NASA’s Dr. James Hansen once again goes over the top. See his most recent article in the UK Guardian. Some excerpts:
“The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”
And this:
Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know. Carbon dioxide would increase to 500 ppm or more.
Only one problem there Jimbo, CO2 has been a lot higher in the past. Like 10 times higher.
From JS on June 21, 2005:
One point apparently causing confusion among our readers is the relative abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere today as compared with Earth’s historical levels. Most people seem surprised when we say current levels are relatively low, at least from a long-term perspective – understandable considering the constant media/activist bleat about current levels being allegedly “catastrophically high.” Even more express surprise that Earth is currently suffering one of its chilliest episodes in about six hundred million (600,000,000) years.
Given that the late Ordovician suffered an ice age (with associated mass extinction) while atmospheric CO2 levels were more than 4,000ppm higher than those of today (yes, that’s a full order of magnitude higher), levels at which current ‘guesstimations’ of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 suggest every last skerrick of ice should have been melted off the planet, we admit significant scepticism over simplistic claims of small increment in atmospheric CO2 equating to toasted planet. Granted, continental configuration now is nothing like it was then, Sol’s irradiance differs, as do orbits, obliquity, etc., etc. but there is no obvious correlation between atmospheric CO2 and planetary temperature over the last 600 million years, so why would such relatively tiny amounts suddenly become a critical factor now?
Adjacent graphic ‘Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time’ from Climate and the Carboniferous Period (Monte Hieb, with paleomaps by Christopher R. Scotese). Why not drop by and have a look around?
The number one risk Hansen takes is that he is the perfectly positioned fall guy or scapegoat for Politicians should they wish to exit the AGW scam.
The politicians can easily say that they were wilfully mislead by scientists such as Hansen and thus avoid the blame.
@ur momisugly E.M.Smith (16:45:32)
paranoid much?
“My conclusion? Either we have AGW trolls, or they are just not willing to use their real names. (Why? Don’t ask why…)”
There are a million reasons why folks don’t use their real names. I suppose I could start posting with the moniker “Emmet Martin Smith” would that make my posts more valid in your eyes?
For the record, I chose to use my first name and initial of my last name to retain a bit of anonymity because I don’t think its necessary to post my full name for the world-wide audience. I am not claiming to be a renowned climate scientist, nor an authority on the subject. I am here contributing as a citizen of the world, nothing more.
My profession is an instructor of geology at the community college where I live. I have a BS, MS and PhD in geology and I study subduction related volcanism. I am not a climate scientist, nor have I claimed to be, but I am a scientist.
I like to keep my identity to myself for a variety of reasons. The main reason is my opinions/views expressed here are my own. I do not want them to be linked to my professional career, nor do I want my students to come to class and say how a Google search linked them to my comments on this site. Additionally, a bit of anonymity is a good thing, even more so when some of the readers of this blog seem to have delusional tendencies. The last thing I need is white powder showing up in my mail box.
Cheers,
Ben
Paul Shanahan (16:53:21) :
On the topic of CO2 from breathing compared with the CO2 from fossil fuels (e.g. Ron de Haan (00:19:41) “a car driving at a speed of 30 mph produces the same amount of CO2 as a cyclist at full speed” )
Surely you have to take into account the size of the engine. I’m pretty sure a bog standard 8 litre Dodge Viper will pump out more CO2 at 30mph than a 1.5 litre Toyota Prius. So the car vs the bike is not really comparable. Sorry.
Here are the conversons that I found on the web. A gallon of gas is 30-38,000 kcal. Assume that a good milage car (by American standards) gets 30 miles/gallon.
A note on conspiracy.
An active conspiracy requires excellent organisation, strong and unwavering commitment from it’s proponents and superb operational secrecy.
The longer a conspiracy has to run the harder it is to maintain it.
For the above reasons – I see “conspiracy” claims as extraordinary and therefore requiring extraordinary evidence.
However – I think that the current AGW Scam can been seen in the light of a “Collusion of Means”.
This is exemplified by the “Baptists and Bootleggers” concept of the 1920s prohibition era. The Baptists wanted booze banned for religeous reasons. The Bootleggers wanted booze banned to allow for a monopoly market and increased profits. A Collusion of Means, “Booze Banned” to achieve very different and contrary ends. Of course the Baptists and bootleggers would have loathed each other and would not have associated as their means were the same, but the goals contrary.
In the AGW scam context. You have.
1. Energy companies seeking to make profit from the provision of tax funded windmills.
2. Politicians seeking to get re-elected for “saving the planet – and hence every voter”.
3. Electricity providers seeking to make profit by passing on the costs of carbon credits to their customers at inflated prices to what they paid.
4. Environmentalists, seeking self-validation and the realisation of their ideal of a “Pristine Natural World”.
5. Malthusians seeking reduced human populations.
6. Banks and other trading organisations, seeking to make increased profit from the trading of Carbon.
7. Developing countries (such as China) seeking to get western funded infrastructure (i.e. Hydro Dams) paid for by carbon credits.
8. Psychopaths, and Narcisstic Personality Disordered people seeking power, control, fame, and wealth and importance at the expense of everyone else.
The Collusion of Means is the “Control of CO2 emissions”. No active conspiracy required.
Note that some of the above would have goals of controlling CO2 to decrease CO2 emissions. Other’s, such as banks, would be happy to see CO2 emissions rise (contrary goal) – as long as they remain controlled and tradeable.
I.e Kyoto Protocol – $50B+ in profits and increased CO2 emissions…
The key losers in this scam are the everyday joe public (such as myself) who will have to pay substantially higher costs on everything that has an energy imput (i.e nearly every human activity).
AGW is the perfect rent scam. If it persists, I would expect my working life to be at least 5 years longer just to provide the extra funds necessary to cope with the extra costs.
Paul Shanahan,
Hansen’s credibility is based on his being a prophet, not a scienitist.
As long as people have the AGW faith, Hansen will do OK.
Paul Shanahan (16:53:21) :
On the topic of CO2 from breathing compared with the CO2 from fossil fuels (e.g. Ron de Haan (00:19:41) “a car driving at a speed of 30 mph produces the same amount of CO2 as a cyclist at full speed” )
Surely you have to take into account the size of the engine. I’m pretty sure a bog standard 8 litre Dodge Viper will pump out more CO2 at 30mph than a 1.5 litre Toyota Prius. So the car vs the bike is not really comparable. Sorry.
Here are the conversons that I found on the web. A gallon of gas is 30-38,000 kcal. Assume that a good milage car (by American standards) gets 30 miles/gallon. A cyclist riding at 15 mph can comfortably ride 30 miles using about 700-800 kcal. This means that a car getting 30 miles to the gallon uses 40-50x more energy and releases about 40-50 x more CO2 than a cyclist going the same distance. I’m not sure what “peak speed” for a bike means. Some professionals can hit 45 mph on the flat, but only for a few seconds.
Another way to think about this is to imagine attaching a car to the back of your bike and pulling it around the neighborhood. The weight of a bike is negligible compared to a car. (Moderator–please remove my incomplete comment about as well as this comment to you)
@ur momisugly Foinavon and related threads
I have arrived a little late but have enjoyed Foinavon’s clearly geologic inspired discussion on CO2 and paleoclimate temperatures.
First off it seems a bit of a circular argument to claim that we do not know paleo-CO2 values and the relationship to past temperatures and then to cite a raft of papers, such as Royden’s that argue there is a relationship between past CO2 levels and temperatures. The papers you cited all make estimates of past CO2 values – surely you believe some of them?
I do agree with your point about Ordovician glaciation that the number of data points is sparse and to draw a line between two estimated values of CO2 10 my apart could smooth out great variations within that time span. However this is a dangerous line of reasoning for you to adopt because if you recognize that CO2 levels can change rapidly, then clearly the earth has a rapid-response regulatory mechanism to remove excess CO2 quicker than Berner’s weathering equilibrium response. We may find that global CO2 fluctuations correlate with coal cyclothems on a timescale similar to that seen in ice core data.
Jeff L made this point earlier and I think he is right to point out that over geologic time massive amounts of CO2 have been removed from the atmosphere, primarily through carbonate deposits in the Precambrian and organic material during the Phanerozoic. It has been suggested, and something that you should consider more, is that potentially the atmosphere is deficient in CO2. You suggest a Greenland ice sheet should be a goal to aim for, but failed to explain why. What exactly is so special about 450 ppm CO2? Exactly how do you calculate that 2,000 ppm CO2 in the Ordovician is equivalent to some value of CO2 today that marks the tipping point between an ice-house/hot-house climate?
Hansen’s Catastrophism relies on the following concepts.
1. A CO2 Tipping Point.
2. Positive Feedback(s) post tipping point leading to Runaway Global Warming.
Could the AGW Proponents visiting this blog please provide the hard data, and empirical evidence of
1. The presence of a “CO2 Tipping Point”, and it’s measure, I.e at what point does it kick in. I.e not a hypothetical measure and no computer models that assume a CO2 tipping point.
2. The presence of positive feedbacks in the historical climate and how that is reconciled with cyclic climate behaviour (now that’s got to be a tough call, as it requires negative feedback to generate oscillation around a mean).
3. (A Q?) If there are no positive feedbacks in past climate – why are we being threatened with one now?
Mary, Flanagan, Foinavon???
Smokey:
Let’s see how good those references really are. Most of them are to the popular press (N.Y. Times, Newsweek) or popular science journals (Science News, Science Digest). But there is at least one in there to an honest-to-goodness peer-reviewed scientific journal and a good one at that (Science, Dec. 10, 2006), so let’s take a closer look at it. George Will quotes it as predicting “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation”. It turns out to be the classic paper “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages” by Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;194/4270/1121 ) that talks mainly about the past ice ages but does touch on the question of what might happen in the future…So, let’s have a closer look at the full context in which the quotation that Wills appears:
Do you see the problem with Wills’ use of this quote? Do you see how he has ignored minor details like the fact that they are ignoring “anthropogenic effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels” or that their prediction applies to trends over the period of the next 20,000 years and does not have anything to say about climate oscillations at higher frequencies? Yup, it looks like once again, those who like to call themselves “skeptics” seem to be anything but when they find something that supports their pre-existing beliefs!
Jeff Alberts says:
Alas, your hypothesis is contradicted by the facts. Like the fact that in the peer-reviewed literature, not only was cooling not the consensus opinion at that time, it was nowhere near being even the majority opinion, with about 6X as many papers predicting warming as cooling (with those that were neutral on the question being another 3X in addition to the 6X). ( See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/the-global-cooling-mole/ ) Or, the fact that when the National Academy of Sciences was asked to weigh in on the question of climate in 1975, they concluded that “…we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate…” ( http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/nas-1975.html ).
In fact, looking back on the 1970s with hindsight, we can now see that scientists had all the basic pieces more or less correct: they knew that greenhouse gases like CO2 would cause warming, they knew (at least most agreed) that aerosol pollutants would cause cooling, and they knew that we were in an interglacial period between ice ages that, left to its own devices, would eventually come to an end. However, they were still discussing how all these pieces fitted together and what they would mean for the future climate. And, an organization like the NAS, whose job it is to assess the science came to the clear conclusion that we did not yet know enough to predict the future climate.
So, to sum up, the evidence from the past is that, while some individual scientists may have been quick to jump to one conclusion or another (and some popular press articles got the story partly or quite significantly wrong), the scientific community as a whole remained undecided…and clearly acknowledged their uncertainty about what the future course of the climate would be.
Graeme Rodaughan says:
I’ll bite, at least sort of.
First of all, if you are asking me to defend Hansen’s talk of positive feedbacks leading to a true instability and a “runaway” effect then I will decline because, as I have noted before, I am a skeptic on this claim since, to my knowledge, Hansen has not yet detailed it in the peer-reviewed literature and it seems to go against what most other scientists in the field believe. [The one thing I will note is that Hansen has pointed out that two things that have saved us from such a fate in the past might not be operable here: One is that if you go significantly back in geological time then the sun was significantly fainter. A second is that some known negative feedbacks that operate on geologic timescales (like the absorption of CO2 into geological formations) will not be operable this time since they will be overwhelmed by the pace of our release of CO2 into the atmosphere. But, these are only arguments for why such a runaway effect is still conceivable…and not an argument as to why it is at all likely.]
Second of all, in regards to feedbacks: Yes, there is a significant amount of empirical evidence that the feedbacks are positive. However, first it is important to understand that positive feedbacks only produce instabilities if they are strong enough. Otherwise, they simply magnify the effects without causing any “runaway”. The distinction between an instability and a magnification is basically the one between a diverging infinite series and a converging infinite series. If a 1 deg warming produces more than 1 deg of direct response, you get a diverging series (e.g., 1 + 3/2 + (3/2)^2 + …) If a 1 deg warming produces less than 1 deg of direct response, you get a converging series…For example, if it produces 1/2 deg of direct response, you get 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + … and the result is a doubling of the “bare” response. Such magnification is what is predicted by the IPCC…with the estimate being that the magnification factor is likely between ~2 and 4 (from the ~1.1 C +- 0.1 C of warming that doubling CO2 would produce in the absence of feedbacks).
As for the evidence of positive feedbacks, here http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;306/5697/821 is a paper that provides a brief summary of the paleoclimate evidence on climate sensitivity and concludes that “the climate system is very sensitive to small perturbations and that the climate sensitivity may be even higher than suggested by models”. And, in fact, one argument for a ~3 C climate sensitivity comes from the best estimates of the climate forcings and temperature response between the last glacial maximum and now. There is also evidence from the Mt Pinatubo eruption: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;296/5568/727
Finally, there is independent verification that the increase in water vapor in the upper troposphere that is produces the predicted positive water vapor feedback is occuring approximately as expected: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;310/5749/841
Joel
The rewrite of history by AGW true belivers is simply not holding up.
You guys can claim that the great ice age of the 1970’s was not the consensus, but it was. Along with nuclear winter, it fell apart as reality intruded.
AGW has been more tenacious than either of the other two climate scams of recent years, because Hansen and co. have draped it in a lot more blue smoke and mirrors.
But, once again, reality is intruding as ridiculous claims of death trains and a tripling of AGW is confronting a climate that simply does not do what you guys want it to do.
Mann is pretty good at making really complicated, untrue representations of reality and selling them with Gore, but hiding things like MWP and the LIA are just a bit too challenging.
So keep telling yourself the 1970’s ice age, like disco, never happened. It may make you feel better, but it does not make it so.
Graeme Rodaughan,
Extremely well and concisely stated.
The AGW promoters have not ever answered those questions, and will not be able to while maintaining their belief in AGW.
“You guys can claim that the great ice age of the 1970’s was not the consensus, but it was”
That is the very epitome of a denier. Ignore the facts, believe what you want to believe. Ridiculous.
If you don’t like the word ‘denier’, then don’t deny basic, simple, easily demonstrated facts. Very simple.
Fair enough, Joel. I’ll admit I don’t have anything to counter your argument, and don’t have the time to do the proper research.
I did do a brief search on the all the mags on the Science web site. Found a couple things about cooling and warming during the 70s:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/193/4252/447?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=1970s+global+cooling&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
OK, just one thing, but my search-fu is weak. Didn’t have time to go through all 511k results. 😉
hunter says:
I guess you accidently left out the part of your post where you actually give any evidence to back up your assertion?!?
Funny how those death trains have helped drive the largest increase in biomass worldwide our modern society has ever seen. Yup, plants mostly love more CO2. It also makes them more resistant to drought and heat.
See
http://www.co2science.org/
for links to numerous papers on this and related subjects.
Joel Shore, do you homework. Whining about being wrong is funny!!!
By the way, the 60’s are a better period to search. The consensus appears to have been created then and was lost in the 70’s!!!
Joel Shore:
You’re kidding, right, Joel?
Here’s plenty of evidence of the consensus from the ’70’s. I can give you twenty more if you like:
click1
click2
Face it, the same “consensus” was jockeying for grants back in the 1970’s. Only then, the scare story was global cooling. Today, it’s global warming. Same-same.
So, basically, my memories (although I was admittedly young) of the 70s are all faulty. No ice age scare. Sure. Even though I vividly remember reading about it all over Time, hearing about it on the news regularly, and people talking about it as winters got seemingly colder and more vicious every year. The meme of “Ice Age” was everywhere, and if you’re too young to remember it then you have no valid opinion on the matter. Got that? No VALID opinion.
To David Porter and tallbloke,
The Log CO2 warming chart comes from a post I did on adjusting temperatures for the influence of the ENSO, the AMO and an ocean index I added later the Southern AMO. I just wanted to pull out the natural variation of the climate and arrive at the global warming signal which remained.
If you want to see how the empirical temperature numbers to date square with global warming theory and the log warming chart, this zoom-in of the chart (covering CO2 from 270 ppm to 560 ppm) against all the major temperature series (including Hadcrut3, GISS, RSS, and UAH – NCDC would right in the middle as well) shows how the empirical evidence to date does not support the warming proposition.
http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/2626/tempobsrvvsco2ct4.png
A more conventional look with temperature versus time is this one.
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/811/finalwarminggw8.png
I threw in the log warming chart into the post because it is really required to understand the basic theory of global warming. It is not a straight line going up, it is logarithmic and has different characteristics depending on where you are on the CO2 line.
You can read the post here. I’ve added some additional features since then. And the Nino 3.4 index for January was -0.99C and the AMO index went negative for the first time in a long time at -0.073C in January. The oceans will provide cooling for a period of time now especially if the AMO continues its downward trend and the ENSO stays negative (I might have a post coming up on that soon).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/25/adjusting-temperatures-for-the-enso-and-the-amo/
kuhncat says:
That’s strange. All Will’s quotes are from the 70s but now its been moved back to the 60s? At any rate, the paper by Peterson, Connelly, and Fleck ( http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf ) has a table going back to 1965.
Smokey says:
I wasn’t aware that Time and Newsweek were peer-reviewed scientific journals. Look, if you are trying to argue that we shouldn’t trust the mainstream media on scientific issues like climate change, you aren’t going to get any argument from me. What matters are what the scientists are saying in the peer-reviewed journals and what the organizations whose charter it is to summarize and present that science to the government, such as the National Academy of Sciences, are saying. And, what the former were talking about was both warming and cooling, but more about warming than cooling. And, what the latter were saying was that, while we understand some of the various effects on climate, we do not yet understand enough about which will predominate to predict the future course of the climate. It is really as simple as that.
Code Tech says:
What your memory is telling you is that there might have been some scare stories in the popular press and a couple of popular books about an ice age…fostered in some part by the general understanding that we were now in an interglacial period between ice ages and would eventually go back into an ice age again. However, what the scientific community was actually saying is what the actual record in the peer-reviewed literature and in the NAS report from 1975 shows that they were saying and no amount of carping about what you read in Time Magazine or heard on the news or “everywhere” is going to change that.
By the way, the Peterson, Connelley, and Fleck paper ( http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf ) is really the one to read for the complete overview of what was being talked about both within the peer-reviewed scientific community and the popular media. I recommend reading it.
So now I’m “carping” Joel?
Did I not ask politely for you to not reply to my comments?
I’m always amused, and somewhat irritated, by the amount of effort spent in these discussions and the overall debate of these issues, devoted to where the “consensus” of opinion falls. From what I’ve seen a truly dispassionate observer couldn’t honestly claim, even with all the wonderful technology aimed at determining it, that there is a consensus opinion of what the average global temperature is for today or yesterday or last week. Indeed, I think a reasonable case can be made that trying to arrive at such a value, given the disparate and chaotic nature of the climate system is a fool’s errand. If history has shown us anything, it is that the number of people willing to believe a thing has no relationship at all to whether or not that thing is true. Modern science in general, and climate science in particular seem to me to be overrun by people more than willing to make logical leaps way beyond the evidence at hand. One of the reasons I’ve come to so greatly admire Leif’s work here and throughout his career is that he strikes me as embodying what every scientist should be, but seldom is. One who is willing to follow the data wherever it leads and realizes that all we really know is that we don’t “know” much at all.
I read Hansen’s article and was disappointed that, after his lengthy reiteration of all the ways coal usage will destroy the planet, he did not offer a single alternative.
To be sure, reducing fossil fuel consumption would have many beneficial results; however, an abrupt cessation of coal usage, as he suggests is imperative, would leave millions worldwide without heat or electricity.
Also, I can’t help but wonder, what is Dr. James Hansen’s carbon footprint?