Re: [asa] Re: global warming

On Jun 12, 2008, at 6:05 PM, David Campbell wrote:

> The real problem is how fast the change is occurring. I don't know of
> anything since the end-Paleocene (about 55 million years ago) that
> might approach the modern rate of change in temperature and CO2.
> Organisms have trouble keeping up or keeping in syc.

Glenn and I have been discussing off line whether we can attribute
anthropogenic CO2 to the current warming. He kept accusing me of not
taking into consideration certain factors such as changes in solar
output and albedo. If he had read the IPCC reports he would have seen
to what excruciating degrees they took such things into account.
Please note that this is not a personal attack. Due to health reasons
he rightly wants to focus on areas where he has world-class expertise.
Nevertheless, he should realize there are others such as myself who
have looked at this in very deep detail. More importantly so did
thousands and tens of thousands of climate scientists in one of the
largest peer review processes in the history of science. One of the
things that YEC and ID has done has been to portray the scientific
enterprise whether it is evolutionary biology or climate science as
not being in as mature or having as much consensus as it really does.
In the case of climate science corporate and hyper-libertarian have
also tried to misportray the science for their own benefit. As one
tobacco executive put it in the Sixties, "doubt is our product".

Still, I gave Glenn sufficient information that he could determine
himself which is the driving force. Since the exchange didn't involve
this list I showed him with numerous graphs how the surface and the
lower troposphere was warming but the lower stratosphere was cooling.
This is counter to having the solar output being the driving force
because it would warm up both the LS and LT. The same holds for albedo
differences. In fact climate skeptics Roy Spencer and John Christie
advance the exact same test on their web site:

> During global warming, the atmosphere near the surface is supposed
> to warm at least as fast as the surface warms, while the upper
> layers are supposed to cool much faster than the surface warms.
>

I showed Glenn precisely this. This is a good deal why the IPCC has
put a greater than 95% (before the Chinese delegation pushed them down
to 90%) confidence that anthropogenic global warming is true. The 90%
figure was agreed to by every government delegation word-for-word
including our own.

>
>
> I'm inclined to agree with Glenn that running out of oil is the most
> pressing issue, though of course conserving oil would probably also
> cut back on CO2 emissions.

I don't disagree with Glenn that the oil supply problem is urgent but
I also contend that anthropogenic global warming is just as urgent and
we should be trying to solve both problems simultaneously. One thing
that hasn't really been stressed much here is how AGW has caused an
extremification of the climate *right now*. Dealing with extremes is
often a dangerous thing to do because it usually involves anecdotal
data which often conflates climate and weather. Fortunately the NCDC
has what is known as the climate extreme index.

The U.S. CEI is based on an aggregate set of conventional climate
extreme indicators which, at the present time, include the following
types of data:
    1) monthly maximum and minimum temperature
    2) daily precipitation
    3) monthly Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI)
    4) landfalling tropical storm and hurricane wind velocity*

* experimental

The climate extreme index (without the experimental part because when
I look at this I see no discernible trend) looks like this:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/cei/dk-cei.01-12.gif

Here is the maximum and minimum temperature portions of the index:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/cei/dk-step1.01-12.gif
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/cei/dk-step2.01-12.gif

Note that the extremes for the high maximum and high minimum are
happening but not the low maximum nor the low minimum. This gives us
another clue of what is causing the current warming. This is because
warm nights are best explained by CO2 forcing than solar forcing
because (duh) the Sun is not shining at night nor is the earth
reflecting where albedo differences would be significant. Note also
all this talk about all the "cooling" going on is not happening.
That's because the local cooling that people notice is not a
significant portion of the area of the United States. Basically, it is
one giant case of ascertainment bias.

Now I am moving on to something I found even more interesting from the
data than what I have shown above which is merely restating what is
the solid consensus of the climate science community backed by a
massive amount of evidence collected over a century. Here's the
drought and flood graph:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/cei/dk-step3.01-12.gif

Until the recent years we have had years of drought and years of
flooding. Now we have years of both. This is currently in the news
with Cedar Rapids IA being evacuated for flooding while California
declares a drought emergency. It has been computed that there is a 50%
chance that Lake Mead will be completely dry in 2021. The Twentieth
Century was the century of oil. The Twenty-First Century is the
century of water. While $4 or $6 or $10 a gallon gasoline is painful,
the extreme weather events are here now. Thus mitigating and adapting
to climate change is something we must do NOW and is no less pressing
than solving the problem of ever-more-expensive energy. Congress
failed to produce meaningful legislation both for energy and climate
change. Given the interrelationship of these problems we need to deal
with this in tandem rather than serially.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Fri Jun 13 09:21:44 2008