Re: [asa] Creation Care

Rich, I think it's important to distinguish the facts Gore asserts from the
images he displays. While it may be true, as the Real Climate Blog asserts,
that Gore states most of the facts correctly, I can't see how any
sober-minded person could view the string of images presented in that
trailer and consider it a fair and balanced discussion of the problem. The
impression I get upon viewing that trailer is that Florida will be
underwater in short order and millions of starving refugees will soon be
streaming into the U.S. interior. The actual science doesn't support that
imagery by a longshot.

BTW, I note that the Real Climate Blog also praises Gore's earlier book,
Earth in the Balance. I read that book years ago. In it, Gore asserts that
most of the major turning points in human history were attributable to
environmental changes -- even pinpointing the outcomes of specific wars to
particular environmental events. How anyone could consider that
scientifically sound is beyond me.

On 1/22/07, Rich Blinne <rich.blinne@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 1/22/07, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Take a look at this trailer for Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth,"
> > and tell me if you think it properly represents the science. In particular,
> > focus on the images he employs, and on the centrality of hurricane Katrina
> > to the narrative: http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_classics/aninconvenienttruth/trailer/
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
> Here's what real climate blog says about Katrina:
>
>
> > The correct answer--the one we have indeed provided in previous posts (Storms
> > & Global Warming II <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=173>, Some
> > recent updates <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=162> and Storms
> > and Climate Change <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=140>) --is
> > that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected
> > by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such
> > attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will
> > follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is
> > impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we
> > had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as
> > much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of
> > deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural
> > climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).
> >
>
> As for the accuracy of the movie in general:
>
>
> > How well does the film handle the science? Admirably, I thought. It is
> > remarkably up to date, with reference to some of the very latest research.
> > Discussion of recent changes in Antarctica and Greenland are expertly laid
> > out. He also does a very good job in talking about the relationship between
> > sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity. As one might expect, he
> > uses the Katrina disaster to underscore the point that climate change may
> > have serious impacts on society, but he doesn't highlight the connection any
> > more than is appropriate (see our post on this, here<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/09/hurricanes-and-global-warming/>
> > ).
> >
> > There are a few scientific errors that are important in the film. At one
> > point Gore claims that you can see the aerosol concentrations in Antarctic
> > ice cores change "in just two years", due to the U.S. Clean Air Act. You
> > can't see dust and aerosols at all in Antarctic cores -- not with the naked
> > eye -- and I'm skeptical you can definitively point to the influence of the
> > Clean Air Act. I was left wondering whether Gore got this notion, and I hope
> > he'll correct it in future versions of his slideshow. Another complaint is
> > the juxtaposition of an image relating to CO 2 emissions and an image
> > illustrating invasive plant species. This is misleading; the problem of
> > invasive species is predominantly due to land use change and importation,
> > not to "global warming". Still, these are rather minor errors. It is true
> > that the effect of reduced leaded gasoline use in the U.S. does clearly
> > show up in Greenland ice cores; and it is also certainly true that climate
> > change could exacerbate the problem of invasive species.
> >
> > Several of my colleagues complained that a more significant error is
> > Gore's use of the long ice core records of CO2 and temperature (from
> > oxygen isotope measurements) in Antarctic ice cores to illustrate the
> > correlation between the two. The complaint is that the correlation is
> > somewhat misleading, because a number of other climate forcings besides CO
> > 2 contribute to the change in Antarctic temperature between glacial and
> > interglacial climate. Simply extrapolating this correlation forward in time
> > puts the temperature in 2100 A.D. somewhere upwards of 10 C warmer than
> > present -- rather at the extreme end of the vast majority of projections (as
> > we have discussed here<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/03/climate-sensitivity-plus-a-change/>).
> > However, I don't really agree with my colleagues' criticism on this point.
> > Gore is careful not to state what the temperature/CO 2 scaling is. He is
> > making a qualitative point, which is entirely accurate. The fact is that it
> > would be difficult or impossible to explain past changes in temperature
> > during the ice age cycles without CO2 changes (as we have discussed here<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/>).
> > In that sense, the ice core CO2-temperature correlation<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/650000-years-of-greenhouse-gas-concentrations/>remains an appropriate demonstration of the influence of CO
> > 2 on climate.
> >
> > For the most part, I think Gore gets the science right, just as he did
> > in *Earth in the Balance*. The small errors don't detract from Gore's
> > main point, which is that we in the United States have the technological and
> > institutional ability to have a significant impact on the future trajectory
> > of climate change. This is not entirely a scientific issue -- indeed, Gore
> > repeatedly makes the point that it is a moral issue -- but Gore draws
> > heavily on Pacala and Socolow's recent work to show that the technology is
> > there (see Science 305, p. 968 Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate
> > Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies).
> >
> [RDB Note: The referenced paper is excellent and can be found here:
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/305/5686/968
>
> Here's the approaches outline in the paper:
>
> *Table 1.* *Potential wedges: Strategies available to reduce the carbon
> emission rate in 2054 by 1 GtC/year or to reduce carbon emissions from 2004
> to 2054 by 25 GtC.* *Option* *Effort by 2054 for one wedge, relative to
> 14 GtC/year BAU* *Comments, issues*
> ------------------------------
> *Energy efficiency and conservation*
> ------------------------------
> Economy-wide carbon-intensity reduction (emissions/$GDP) Increase
> reduction by additional 0.15% per year (e.g., increase U.S. goal of 1.96%reduction per year to
> 2.11% per year) Can be tuned by carbon policy 1. Efficient vehicles Increase
> fuel economy for 2 billion cars from 30 to 60 mpg Car size, power 2.
> Reduced use of vehicles Decrease car travel for 2 billion 30-mpg cars from
> 10,000 to 5000 miles per year Urban design, mass transit, telecommuting 3.
> Efficient buildings Cut carbon emissions by one-fourth in buildings and
> appliances projected for 2054 Weak incentives 4. Efficient baseload
> coal plants Produce twice today's coal power output at 60% instead of 40%
> efficiency (compared with 32% today) Advanced high-temperature materials
> *Fuel shift*
> ------------------------------
> 5. Gas baseload power for coal baseload power Replace 1400 GW
> 50%-efficient coal plants with gas plants (four times the current production
> of gas-based power) Competing demands for natural gas *CO2 Capture and
> Storage (CCS)*
> ------------------------------
> 6. Capture CO2 at baseload power plant Introduce CCS at 800 GW coal
> or 1600 GW natural gas (compared with 1060 GW coal in 1999) Technology
> already in use for H2 production 7. Capture CO2 at H2 plant Introduce
> CCS at plants producing 250 MtH2/year from coal or 500 MtH2/year from
> natural gas (compared with 40 MtH2/year today from all sources) H2 safety,
> infrastructure 8. Capture CO2 at coal-to-synfuels plant Introduce CCS
> at synfuels plants producing 30 million barrels a day from coal (200 times
> Sasol), if half of feedstock carbon is available for capture Increased CO2emissions, if synfuels are produced without CCS Geological
> storage Create 3500 Sleipners Durable storage, successful permitting *Nuclear
> fission*
> ------------------------------
> 9. Nuclear power for coal power Add 700 GW (twice the current
> capacity) Nuclear proliferation, terrorism, waste *Renewable electricity
> and fuels*
> ------------------------------
> 10. Wind power for coal power Add 2 million 1-MW-peak windmills (50
> times the current capacity) "occupying" 30 x 106 ha, on land or offshore Multiple
> uses of land because windmills are widely spaced 11. PV power for
> coal power Add 2000 GW-peak PV (700 times the current capacity) on 2 x 106ha PV
> production cost 12. Wind H2 in fuel-cell car for gasoline in hybrid
> car Add 4 million 1-MW-peak windmills (100 times the current capacity) H2safety, infrastructure 13.
> Biomass fuel for fossil fuel Add 100 times the current Brazil or U.S.
> ethanol production, with the use of 250 x 106 ha (one-sixth of world
> cropland) Biodiversity, competing land use *Forests and agricultural
> soils*
> ------------------------------
> 14. Reduced deforestation, plus reforestation, afforestation, and new
> plantations. Decrease tropical deforestation to zero instead of 0.5GtC/year, and establish 300 Mha of new tree plantations (twice the current
> rate) Land demands of agriculture, benefits to biodiversity from reduced
> deforestation 15. Conservation tillage
> ------------------------------
> Apply to all cropland (10 times the current usage)
> ------------------------------
> Reversibility, verification
> ------------------------------
>

-- 
David W. Opderbeck
Web:  http://www.davidopderbeck.com
Blog:  http://www.davidopderbeck.com/throughaglass.html
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