Global warming getting faster and faster
National Radio this morning had this report on two new studies which reveal that the pace of global warming will probably be much faster than previous estimates. The reason = as the planet warms, a natural consequence of the higher temperatures is that more CO2 is released from natural eco-systems, forests, soil etc. This CO2 then itself adds to the problem and speeds the pace of warming. Sounds like a horrible vicious cycle, doesn’t it? This Guardian article explains in more detail.
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May 24th, 2006 at 11:25 am
With every vicious cycle there is a virtuous cycle. The corresponding good news of this theory is that if temperatures drop, less CO2 is released, and cooling accelerates. So perhaps fixing climate change could require less effort than it might seem.
May 24th, 2006 at 11:51 am
Newsflash! The climate models are just models and bear only a small resemblance to reality! They don’t take lots of things into account!
May 24th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Much better to conduct climate experiments in the real world and kill a few million people thereby solving the problem created by overpopulation in the first place!
Hey, mugwamp. If you don’t get on with models maybe you should have a chat with a polar bear.
May 24th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
mugwump:
please! no model is capable of taking everything into account. thats why we get scientists, statisticians, and economists to run them. models are important as individuals and govternments are capable of taking less into account than models.
lets be constructive here. models are typically forecasts. they’re needed as we have no chance of anticipating future impact without them. i’ll believe a model before anyone who says ” theres not enough information so its all ok”.
May 24th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
mickey: the Kyoto protocol is such an experiment. The logical conclusion of that argument basically prohibits any development that impacts on the environment at all. Your polar bear argument is typical unresearched rhetoric, only parts of the ice caps are melting.
mikeymike: great, you acknowledge the point. Indeed no model is capable of taking everything into account. This must be a huge part of the reason why their climate models can’t predict the temperature next year, let alone 50 or 100 years from now. Believe what you like, but I’ll respect models only after they actually have made some correct predictions. And I certainly won’t believe the alarmist models, such as this one. They are a minority, despite the way they make the headlines in the papers.
Fear is a powerful tool, don’t be so foolish as to assume that the interests in hyping up this to the scale of cataclysm are benign.
May 24th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
mugwump:
“I’ll respect models only after they actually have made some correct predictions” - i say again, models help us predict. their job is not to provide vindication for a position (ie after the event), rather to provide reasonable basis for adopting a position (before the event).
based on your logic commodity markets wouldn’t exist and joe/jane average would have no means of borrowing money. “ah, yes… we did indeed agree on a fixed interest rate, but we at the bank had no way of knowing the dollar would collapse, so you owe us a further $x.”
May 24th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
I used to have this understanding that more CO2 == Bad, but I’ve now been set straight by some TV ads.
Go here to have a look: http://streams.cei.org/
I’ve even adopted the mantra: CO2: Some call it pollution, we call it life. Bring on that life, man.
[I’ll take my tongue out of my cheek now; I posted this on the coal ad thread and it got exactly zero response, so I’ll try one more time, then cross over to the dark side
]
May 24th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
yeah, dbuckley, that ones a shocker.
but such pretty pictures. and boy are those kids cute. it must be true.
brings to mind the jamming post elsewhere in here, it’d be great fun spoofing those ads!
May 24th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
The established scientific fact that CO2 is a fertiliser was frequently mentioned by David Bellamy before he withdrew from the climate change debate.
Increased CO2 levels means more crop production. Yup, our world’s yields per acre have gone up since industrialisation, all other things equal. Look at that, you have more CO2 in the system, more plants grow and therefore more CO2 goes out. Another “buffer” in the system that makes the problem of modelling another order of magnitude difficult.
The problem with models in general is that they try to reduce the complexities of the natural world into something computable. There are so many buffers and feedback mechanisms, it’s entirely possible the complexity problem will never be overcome by simply adding more computing power and weather stations - just like Weather Prediction.
I’m not saying this isn’t valuable research or that this is justification for burning up fossil fuels. What I am saying is that when somebody runs some numbers on his computer (or even 100,000 computers across the globe) and comes up with some new crazy number, the sensible reaction is, “so what? throw it on the pile with the majority of the predictionsâ€?, not “OMG OMG OMG THE SKY IS FALLING!!â€?
Ever read chicken little?
May 24th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
A bit more unresearched rhetoric:
Associated Press
Updated: 12:17 p.m. ET Feb. 8, 2006
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - In a move hailed by environmentalists, the Bush administration announced it will review whether polar bears should be considered a threatened species given indicators that their icy habitats are melting away due to global warming.
In a statement Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said protection “may be warranted� under the Endangered Species Act, and began a review process to consider if the bears should be listed.
May 24th, 2006 at 5:46 pm
Mugwimp says: Increased CO2 levels means more crop production. Must be true! Or should we ask some real scientists?
‘According to the University of California San Diego (UCSD), one of the standard arguments against taking action to reduce emissions of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels is that the elevated carbon dioxide levels will stimulate plants to grow faster. The assumption is that plants will take up excess carbon dioxide to produce carbohydrates—their stored energy source. However, recent studies have shown that, contrary to expectations, increased carbon dioxide does not accelerate plant growth. Research has also shown that the doubling of atmospheric CO2 expected to occur this century can cause leaf stomata to close by 20 to 40 percent in diverse plant species, reducing CO2 intake and water respiration. Dr. Schroeder said that this latest research aimed at understanding the underlying mechanisms “may make it possible to engineer improved water use efficiency in some crop plants or trees that will be exposed to higher carbon dioxide levels in the future.â€?’
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/sCO2plants.asp
May 24th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
with them cycles getting faster and fasterer fwwog do you think we cycling nowhere on this thing till we actually know something ??
May 24th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
Or “Liebig’s Law of the Minimum”. Just because there is more CO2, that’s no guarantee that plants can use it.
May 25th, 2006 at 12:21 am
“Look at that, you have more CO2 in the system, more plants grow and therefore more CO2 goes out. Another “bufferâ€? in the system that makes the problem of modelling another order of magnitude difficult.”
Not quite, most man-made CO2 is absorbed by ocean plankton, which are being affected because of higher water temps.
Also deforestation and drought on land are much more widespread, which obviously means there are no plants to absorb anything.
BTW most crops require massive fossil fuel inputs to grow/process/transport, so they are not a carbon sink anyway.
May 25th, 2006 at 1:38 am
Global cooling will cause CO2 to drop! That’s good news Ben…
In the past, huge volcanic eruptions have caused cooling. Probly a bit hard to engineer. However, the same effect could probably be produced by nuclear war.
May 25th, 2006 at 1:43 am
Let’s see you put a positive spin on this one, Ben :
Ski season draws to a close : http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.asp?id=158
By the century’s end, the Andes in South America will have less than half their current winter snowpack, mountain ranges in Europe and the U.S. West will have lost nearly half of their snow-bound water and snow on New Zealand’s picturesque snowcapped peaks will all but have vanished.
But it’s only a model! Nothing to worry about eh.
May 25th, 2006 at 10:50 am
mugwump:
“I’ll respect models only after they actually have made some correct predictions�
But they have.
They’ve predicted accurately that the levels of C02 in the atmosphere would grow exponentially, following the Keller Curve: and it has. They’ve predicted quite accurately that the rate of rise in ocean levels would double. And they have doubled.
When we study new ice-cores they tend to follow the correlation patterns we’d expect for C02 levels and pollen levels given known models of solar variation and temperature. Micropaleontologists find fossil diatom spreads match expected results from the models as to when there was fresh water in the antarctic.
They get stuff right all the time.
mugwump: “Newsflash! The climate models are just models and bear only a small resemblance to reality! They don’t take lots of things into account! ”
The point of a model is to abstract away what’s not important and then understand the key relationships. If you mean “I won’t accept a model unless it’s perfect” then you’d better stop paying any attention to inflation rates, unemployment rates, GPD growth, or any other economic news ever reported in the newspapers. Because that’s all just the outputs of incomplete models too. And stop flying because safety models are incomplete. And stop investing in banks because their risk models are very incomplete and involve lots of approximations.
May 25th, 2006 at 11:11 am
Alistair, I’m sure you get my point. I’m saying that when you have feedback loops you can control huge systems by getting hold of the right little lever.
There is a tendency to predict doom whenever a feedback loop is discovered in nature. This is naive, since when the feedback loop is understood it can be used in reverse. Just as the PA system will rapidly scream when the microphone picks up the speakers, so it will rapidly stop screaming when the microphone is covered.
Or the drunk who drinks because they are depressed and gets even more depressed from drinking. This feedback loop can be exploited to get them off the piss - because stopping drinking for a bit will make them less depressed and that will make them feel less like having a drink.
So if humans have the ability to reduce global warming by reducing CO2 output, then the warming could reverse rapidly as the planet cools and the natural ecosystem slows it’s own output.
That *if* is still there. Perhaps we can’t influence global temperatures. But we will never know unless we try.
May 25th, 2006 at 11:20 am
Mug says: “Believe what you like, but I’ll respect models only after they actually have made some correct predictions. And I certainly won’t believe the alarmist models, such as this one.”
Once again, mug, you spout contrarian dogma without troubling yourself with checking the facts. The global climate models have made successful forecasts, most notably when James Hansen testified to the US Congress in 1988. He outlined three possible scenarios for global temperature increase through the 90s - low, medium and high - and indicated the medium was most likely. Guess what, the medium prediction was pretty much spot on. And that was with a GCM a great deal less sophisticated than the ones we have today. (Graph and Hansen’s commentary here: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/).
What is alarming about the new research frog links to above is that it is part of a growing list of positive feedbacks (warming making itself faster) that are being quantified. A recent US Navy study suggests that the Arctic may be ice-free in summer in ten years. Permafrost melting in Siberia is releasing lots of methane (far more potent a GHG than CO2). You could call this a cascade of positive feedbacks, many of which are not handled well by the GCMs because they’re only becoming quantifiable now.
Without wishing to be seen as an alarmist, I have to say that I am beginning to find the accumulating evidence rather alarming. Climate change is here. It looks as though it may be happening faster than we thought it would, and the risks of really damaging consequences are increasing.
May 25th, 2006 at 11:43 am
Ben says “So if humans have the ability to reduce global warming by reducing CO2 output, then the warming could reverse rapidly as the planet cools and the natural ecosystem slows it’s own output.”
Sorry Ben, but reality bites back. It’s not just that we have to reduce CO2 output, we have to reduce the CO2 level in the atmosphere to some arbitrary point where we feel comfortable that the climate is stable. We’re at 380ppm now, and heat storage in the oceans means that we’re already committed to another 30+ years of warming even if we could freeze CO2 at today’s levels.
What’s realistic? If we could get the world to agree to sensible carbon controls could we stabilise atmospheric CO2 at under 450ppm by, say, 2030? We’d still have another 30+ years of warming to come. How do we go about reducing CO2 levels? Stopping the felling of tropical rainforests, and planting trees everywhere would help, as might large scale carbon sequestration, but you’re looking at huge undertaking to get the atmosphere back to a comfortable level (where’s that - 330ppm, or a pre-industrial 280ppm?) The world won’t start cooling until we get into a position where there’s a negative heat flux with respect to space. If we want to restore ice caps, we may have to go lower. This is planetary engineering on a considerable scale, and while we probably have to think about ways of doing it, it certainly isn’t going to be easy.
May 26th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Bucolic, you’re not telling me anything I don’t know there. Reversing climate change is a massive task. We get it, man.
I’m just commenting on the topic - warming is getting faster and faster from feedback loop, pointing out the same dynamic can be exploited in reverse. So the existence of the feedback loop is not any particular cause for alarm.
Your statements about what’s realistic remain to be seen. The world has never conducted an experiment like this, so I won’t be taking anyone’s word for what the outcome will be.
It is quite possible that some quite unknown dynamic will take effect as the planet warms, which could accelerate the warming or decelerate it. We’re talking about the biggest system humanity has ever tried to control, the entire planet, so I’m still sceptical about what the future holds. But I fully accept that the warming results from human activity and has extremely dangerous potential. As I say, the large scale dynamics are not really known.
I also think that we could be very surprised by what humans are capable of when they finally put their minds to it, when general acceptance of the problem finally occurs. Maybe there are solutions that go well beyond our predictions.
May 26th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
BW: “Maybe there are solutions that go well beyond our predictions.”
There almost certainly are, since predictions are usually wrong! I would say that there’s
a race on: can we develop and implement the technologies and systems that will allow us to avoid really damaging climate change before that change goes too far. I’m sure we’re smart enough to do it, but the political will seems sadly lacking. And the rate of change is certainly increasing…
May 29th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
The chaps you really need to talk to are the seething millions of Chinese, Indians, and others who are currently having their own Industrial Revolution. Dear little NZ is but a drop in that energy ocean.
May 31st, 2006 at 4:48 pm
waymad:
every drop counts!