Re: [asa] Creation Care

I found the scientific data on climatology to be quite interesting. Lots of stuff I hadn't known. There's a lot of interesting work going on to dig into the details of all the different factors at play. The big picture seems clear. With business as usual, the global mean temperature could increase by approximately 3C. That would imply a sealevel rise of 25m +/-10m which is pretty substantial. Of all the factors that underlie the warming, CO2 of course is the largest but it's by no means the only one.

Journalists love to amplify and report the sensational. But the scientists are out in the field hard at work understanding implications. They are systematically working through a number of industries to determine the impact on any global warming. For example, one industry being studied now is agriculture. In particular, the dairy industry is interesting. Have you even wondered why the top dairy producing states are all in the northern part of the country? Vermont, NY, Wisconsin, etc.? Why not Texas? or Kansas where the beef cattle are? It turns out that the productivity of dairy cattle is quite sensitive to climate. The challenge is to set up an appropriate way to monitor how dairy cattle are being affected. What would be the societal impacts of the dairy industry being gradually forced to migrate to Canada? We've survived on foreign oil, surely we can survive on foreign milk. But the transition may be quite disruptive.

There is a rapidly growing body of literature on this topic and it's hard to keep up or to find the time to read the details. Here I'd like to provide a link to a presentation that I found particularly informative. Jim Hansen gave this lecture a couple of weeks ago and it has a wealth of information. Unfortunately, without the accompanying talking points and explanations, the charts may not always be self-explanatory. But they do show many of the key points. I would encourage everyone on the list to at least read through the charts. If you're interested, several charts are worth studying in detail.

The 48 page presentation in pdf format can be found at http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/SierraStorm.09Jan2007.pdf

Randy

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Mon Jan 22 10:15:42 2007