Guest post by Thomas Fuller
Before I start, I’d like to remind readers that as a guest poster, the opinions I voice here are not those of Anthony Watts, and should not be taken as having been endorsed by Watts Up With That.
I am going to propose an idea based on my position as a Lukewarmer regarding climate change. I fully expect to get a lot of criticism from commenters here, and I welcome it. My idea is new (at least to me), and if it is a good idea it will be sharpened by your criticism–and of course, if it is rubbish, best to know quickly, right?
I think the debate on climate change needs some new ideas and criticism too. So blast away–but please bring your A game. I neither need nor want to see the equivalent of ‘you suck, dude.’
Families, businesses and yes, even governments, need to make plans for the future. Those plans used to include assumptions about the physical environment, although most of those assumptions were passive acceptance of the status quo. However, it is now difficult to make assumptions because various theories of climate change and its effects have people wondering if their homes will be threatened by sea level rise, drought, hurricanes or floods.
Because of the competing number of possible futures (the IPCC has many scenarios and many more have been pulled from the science fiction rack and offered up to us), people are somewhat paralyzed by too many choices. I think it is time to recognize that all of use engaged in the debate about climate change are not doing the rest of the world any favors. We are making their life more difficult because they cannot make plans with any confidence.
If there is one dataset that I trust regarding the Earth’s climate, it is the measurement of atmospheric concentrations of CO2. It has been freely available for examination, it is replicated by measurements in more than one site, and in my mind survived criticism from people such as the late Ernst Beck. I trust the numbers.
The numbers show that concentrations of CO2 were 315 ppm in 1958, when Mauna Loa started measuring. Concentrations now are 390 ppm. That is a rise of 19%. The central question in climate change is, ‘What is the sensitivity of the earth’s atmosphere to a doubling of the concentrations of CO2?’ Is the atmosphere easily influenced by CO2, producing more water vapor and adding to temperature rise, or is the atmosphere largely indifferent? Despite protestations from both sides, the honest answer is we don’t know now, and we are not likely to know for another 30 years.
Temperatures appear to have risen globally, although the accuracy of the data is not yet fully determined. The rise since 1958 appears to be about 0.5 degrees Celsius.
If these were the only statistics available to us, we would quickly conclude that the sensitivity of the earth’s atmosphere to all human-related activities might well be 2.5 degrees Celsius. This would lead to the supposition that, if concentrations of CO2 rise to about 600 ppm, which certainly seems possible, that the Earth’s temperature will rise about another 2 degrees C. Since it’s based on measurement of temperatures, it can be presumed to include all the effects we are having on temperatures, not just CO2.
And I am arguing, no–proposing, that we do exactly that. Attempts to refine models and measurements have been unsuccessful and have served to heighten suspicion and muddy the debate. I have seen very credible arguments for sensitivities that are both higher and lower, but these arguments are based on data or models that have much higher levels of uncertainty associated with them, ranging from differing ways of measuring tropospheric temperatures to analysis of varves from Finnish lakes.
I don’t see undisputed data that will allow us to do better than the 40 years of good data we have now. So I think we should provide a ‘rough and ready’ estimate of 2 degrees C climate change this century to the public, business and politicians, so they can start making plans for the future.
It should obviously come with an asterisk and error bars, and should be presented as ‘crude, but the best we can really do at this time.’ Much like earlier and simpler climate models have often done better in handling projections of future climate, our rougher and cruder metrics may serve us better for now.
We need to stop throwing sci-fi fantasies out as plausible outcomes. We need to provide a range of outcomes based on measurements that we trust.
We also need not to be distracted by elements of the debate that have only served a political purpose. Current temperatures are not unprecedented. There was a MWP and a LIA. Sea level is rising at 3 mm per year. The ice caps are not going to disappear this millenium.
None of that really matters. Temperatures are rising, and more quickly than they have often in the past. (Yes, they have risen this quickly on occasion.) It is the speed of change and the numbers of people those changes will affect that are actually of more concern than the total temperature rise. The people in developing countries are actually more vulnerable than the last time there was a big quick rise–hunter gatherers didn’t have homes and could just move out of harm’s way, and they were few enough in number that they would not have been labeled ‘climate refugees.’
So, I call for all those involved in the climate debate to throw down their weapons, embrace this practical solution as being of use to the rest of the world, climb aboard the Peace Train and sing Kumbaya. Right.
No, have a look at this–tell me if it’s remotely possible that the skeptic community could sacrifice its current temporary, but very real advantage in the debate and agree that a rough metric that acknowledges warming but puts sane boundaries on it would be of use to the rest of the world.
Again, I’d like to thank readers who have made it this far for listening to a different side of the debate in a forum where you are more comfortable seeing the failings of your opponents exposed. If you find the gaping flaw in my logic, my idea can die quickly, if not quietly. If you see merit in my proposal, any indication of such would be warmly welcomed.
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There are couple of fairly fundamental flaws in the inital analysis:
1) The natural variations that are undoubtedly present in the recent rises (up to about year 2000) in average temperature (PDO, AMO related particularly, also maybe solar activity) have been positive factors but are known to be cyclic – PDO appears to be in a negative (cooling) cycle now, with the AMO persumably to move negative in the near future and solar activity proving entirely unpredictable in this solar cycle. As such, the linear interpolation breaks down (how much warming has there been this decade compared with between about 1975 and 2000?).
2) Based on the above, with the uncertainties in forcing, the likely future warming for a doubling of CO2 (assuming the GW mechanism of LWIR trapping is fundamentally correct, which in itself is a fairly big assumption given that most near surface heat transfer is by convection plus the consideration of IR absorption by local and short term variation of water vapour) should be considered as somwhere pretty close to 1 degree +/- 1 degree (i.e. the ‘no feedback’ value with an allowance for some feedback or some moderation by other processes). On this basis, I think the 2.5 degrees hypothesised may be considered a ‘worst case’ scenario.
One other thing that is rarely mentioned is what does a change of 1 degree or 2 degrees C actually means – in the UK 2 degrees C is less than the difference in temperature between Leeds and London, or is roughly the difference between central London and the surrounding (upwind) countryside. This morning, with 150 miles of London, there was a range of temperatures from about -4 degrees to +9 degrees (the north midlands and south Yorkshire, at the northern edge of this area were warmest because of the presence of a weather front, whereas the skies were clear to the south leading to much lower temperatures).
As has been pointed out elsewhere, another consideration is the rate of change – if sea levels rose by 1 foot overnight there would be much expense in attempting to adapt, but if this occurs over the course of the next 100-150 years then is it simply a case of modifying existing sea and flood defences as they require (based on design life), with an eye to this likely ongoing increase.
Blindsided by the next Ice Age–that’s what’s going to happen. We should focus on the tipping point that rapidly takes the Earth from an interglacial (we’re at the end of one now) back into a glacial–a palynologist studying prehistoric soils in Europe found that the switch took only two or three years; another researcher studying pollen in lake sediments found the change took as little as four months! That’s the REAL tipping point that’s been demonstrated by geologists, and like clockwork, a repetition is inevitable. Yet everybody’s running around wasting precious time and resources wondering if/when/how CO2 is impacts Earth’s temperature, vying for a worthless consensus!
Sure, we might be able to apply geoengineering to avert the next glacial tipping point that forces us back into the clutches of massive ice (and a global cooling that ranges anywhere from 10 to 15 degrees C), but the extremely short window of opportunity will catch the world flatfooted and completely unprepared. (On a lark, estimate what would happen to your local farmers, ranchers and fruit/vegetable growers if average annual temps dropped by 10 to 15 degrees–applied to where I live, there would be no agriculture whatsoever, quite a contrast to our extant thriving ag industry.)
We’re being blindsided with the CO2 strawman; much bigger problems face us!
Once upon a time, there was a Danish astronomer known as Tycho Brahe. Although not as well known as Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, his contribution to the field was, for lack of a better word, immeasurable. With his new observatory, Tycho Brahe took readings of movement of celestial objects ten times more precise than previously. The new data helped his assistant Kepler to devise the Laws of Planetary Motions, effectively killing off the geocentric model of the universe in favour of the heliocentric one.
The reason why Tycho Brahe isn’t celebrated as a scientific hero today is because he was a middle-of-the-road kind of guy. He could neither abandon Aristotelian Earth-centric universe nor embrace the Copernican Sun-centric model. So, mixing the two models, he created one of his own. In his model, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter all revolved around the Sun, whereas the Sun, the Moon and the stars moved around the Earth. His model and reputation ended up nowhere.
The lesson here is that you can’t have half-truths. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is either a scientific fact or it is not. We are either going to fry in 2100 or we are not. We just don’t know yet. As a result, we cannot and should not re-order the world economy to the perceived tastes of the 22nd Century, the way we order steaks; rare, medium or well done.
What Thomas Fuller is suggesting is similar to what Tycho Brahe did centuries ago. Because the debate is whether temperatures might go up between 0 and 6 degrees Celsius by 2100, let’s have a gentlemen’s agreement on 2C increase, and voila!, the debate is a lot friendlier and the differences closer than before. Of course, there is no room in that agreement for the possibility, by an act of god or nature, that global temps may be cooler than present.
Whether he likes it or not, Thomas Fuller is clearly searching for a Kumbaya moment. When Brahe did that, Kepler told him, “you suck, dude!”
Late to the party, but this post really annoyed me:
thomaswfuller says, October 20, 2010 at 2:49 pm
(SNIP)
I am not concerned really with the active participants in the debate. The reason I put this forward is to try and satisfy the needs of people who do not have time or wherewithal to look at the evidence and form their own opinion, but do have a need to chart a course for their family, business, city planning department, etc.
Thank you. So everybody here might as well have nodded their heads and moved on, or what?
“I do not at all consider it unscientific to take the best two measurements we have–CO2 concentrations and satellite measurements of temperature–and say with appropriate caveats that if trends continue we might see 2 degrees C of warming over the next century.
Such a course would also free us from ‘having’ to attribute x percentage of warming to y cause. It can include CO2, land use/land cover, deforestation, oxygen depletion, rebound from LIA for reasons we don’t know, and more.
What I’m arguing for is the removal of distracting observations using poor data or no data at all.”
(my emphasis)
And who is it that decides which observations are distracting and should be removed? Ditto – who decides which data are ‘poor’?
From your proposal it would seem that you advocate going ahead with everything the CAWGers propose – not because of the data, poor (2.5 C???) or non-existent.
IAW – disregard the whole debate about science v pseudoscience, but follow those who are set to make the most money from the hare-brained schemes proposed by the Algores of this world.
Thanks. That is good to know for future reference …
You took a long way and a lot of time going around your knees and elbows to get to the point and by the time you got to where you thought you were going I really couldn’t tell where your were at or what your point was. Now I know I haven’t been up that long and probably shouldn’t attempt to say anything before another few cups of tea have worked their morning magic, but really, I have a funny feeling between my ears that it wouldn’t matter at all. That said, I put fingers to keyboard and say: “What’s the point?” “Why?”
#
#
sHx says:
October 21, 2010 at 4:32 am
Once upon a time, there was a Danish astronomer known as Tycho Brahe. Although not as well known as Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, his contribution to the field was, for lack of a better word, immeasurable. With his new observatory, Tycho Brahe took readings of movement of celestial objects ten times more precise than previously. The new data helped his assistant Kepler to devise the Laws of Planetary Motions, effectively killing off the geocentric model of the universe in favour of the heliocentric one.
The reason why Tycho Brahe isn’t celebrated as a scientific hero today is because he was a middle-of-the-road kind of guy. He could neither abandon Aristotelian Earth-centric universe nor embrace the Copernican Sun-centric model. So, mixing the two models, he created one of his own. In his model, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter all revolved around the Sun, whereas the Sun, the Moon and the stars moved around the Earth. His model and reputation ended up nowhere.
The lesson here is that you can’t have half-truths. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is either a scientific fact or it is not. We are either going to fry in 2100 or we are not. We just don’t know yet. As a result, we cannot and should not re-order the world economy to the perceived tastes of the 22nd Century, the way we order steaks; rare, medium or well done.
What Thomas Fuller is suggesting is similar to what Tycho Brahe did centuries ago. Because the debate is whether temperatures might go up between 0 and 6 degrees Celsius by 2100, let’s have a gentlemen’s agreement on 2C increase, and voila!, the debate is a lot friendlier and the differences closer than before. Of course, there is no room in that agreement for the possibility, by an act of god or nature, that global temps may be cooler than present.
Whether he likes it or not, Thomas Fuller is clearly searching for a Kumbaya moment. When Brahe did that, Kepler told him, “you suck, dude!”
==========
Good comment. Thank you. Isn’t this somewhat close to the message of Revelations 3:16 .. “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
What Mr Fuller is proposing is that we simply accept the AGW position in a lower extreme of their range (Dr Mann has ‘nailed’ (his words) the sensitivity of the climate to a 2x increase as 3-3.5C) so that we can all – as Rodney King said, “just get along” and go about the business of implementing policy to change the level of CO2 that is within our control. He’s offering a quiet surrender so the skeptics can achieve ‘peace with honor’.
Michael Tobis says:
October 20, 2010 at 9:57 pm
How about we think about what we should do knowing that the interglacial period we’re in will end soon and most of north America and Europe and Asia returns to the way it was 20,000 years ago – buried beneath two miles of ice with global temperature 8C lower than it is right now.
Ya think the delusional catastrophic global warming crowd is willing to talk about that?
I do not believe it is in any way possible to quantify the variables that affect the climate on earth, there is too much we do not know let alone be able to guess a reading. The one thing that tells me that CO2 is no danger is the official answer to CO2. Firstly the laws about calalytic converters are still enforced, these abberations were inflicted on us before digital engine management was invented and the mechanical means were causing a lot of pollution so we got an expensive and restrictive device to convert CO and unburnt hydrocarbons in to CO2 in large amounts. Modern cars have to be set to run badly to provide the fuel for these things to work, I have had several cars pass emission tests without the cat. The other tell tale is the result or carbon credits this closes factories that are efficient and clean and funds their move to India and Chine where they are neither, thankfully these places are poisoning themselves and hopefully will die off enough for production to come home before it is too late.
Tom, thanks for your post.
As a skeptic, I can get on board with your “rough and ready” estimate. I like the idea of having a common baseline from which to argue other contributing factors. I also like the idea of having an unlikely – but possible – rise of 2C (with caveats below) and then asking, “Okay – so what do we do about this?” (I think it’s unlikely, although I guess you think it is a good ballpark.) However first, I think you need to correct your math.
I’ve read or skimmed all the posts here, so I don’t think this point has yet been made. You take a 0.5C increase from 1958 to today, and couple it to the 75 ppm increase in CO2 for the same time frame. I do understand that this is a correlation, not a 100% causal relationship you are assuming. However: you say that 315 ppm in 1958 to 390 today is a ~19% increase. It is not.
390 – 315 = 75 ppm. 75 / 315 = ~24% increase. (I get that you used 390 in the denominator, rather than 315 … but this is the wrong way to calculate it, especially given what you do next with your numbers.) So, even conceding a linear relationship between the CO2 level and temperature, your method should rightly conclude with 1.4C between 390 and 600 ppm (i.e.: 0.5 * 210 / 75).
Of course there is an additional problem with your method. You are coupling a linear temperature trend (0.5C) to an exponential CO2 trend (75 ppm over the last 52 years, but 210 ppm over the next 90 years). That is why so many people complained that you assign 100% of the warming to CO2 levels. Even though you state that there are other anthropogenic factors, you use CO2 levels as a proxy for these. Other (unstated) human factors may not be increasing exponentially. But I’ll ignore that, in the spirit of reaching common ground.
Since you have already conceded the 30 year cycle in temperature data (1940 – 1970, temperature down; 1970 – 2000, temperature up; 2000 – 2030, temperature down?) I think it is also reasonable – using your method – to assume (conservatively) no temperature increase for the next 8 years, and thus get a nice, round 60-year trend from 1958 to 2018. This will only affect your numbers a little bit more, giving us a “baseline” of ~1.1 C between now and 2100. (I used 1.9 ppm increase per year, giving us ~405 ppm in 2018, and thus a 0.5C increase for 90 ppm CO2 increase. Extrapolating this as a linear relationship, we have ~1.1C over the next 90 years, or: 0.5 * 195 / 90).
NOW we can use this and start arguing about other contributing factors, such as the linear (60-year smoothed) trend since the LIA; or the logarithmic temperature trend from increasing CO2; or the multiple positive and negative feedbacks; etc.
But I am willing to agree to your terms and say a 1.1C increase between now and 2100 is a good baseline prediction in which to consider: what do we need to do about it? And if you don’t like the adjustment for the 60-year trend, then I suppose I could accept 1.4C as necessary for “possible, but unlikely.”
But if you want me to accept a linear trend between CO2 and temperature over the last 52 years as a “rough and ready” prediction, then it is not logically acceptable to assume – as you did – a *higher* linear trend for the next 90 years. That’s not a linear trend.
Cheers.
Here is small list of “even-ifs” quickly put together to illustrate the absurdity of it all.
1. The 0.5 C increase since 1958 is difficult to accept with certainty, given what we know about measuring methods, instrments, enigmatic data treatments, and a general eagerness by the data keepers to arrange things in a way most favorable to warming scenarios.
2. Even if the 0.5 increase is true, it says absolutely nothing about its causes. There is no reason to attribute it to one particular cause.
3. Even if the temp increase is true, and even if it were 100% due to the CO2 increase, it does not follow that the remaining 80% increase in CO2 would produce a linear increase in temperature at the same rate as the first 20%.
4. Even if the assumptions in 1, 2, and 3 were miraculously true, it is highly doubtful that increases in CO2 will continue at the same rate for the remaining of the century, if only because of physical and economic limits in the rate at which we can keep extracting fossil fuels.
5. Even if it continued at the same rate, it is by no means certain that it would continue to accumulate at the same rate, given that sinks would be expected to also increase their absorption rate.
6. Even if assumptions 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were all true, it is not clear at all that a 2 degree increase in global mean temperature, affecting mostly higher latitudes, would on balance have negative effects for life on the planet, let alone catastrophic ones. In fact, it might very well have a positive effect.
7. Even if the 6-story-high stack of assumptions just described were all true from the catastrophist perspective, it seems clear that the emission reductions we could realistically put in practice would have a negligeable effect in preventing the temperature increase. Calculations done by Monckton and others suggest that even the most drastic reduction imaginable (all the way down to zero emissions, or stone-age economy) would need to be kept up for several decades to forestall just 1 degree C of warming, assuming the IPCC assumptions to be true. This last floor of the stack of assumptions is hardly if ever discussed.
Clearly, CAGW is absurd.
Steven Mosher says:
October 20, 2010 at 11:30 pm
The best science we have suggests the current interglacial period is due to end and global average temperature will be dropping about 8C.
Tom is a poster child for science illiteracy. Maybe we should be talking about the problem of scientific illiteracy instead.
Frankly I’ve never seen a CAGW argument that comes close to science. There’s no science to dent. There is only narrative of a possible but historically unlikely future.
Earth to Steven Mosher. The planet has been in an ice age for millions of years. This is a temporary respite called an interglacial period. It’s due to end real soon now. The present ice age, the interglacial, and the length of time spent in each isn’t a theory. It’s an observation.
Nuclear energy does not and can not replace gaseous and liquid fuels and the huge infrastructure built around them both. The electrical grid is routinely operated at near 100% of capacity. A huge investment would have to made in upgrading the grid before it can begin to displace the energy provided by natural gas pipelines and tanker trucks. Your suggestion that nuclear energy is a viable strategy is alarmingly naive on many levels.
I’d be willing to dance in the streets because a warmer earth is a greener earth. In the Eocene Climatic Optimum that ended about 30 million years ago the earth was green from pole to pole. It was a lush world. Compartively speaking the biosphere today is stunted and struggling to survive in the cold and in an atmosphere where CO2 concentration is barely high enough to support plant life at all.
I have yet to see a single argument from anyone that anthropogenic CO2 is anything other than a huge benefit which, unfortunately, appears to be grossly insufficient to do anything more than delay the inevitable ending of the interglacial period. It would be great if it was enough to break the earth out of the current ice age but there simply isn’t enough economically recoverable fossil fuel to do more than that.
Thomas, you post at 10:22 PM says this:
“We have temperature rises that we can almost trust from 1958 that show a trend of about 2 degrees for this century if things go on. Our increasing emissions (and concomitant concentrations) of greenhouse gases means to me that one of the few new factors in the equation is not going to change dramatically over the next few decades, so with 50 years’ decent data, if we tell people that our best guess is 2 degrees this century plus or minus…”
There is an obvious problem with this. If the CO2 emissions don’t change much, but if we sharply reduce the easier and less costly to eliminate emissions which cause warming — black carbon, ozone, methane — then we cut the temperature growth in half.
The source for this was featured in WUWT a few weeks ago: “Short Lived Uncertainty,” by Penner et al in Nature.
This article also said that there is more uncertainty than your 2 degrees. The reason for that uncertainty is that humans also emit sulfates and some other emissions which cause cooling. We don’t know how much cooling (large uncertainty range). So if the amount of cooling isn’t very large, then the amount of warming it is masking isn’t very large, and vice-versa. Here is what the study says:
“…Warming over the past 100 years is consistent with high climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide combined with a large cooling effect from short-lived aerosol pollutants, but it could equally be attributed to a low climate sensitivity coupled with a small effect from aerosols. These two possibilities lead to very different projections for future climate change….
…Of the short-lived species, methane, tropospheric ozone and black carbon are key contributors to global warming, augmenting the radiative forcing of carbon dioxide by 65%. Others — such as sulphate, nitrate and organic aerosols — cause a negative radiative forcing, offsetting a fraction of the warming owing to carbon dioxide….”
So I think your 2 degrees is more like 1 degree — based on your method of empiricism, which I like — when the other causes of warming than CO2 are sharply reduced. But it also seems that there may be more uncertainty, in either direction, than the empirical approach.
Steven Mosher asks: “So Toms question is really this. If you accepted, for the sake of argument that 2C was a reality, what would you suggest we do. what would you be willing to do.”
The smart thing to do then is to increase capacity for flexible and dynamic response. Free the markets to invent solutions to problems. Reduce governmental dictates and actions that warp markets (eg, ethanol subsidies) and waste resources. There’s a much better chance of accommodating to stresses with diverse approaches. Control should be local, not global. Ecosystems adapt to both slow and sudden changes when they are permitted to do so. Figure out the specifics within this framework because we know that command and control has a history of abject failure.
Here are the things we know about CO2 producing sources:
1. There is substantial evidence that human population is exponential (or logarithmic).
2. The rise in CO2 closely matches the rise in human population (and is indeed the closest match we have from the very beginning of the rise to now).
3. There is substantial evidence that humans emit enough CO2 to explain not a small part of the rise.
4. There is as yet no evidence that insect populations are increasing.
5. There is substantial evidence that food production (the other end of what some consider to be a closed CO2 cycle) is not keeping pace with population growth.
6. Fossil fuel production and consumption does not match population growth, as it is based on human productivity which is highly dependent on economic conditions.
Summary: The most plausible cause of the rise in CO2 is human population increase regardless of their fuel consumption.
Consequence: Hunger will continue to increase as more babies are born with not enough food to eat (a far more devastating problem than a slight increase in temperature).
Mitigating course of action: Educate women in countries with hyper population growth. Population stability (thus CO2 stability) has ALWAYS been the result of female education. When we are busy at our corporate office, more often than not we are not spending as much time in the “kitchen”, meaning we have our shoes on and we are not pregnant.
“I don’t know” has never stopped people from dreaming and planning the future. A plehtora of possible futures has always been the human condition and somehow people manage to plan, or not to plan, and somehow survive, despite “too many choices.”
That is the only “flaw” I bothered to notice in the guest-piece by Thomas Fuller.
(To put it another way, science is about attempting to discover empircal reality, not social planning and government policy initiatives.)
Before there can be any productive discourse, the existing proponents of global warming/climate change/climate disruption have to admit that the science is NOT settled. I’m probably closer to a luke warmer myself, but I am very tired compared to a flat earther.
Next, labels on groups should be changed to the match the theories they believe, not some diminutive title. For example, Newtonian versus quantum mechanics.
There should be some control on the hyperbole put before the public, in particular catastrophic predictions and use of large numbers in units that the the public may not understand.
I don’t mind the assumption of a 2 C rise as long as the focus of the rise is not limited to CO2 and it is intended as the initial study. But this means that there has to be better evaluations of feedback, the basic interaction of gases and particulates in the atmosphere. And there has to be inclusion of factors beyond those produced by humans.
When the results are produced, the data should be accesible, and presenters should be scientists, not Al Gore or some Hollywood star. In addition to the majority view, there must be a minority view presented without prejudgement.
Finally, if I see one more article on how mankind is threatening the existence of the cute Polar Bears, I’m going hard core skeptic.
Wow, over 300 comments already! I don’t have time to read them all now, so this has probably been said before, but if we accept Tom’s approach there is still no advice we can give to anyone as to what another 2 degrees C will mean to them.
Since the daily and seasonal change in temperatures swamps this, it is clear that there is no direct impact of such a rise and the indirect impact of this rise can only occur through some kind of change in weather patterns. This is the biggest area of uncertainty in the whole argument. The advice we give will have to be tailored by region – and we don’t know what regional effects will be.
For example, at its most basic, will it mean more rain or less rain? Well I’m sure some regions will get more, but some will get less – can you give anyone advice for their region on what to expect and thus what they can do about it?
Only today the largest Norwegian newspaper (Aftenposten) ran a story that global warming would be better for Norwegian agriculture (a no-brainer to anyone with even a basic knowledge of Norwegian history). The same benefits have been observed in Canada over the last 30 years as crops are regularly harvested in regions further north than previously observed.
As I have said a couple of times, the only way to respond to climate change is to increase the capacity to adapt to whatever regional changes occur. The advice in this case is to increase your level of development. The countries which suffer the most from any change are those at a lower level of development and the quicker these countries develop, the better off they will be to adapt to any (and all) changes that may occur.
Interestingly enough, his is the same advice we should give in response to any problem – so why are we singling out climate change?
This is presuming it is even possible for humans to raise global CO2 concentrations that high. We don’t know how good the sinks are, or what new sinks might manifest with elevated concentrations.
While I like the idea of experimenting and observing the results, I wonder which scenario is more expensive. Is it burning everything to try to double CO2 levels, or bending over backwards to mitigate CO2 emissions? Remember the law of unintended consequences. Soot has always been and remains the number one health hazard from all fuel use. With more CO2 release there will likely be an increase in soot worldwide, which is not good.
I skipped half the comments in this thread, so my apologies should this have already been said.
Mr Fuller’s article contains two fundamental errors. The first is a matter of science, the second a matter of strategy.
1. My Fuller notes correlation between a 19% rise in CO2 and a temperature increase of o.5 degrees, going to conclude that doubling would result in 2.5 degrees since 19% is about 1/5 of 100%. What value is there in entering a “reasonable debate” on what to do about an observed effect when the lukewarmer begins the discussion with the exact same misunderstanding of how to extrapolate properly a logarithmic function that is used by alarmists to justify their position. Answer; None. A false assumption presented in a reasonable and cooperative tone is none the less a false assumption and no further discussion is warranted until the false assumption is corrected.
2. Your poor math skills aside, your attempt to promote a reasonable conversation amounts to no more than waving a yellow flag on behalf of the enemy who, having declared the war over with themselves the victor, suddenly seak a cease fire while they re-arm. The truce proposed in this case, is predicated on the same misunderstanding of the nature of the natural log function that was misrepresented and interpreted the same way by them as a weapon in the war. That you yourself continue to misunderstand it despite proposing yourself as a journalist with familiarity with the issues attests to the need for proper education of the issues, and there can be no truce until the enemy camp has been invaded and the infrastructure of lies and deception dismantled.
Until then there is as much reason to discuss plans for +2 as there are for -12 or +926. In other words, none.
Vaclav Klaus (see the immediately previous post!) pointed out:
“…… two exceptionally economically successful countries – Finland and Singapore. The average annual temperature in Helsinki is less than 5 °C, whilst in Singapore it is over 27 °C. The difference is greater than 22 °C!”
What is this concern over a mere 2°C?
Thomas,
You stated “If these were the only statistics available to us, we would quickly conclude that the sensitivity of the earth’s atmosphere to all human-related activities might well be 2.5 degrees Celsius.”
Really? I would not conclude this. Please explain why you do. It seems to be an unsupported leap of faith to me.
I am not one who subscribes to the ‘glass half full/glass half empty’ analogy, nor the optimist vs pessimist perspectives that accompany that old saw. I am a realist. I don’t associate any optimism or pessimism with the level of the liquid but I REALLY want to know what that liquid in the glass is before I’ll assign any benefit or detriment to that ‘half full glass’. Tasty vintage vino? I’m getting a bit optimistic now!
Yes, the CO2 levels have risen a bit and, we suspect, will continue to rise a bit more. This is not exceptional or unprecedented. Yes, the planet has warmed a bit since 1950 but it has been in a warming trend since the last ice age. There is nothing exceptional or unprecedented here either. Yes, a simple correlation can be shown between CO2 atmospheric content and the current bit of planetary warming, but that does not establish cause and effect.
Does the rooster’s crowing at 5:00am cause the sun to rise? To paraphrase your statement, ‘If these were the only statistics available to us, we would quickly conclude that the rooster’s crowing might well be causing the sun to rise.’ I would not conclude that either….. Me thinks all of the money and attention paid to atmospheric CO2 is the equivalent of spending gobs of money to protect, control and model the rooster!
While we have a lot of roosters crowing about man made global warming, we have had very little direct sunlight shining into their privately held data bases, analytical methods, and self proclaimed predictive models.
Yet dawn is on the horizon! As we catch glimpses of the behind the scenes inadequate instrumentation, sloppy statistics, inappropriate proxies, and willful attempts at deceit, an educated and aggravated citizenry is increasingly demanding full disclosure and independent evaluation before ANY more government expenditures or actions are taken, based on the highly contested hypothesis that industrial release of CO2 into the atmosphere poses even the slightest threat to humanity or the global climate.
“Let The Sun Shine! Oh Let It Shine! ..The Sun Shine In!” – The 5th Dimension
As a forester and ecologist who has read thousands of articles on this topic, my sense is that the balance of costs/benefits from 2.5 deg C warming would be positive. More rapid tree and crop growth. The hysteric focus on a few more tornados or hurricanes is like the phobic person who won’t leave their house. People already CHOOSE to live in places with a virtual certainty of getting whacked by a hurricane in any 20 year period. A 10% increase matters? (not that recent events even support such a scenario of increasing risk…)
Rationalist: the difference between an ice age and today is estimated to be about 6 C global cooling.
So if 22 C is fine, I assume that 6 C is nothing and that an ice age would be absolutely fine for everyone involved. Is this your logic?
The original post estimates climate sensitivity wrongly (CO2 logarithmic, we’ve not seen all the warming etc). We can use estimates from the past though, and these largely cluster around 2-4.5 C. (e.g. Knutti & Hegerl, 2008)
Using these figures, assuming no action on global warming and a “business as usual” surge to 1,000ppm+, we should be preparing for an eventual warming of ~6 C globally (best estimate 4-9 C). So as much warming as from an ice age to today.
Mr. Fuller, every physical thing in nature that we have been able to describe via mathematics has been turned into a commerical product of some sort.
The heat disappating quality of gases drys our hair, spreads warmth through homes, unthaws the turkey. The simple formula E=mc^2 has lead to power plants that supply us with electricity. PE = mgh tells us why dams can be of use.
But Mr. Fuller the supposed 200 year knowledge that CO2 can force temperatures higher has given us nothing. No better steam engines which I would have thought was natural. No home insulation, blanket, coat, etc wrapped in a gaseous reflective shell to increase the warmth we feel. Nothing.
England and America have been capitalist for centuries and any knowledge that a physical phenomena like CO2 could gets us profit would have been done years ago. Not even the power house GE has ever introduced a product, based on the knowledge of CO2, to make its shareholders wealthier.
My faith in the individual inventor to use physics to make money is large and not one patent that I am aware has been awarded to anyone anywhere.
No, Mr. Fuller CO2’s ability to heat the earth is non-existant because if it could heat the earth it might help heat my coffee, home, bed, etc.
Tom Fuller:
“our best guess is 2 degrees this century plus or minus x percent, we are doing two very good things. First, we are giving them the best information we actually have. Second, we are not throwing a ton of crappy data and science fiction scenarios to scare them into supporting General Electric’s bid to become Ecomagination Masters of the Galaxy.”
Well, that’s a different proposition than the one I signed on to at Kloor’s, which was to settle on a 2.5 sensitivity.
At present our best guess is “2 C or more”, the 2 C being the result of hard work to limit it there. Now, since your sensitivity is a tad low, and you are talking about 2 C in addition to the 0.5 C already realized, the work is slightly less hard. And, maybe the engineers that the Breakthrough boys are leaning on will actually come up with a Breakthrough. (Of cousre, that’s exactly the General Electric scenario you dislike. Oh well.)
So in your scenario we won’t have to work QUITE as hard as the Copenhagen consensus implies.
But that isn’t the scenario you asked me to sign on to at Kloor’s, so I feel baited/switched a bit, just like the last time I encouraged you on a project intended to promote some common ground. If you run a one liner past me and the whole piece past Mosher, you take your chances on whether what you say will interest the consensus camps.
As I said, what to expect from 2 C is not a bad question, but the answer is first of all that even real scientists have a hard time with that. I agree with what Schneider said, that we should consider ourselves lucky if we manage to avoid it getting worse than that. At 2 C there is a good chance that the economic and social systems will not break down altogether. As Eli is always pointing out, if you really want to see threats to freedom, pull the CO2 lever as hard as you can and see how people behave in a real bottleneck.
To answer your question, here’s my guess:
The 2 C on top of the 0.5 C brings us above Eeemian temperatures so a couple of meters of sea level rise is on the cards, but probably relatively slowly (several centuries). 600 ppmv raises ocean acidification questions. The arid subtropics will continue to expand, the large scale organization of weather will continue to move poleward and become relatively weaker, and the small scale organization will get more intense, leading to localized flooding and less predictable seasonality. Tropical storm behavior will probably not change enough at that level to emerge from natural variability. Several centuries of less predictable year-over-year climate variation will occur as the oceans adjust to the new atmospheric forcing. ENSO, and those of the other oscillations that have a physical basis, will increase in amplitude and may change preferential phase.
Growing seasons will get longer and plants a bit more drought tolerant, but there will be more drought for them to tolerate. Population pressures from some low-lying countries (notably Bangladesh) will become very large but probably the arid zones can be managed at that level.
I agree that nothing we can do now will change what happens between now and 2050 by much. This is the real inconvenient truth: the time scales of the system are long compared with political cycles so we aren’t equipped to deal with the problem. No systems have emerged to cope with such issues, so the first one to come along was bound to be handled badly. The scope of the blaming-the-messenger which we see on sites like this one certainly takes me by surprise, though.
What happens after 2050 is what we are fighting about. And a 2.5 C sensitivity makes a 2.5 C final change possible. It sure doesn’t make it automatic.
I don’t know if this is the sort of thing you wanted. But if you specify the temperature change, that is the sort of thing you can reasonably expect to get. You stipulate that we constrain ourselves to 600 ppmv CO2, sort of half-bury the other forcings, and ask what happens. But the big question remains how we manage to constrain ourselves to (your chosen) 600 ppmv. Neither “lukewarmers” nor “breakthroughists” have any idea how we are going to do that, but that remains the big question.