motivated by rent and power seeking schemes and neither know nor care about the actual science. I doubt that is true of Chu, who is in a very uncomfortable situation. Of course he wants grants for the national laboratories, and to get those he has to sail pretty close to the edge of real science. I'd like to see the national laboratories kept together too. They're national treasures. But I would fund them through a different process rather than making the Energy Secretary dance to political tunes.

[Haletown]

"He asks where the reflected heat from white roads would go. The answer, of course, is that the UV and visible light components of solar radiation would not be absorbed into the road to be turned in to heat but rather returned to outer space"

Not really.  Energy form the sun enters the atmosphere as shortwave radiation. Soon as it hits something solid, regardless of the color, it changes to long wave radiation - essentially heat.  Whether the heat is absorbed by a black road or roof  - and then slowly released into the atmosphere at night, or hits a white surface and the majority of the heat is absorbed by the atmosphere, all the long wave/heat energy ends up in the atmosphere, where it warms that atmoshpere.

This is just another one of the "Stuck on Stupid" ideas that sounds good but shows a complete non-understanding of atmospheric physics.


And can you imagine white highways here in the Great White North in the middle of winter ?  What road you say, where the hell is it ??

Now that would be fun driving.  Think Saskatchewan in a winter storm

[Brad Sallows]

Energy from the sun enters the atmosphere as photons across a wide range of frequencies, including the visible spectrum.  Every photon not reflected is by definition absorbed by something, and its energy transferred to the matter which composes our planet and atmosphere.  Do you understand this?