The New Yorker magazine’s Web site has the full text of a recent series by Elizabeth Kolbert on climate change. Highly recommended.
39 thoughts on “Three great articles on climate change in New Yorker magazine”
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A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
The New Yorker magazine’s Web site has the full text of a recent series by Elizabeth Kolbert on climate change. Highly recommended.
Comments are closed.
Read them. Trying to get everyone I know to read them. I stopped commuting by car (I ride my bike) a while ago. Trying to do more. The problem starts and ends with each one of us.
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The biased mainstream media fails to present both side of the argument. All we get is unsound science and elitist liberal conspiracy theories. And even if the planet was warming, are we to oppose the will of God?
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Yeah only “Red State”, you forgot to end the post with “bubbl.. blubb.. blub…” Water wings, anyone?
Well, you sure can’t convince ol’ Red State here with arguments like that. Or this:
AMY DAVIDSON: What is global warming? Is it real, or theoretical?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: I guess you could say that that depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. […]
Verbatim. http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?050425on_onlineonly01
Thanks Philip, for pointing that gem out, that was a great read and very informative.
Still, I’m sure there will be a chorus of those who sound off on how that series is just another in a continuous stream of liberal tripe…
I think the luxury comment spam sums it all up very neatly. We’re all zooming around in our gas guzzling SUVs, those on the left with bumper stickers grasping at irrellevant conspiracy theories, the ones on the right wanting to keep those yellow ribbons waving on the antenna forever. Both sides don’t see that they themselves are the enemy, the problem. There is no conspiracy if it includes everyone (hint: you’re driving in it) and “supporting” your troops by driving an SUV, egads even a car, is as hipocritical as you could ever be.
The response Kobert gave to the questioner was based on the question being completely idiotic. Not to say she couldn’t have helped out the questioner by restating the question in a nonidiotic way. The real question is “Does impending climate change mean something we need to worry about?” The answer is “Yeah, duh.” While Michael Chrichton’s book is all the “science” the opposition to the direct impact of global warming has been able to come up with, lately reams and reams of studies and data are stating and restating the obvious.
The charges that any change in global temperature are as a result of mankind’s actions are still a farce. It is well known that the Earth goes through cycles of warming and cooling; for instance, grapes used to be grown in parts of England that can no longer support grape-growing. The climate models used, even on the most advanced supercomputers, are still ridiculously simplistic – and this was the case when I first read about global warming in 1986, and is still the case 20 years on, when computers have gone through 6 or 7 generations of computer architecture. Even if you do grant that global warming exists, global warming is objectively a GOOD thing for humanity – more crops can be grown, less winter heating is required, the rainforest can be expanded, etc.
I am really concerned about global warming. On my weekly helicopter and airplane trips I get a great view of the coastline, and I wouldn’t want my view spoiled … we should all do our part to cut emissions! That’s it for now, gotta go drive my sports car around.
My reaction to the notion that the icecaps might disappear entirely within the next century or so is: “cool!” I mean, that’s pretty exciting. I’d like to see what that looks like. Maybe I should go buy an SUV to help it along. Why are liberals so conservative and conservatives so liberal when it comes to changes in climate?
The worst Q&A response was:
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Q: If human beings have caused climate change, can we also reverse it?
A: We cannot reverse climate change. This is because carbon dioxide is a long-lived gas….
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Does she not understand the question or does she merely lack imagination? If the addition of carbon dioxide is a positive forcing, we’d need a negative forcing of similar magnitude, but it needn’t have anything to do with carbon dioxide. For instance, changing the planet’s albedo. We could start by painting roofs and streets and parking lots white. Move on to planting different crops and engineering new ones, cloud-seeding…
PatrikG, you need to read your own words again. The occurrance of natural climate change does not preclude human agency. Logically, they aren’t mutually exclusive, which is all the more reason you should be concerned. As far as climate models go, you’re absolutely right: they are considerably simpler than what they are modeling. But the last climate model one of Kolbert’s interviewers used in a government lab in NY predictied the last 100 years climate changes to a tiny fraction of a degree. This model projected into the future is predicting science-fiction-level droughts for the vast majority of the continental US for most of the second half of the century. The models suggest that these droughts could be mitigated if we curbed our CO2 creation now.
I’m reading Lomborg’s “the skeptical environmentalist”. I found it very surprising that the author of the article did not mention this book: it challenges most of the Doomsday arguments that we read in the article.
See also http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/
The models suggest that these droughts could be mitigated if we curbed our CO2 creation now.
Look, I’m pragmatic. It seems obvious that, yes, not dumping crap into the air is a good idea. On the other hand more study is indicated and we should not hold ourselves to a dogmatic viewpoint.
We need to balance two things; the need to keep from fouling our nest and the need to maintain a high-energy civilization.
It should be possible to do both.
Brian,
Sure, being open-minded is a good thing. However, when you are faced with a power-generating business community that will do anything (yes, ANYTHING) to prevent carbon dioxide from being identified as a pollutant, then it is time to be DAMNED close-minded about the whole thing.
Just the facts man, the right wing shouted denial about clobal warming for over ten years. In President bush’s speach it is not even denied now. What the current administration continues to deny tho is limits on carbon dioxide emissions.
It is a profoundly sickening pile of crap when public figures can no longer deny global warming to the general public and the continue to fight to limit curbs on grrenhouse gasses in private.
Arjen,
Much like the brouhaha over evolution in the states, it is possible to find a few published pieces that fly in the face of the widely held opinions of the scientific community. Sure it might be fun to stand with the minority… sure, the mught be right… But there is a hell of a lot more at stake here than polite inquries into the nature of man, or the behaviour of polite society.
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It is time for all of us to influence our politicians in any way that we can to accept that co2 IS a pollutant and that we have the political will to lose out on some of our conveniences in order to prevent further global warming.
Gary: CO2 is naturally occurring, so it does seem a little weird to try to classify it as a pollutant. Not sure the context in which you made the remark though. If you are referring to Bush’s non-support of Kyoto in your second paragraph, it makes eminent sense, since India and China are exempted from being required to follow Kyoto.
Gary it’s easy to see we disagree about methods if not the destination. But that’s me; lay out the facts and people will generally choose in their better interests. When both sides become bitter howling monkeys you’re not getting anywhere. To be honest your stance as noted here reminds me of a little kid holding his breath because he’s not getting his way.
But as I said – we likely agree on more than we disagree.
So, those of you who don’t think we have a human-worsened problem: what part of the cited article don’t you understand? Or didn’t you bother to read it? And what industry pays your salary?
This should be a no-brainer, folks. Sure, do more research, but while we’re waiting for the results, it’s insane to risk pushing the effect past the point of no return. Don’t any of you have children?
PatrickG,
CO2 is naturally occuring…
Sure, so is sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, any number of hydrocarbon based ethers, and even ‘particulates’, however these are all classified as pollutants.
The deal is that they are all unhealthy (an covered by the ‘Clean Air Act’), and when we are able to identify a source that we can control (read human created), then it is within our grasp to limit the production of these elements. Just take a look at the LA valley. In the early 70’s it was nearly impossible to see through the brown soup that filled the air.
In the mean time we identified the source of the pollution, passed legeslation and have seen noticible improvements.
What we need to do is continue to identify co2 as a pollutant, modify legislation and come up with a technological solution that will allow industry to meet the requirements while remaining profitable.
What (most) industry and this administration has done is distract form public attention while gutting programs to force improvements in power generation facilites.
Kyoto is secondary to my disdain over bush failure to enforce current us legislation. Although it does not take a particularly bright person to see that even India and China would eventually have to limit co2 production at which point they will have to purchase technology from western countries that will have already had to implement it.
Brian,
Honestly I do not think that we agree at all. I have noticed that most people, if left to their own, will satisfy their short term interests. This has lead to an america that is addicted to power consumption and suvs. These people (who are for the most part great folk) need to be woken up to the situation and mobilized to get their politicians in gear to make long term legislation which will help to avert disaster. You can cll me names all you want but it really isn’t much of a distraction.
“My reaction to the notion that the icecaps might disappear entirely within the next century or so is: ‘cool!'”
It’s not so much fun to contemplate global warming from the Netherlands, where a quarter of the land is below sea level. They’re working on building floating houses. (See Part III of Kolbert’s series.)
What can you do about it? If you can improve your energy efficiency (e.g. by upgrading the insulation on your house), you can save some money and feel virtuous at the same time. Some ideas from Canada:
http://www.climatechange.gc.ca/onetonne/english/tipstogetstarted.asp
The average Canadian produces 5 metric tonnes of CO2 each year; we can meet our Kyoto commitments if we each reduce our energy usage by 1 tonne. (For example, reducing your driving by 10% saves half a tonne. Improving your caulking and weather-stripping can save half a tonne. Switching from an SUV to a mid-sized car would save two tonnes. Etc.)
Our models may be decent models of the way the climate seems to behave /during a warming trend/, but until we know what starts ice ages and why CO2 levels /decrease/ during them, it seems silly to extrapolate as far as the doomsayers do. Yes, C02 is increasing and temperatures seem to be increasing too, but those two trends started before we industrialized and will probably reverse themselves eventually no matter what we do. For the same reason they always reversed themselves in the past, whatever that reason is. Here’s the relevant part of that first article:
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“At the same time, for reasons that are not entirely understood, as the ice sheets advanced CO2 levels declined: during each of the most recent glaciations, carbon-dioxide levels dropped almost precisely in synch with falling temperatures.”
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The articles reeked of selection bias – presenting anecdotes and information that support one side of a debate, while ignoring the other side. No matter whether the climate as a whole were warming or cooling, it would be possible to find places where changes at the margin are making life harder for the locals. Somebody who wanted to prove global cooling was a problem could fill a page with anecdotes about people who live, work, or do science in the places on earth where glaciers are growing and the growing season is getting shorter.
I also liked this snippet:
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“The year 1998 ranks as the hottest year since the instrumental temperature record began, but it is closely followed by 2002 and 2003, which are tied for second; 2001, which is third; and 2004, which is fourth.”
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Another way of putting that is: the average recorded temperature was on an increasing trend until 1998 – the local maximum – and has been slowly declining since then. Doesn’t sound quite so scary, does that?
Glen,
Pretty selective stuff that you pulled out there.
Maybe you could remember that (according to the article) air temperatures are a poor way of measuring warming trends due to large fluctuations, ie: noise.
Or maybe (same article) that permafrost forms a co2 storage, which would go hand-in-hand with the whole co2 dropping while ice-ages are expanding…
What you seemed to miss (intentionally?) is that there will be large releases of stored co2 as the permafrost melts, that there will be large shifts in climate as the oceans dilute (disrupting the gulf strem) and that such changes will not be localized to the small fringe of humanity that lives on the edge of a glacier…
A huge percentage of the earths population lives on the coast-line, what about that disruption… Or what about those who live in marginally habitable desert areas? Or even those who… The list goes on for quite some time.
These are not flights of liberal fantasy but cold hard conservative loss estimations. We all should be doing some thinking, not simply casting off these problems as academic flummery, or the weak rhetorical devices that you resort to.
gwb says: Who you gonna beleive? Me or your own lie’n eyes?
My uncle who lived in SE AK from ’43 to ’88 told me that during his first years 20 below and 6 feet of snow was usual winter weather. On his last trip out he said there was no snow that winter and no below zero temps. The AK weather is changing -that is for sure, and in human time scales.
Enjoy
“The articles reeked of selection bias – presenting anecdotes and information that support one side of a debate, while ignoring the other side.”
Burton Richter (who won the Nobel prize in Physics) came to Vancouver back in 2002 to give a talk on global warming and energy usage. One of the things he said that made an impression: if you really wanted to present an accurate picture of the global-warming dispute within the scientific community, you’d need to have one person on one side and .5% of one person on the other side. Of course on TV you have to round up to one person on each side.
“Somebody who wanted to prove global cooling was a problem could fill a page with anecdotes about people who live, work, or do science in the places on earth where glaciers are growing and the growing season is getting shorter.”
Are there any such places? (Really, I’m curious.)
“Another way of putting that is: the average recorded temperature was on an increasing trend until 1998 – the local maximum – and has been slowly declining since then.”
Take a look at the graph and judge for yourself:
http://tinyurl.com/cexdy
My own interpretation would be that the last four years have been record-high years.
One 1988 quote from James Hansen which wasn’t in the Kolbert articles: “With the climatological probability of a hot summer represented by two faces (say painted red) of a six-faced die, judging from our model by the 1990s three or four of the six die faces will be red. It seems to us that this is a sufficient ‘loading’ of the dice that it will be noticeable to the man in the street.”
Let me try that again with better formatting (I hope)….
“The articles reeked of selection bias – presenting anecdotes and information that support one side of a debate, while ignoring the other side.”
Burton Richter (who won the Nobel prize in Physics) came to Vancouver back in 2002 to give a talk on global warming and energy usage. One of the things he said that made an impression: if you really wanted to present an accurate picture of the global-warming dispute within the scientific community, you’d need to have one person on one side and .5% of one person on the other side. Of course on TV you have to round up to one person on each side.
“Somebody who wanted to prove global cooling was a problem could fill a page with anecdotes about people who live, work, or do science in the places on earth where glaciers are growing and the growing season is getting shorter.”
Are there any such places? (Really, I’m curious.)
“Another way of putting that is: the average recorded temperature was on an increasing trend until 1998 – the local maximum – and has been slowly declining since then.”
Take a look at the graph and judge for yourself:
http://tinyurl.com/cexdy
My own interpretation would be that the last four years have been record-high years.
One 1988 quote from James Hansen which wasn’t in the Kolbert articles: “With the climatological probability of a hot summer represented by two faces (say painted red) of a six-faced die, judging from our model by the 1990s three or four of the six die faces will be red. It seems to us that this is a sufficient ‘loading’ of the dice that it will be noticeable to the man in the street.”
I agree with you that the last four years were record-high years, but the trend matters. Given that last year’s temperature is a good predictor of this year’s temperature at any particular time of year, if 1998 were a local maximum we’d expect the years after that to be pretty warm too, even if the trend from that point were downward or flat. This “5th highest” and “9th highest” stuff is a way to obscure the trends and make things sound scarier than they are.
That you could even ask the question “are there such places?” proves that you’re not really paying attention to the other side of the debate. You might want to read Crichton’s book; it’s pretty good at debunking the standard misconceptions (which is all it really claims to do; the folks at realchange.org essentially criticize it for not being the book /they/ would have written, rather than for what it actually is.)
There are lots of glaciers that are growing. Try Scandinavia. Or, hey, how about Hubbard? That one has generally been on an advancing trend, and it’s even local! Our hypothetical counter-article could talk about endangered seal populations and impact on the native Yakutat from the current and predicted growth. Um, here:
http://www.fs.fed.us/r10/tongass/forest_facts/faqs/hubbard.shtml
Quote: “Glaciologists predict that Hubbard Glacier will again block Russell Fiord; however, they cannot predict when this event may happen. Hubbard Glacier, unlike most glaciers in North America, is predicted to continue to advance for the next century.”
Here’s another recent advancer that was in the news for a bit, the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand:
http://www.cnsnews.com/ForeignBureaus/archive/200502/FOR20050216a.html
I’m not claiming that most glaciers are growing or that the trend is for them to grow. We are in a warming period, so the trend has been for them to shrink with or without us. But there are /enough/ that are growing that if you wanted to you could write an article that left the impression that glacier growth was a recent trend. Or on the flip side, you could find places where glacier retreat is making life much /better/ for the locals and write stories about that. But doom-and-gloom sells newspapers and gets grants, so there’s really no incentive to seek out happy or neutral news. So we all accumulate the false impression that things are getting worse /everywhere/, when in fact things are getting “better” in some places and are failing to get significantly “worse” in most places. “Worse” makes headlines, so we assume it’s all there is.
“I agree with you that the last four years were record-high years, but the trend matters. Given that last year’s temperature is a good predictor of this year’s temperature at any particular time of year, if 1998 were a local maximum we’d expect the years after that to be pretty warm too, even if the trend from that point were downward or flat.”
Really? I would have expected reversion to the mean.
“That you could even ask the question ‘are there such places?’ proves that you’re not really paying attention to the other side of the debate.”
True enough. I have libertarian climate-change-skeptic friends who send me stuff from Tech Central Station (Patrick Michaels, Roy Spencer, etc.), but I haven’t been impressed with what I’ve seen so far. Same with Michael Crichton (they sent me his speech on alien invasion and Kyoto).
“… the folks at realclimate.org essentially criticize it for not being the book /they/ would have written, rather than for what it actually is.”
What did you think of Gavin Schmidt’s specific criticism about Patrick Michaels’ representation of James Hansen’s 1988 testimony? (According to Schmidt and Hansen, Hansen presented three scenarios, A, B, and C, B being the most probable; in 1998, during testimony of his own, Michaels erased Hansen’s B and C scenarios to make it look as though Hansen’s prediction of warming had turned out to be 300% off. Crichton repeats Michaels’ assessment uncritically.)
http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/02/01/schmidt-fear/
Thanks for the info on advancing glaciers. Anything on shorter growing seasons?
“… doom-and-gloom sells newspapers and gets grants, so there’s really no incentive to seek out happy or neutral news. So we all accumulate the false impression that things are getting worse /everywhere/, when in fact things are getting ‘better’ in some places and are failing to get significantly ‘worse’ in most places. ‘Worse’ makes headlines, so we assume it’s all there is.”
I suppose that’s one way to look at it: discount predictions of doom, because of people’s interest in exaggerating threats.
My own view is a little different. I tend to put a lot of weight on scientific authority, given the track record of the scientific community over the last few centuries. So when a large number of climate scientists say that they’re very concerned, I think it’s worth paying attention.
Of course it’s not possible to take out insurance against every possible threat — you have to look at costs and benefits. But it seems to me that encouraging energy efficiency would make sense for other reasons, e.g. reducing dependence on the Middle East, adapting to the high price of oil, reducing the flow of cash to radical groups like al-Qaeda.
Schmidt’s article initially takes it for granted that “everybody knows” the climate isn’t getting warmer everywhere. He’s wrong. Just like you did, most people assume “global warming” means it’s getting warmer globally. Maybe the scientific community knows better, but they aren’t the audience Crichton is playing to.
Schmidt might be right about the testimony, but when I look at the article abstract here ( http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1988/HansenFung.html ) , it sure sounds to me like Scenario A is being sold as the real prediction. A is claimed to be based on “continued” exponential growth, whereas B is based on “reduced” (to linear) growth – a change from the status quo – and C on “rapid curtailment” – a drastic change. (RealClimate in retrospect describes B as the “business-as-usual” assumption, but if business as usual means continuing to do what you’ve done in the past, that’s what A was for. No?
Anything on shorter growing seasons?
Crichton makes good use of “small multiple” graphs to convey that – contrary to the popular impression – temperatures aren’t uniformly increasing any more than glaciers are uniformly shrinking. In some places temperatures are increasing, in some places they are decreasing, and some are staying the same. It largely depends on what timescale you look at. Let’s see… according to charts on pages 373-374 of State of Fear, Truman, Missouri has gotten colder by 2.5 degrees since 1930, Greenville, SC by 1.5 degrees, and Ann Arbor, MI by one degree. Much of upstate New York has gotten colder since 1930 too. So if we take 1930 as the baseline, you can probably find farmers (of marginally productive crops) in those areas that have been inconvenienced by the cold. Crichton claims that the “heat island” effect hasn’t yet been adequately controlled for. It’s been controlled for to some degree – it certainly hasn’t been ignored – but he considers it an open question whether it has been controlled to a sufficient degree. He cites a paper ((from SoF p. 384, footnote) Ian G. McKendry, 2003, “Applied climatology”, Progress in Physical Geography 27, 4:597-606. “Recent studies suggest that attempts to remove the ‘urban bias’ from long-term climate records may be overly simplistic.”)
Hmm. It looks like that paper is available online, but you can’t link to it directly and have to pay $30 to read it. There’s a link to the journal here:
http://tinyurl.com/9ldp4
I suppose that’s one way to look at it: discount predictions of doom, because of people’s interest in exaggerating threats.
Exactly. I worried about nuclear war. I worried about killer bees. Somewhere along the way I grew up and realized that the better the scare story, the less likely it is that any of it will come to pass. So unlike much of the nation, I managed not to be even slightly worried about the Y2K bug, the alleged “crack baby” epidemic, the alleged epidemic of “school shootings” or the possibility that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Those all turned out to be good calls. Now here’s global warming. How worried should I be? 🙂
Glen,
If you are willing to accept the work of a fiction writer (Andromeda Strain, jeez), then I will worry for you.
In order to do a proper threat assessment, you need to understand the problem…
Even a few nukes can be ‘messy’, and the old style MAD was intentionally ‘unthinkable’, just enoug of an immediate threat to get people to _not_ send tanks accross a border in the heat of passion.
As far as ‘war on drugs’, ‘war on terror’, ‘war on killer bees’… These may be seen as intentional mis-use of the attention drawn to an immediate threat for ‘other’ motives…
With global warming we have an actual, measurable, scientifically identifi-able trend that may have devastating (but certainly HAS had disrupting) effects on the lives of millions of people. To ignore this is more than irresponsible.
On the other side of the table, you have money and business. A business that operates in a manner that is increasing greenhouse gasses, and that does not want to impact profits in order to change the way that they operate. It is much more feasible financially to support a small number of ‘scientists’ and popular authors that it is to retro-fit powerplants, develop new technologies, etc… One costs millions, the other costs billions.
So, you are caught in the middle, who’s interest should you promote and how much weight should you give to their arguments?
My own precautionary principle says you don’t force people to take action (at metaphorical, and possibly actual, gunpoint) unless the expected benefit of that particular action significantly outweighs the cost. Nobody has made a positive case that Kyoto by itself will make much difference in the cost of warming. Some Kyoto advocates have fallen for the “something” falacy of government: “something must be done; this is something; therefore, this must be done”. Some hope it might be a step down a slippery slope towards some future as-yet-unimagined policy that might make a difference, but that future policy would also be more costly. Some simply reject the idea of cost-benefit analysis and regard “doing something for the environment” as worth any cost.
We know for a fact that economic and technological progress makes us ever more capable of dealing with threats of all sorts. The richer we get, the easier it will be to deal with change in general. So the “do nothing” option is actually a positive solution — it means we should keep making progress in our ability to deal with problems and our technical understanding of them.
Claims that we need to shut down the engines of economic progress in order to deal with any one particular threat should be met with a lot of skepticism, because economic progress tends to protect us against all threats, not just the ones that are currently in our field of view.
Both Lomborg and Crichton do a reasonable job of listing their references, and to the degree that I’ve checked them the sources generally bear out the claims being made. It’s the arguments, not the authors making them, that I find convincing.
Glen,
You are grasping at a ‘Slippery Slope’ argument in suggesting that we have to ‘shut down the engines of economic progress ‘ in order to reduce co2 emmissions.
What I believe a reasonable culture would do is induce their private sector to adopt newer technology that will reduce the emissions of co2.
If ther eis one thing that I believe, it is that there are only two things that corporate america will respond to, obvious and immediate losss of profits, and laws with the immediate effect of incarceration of the leadership of a company.
Seems pretty clear to me, wither the companies find another way to maintain profitablility or they face incarceration.
“… it sure sounds to me like Scenario A is being sold as the real prediction.”
Maybe we need to track down the actual testimony. (I did a Google search and couldn’t find it on the web.) Hansen: “Scenario A has a fast growth rate for greenhouse gases. Scenarios B and C have a moderate growth rate for greenhouse gases until year 2000, after which greenhouse gases stop increasing in Scenario C. Scenarios B and C also included occasional large volcanic eruptions, while scenario A did not. The objective was to illustrate the broad range of possibilities in the ignorance of how forcings would actually develop. The extreme scenarios (A with fast growth and no volcanos, and C with terminated growth of greenhouse gases) were meant to bracket plausible rates of change. /All of the maps of simulated climate change that I showed in my 1988 testimony were for the intermediate scenario B, because it seemed the most likely of the three scenarios./”
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/
Schmidt: “In fact, in his congressional testimony Hansen _only_ showed results from scenario B, and stated clearly that it was the most probable scenario.”
http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/02/01/schmidt-fear/
“… according to charts on pages 373-374 of State of Fear, Truman, Missouri has gotten colder by 2.5 degrees since 1930, Greenville, SC by 1.5 degrees, and Ann Arbor, MI by one degree. Much of upstate New York has gotten colder since 1930 too. So if we take 1930 as the baseline, you can probably find farmers (of marginally productive crops) in those areas that have been inconvenienced by the cold.”
Okay, thanks for the info.
[Regarding correction for the urban heat island effect:] “He cites a paper ((from SoF p. 384, footnote) Ian G. McKendry”
McKendry’s at UBC (I’m in Vancouver). I’ll see if I can give him a call, find out what he thinks.
“I worried about nuclear war. I worried about killer bees. Somewhere along the way I grew up and realized that the better the scare story, the less likely it is that any of it will come to pass.”
I think it’s reasonable to do some discounting, but I guess my perspective is a little different: from looking at the historical record, all past civilizations _have_ collapsed, for one reason or another. (With ugly consequences. I have a strong interest in twentieth-century Chinese history in particular, and it’s pretty gruesome.) To me, this suggests that sooner or later, something will come along that _could_ cause Western civilization to collapse; and so we should watch out for such threats.
Of course you need to evaluate costs and benefits. You also need to evaluate opportunity costs — global warming isn’t necessarily the biggest problem facing us (personally, I’d put nuclear war at the top of the list), or even the biggest environmental problem. (Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” provides a historical perspective on environmentally-induced collapses: civilization depends on an agricultural base, and if you start losing your agricultural base to deforestation and soil erosion, you’re in deep trouble.) And of course it’s necessary to be sober and objective in evaluating the evidence. But from what I’ve seen, the evidence that global warming is happening, and that it’s bad news, is pretty strong. One of my libertarian friends sent me a Times article which suggests that the Gulf Stream is getting screwed up (which William Calvin has been warning about for a while), which is very bad news for Europe.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1602579,00.html
Killer bees I can’t comment on. 🙂
“Claims that we need to shut down the engines of economic progress in order to deal with any one particular threat should be met with a lot of skepticism, because economic progress tends to protect us against all threats, not just the ones that are currently in our field of view.”
Would capping global greenhouse gas emissions really require putting a stop to economic growth? If we had a market in CO2 permits, industries that found it easy to reduce CO2 emissions could sell their permits to industries for which reducing emissions would be much harder. We’ve got an enormously flexible market system that can adapt to all sorts of technological change; would a global cap on CO2 emissions be that difficult to deal with?
I should also mention Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Design initiative. Sterling, a science-fiction writer, argues that you’re not going to get anywhere by preaching to people that they need a more sustainable lifestyle; instead what you need is to _seduce_ them into a more sustainable lifestyle by making it more glamorous than the old industrial carbon-belching lifestyle.
http://www.viridiandesign.org/manifesto.html
Maybe we need to track down the actual testimony. I did track down the actual abstract to the paper that testimony was based on. Maybe calling A “continued exponential growth” was the mistake? It’s a bit ambiguous. Calling B “reduced linear” is even more so – it could be they meant reduced relative to A rather than reduced relative to current trends. In any case, I can see both sides.
To me, this suggests that sooner or later, something will come along that _could_ cause Western civilization to collapse; and so we should watch out for such threats.
I guess I see panics about things like global warming as just such a threat. The threat to our nation I worry about most is demosclerosis — that we have a tendency to take on more and more spending and regulatory commitments, each one like tying another weight to the ankle of a long-distance runner. Each new commitment isn’t deadly in itself, but the sum total of them will ultimately cause the runner to fall. Like the British Empire before it, the American Empire will eventually stretch itself too thin and collapse.
The War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Terrorism, and now the War on Global Warming…each time a new War is proposed to deal with a new source of panic, the advocates say it won’t cost all that much and we’re rich enough to afford it alongside all our other commitments. And so we shave off another fraction of our potential output to handle the new commitment. In the short run it doesn’t seem like much, but in the long run it’s tragic, because exponential growth is a powerful force for good. Even if each new speculative threat prompts us to reduce our GDP growth by a mere fraction of a percent per year, over the subsequent decades that will still do enough damage that we won’t have the resources to spare later for when some real, serious and verifiable direct threat comes along. Like, say, a comet headed for the earth. Or something we haven’t even thought of yet.
I’d like to leave this runner as unencumbered as possible so he remains nimble enough to dodge when he sees the next truck coming.
(I’d be a lot more sympathetic if advocates specified what existing programs they would cut to free up resources for their shiny new boondog- er, government program, so as to make it a net zero-sum proposal.)
“I’d be a lot more sympathetic if advocates specified what existing programs they would cut to free up resources for their shiny new boondog- er, government program, so as to make it a net zero-sum proposal.”
A common net zero-sum proposal is to shift taxes from income to carbon emissions. For example, Paul Krugman had a Slate column on this subject in 1997:
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/green.html
Bruce Sterling argues for tackling global warming without government action.
“… over the subsequent decades that will still do enough damage that we won’t have the resources to spare later for when some real, serious and verifiable direct threat comes along.”
It seems to me that global warming is already a real and serious problem, rather than a speculative problem; but I guess we’ll continue to disagree.
“I did track down the actual abstract to the paper that testimony was based on.”
I know, but I’d like to see the actual testimony, to see whether Hansen’s description of Michaels’ misrepresentation is accurate or not. According to the Senate website, I need to find a federal depository library:
http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/how_to_congressional_record.htm
Unfortunately, I’m in Canada.
I did find the index record for Hansen’s 1988 Senate testimony, in case someone in the US is interested in tracking it down:
Energy Policy Implications of Global Warming: James Hansen, D469 [7JY]
John Firor, D469 [7JY]
Michael MacCracken, D469 [7JY]
One of the things Kolbert (somewhat unemphatically) points out is that while most scientists seem to be in a consensus about the inevitability of climate change, very few of them agree on the outcome or even the general effects of climate change.
A tiny example is here in my home state of Minnesota, which has historically had many of the coldest winters in the lower 48 states on record, change has come in the form of warmer winters and _cooler_ summers. A larger example points to certain climate models of warming periods triggering ice ages.
What Kolbert never talked about is the fact that over almost half a billion years the sun has increased its heat output by 10%, a trend that will continue for the next billion years until the sun novas and/or the galaxy collides with Andromeda (slated to happen about the same time). The earth has its own thermostatic phenomenon to combat the sun’s increasing heat output, called the Terrestrial Carbon-Erosion Cycle. This cycle will eventually be unable to keep up at the current rate, where halfway through the century we will have as much carbon as we had during the Cretecous era when most of the US was an inland ocean and crocodiles swam at the poles.
So if we are in a “natural warming trend” would it be a Good Thing to not try and help it along, considering the effects of Business As Usual will probably amplified? Even if the trend will reverse at some point, wouldn’t it be smart not to extend it several hundred years by our own agency?
I understated the number of increasing glaciers. A NASA press release says “SATELLITES SHOW OVERALL INCREASES IN ANTARCTIC SEA ICE COVER” here:
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20020820southseaice.html
Further analysis is here.