Is it just me or does it seem obvious that, in the big picture, the answer to both of these problems is the same? We have to stop burning fossil fuels.
Of course the details are not so simple. I suspect that there is not going to be any one energy source that is going to save us, but we should be working very hard to find alternative sources, and in the short term we should be building nuclear power plants until a better source is found. And we should have started years ago, so we need to get moving on this right now.
On Fri Jun 13 9:19 , Rich Blinne
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:
Here is the maximum and minimum temperature portions of the index:
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:
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 BlinneMember ASA
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