Re: [asa] Re: global warming

Thanks, Rich.

The $64 question (remember when that was a lot of money? is this:

At what point will gas rationing begin?

I have no doubts that gov't bureaucrats (no pejorative intended) are,
even now, working on plans.

Well -- maybe that's only the $32 question.

But I can remember 1944 and gas rationed (A sticker) to two (2)
gallons a week. My grandpa's 1940 DeSoto got, on average, 13 mpg. He
did not travel far. Or often.

Burgy

On 6/13/08, Rich Blinne <rich.blinne@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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*
>
> * experimentalThe 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
>
>
>
>
>

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Fri Jun 13 10:43:45 2008