climate policy
1 Dec 2009
A Climate Scientist Explains Our Choices
Whatever your stance on the ETS, we need to make some hard choices very fast, writes climate scientist James Risbey
Climatologists have been described as the Cassandras of the modern era. We have developed the ability to see what the future may have in store for the climate, but are confronted by big industry that doesn’t want to hear it, government that mirrors big industry, and an ambivalent public.
Despite that, I’d like to set out what climate science has told us about the choices we have in the situation we’re facing.
The futures that we climatologists see diverge radically in the next few years. On one path, the world imposes rapid reductions of carbon emissions and ultimately manages to stabilise concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would keep the warming below about 2 degrees Celsius. On the other path, we keep to our present course and bring about warming well beyond 2 degrees, perhaps 4 degrees or 6 degrees, or more.
Climatologists have picked 2 degrees as the rough number that separates "manageable" impacts from major, irreversible changes to the planet. This is not to say that the impacts would be "moderate" below 2 degrees. There would still be major impacts and a fair risk of irreversible climate changes at this level of warming. However, it is a matter of likelihoods, such that the severity of impacts and likelihood of irreversible climate changes increases rapidly thereafter. Beyond about 2 degrees we would be committing to high likelihoods of melting the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. This would ultimately result in a dozen or so metres of sea level rise that will change the geography of coastal environments and cities for tens of millennia.
At higher temperature increases beyond 2 degrees the committed sea level rise would be in the vicinity of tens of metres, matching the 25 to 40-metre higher sea levels that prevailed when the earth was last 3-6 degrees warmer.
Warming beyond 2 degrees would also result in a breakdown of snowmelt-driven hydrological systems. The water resources of a significant fraction of the global population depend on the gradual release of snowmelt from large winter snowpacks in the Himalayas and other mountain regions. Loss of snowpack in these regions poses a major threat to the agricultural basis of these regions and populations.
Warming beyond 2 degrees would be accompanied by levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that would lead to higher concentrations of dissolved carbon and higher acidity in the ocean. This in turn would hamper the ability of calcifying marine organisms to form shells. The consequences of this for the marine ecosystem and foodweb are largely unknown.
The release of stored methane and carbon dioxide from natural stores in the biosphere could be triggered by the warming and is more likely the greater the warming. Such feedbacks have the potential to greatly accelerate the warming and to continue that process regardless of our attempts to reduce emissions. That is, we could lose control of our ability to "regulate" the rate at which greenhouse gas emissions increase and the climate would be truly out of our control.
As I say, these are the divergent futures we have to choose from. And if we want to avoid the worst of these consequences then we face another choice: deciding how to reduce emissions in a way that makes sense.
So far humans have emitted about 520Gt (gigatons) of carbon to the atmosphere. The present rate is about 10Gt of carbon per year and is increasing at a rate of 1 to 3 per cent per year. In order to have a reasonable chance of keeping the warming of the planet below 2 degrees we can only afford to emit another 190Gt or so of carbon. At present rates we would use that allotment in less than two decades. That means that major efforts to reduce carbon emissions must commence now if we are to have any chance of staving off the warming and impacts described above. If we delay any longer we simply won’t be able to transform infrastructure, transport, and energy systems fast enough to stay within the 190Gt carbon allotment.
With a remaining "safe" allotment of carbon of only a couple of hundred gigatons, we need to pay attention to the main sources of carbon emissions: coal, oil, and land use changes. The latter can be minimised by preserving forests and practicing more sustainable agriculture. The main issue is coal, which is the largest source, and whose estimated reserves vastly exceed the 190Gt "safe" allotment.
There is no way to stay inside this allotment without a rapid phase-out of emissions from coal.
In practice, phasing out coal carbon emissions means phasing out coal. In principle, carbon capture and storage (CCS) could provide a means to burn coal without emitting all the carbon. However, CCS is expensive, and more importantly, it would come online too late to phase out coal carbon on the required timescale. CCS is not expected to be implemented at commercial scale for a couple of decades. If we wait for CCS, we guarantee that we will long exceed the 190Gt carbon allotment. CCS cannot help much in stabilising the warming at 2 degrees, and thus any strategy (such as the Australian one) that relies on CCS to continue burning coal is a strategy that accepts large, irreversible, climate change.
The remaining carbon allotment must be shared fairly if we expect to gain the cooperation of the world’s nations in reducing global emissions. Countries with the highest per capita emissions and with historical responsibility for most of the 520Gt of carbon emissions to date need to cut emissions first and fastest (to be sure, the developing world will need to cut quickly too as the remaining carbon allotment is so small). These principles are embodied in the UN climate change framework and make basic sense. Despite this, some countries in this category of high emitters have made their own actions conditional on those of poorer nations who do not bear the same historical responsibility.
In particular, the US and Australia have declared that they will not take effective action until all countries do. This stance violates the principle that the nations most responsible for the problem should act first, and it weakens prospects for meaningful cooperation in Copenhagen and beyond.
While the science of climate change is clear in pointing out the need for rapid action in order to avoid monumental climate change, the politics seem more designed to avoid responsibility than to avoid climate change. At the same time, the national media and most political parties in Australia indulge a tiny minority of so-called climate "sceptics".
While there are many uncertainties in any scientific discipline, the majority of the "sceptics’" arguments don’t particularly address them. Most of their arguments act to obfuscate the science — for example, by conflating climate variability with climate change. The notion that it has cooled since 1998 (it hasn’t: global temperatures over the past decade are the warmest in the record), and that this is evidence against greenhouse climate change (it isn’t, since the length of run is too short) is typical of this line of argument. Variations on this theme are played out across the press and blogosphere and must go some way in explaining the recent reduction in priority given by the public to climate change. When our political and media institutions continue to give a platform and apparent legitimacy to these arguments, no matter how absurd or how often refuted, it is no wonder that the public is still not resolved.
Australia has made virtually no progress in reducing carbon emissions from energy and transport to date. Most of the reductions have come about due to a reduction in the rate at which land is cleared. The Government’s preferred method for reducing future carbon emissions is an emissions trading scheme (ETS). As Richard Denniss has pointed out, that scheme is constituted in such a way that it will do very little to reduce carbon emissions in Australia for decades. Treasury modelling for the ETS shows no significant reductions from coal in Australia before 2033, when CCS is then assumed to play a role.
In the meantime, Australia proposes to allow itself to reach its emission targets by purchasing carbon offset credits from poorer countries. Australia is thus planning to make little or no contribution to the global effort to reduce carbon emissions for the next two and a half decades. The Australian trajectory for emission reductions, writ large, would quickly use up the 190Gt carbon allotment and guarantee climate changes well beyond 2 degrees.
The Australian Government’s argument is effectively that it is preferable to adapt to large climate change than to prevent it. Their argument is not usually stated in this form, but that is the inescapable consequence of their policy of postponing meaningful carbon reductions. On the one hand the Government calls for rapid action to prevent climate changes, while on the other hand it has crafted a policy that would guarantee that effective action is not taken. The Australian public is left largely unaware that the nation is opting to try to adapt to large climate change rather than prevent it occurring. One of the most fundamental issues facing this generation and those which will follow is being decided irrevocably now, largely without the knowledge that it is being decided at all.
While the Government policy of adaptation without effective mitigation is implicit, some are openly calling for an abandonment of the 2 degrees limit and preparation for adaptation to 4 degrees warming or more. I doubt that many who so calmly accept the higher limit truly understand what would have to be adapted to, or that we are effectively locking in these climate futures by our current decisions. Do they really believe that it is better to adapt to a hothouse climate with ice-free poles, massive sea level rise, dry basins, and acidic oceans than to adapt our cities and energy systems to run efficiently on alternative energy? The time to choose between these futures is upon us. If we don’t explicitly make this choice, then we choose our present course.
In that case, Australia’s policy of continuing to mine, burn, and export coal for decades will ensure that we play a pivotal role in accelerating the planet’s rapid approach to irreversible climate changes.
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In short, we’re stuffed. I have no faith in politicians. Look at the loonies calling the tune in the Liberal Party and they are totally rational compared with their ilk in the US.
“King Coal” OWNS every Labor, Liberal and National pollie in Australia, so Krudd and Co. have ‘run dead’ on factual information to the Public, other than to make broad ‘bulls**t statements about how they are doing so much to stop Global Warming…which are ALL great big fat LIES!
The Mad Monk, now the leader of the Libs, is a non-believer in anything other than his personal God, who will of course, save HIM when the time comes. Of course! Krudd seems to be of the same mind… that being an oxy-moron, of course. None of them really HAVE a mind.
Which means I have to agree with GraemeF…we are STUFFED!
Thank you for the article James Risbey but those of us who have the brains to understand are already very much converted to the cause…the others, the pollies, the religious nutters, the people paid by Big Business to obfuscate all truth in the name of GREED, will not allow information, intelligence and sense to penetrate their Troglodyte grey matter.
As some have noted, the human race has already lasted for too long for the health of the Planet. If anything else survives our selfish, greedy, mindless devastation, one could hope that they will learn from out mistakes from anthropological records in the future. They will have to be able to survive in a very toxic environment.
Whilst I agree that we are stuffed if Australia and the USA were the only countries in the world. But they aren’t - Australia is essentially unimportant in terms of total emissions, and that’s a great thing as clearly Australia is not going to repsond to any issue of substance in a positive and progressive manner - that possibility died off with the Whitlam govt and unless the Greens get a massive swing next election it is over for us - as a nation - as anything other than a regressive lapdog of the USA.
The USA is also waning - albeit they have a long way to fall.
Nonetheless we will still be relying on luck and timely techno-fixes that hopefully will be able to compensate for the deep and widespread structural problems in the allocation of power whereby those least able to make community based decisions make the primary decisions upon which the community is based.
What gibberish. ‘Stabilizing’ CO2 and in turn ‘stabilizing climate’.
Not only is this impossible, but it is impossible to imagine how a ‘Scientist’ could arrive at formulating such a position.
We do indeed live in a new ‘dark age’.
With Billie Bob Hall on this one, for sure.
What gobbledigook.
I guess the general idea is that ‘they’, the ‘scientists’ will ‘fix’ it all so we don’t have to exercise any greater degree of self control than is absolutely necessary.
This is the price of all the gadgets and conveniences - being beholden to mad scientists and their idiot politician accomplices.
Well if you want to “stabilize” the climate, just do it to your bit, eh? - leave my bit to do its own thing.
I must quibble with two statements herein. The author speaks of ‘irreversible’ climate change when all climate change is eventually reversed given enough time. It’s just that several billion, if not all, of humanity will have disappeared. And CCS is a total con, that will never work, ever. Ocean acidification is actually the greatest calamity, but little understood by the intellectually deficient ‘aspirationals’, whose sole interest, in any case, is feeding their egomania and cupidity. I think Abbott is a brilliant choice, and epitomises the Liberal Party ethos. I believe he will be our next PM-at least I hope so! ‘Cometh the hour..’ or ‘The times will suit me’-take your pick.
A great article, but very, very scary.
The mainstream media have a lot to answer for as they give oxygen to the deniers in the name of ‘balance.’ In just a few short years the world will be a very different place and people will be demanding why our leaders didn’t lead when they knew the risks.
The politics of Labour and their deeply-flawed CPRS is disgusting.
Um…Hasn’t anyone here read about ‘Climategate’ yet?
The East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the biggy when it comes to IPCC GW modeling, has been telling porkies:
Hiding the temperature declines over the last 7 or so years.
Hiding the record global temperatures of 1,000 years ago.
Building fudge factors into their modeling code to ensure the graph kept climbing despite falling temperatures (concurrent with increasing CO2 levels).
Attempting to control debate and prevent publication of research that didn’t agree with them.
Destroying and withholding data.
And more.
People who think the coal companies are the bad guys are only seeing part of the picture…there are other companies of far greater wealth and power that expect to make massive gains on the back of carbon trading and the forced global investment into the next investment bubble it would accomplish and one of them is well represented by its former top dogs now sitting pretty in the US executive branch.
Do a bit of digging. Go on. I dare you.
Spot on James. Imagine if the world phased-out coal by 2030 like it did CFCs?
Fostermann apears to be a typical denialist, ie he has no conception of the truth and takes all other people to be idiots, like himself and the rest of the denialist rabble. CRU is but one of hundreds of research centres, learned societies Academies of Science etc that unanimously support the anthropogenic climate change theory. Fostermann et al, on the other hand, are led by scientific luminaries whose names will echo down through the ages like Andrew Bolt and Barnaby Joyce. The stolen e-mails have been, in typical denialist manner, twisted, misrepresented and taken completely out of context. The denialist industry, like its forebears the tobacco harm denialists, having no scientific credence, rely totally on smear, innuendo and outright lies, and on the ignorance, stupidity and viciousness of the Rightwing mob, now running amok in a feeding frenzy I expect to be successful in installing Abbott as our next PM. No political leader in this country ever failed by appealing to the great Australian public’s grr-eed, stupidity and total disinterest in the fate of others.
An excellent article from James Risbey.
Rudd, like Howard before him, is prepared to act on the looming emergency as long as it does not upset the economy. But as anyone old enough to remember WW2 will tell him, you just can’t swing that.
CCS is a fool’s paradise, and those trying to develop it, and accepting a hell of a lot of government money in the process, must be aware of that. If it works, the total mass of liquid CO2 (at pressures around 100 atmospheres) that must be transported from sites of production to sites of sequestration is around 10 times the annual mass of oil transported globally. And that is just to hold the CO2 level in the air constant, never mind reducing it.
But there are plenty of additional reasons for doubt that it will work.
It is going to cost to switch to renewables and benign methods of electricity production; to convert transport to non-CO2 generating motors; to switch agriculture towards being a CO2 sink rather than source. That is inescapable, and the longer it is put off, the costlier it will be. By caving in to the denialists and choosing the easy political route of the CPRS, the Rudd government is probably ensuring that not a single net molecule of CO2 will be removed from the atmosphere. But the inevitable rorting (which is built into the scheme from the outset) will cost the nation enormously.
http://noahsarc.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/are-denialists-in-denial/
Fostermann, don’t like East Anglia? Try NASA, they even have satellite pictures of melting ice caps and they rate 2006 as the hotest year not 1998. No sign of cooling. Which communist plot has suborned NASA? http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
The hacked emails show bad behaviour of 3 scientists out of thousands. Heads should roll but it only brings into consideration one set of figures in one set of papers. The entire climate change consensus does not rely on this information.
Deniers are either idiots or liers. Stick to claiming that warming is natural. That takes more than 1 minute to disprove. Unfortunately the irrational anti-science deniers are given almost equal coverage in the media which is sowing confusion and will result in nothing of consequence happening.
Doug Evans
Bolt’s a lier, Fielding’s an idiot, Plimer is an alien from outer space, Fostermann’s one or more of these. Don’t waste time and energy on them they are the irritating symptoms of a very transient phenomenon. There is still a chance of retrieving the situation. Inaction whether out of despair or stupidity equates to choosing (probably within two or three decades) the destruction of civilization as we know it and even perhaps (in the longer term) the end of human life on earth. Pessimism may be understandable but hope is still possible. We must strive to retrieve the situation. There is no alternative. Recent developments in the House Under the Hill in Canberra give me hope that in Australia at least, the political dynamic is beginning to favor the inconvenient climatic truth that we confront. KRudd and the KRuddites are now forced to think again on climate policy. With an ounce of luck the results of by-elections in Higgins and Bradfield might persuade them that the not so subtle threats of the mining and power lobbies are not the only messages they need to pay attention to on climate change. Perhaps appearing centre stage at Copenhagen with only flimsy veils of spin to cover his policy nakedness KRudd might decide belatedly to get himself a nice three-piece climate policy suit. Despite their rejection of the CPRS the Lib-Nats must have a climate change policy to take to the election. Having wrestled each other down into a very brown sticky mess during their CPRS negotiations the two main political forces in the Lucky Country might find themselves competing to out-green each other in the lead up to the 2010 elections. ‘How naive’ you groan? We’ll see. An ETS (even a good one) is not the only strategy (or even the best strategy) that can be adopted to get things moving. A sensibly strengthened Renewable Energy Target, serious action on energy efficiency, serious action to protect forests, serious work on biochar and low emissions agriculture, a comprehensive gross feed in tariff even carbon taxes on those bits of the economy (30 or 40%?) not covered by the about-to-fail CPRS are all fruitful areas of investigation. The ground is now shifting very quickly under the feet of the politicians when it comes to this issue. Instead of sinking into self indulgent despair stand up and fight. Fight for the future. Get involved. When we have 50,000 instead of 500 on the streets for climate change demonstrations, when our elected representatives have to run the gauntlet of 50 or 60 climate change demonstrators to enter or leave their electoral offices – then they will pay attention. As I write this KRudd’s CPRS has just gone down the gurgler in Canberra. Now is the time get up and fight for the future!
too right Doug Evans, this is the most serious problem of our generation (at least). Inaction is not an option, but action will involve changing the way power is distributed both within and between countries. That’s a good thing.
My response to Mulga and Graeme.
Mulga, drop the ad hominem attacks. They’re nothing more than insults and mud-slinging. Address the issue. Smear is exactly what you’re guilty of in your post. Perhaps you’re a fundamentalist of sorts and see everything as black and white, us and them. I’m not. I’m no fan of Andrew Bolt and I have little to no knowledge of Barnaby Joyce as politics and the game-playing and its frequently puerile debating methods tends to make me nauseous. Your fury might be better spent addressing Mr Gore’s hypocrisy in matters of CO2 emissions.
Graeme, the East Anglia stuff’s barely been touched on by the media. East Anglia’s not just any climate research organisation. Their work was foundational to the IPCC and its announcements to the global media being one of only four sources used by the IPCC and arguably the most influential. In this position they prevented the work of many other scientists from seeing the light of day. Thanks for the link to http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ Did you read where the information had come from? See the bottom of the page. Please understand: The very code used to model likely scenarios in the future, the same models being used as a basis for justifying a global CO2 tax and the ‘cap and trade’ and related plans that will make Mr Gore and Goldman Sachs even more wealthy was deliberately screwed with to give desired (high temperature) results. Now, why do you start acting like a fascist calling me an idiot or a liar for not believing what you do? Do some research. You’ll be surprised at the ‘idiots’ and ‘liars’, some of whom are top climate scientists, who don’t go along with you. Please drop the name-calling and respond rationally.
For anyone who’d like to do some research instead of forming their opinions purely on the basis of what their newspapers and TVs say here are some things you might want to look at:
1. Throughout history CO2 levels have risen in response to warming not been the cause of it. A simple example: Warmer oceans release dissolved CO2.
2. During the Medieval Warm Period the earth was warmer than it is today:
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html
3. CO2 functions to warm the atmosphere as water does though in far weaker fashion, through IR absorption and emission not, strictly speaking, through a ‘greenhouse’ effect, hence CO2’s role in warming is secondary to actual heat available to warm it and much less than that of water. The human contribution to these gases is about 0.28% of which less than half is CO2.
4. One of the most powerful forces influencing climate on earth is convection.
5. Recently the earth has been cooling. Yes, it’s only been for the last several years but the fact it’s done so despite rising CO2 levels should be reason for pause. Actually, the most rapid change in global temperatures ever measured happened over the last two years.
6. When I was a kid in the 70s the big fear was global cooling. Does anyone else remember the talk of a looming ice-age?
7. Earth warmed in the 20s and cooled again in the 70s.
8. Sunspot activity powerfully influences climate. These both dropped to extreme lows in 2008. In the past low sunspot activity has strongly correlated with global cooling.
9. There are growing differences between the temperature readings from urban versus rural environments.
10. “”There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, [the Kyoto Protoco] would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures - one-twentieth of a degree by 2050.” Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia,
and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service.
etc.
By the way, though this is not hard evidence, I am informed by a friend who works at CSIRO that due to political pressure they have been forbidden to continue debating AGW by email any longer. No consensus there either.
For anyone who might be wondering, my politics lean very much to the left. I strongly support the development and use of renewable energy sources and have for many years and believe the oil industry is guilty of everything from murder to price-fixing. As far as lifestyle goes, I live in a way that has (comparatively, in Australia) very low environmental impact. I simply don’t like lies and the abuse of power. And I’ve been finding the weather in Sydney rather chilly of late.
If you’re worried about CO2 emissions, did you know that the US military’s CO2 emissions in Iraq are equivalent to those produced by an additional 25 million cars in the US?
Doug Owens and anyone else who thinks calling people names is a substitute for rational comment, please see above.
May be of interest:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16339
For the scientists among us:
http://www.john-daly.com/co2-conc/updated.htm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/24/
(See “A new view on GISS data, per Lucia” at bottom.)
(Forgive me: Doug EVANS not Doug Owens)
Excellent article, oblivously to close to the truth judging by some of the scared comments here. It’s true fear provokes some realy stupid answers to problems, like Rudd’s CPRS.
Fostermann bring up the ice age furphy yet again. A couple of scientists bring out a paper saying we were heading to an ice age and newspapers thought it was a great shock horror story. It was quickly squashed by peer revue. It died the death that climate change would suffer if the data didn’t come up to scratch.
With the deniers favourite sport of cherry picking I can understand the reluctance to release raw data. I don’t approve but when the deniers have a track record for dirty pool you don’t want them to yet again distort data.
I have been told that ice sheets in the arctic are increasing yet NASA satellite pictures shows the complete opposite. Tell me they are faking those as part of the great conspiracy theories that are constantly dragged out. Are NASA a bunch of deluded fools or are they part of the commie plot to bring down capitalism?
(this comment has been edited)
Fostermann, what about the organisation set up by George Bush Snr (a known greenie anarchist).
http://www.globalchange.gov/
Obviously 13 US Government departments full of deluded fools or data manipulators. Which do you think is true?
We need to pump out MORE CO2. If we doubled the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere it would have negligible effect on climate, but the plants would love us. They’d love us so much we would increase their crop yields by up to 40% and use less water in doing so. Many commercial greenhouses currently increase CO2 levels to quicken growth, increase yields and reduce water useage.
I’m 22 years old.
Within the first 5 posts, my generation has been buggered.
#1 “In short, we’re stuffed.” i.e I get it, but fuckit.
#5 “Well if you want to “stabilize” the climate, just do it to your bit, eh? - leave my bit to do its own thing.” i.e Ignorant individualism. (Deniers: Stop arguing with them. You’re not going change someone’s mind if they haven’t got one in the first place)
How about some hope? Positive thinking? strength?
If even those of you who recognise how very real this issue is, start chanting “we’re stuffed”. you know what? We are.
Again, don’t argue with the deniers. They’re not the enemy, they’re rats running on the treadmill that pumps out newspapers. They’re an amusing but inconsequential minority.
Take aim at yourselves, convince yourselves there is still a chance to fix this. Stand up and do everything you possibly can to avoid having the planet fall out from under our feet.
We’re not stuffed. Grit your teeth and keep at it.
Ty Rigby
Fostermann: What if denialists like you get sufficient political clout around the world to decide the totality of global policy, resulting in a do-nothing approach to CO2 emissions, and then you all turn out to be wrong?
BTW I wish you denialists were right, but I’m not betting the next few human generations on it.
GraemeF, it is entirely incorrect to criticise the local media sewer for giving deniers’..almost equal coverage..’. In the Fairfax papers, perhaps, but in that mighty edifice of ignorance, mendacity and human perfidy that is News Ltd, our version of FoxNews, the detestable ‘The Australian’ in particular, the bias towards denialism is absolute. As with all this propaganda system’s output, the coverage is 95-100% towards the extreme Right. As with coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict, or the neo-colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we see absolute bigotry and propagandising. And the denialist rabble congratulate them on their ‘balance’. ‘Fair and balanced’ as FoxNews says. Pathological liars on the Right are psychopaths, so perhaps treatment might help, but as for the disease of the soul, where the denialists are prepared to see billions die simply to protect business profits and to ‘win’ an ideological battle over the hated ‘Left’, that seems to me incurable. And congratulations to Fosterman for illustrating the intellectual insufficiency of the denialist ignorati. Every one of your ten points has been refuted, explained or laughed at by real scientists and the even minimally intelligent lay public for years. It does not stop those too stupid to understand, or too unprincipled to learn from their errors from endlessly recycling them, but it beautifully illustrates the intellectual milieu you and your denialist ilk inhabit.
James, as a “climate scientist” I bow to you when it comes to facts and figures. However, shouldn’t you be addressing the most pressing issue at the moment, ‘THE CREDIBILITY OF CLIMATE SCIENTISTS IS SHOT.” Professor Phil Jones has been forced to stand down from his posision at the CRU. Michael Mann’s research methodology is being investigated by his University.
As long as the scientists with a vested interest obfuscate and pretend not to notice, the more heads will roll and the bigger the stink is going to be.
Check this out.
“Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change “consensus.”
To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.00027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.”
As usual, Follow the Money
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870393940457456612425020549…
I’m with yellowbird on this one.
And yea, it would be great if the denialists were right - but betting on that would be irresponsible. I think the ship sailed on that debate many years ago and it’s like arguing with flat earthers and people who believe the moon landings were faked or the Queen runs the drug trade.
Yowie: “We need to pump out MORE CO2. If we doubled the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere it would have negligible effect on climate, but the plants would love us.”
I take it that you got that from Alan Jones, the Mad Monk or some denialist website.
The fact is that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is only going up because in global terms, the plants can’t keep pace with it. Forget those in greenhouses.
As for the negligible effect on climate, I suggest you read the James Risbey piece (above), particularly the following bit:
“The release of stored methane and carbon dioxide from natural stores in the biosphere could be triggered by the warming and is more likely the greater the warming. Such feedbacks have the potential to greatly accelerate the warming and to continue that process regardless of our attempts to reduce emissions. That is, we could lose control of our ability to ‘regulate’ the rate at which greenhouse gas emissions increase and the climate would be truly out of our control.”
Thanks for the article, which frankly makes the choice all the more stark.
It continues to bemuse me that apha-male, money-and-power-hungry types assume that everyone - but in particular scientists - are motivated by money, greed and “vested interests”.
Were the geeky kids at their schools particularly avaricious? Could any of them actually claim to personally know a greedy, corrupt scientist? Or rather, is it simply easier (and disingenuous) to “call the kettle ‘black’?”
I stumbled on Miranda Devine’s article at http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/climate-doomsayers-caught-out-…
and thought it prudent to read further - for instance, from the alleged “corrupt scientists” themselves:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/comme…
Upon reading more widely:
• the body of independently reviewed scientific evidence (i.e. using documented scientific method);
• the deliberate salacious quoting of this concocted “Climategate”, while misunderstanding the actual scientific content; and
• the fact that the “sceptics” have created unsubstantiated sh*t-storms only when it looked like the world was in danger of actually doing something,
all suggest that it is the motives and interests vested in the status quo which lie open to question.
Are any of these sceptical individuals passionately fighting any of the more obvious (actual) frauds or injustices that bedevil the world? I’m not willing to bet life as we know it on their bona fides.
Congratulations to James Risby on an excellent and timely article. He probably feels ‘like a voice crying in the wilderness. At age 67 I have great sympathy for the views of Yellowbird, who is a year older than my eldest grandson. I offer him my apologies for my generation’s stupidity and ask him to note he can vote at the next election, as can I. I suspect we will be on the same side. This issue should be apart from politics, but of course it’s not, since it involves the expenditure of large sums of money in order to solve it. It also requires the transfer of large amounts of money from some people’s pockets . Most people are upset at the thought of losing money, especially the “rieh.” I believe Climate Deniers are either in the Rich camp or are mercenaries in their employ. If we are very lucky, using the term advisedly, there will be some really unpleasant surprises awaiting us in the next few years, climate wise. This may jolt the vast, dull, unthinking mass of population, and even some at the big end of town, into demanding some real action. Can I say this to the deniers, there is money to be made if you actively embrace the science of climate change! You should be out there doing what entrepreneurs do and using this need to your own advantage, setting up ‘green’ businesses etc.
I just have to reply to Fosterman’s laughable Ten Points Manifesto, from 2/12 at 1130.
Point One is incorrect, and the fact has been pointed out innumerable times, but that never stops the denialist rabble. CO2 levels rise after the end of Ice Ages, where the inter-glacial warmings are set in train by the increase in insolation caused by changes in the Earth’s orbit and the angle of tilt on its axis known as the Milankovitch Cycles.This warming helps liberate carbon, as CO2 and methane, from the oceans and melting permafrost, and this increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere furthers the warming. In other words Fosterman has it arse-about, as they say.
Point Two is also incorrect. The MWP is known to have effected only part of the planet, unlike today’s warming, so Fosterman is WRONG again. This, too, has been pointed out by real scientists over and over again, but when did that ever stop a denialist?
Point Three is incoherent gibberish. Must try harder.
Point Four is ‘stating the bleeding obvious’. Your point is what, exactly? Surely you cannot be so deluded as to believe that the 99% of climatologists who ascribe to anthropogenic climate change do not know of atmospheric convection, and only self-professed denialist geniuses like yourself understand its role?
Point Five is simply incorrect no matter how it is looked at, unless your aim is deliberate disinformation. In any case the climate is a chaotic system, and to expect global temperatures to slavishly follow greenhouse gas concentrations, year by year, is idiocy, or deliberate obfuscation intended to impress the dullards.
Point Six is also incorrect. A few climatologists predicted an Ice Age, but most were already predicting climate change, most in the direction of warming. In any case, science has advanced since those days. It tends to do so, even if denialists prefer to be stuck in the ’70s-the 1870s that is.
Point Seven is pure ignorance. The climate, as I said, and you learn in high-school if you make it that far, is a chaotic system, and moves about around long-term trend lines.
Point Eight is weird. Yes, sunspot activity is way down, yet warming continues. What do you expect? That sunspots will stay this low forever? When they get back to higher levels, watch the warming go into overdrive.
Point Nine is more bleeding obvious claptrap. The ‘urban heat effect’ is well understood and irrelevant. And Point Ten is really risible. Singer is notorious, an ex-tobacco harm denialist with zero credibility amongst real climatologists. Your choice of sources is revealing.
So Fosterman, I’ll give you a generous 2/10 and a fail.
[This comment has been edited]
An excellent summary presentation of the essential climate science. What’s missing - it couldn’t have been fitted in - is an equally clear presentation of the renewable energy engineering solutions available in Australia, to replace coal burning for electricity - the major and increasing source of our GHG emissions. Chapters 6-10 of my new book “Crunch Time”” explores this technology in a practical and - dare I say it - optimistic way.
I would advise correspondents to NM - don’t waste time and energy arguing with deniers - they are flat-earth dogmatists with calcified brains. Put your intellectual energy instead to developing expertise in thinking about practical ways of getting our national energy emissions down by 25% by 2020.We will need large engineering solutions to do this - not just clever financial engineering, but real physical engineering of grid connections for the new renewable energy technologies that are available.
Having found our way through climate science with the help of guides like James Risbey, we then need to find our way through energy engineering as well. That way lies hope.
If only scientists realized that they have to be humane and humanists that they need to be scientific.
The data in this article deals with the relationship between the tonage of carbon released into the atmoshere and the warming produced by such.
How come that guy from James Cook uni, can produce a nice graph showing the average temperatures over the century being largely unaffected by the amount of industrial carbon going skyward.
Dr Risbey is convinced that we have another 190gt to go before we go to hell.
Also we are told that there is a percentage of CO2 when reached that will lead to destruction of the GBR (Coral reef).
Are the warmists the modern Darwinists?
Is their philosophy not a religion?
Darwin, like Freud, like Einstein were brilliant minds who saw causality and relationships which most of us would never see in a hundred lifetimes.
Darwin proposed an evolutionary progression against entropy (physics dictates that the laws of thermodynamics and entropy are obeyed)yet species would continue a march forward into greater and greater complexity, while everythin else cools off and winds down.
Freud took the notion of mental illness out of the realm of witchcraft and exorcism to a science of mind based on what he termed the fountainhead of psychosexual development, only to have his close friend and colleague Carl Jung challenge it and develop a psychology beyond ego, id and superego to the “archetypes” and spirituality of man’s ‘collective subconscience’, neither theories being provable however applicable to individual cases.
Einstein showed that matter and energy are manifestations of the same thing, but failed to prove what that thing was, and died perplexed saying on the one hand “god does’nt play dice with the universe”, but Newton’s Laws should operate for larger entities than the milkyway or smaller entities than the nucleus of the atom.
In summary then, scientific theories come and go as they should as new evidence comes to light, and those who cling to disproven ideas inspite of the facts are as guilty of blind faith as the people they accuse.
Einstein accused the religious men of the day of “slavish adherence to outmoded mysticism”, how ironic…this actually describes what became of him with regard to “the unified field theory”.
We mus’nt let this debate degenerate into the “Warmists Vs antiwarmists”, or we really have’nt progressed beyond Jonathan Swift’s critique of the characters in “Gulliver’s Travels”. Oli
James Risbey,
Your balance between science and imagery is effective.
Climate scientists- please patiently continue sharing your science effectively,
because Climate Destabilization knowledge brings grief, and the denial, anger, and bargaining stages of grief delay your students ability to learn.
All people who have reached acceptance- please lead by example, and lead fast!
Thank you.
Gotta be quick on this but hope to get back later today or tomorrow.
A little something re: NASA
“Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed that data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for first, with 1934 slightly cooler.”
(I found this in an article about someone who’s trying to get NASA to release its data.)
Also, a NZ scientist with NIWA (?) is in trouble at present for fudging temperature figures as well.
Some of us have believed this AGW thing for so long we have a hard time believing it mightn’t be quite what we’ve been told. I was one of them.
Great article.
But it’s no use putting down climate change deniers, if you’re a believer it is your civic duty to try and convert them.
It is only evidence based science that will convince non believers of the dire circumstances in which we are heading if we continue to increase CO2 in the biosphere.
Because as the Earth’s crust is slowly cooling (since creation) the warming of the atmosphere creates a more volatile weather system anyway, which as you point out is also dependent on spasmodic solar activity which in essence must be slowly decreasing in output power (since creation).
But by far the least understood part of our planet, the oceans stand to lose the most due to the destructive forces of increased CO2 level; with many of its creatures already under threat, including the Barrier Reef.
And the irreversible, scary part is that when there’s no more ice caps left (possibly less than 50 years at present rates of disappearance) and the oceans are already at full capacity (having wiped out millions of people as they rise (with both volume and temperature expansion) and the earth is dry and barren, barely able to support life.
I also think its about time a zero world population was considered by the UN, as the extra strain of an exponentially increasing population on the earth’s resources, will only speed up these potentially destructive and life threatening processes induced by anthropological activities.
We’ll try again……
At last someone who understands climate science or should….so we can ask intelligent questions …. maybe.
The basis for most of the article rests on that seemingly innocent first paragraph:
We have developed the ability to see what the future may have in store for the climate,
If that assumption (i.e. the “MAY” word) is wrong (i.e. if the GCMs are wrong) then the whole premise of the article is wrong! So here come the questions:
- Tell me which GCMs predict El Nino, THF, PDO, NAO or any of the major heat transfer events on the earth?
- Which GCMs accurately predict cloud formation or rainfall?
- Which GCMs model turbulence or mixing on any scale?
- How do we know what the boundary and initials are to within any reasonable values?
- And all this on a massive 2x4 degree grid which ignores all sub grid transfers?
- So in view of all this and the fact that every single IPCC sponsored GCM prediction has been wrong how can you say that any GCM models have predictive skill?
Climatologists have picked 2 degrees as the rough number that separates “manageable” impacts from major, irreversible changes to the planet.
First: how did they pick this magical 2C? Next where did “major irreversible” come from. We know that both during recent history and in the far past temps have been much higher than 2C warmer and planet and life survived just fine!
Beyond about 2 degrees we would be committing to high likelihoods of melting the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. This would ultimately result in a dozen or so metres of sea level rise that will change the geography of coastal environments and cities for tens of millennia.
What utter rubbish! The last warming caused sea levels to rise ~20-30m higher than present levels and the previous cooling about 100m lower. Again the earth survived quite happily as did most mammals and other life including out ancestors!
And in any case it is all going to happen by itself anyway! We are now about 5-6000 years overdue for another Ice Age which is a truly terrifying scenario, far more so than any global warming doomsday.
EITHER SCENARIO MEANS MAJOR IMPACTS ON CIVILISATION!
Stuff about CO2 and ocean acidity
So how did the corals survive CO2 of 2-4 x predicted i.e. 1-2000+ppm before?
runaway feed back possibility
If this is likely why has this “runaway greenhouse” NEVER happened in the 3 billion year history of the earth before when warming occurred and CO2 and methane and other GHG were order of magnitude larger than now?
stuff about how much CO2 we emit
But fossil fuels WILL run out in the next 200 years. Based on known reserves it is only possible to emit another ~1000Gt so the max ppm we can reach is limited to ~500ppm!
There is no way to stay inside this allotment without a rapid phase-out of emissions from coal.
As a mathematician/scientist you will realise that there is no way for us to do this with our current technology without a return to the caves. We need a reliable base load energy source and the only alternative in the short term is nuclear until we get the PT and PV to usable efficiencies.
While the science of climate change is clear in pointing out the need for rapid action in order to avoid monumental climate change
With all due respect this is just rubbish! The predictions of extremely primitive, and coarse computer models is NOT science!
The rest of the article is just harem scarem stuff to support some philosophical point of view.
Really, the vocal denialists can’t be converted. However, it doesnt stop them trying to spread the same old rubbish, its effective because most denialists only need one lame excuse to hold on to ‘we dont need to change anything’. Im not going to bother refuting denialists such as Fostermann, people have already done the hard work on sites such as this:
http://skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Dont be confused about the media reporting the sceptics view in terms of balance. Balance it is not. There are not hundred of real scientists that are qualified to say so that deny climate change and/or that CO2 is the cause. There is maybe one or two, but Im struggling to find their names!
Nothing can be more evident of that in how that Fostermann quotes Fred Singer. The cash for comment retired scientist. No he is no longer a practising professor nor holds any post or has done any research into the climate. Yes he has received monies from oil companies and tobacco companies for points of view to deceive the gullible.
I was just catching up on a year old episode of 60 minutes where 15mins of oxygen was given to Dr David Evans on how the climate wasnt changing. His qualifications in atmospheric science…zero, peer reviewed papers on the topic….zero.
Vested interests-substantial, share holdings, company investments, interest in goldnerds.com.au ……not disclosed.
Recently the same sort of oxygen has been given to Ian Plimer(do a search on his mining interests), and we have the leader of the opposition telling us that is where he gets his information, Lord help us
Look very closely at the qualifications and background of any “scientist” that is given oxygen in the media(the same old charletons will reappear), just a google search should make any discerning person real backwards at a hundred miles an hour!
Thanks much for the many insightful comments. I wish to respond
to a couple of points.
My main point is not that we are “stuffed”, but that we have a choice
to make, and that we are increasingly locking in one particular choice
by default. However, it is still a choice. We don’t have to keep
burning fossil fuels, sprawling our cities, and cutting down our
forests. The technology and skills exist to make the transition out
of fossil fuels, and if we exercise the political will, we can do it
in a way that would still avoid the worst climate impacts. But we
can’t do it in a half-hearted manner, and we can’t do it by
transferring the problem to someone else as we simply don’t have the
time now. Whether we can muster the required political will or not is
a topic for another post, but if we assume we can’t, then we help
ensure that we can’t.
I would like to mention ‘climategate’ because it is much in the news,
but confine my comment to whether it has any significance for the
robustness of conclusions about climate change. In short, no. As
Peter Kelemen has pointed out
(http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4338343.html), climate
science is not a house of cards. Just because some findings are
called into question does not mean that the whole base of evidence for
greenhouse climate change collapses. Kelemen notes that the
appropriate analogy for the evidence base is not a house of cards, but
a “deck of cards, spread out, face up. Some data and interpretations
of those data are more certain than others, of course. But pulling out
one or two interpretations, or the results of a few scientists, does
not change the overall picture.” Multiple, independent lines of
evidence and tests point to the overwhelming role of anthropogenic
greenhouse gases in driving contemporary climate change.
Just want to cast my vote for your article, James. We need more scientists who know how to write for lay people, and we need them getting their articles in the mainstream press as much as the mainstream will give them a voice (sigh).
I also think Peter Doherty’s article in the Monthly sums up, from a scientist’s POV, our whole sceptics-in-the-media debacle:
http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-peter-doherty-copenhagen-and…
UNIVERSITY TACKLES SCEPTICS’ ARGUMENTS
“Dr Brett Parris, a research fellow at Monash University and World Vision Australia’s chief economist, [who trained as a geologist,] has developed a 48-page document outlining scientific responses to questions and objections proposed by sceptics.”
In the article as well as in the comments above, scientific arguments differ, predictions of catastrophy vary in ferocity and the scale and scope of the impact over which humans have any control at all is debated quite sensibly.
The only statement I would like to make is that whether or not a devastating global effect will result, doing nothing will mean that local climates surrounding our cities and the quality of the air we breath in those cities will continue to decline.
There is an enormous cost associated with acid rain, local pollution and other conditions that, everyone agrees, are directly a result of our modern industrial culture.
Isn’t that reason enough to act? If it is done properly, we can, without bringing on economic ruin by creating an ETS, identify an economic imperative, and economically sustainable programmes and methods to fix things!
Sure, there is some urgency, depending on your point of view, but we should be able to sell the idea without having to wave the “Save the Planet” flag.
Fosterman, I won’t bother answering your rubbish point by point, but just make one observation. To believe your denialist position, gleaned, so it appears from notorious denialist sources like the laughable ‘Petition Project’ and ‘Watts up with that?’one simply has to believe that the thousands of scientists involved in the IPCC process, the world governments and their scientific advisors who vet their reports, all the Academies of Science of the planet, all the learned scientific societies and all the learned journals, which unanimously support the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis, are either lying, or are stupid and ignorant (unlike exemplars like yourself and Andrew Bolt)or are part of a massive Communist conspiracy to destroy capitalism. Despite your pompous pretension and fatuous regurgitation of denialist pabulum, despite the concerted efforts of the extreme Right which has spent billions to sabotage the work of the IPCC and which has turned over the entire Rightwing media propaganda apparatus to the cause of whipping up hysteria in the Rightwing denialist lynch-mob, the scientific consensus grows stronger, and the predictions of future climate change more dire, by the hour. Above all else we have the evidence from the field of rapid climate change particularly from the Arctic and high mountain regions. In Nepal, for instance, within the last ten years, temperatures have risen by several degrees, disrupting agriculture, melting glaciers and threatening an apocalypse when the glacier-fed rivers of South Asia dry up in coming decades, if not years. Deny that one! It should be an amusing exercise in gallows humour.
As for ‘Climategate’ it is indicative of the denialists’ gift for crime, in this case theft, lying, in this case the selective quotation of extracts of conversations to build a fraudulent case (an old denialist speciality)hypocrisy, because we know that the denialist industry will not release their e-mails (as with the tobacco harm denial industry, internal communications from this rabble would reveal real conspiracies to lie, mislead and confuse)and thuggishness. The denialist thugs have tried to hack other scientists, break into their offices, are threatening them in e-mails and other communications, are pestering them with repetitive demands for information, a form of harassment intended to subvert their work, and which information, in any case, when received, is twisted and distorted to perfidious ends.
Fosterman, in my opinion you are but a tiny cog in a great engine of misrepresentation, intimidation, disinformation and untruth that is now running amok, like a lynch-mob searching for victims. The Rightwing ideologues and business interests that brought this malign crusade to life realised that they could raise a mob from the Right by portraying the science of anthropogenic climate change as a straight Right vs Left ideological context, but surely even they must be somewhat concerned how this rabble are now running out of control, traducing, vilifying and threatening the global scientific community. But perhaps, in their malignity, they simply do not care.
Karl (see above) refers us to the following website for addressing arguments of those skeptical of AGW: http://skepticalscience.com/argument.php
It’s an interesting site (and I’m a skeptic) but if one doesn’t probe deeper than the first page, i.e. doesn’t look at the (largely scientific and generally free of ad hominem attack) discussions in the comments for the different topics you’ll miss (what I consider) the really interesting stuff.
Here’s another one which I think’s worth a visit: http://icecap.us
They’re independent, not funded by industry, not in complete opposition to the concept of AGW and even have a few antipodeans in their mix.
Mulga,
You seem obsessed with Right and Left, raging against those who don’t see things as you do, much as a fundamentalist might preach fire and brimstone to unrepentant ‘unbelievers’. I’m sorry to tell you as I know you (and I) are no fan of hers but your writings actually reminded me of Miranda Devine’s during the time of the US invasion of Iraq.
You seem to have unquestioning faith in the proposition that global warming/climate change is due to human CO2 production and that the scientists and laypersons who support this viewpoint are trustworthy and those that don’t are vile, demonic, rabid, greedy, pawns of Satan. I’m not sure what you think about the many who don’t think they have sufficient information either way. Perhaps you feel they inhabit a kind of political purgatory until they embrace the salvation that agreement with you would offer. The tens of thousands of scientists who disagree, a small number of whom I know, must simply be reprobates destined for hell.
Where do we agree I wonder? Should we develop alternative and sustainable means of energy production? Yes! Should we protect our forests, rivers, oceans and farmland? Yes! Should rich nations and individuals help poor nations and individuals? Yes! Should our governments get some balls and stand up to business and tax wasteful packaging, stop the wasteful use of resources and legislate against dioxins and other ecological nasties so as to create a strong market incentive towards sustainibility and pollution minimisation? Yes! Has production of useless crap and rampant consumerism become a threat to society and the environment? Yes! But…should we support the establishment of the economic and political systems being proposed and promoted by the same people who helped the US become borderline fascist (and involving those who brought us the financial collapse and Enron) under the guise of dealing with AGW, which systems will (as has so often been the case in history, though never quite to this extent) burden the masses while enriching the super-rich who already have enormous amounts invested in support of them? I don’t think so.
You say Climategate was a crime committed by those depraved people who don’t agree with you but from what I can tell by reading the various computer geek/nerd websites the evidence is that Climategate was not a hack but a leaked ‘dump’ file: information accumulated with the (probable?) intention of destroying it for good. Which would be illegal. A crime. And what if it were hacked? Hackers are typically not supportive of right-wing policies of information control and don’t therefore fit in terribly well to your Left/Right worldview. And what of the CRU saying they’d destroyed the data supporting their model? Information that is supposed to be crucial to the world’s future?! What about withholding information contrary to Freedom of Information laws? And the fudge factors built into the model code? You don’t think these are crimes? Or perhaps massive and prolonged fraud and deception by these highly influential scientists isn’t really bad because they’re just such good people who only want what’s good for us (unlike those evil people who don’t believe them) and would never, ever do anything to try and deceive us and we really should believe them even though their models have been inaccurate and haven’t matched actual results for years and they’ve not wanted to include bothersome information from those funny right-wing satellite things in the sky which contradict their models on heat radiation and global temperatures.
You believe the scientific evidence supports AGW and I don’t. Until that evidence is rationally discussed and evaluated in public we’re likely to continue disagreeing. You believe that your beliefs make you morally superior but how can you wage a righteous war in the realm of ideas and beliefs if you feel such derision and hatred toward people who don’t agree with you?
By the way, I suggest you look at the following website and get an extra dimension to your political paradigm: www.politicalcompass.org
My political beliefs place me somewhere near Gandhi on this chart. I am not right-wing. Please don’t refer to me as such in future.
For anyone interested: http://www.icecap.us/
Since every comment is so heavily moderated perhaps a youtube link might make it past the the tight Pravda censorship on these topics:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zOXmJ4jd-8
Dear Icedvolvo,
In your comment you assume (incorrectly) that General Circulation
Models (GCMs) are the main basis for predicting climate responses to
increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Most expectations about
future temperature changes derive from theory and from observations of
past climate changes on a variety of different timescales. GCMs
provide only a supporting role in understanding these changes and in
helping to illustrate regional differences in warming rates. The
future impacts that I outlined in the article are not dependent on the
simulations of GCMs.
The 2C number is a tradeoff as the article indicated. There is no
magic warming number where impacts are safe below and dangerous above.
However, we do know that for warming above 2C that we are much more
likely to set in train processes like the disintegration of Greenland
and West Antarctic ice sheets. Such processes are ‘irreversible’ in
the sense that they may continue to disintegrate beyond a certain
level of warming regardless of attempts to reduce greenhouse
emissions. If the icesheets do disappear, then ‘yes’, they will
eventually reestablish themselves after some future series of glacial
periods, but that could take hundreds of thousands of years. That is
effectively ‘irreversible’ on the time scale of human generations and
perspectives. We are very unlikely to undergo the next glacial
transition to which you refer, because the greenhouse forcing of
climate to date is already sufficient to prevent that.
You have confused the issue of biosphere feedbacks to climate with the
concept of a “runaway greenhouse”. I did not mention runaway
greenhouse at all. Rather, I mentioned feedbacks from the biosphere
whereby methane and carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere
from natural sources as a result of the human-induced warming. These
are the kinds of processes which have occurred in the past in
amplifying warming of the climate.
Your figures about carbon budgets and carbon dioxide concentrations
are wrong and certainly not consistent with the established
literature. I suggest you consult the Global Carbon Project:
http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/
The philosophical point of view espoused in the article is to draw out
the implications of the established science and the carbon budget.
That provides a framework in which to establish carbon targets and
timetables. That reveals some pretty stringent constraints, but
that’s what we have to, and can, work with if we’re serious about this.
Really Fostermann, the extent which denialists will go to find any lame info that tells them what they want to hear: http://www.icecap.us/
Did you bother with some research, did you look up the notorious contributers and their links to these notorious right wing outfits: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Science_and_Public_Policy_Ins…, and http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Frontiers_of_Freedom.
Sorry I didnt get past most of the rubbish on the site, the role of nitrogen was amusing, yes we know it is 79% of atmospheric gases, but its IR absorption potential, sadly not mentioned.
Its all about CO2, which is at 100000 year highs that absorbs IR reflected radiation, that is the indisputable science. Point me to any skeptic site that tells us that there is something wrong with the 100 year old knowledge of this phenomenon and then skeptics will perhaps be listened to, instead of being treated like the deception criminals they deserve to be treated as.
Thank you for a clear and concise article, this is very valuable in the work that my group does to communicate climate change.
So… the only option is to talk to people at the level they can relate to, create the facts, the reality, in their personal risks at local level, their personal power and their personal responsibility within the great scheme of things.
When communicated at that level and up, people do not understand all the science and politics but understand that it is a concern for them and their community, their children and that they can do something to act, to make a difference. That is where political will is cultivated.
This global program, this conversation, that I coordinate on behalf of Australian Facilitators enables that on a massive infectious scale.
www.changingthedream.org.au
It seems bleak, but it is possible, shoulder to the wheel and let’s do it! Barbara
ICECAP: no, not funded by industry at first glance…
Scroll down to the personnel section and look no further than their founder, then click on ‘Frontiers of Freedom’. Read about tobacco and scandals and… what’s this? Why, our good friends Exxon get another mention.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Icecap
Sorry, Fostermann, lay down with people like this and you can cry foul until you’re blue in the face. If these ‘skeptic’ websites want claims to nobility, they can start by dissociating themselves completely from big oil and any other vested interests.
They like telling us to follow the money. I just did.
James,
The Models:
You say that “I assume (incorrectly) that General Circulation
Models (GCMs) are the main basis for predicting climate responses to
increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.”
No actually I said they are the ONLY basis for predicting climate response to GHGs! This is absolutely true! If you can point me to another chapter of AR4 that uses any other “theory” or “observation” than I will stand corrected. However I have read both the full report and the summary report and there is no mention of other “theories” or “observations” that predict 2-5C rises by 2100! The ONLY graphs which predict this are in Ch 9 (and Ch 10 which is model evaluation) which is directly related to GCMs (no other model types were used for AR4). Previously in history CO2 has lagged T not preceded it and solar sunspot activity shows a much closer correlation to global T than any other physical phenomena.
Melting Ice Sheets:
Yes Greenland may melt, it has done so before many times and at least twice even in our pitifully insignificant human historical record. As for taking hundreds of thousands of years this is just fairly floss. In the recent cycles both warming and cooling have taken place very rapidly i.e. within a few thousand years or so. North America went from prairie grassland to 3km thick ice sheet in less than 2000 years at the beginning of the last cycle. conversely warming occurred at about 10 times the current rate and sea levels rose 120m in 12,000 years or about 10 mm per year. These make any current changes pale into insignificance.
Runaway Effect:
Hmm so you say that CO2 causes warming which causes more CO2/methane/GHG which causes more warming ad infinitum … and this is not “runaway greenhouse”. My point was simple: earth has experienced MUCH MUCH higher levels of GHGs (of all varieties) and there is no evidence in any of the ice cores or geological record that the Earth has gone into some runaway positive feedback scenario before.
Potential CO2 Levels:
As to potential CO2 levels all I did was extract a rough total for all the known reserves of coal and oil and assume a 70% conversion to CO2 (the usual rate) and then add the stoichiometric amount of CO2 to the existing atmosphere (assuming the same biospheric buffering as has been happening since the IR started). It’s “back of the envelope” stuff but if you have better ones please quote them here for all to see.
The Science is Settled:
The science is NOT established by any means and a relatively quick search of the online databases reveals in excess of 500 peer reviewed articles which challenge “the consensus science” on the effect of greenhouse gases on climate. Two of the core predictions of the theory of AGW have recently been shown to be completely and utterly wrong: the “signature warming” in the troposphere was completely the opposite of that predicted and the relationship between a warming atmosphere and water vapour have also been proven to be wrong.
The simplest fact of all is that the main temperature determining part of the climate is the water vapour/cloud cycle and yet we still cannot predict or describe even the most basic mechanisms by which clouds form.
If you’re happy to accept that the science of climate is so settled when there are so many gaping holes in our knowledge and in the full knowledge that we cannot predict even a single major energy transfer event anywhere on the planet then that is your decision, it is certainly not mine nor is it accepted by many scientists around the world.
Alternative Energy:
James if you are really serious about moving to alternative energy sources you have no choice but to admit that we need to spend every possible dollar we can muster on basic scientific research into alternative energy sources. The only hope the long-term future is a mix of photovoltaic, solar thermal and thorium-based reactor technology. it is a completely pointless exercise to even consider moving society over to these alternative energy sources before technology is ready for large-scale deployment.
Our oil reserves will run out within 100 years and our coal reserves within 200 so within that period of time our whole society has to move from fossil fuel-based energy systems to some viable alternative. If we waste that last few hundred years on left-wing instigated politically motivated feelgood schemes to satiate the few psuedo climate messiahs then we really are stuffed as both a society and civilisation.
So, in the let’s get real department.
I am prepared to take odds that the anthropogenic warming models are wrong.
Let me know what odds you want. I have currently limited my trading to shares and ETOs. However I can see some easy money here.
Philip Dowling
Ku-ring-gai resident
@Karl & Pulpyahummer,
It’s funny how one tentative connection with oil from one (www.icecap.us) of many websites mentioned by someone you call a ‘denialist’ leads you to dismiss everything else I’ve said. But OK, if that gnat is causing so much offence try this site. Nice and clean: http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/new-e.htm
As long as you approach this as an ‘us and them’/’Truth and lies’ showdown without actually doing some research you’ll stay in exactly the same position on things. Why? Because you’ve become so wedded to your perspective, your identity so interwoven with it that you will fight facts in order to support what you think is true because your understanding of things has become entangled with your sense of identity. I was shouting ‘Global Warming!’ long before most people had heard of it. It took me a while to even consider the banner I was waving mightn’t be legit. My research since then has led me to believe the truth is nowhere near as simple as those who use terms like ‘denialist’ would like to think. Why not ‘follow the money’ on Al Gore’s side of things? His 10% ownership of the Chicago Climate Exchange (which might explain his opposition to anything to do with REDD) and the connections with JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and their plans to issue ‘carbon derivatives’. Look at the connections between the early plans to develop carbon trading legislation and Ken Lay (Enron). The banking connections are large and notable and the opportunities Al’s plan offers for financial manipulation of the market/global politics, fraudulent practices and more exotic financial vehicles along the lines of the CDSs which played such a huge role in the last slap in the face to the global economy is enormous.
And how about the science? Why is there now evidence of highly selective use of data and alteration of data not only at East Anglia but also in temperature readings from Australia, New Zealand, Russia and the US? Why do weather balloon and satellite readings give such different results from ground stations in defiance of the IPCC-approved model? Why aren’t their data included in the models? What about the evidence that tree growth is strongly correlated with cosmic rays even when temperatures drop? (This one’s particularly important given the huge emphasis on selected tree ring data for the early proxy record created by East Anglia.) Why has the average global temperature not increased since the mid-late 90s and decreased since 2002-2003 despite increasing CO2 levels? This decline is one of the things that caused so much grief to the creators/manipulators of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph because it made their climate modeling appear to be in error. Etc, etc.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11383
(Mentions dissenting ‘denialist’ scientists from the IPCC!)
Thanks for this article James. I think it succinctly describes the choices before us but from the numerous comments from people who apparently ‘know’ science is completely wrong, getting effective action on climate change is looking increasingly unlikely. Australia, far from being insignificant (as nanks appears to believe) is busily building the export infrastructure to massively increase the largest coal exporter’s capacity to export coal and gas.
We can expect all-out PR campaigns, swamping all that’s been seen to date, that are designed to reinforce and spread the misconceptions and misinformation that so many take as proof that the science of climate is fundamentally flawed or even part of a deliberate conspiracy. We can fully expect the mainstream media to be willing participants in spreading such dangerous delusion. And of course the capacity of people to put short-term self-interest ahead of the long term sustainability that’s essential for our children and grandchildren to enjoy any kind of prosperity or security seems to be boundless whereas the willingness accept that the costs of conversion to low emissions should be part of the cost of dirty energy in the present looks absent.
James, a well written article that shows our choices clearly. But the strength of opinion that considers everything science now knows about climate as wrong is strong; just read some of the comments here. That there are no serious scientific arguments that give cause to doubt the fundamentals of AGW appears irrelevant; the flaws in those counter arguments have been put to their proponents over and over without effect.
I, for one, thank the scientific community sincerely for giving us insight into the costs and consequences of ever growing dependence on fossil fuels. You have given us a window of opportunity to avert the worst consequences. That so many people are prepared to accept any unfounded, misleading and mistaken claims that science has it wrong as reason to fail to use that window is likely to mean serious action will be delayed past the point where seriously damaging consequences are already a reality and catastophic consequences a certainty. I suppose many of the same people would still be arguing against action even then.
Hi Fostermann,
While not wishing to reduce people to labels - we’re all more complex than our arguments, I’m sure - for the sake of brevity, ‘denialist’ is pretty useful for me (‘sceptic’ has been particularly abused of late). I think I can feel your anguish. You’ve obviously invested a lot of time in your research and don’t appreciate being dismissed too readily. I imagine you get a lot of blank stares when you try to ‘educate’ people in your everyday life (or do you only hang around with scientists with the ability and inclination to argue all day?) I’m no expert on the subject, but that probably frees me, more than yourself, to not have this lengthy debate become an essential part of my identity, as you seem to believe. I don’t have much of a clue about economics either, but, after paying attention to various opinions and markers and trends and what have you, I have my own opinions and philosophies on that as well (and I’m hopefully making some progress). If my identity revolved around my position on global warming, I’d probably be some sort of expert and - oh, I don’t know - maybe use my real name (so you can read my peer-reviewed scientific journals). Or, then again, I might be Andrew Bolt (I shan’t sleep tonight).
I’ll take your word for it that your latest threads are ‘clean’, as you say. (I’ll try to check them out in the next week or two.) Life’s too short - 55 comments on Mr Risbey’s article and counting. As for Mr Gore, I never got around to watching his film and I’m disappointed that you think my barracking comes from his overexposed corner. You probably should have left your ‘us and them’ argument at that instead of indulging in the same tactics. Some of us know he’s a flawed latecomer with a bigger voice than most. My life is full of grains of salt, alas.
I dread the thought that I might speak for the ‘common person’ (I don’t) but, like most of the population - or most of the part of the population that give a toss - I have to come at this with a limited scientific perspective (although I did all right in science etc, but who’s counting?). Despite this, I think I’m reasonably capable of sifting the informed from the uninformed from those in denial (‘it’s all too horrible to contemplate’) from the denialists (‘I’ve invested too much in existing financial arrangements, my ego, etc’) from the smug (‘we’ve won - they believe global warming is real…don’t they?’) and on I ramble.
Where you slot in, I don’t know, but just because you’ve had a few Damascus moments doesn’t mean you’re not Chicken Little anymore (bad mixed metaphor intended). You seem pretty genuine, Fostermann, in your search for the truth, but then again, maybe I’m just naive. Maybe your exasperations are a clever ruse and you’re no better than a fossil fuel exec (or some other posters on here who’ll remain nameless).
What if you’re right? A victory for the conspiracy theorists (not saying you’re one). Some political reshuffling. Al and his mates count their few millions instead of their extra few millions. Not a biggy, relatively speaking.
What if you’re wrong?