The psychology of climate change

Six-degere rise in temperatures 'inevitable' say experts

Charles Miranda

November 19, 2009 11:01pm

THE world is spinning toward a catastrophic climate change scenario, with temperatures now far more likely to rise by 6C by the end of the century, a leading international team of scientists has warned.

An increase of 6C would have irreversible consequences, rendering large parts of the globe uninhabitable and destroying much of life on earth.

The study by Professor Corinne Le Quere, from the British Antarctic Survey and East Anglia University, is the most comprehensive so far of how economic changes and shifts in the way people used land over the past 50 years have affected CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

It also claims the Earth's natural ability to absorb CO2 into soil, forests and oceans is declining.

The nightmarish possibility of a 6C temperature rise was made public by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, when it was then only a worst-case scenario.

But according to Professor Le Quere it is now all but inevitable.

"We're at the top of the IPCC scenario," she told Nature Geoscience, a respected science journal, which published the study yesterday.

Her research - backed by 31 top researchers from seven countries including Australians involved in the Global Carbon Project - found there had been a 29 per cent rise in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels between 2000 and 2008.

The annual average CO2 increase of 3.4 per cent since 2000 compared with increases of only 1 per cent the previous eight years.

She said there was no doubt carbon dioxide emissions from transport and industry and deforestation were squarely to blame.

Governments around the world are trying to find agreement to limit the rise to 2C, the level believed required to avoid extremely dangerous climate change.

Professor Le Quere said next month's UN climate conference in Copenhagen had to come out with a clear and decisive global policy.

"If the agreement is weak or the commitments not respected, it is not 2.5C or 3C we will get, it's 5C or 6C, that is the path we're on," she said.

An Earth 6C hotter than today's temperatures would be a nightmarish place, according to most predictions.

All ice on both poles would have melted, pushing sea levels at least 6m higher. Temperate bushland and even rainforests would become deserts, while methane fireballs could erupt from oceans where marine life had died because of a lack of oxygen.

Australian pressure group The Climate Institute said on current emission trends, unmitigated climate change is likely to have catastrophic global impacts.

Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Penny Wong, yesterday said Australia must act now to reduce the country's carbon pollution and that a global deal at Copenhagen was difficult but vital.

The Price Carbon Campaign on the superiority of a direct carbon emissions tax to 'cap-n-trade': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuqvX6UDdcg

Some time back (on another thread..?  can't find it now) there was some debate about whether glaciers were melting in the Himalayas.  Well I'd like the deniers here to rebutt these...:

and I could go on, and on, and on, and on, and on...............  so this is caused by climate cooling then..?

Mike

I'm with your Damnthematrix --  anthropogenic climate change is obvious.  What we don't know is how bad things will get and how quickly. I tend towards pessimism in this regard.   Thus far the pace of climate change has occured much quicker than scientists' forcasts.  I see no reason for this to change as scientists tend to err on the side of conservative forcasts. Moreoever,  I don't have much hope that the world will be able to get together to mount any sort of serious effort to mitigate climate change through limiting carbon emissions. I predict geo engineering will occur through utter desperation when things get really bad and folks demand that the government 'does something'.

 

     What's left to argue about AGW? Stuff your gold up your *ss and run for the hills.

DTM wrote:

Some time back (on another thread..?  can't find it now) there was some debate about whether glaciers were melting in the Himalayas.  Well I'd like the deniers here to rebutt these...:

Some pictures are hardly what I would call proof.

1) Were all these pictures done on at the same time of the year?  I think I would like to see some seasonal pictures of each of these over time to be sure that there is nothing else going on. 

2) Do you expect glaciers to remain constant?  If so, why?  If not, then the real question becomes how much change over what time period should be expected?

3) What is the average temperature in these areas?  I assume it is above freezing because the ice is melting but has the local temperature changed greatly in the past 100 years?

4) Could these glaciers still be in retreat from the last ice age?

5) If their decline has excellerated, could it be caused by our cleaning of much of the particulate polution?  Back when we had more dirty industry more of the solar energy was reflected back into space by particulate polution.

6) Are you claiming that there are no glaciers that a growing in the world today?  If not, how do you explain them?

7) Can any of these be explained though deforestation or other phenomenon other than CO2 and global warming?

"47 out of 91 models listed in Chapter 9 assume that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing at the rate of 1% a year when the measured rate of increase, for the past 33 years, has been 0.4% a year. The assumption of false figures in models in order to boost future projections is  fraudulent. What other figures are falsely exaggerated in the same way?"

I think Denninger and all the others pounding this on the 'net are going to end up with serious egg on theur collective faces.... That statement above says it all.  The CO2 levels data in the air are as commonly available as the Earth's diameter and circumference.  The data is there for EVERYBODY to see, and anyone knowing how to do simple maths can easily work out the rate of growth of the emissions.  Like this:

Notice anything common to everything in the Crash Course.....?

Mike

 

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Press Release 09-085 Glacial Advances Glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere are growing out of step with those in the North Scientists have found a record of glacier advances in Mueller Glacier in New Zealand. Credit and Larger Version April 29, 2009 The vast majority of the world's glaciers are retreating as the planet gets warmer. But a few, including glaciers south of the equator in South America and New Zealand, are inching forward. A paper in this week's issue of the journal Science puts this enigma in perspective; for the last 7,000 years, New Zealand's largest glaciers have often moved out of step with glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, pointing to strong regional variations in climate. "This research should provide much more accurate reconstructions of glacial advances worldwide, allowing us in turn to make climate models more accurate," said Paul Filmer, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. Conventional wisdom holds that during the era of human civilization, climate has been relatively stable. The new study is the latest to challenge this view, by showing that New Zealand's glaciers have gone through rapid periods of growth and decline during the current interglacial period known as the Holocene. "New Zealand's mountain glaciers have fluctuated frequently over the last 7,000 years, and glacial advances have become slightly smaller through time," said Joerg Schaefer, lead author of the paper and a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "This pattern differs in important ways from the northern hemisphere glaciers. The door is open now towards a global map of Holocene [a geological time period that began about 11,700 years ago and continues to the present] glacier fluctuations and how climate variations during this period impacted human civilizations." Glaciers are extremely sensitive to changes in temperature and snowfall, which makes them well suited for studying past climate. This archive has been largely untapped, however, because of the difficulty in assigning precise ages to glacier fluctuations. One way to measure glacial fluxes is by studying the moraines, or rock deposits that glaciers often leave behind at their maximum points of advance. However, until now the methods of dating such moraines, including radiocarbon dating of organic matter, could be off by hundreds of years. By refining the analysis of a method called cosmogenic dating, Schaefer and colleagues were able for the first time to assign precise ages to young Holocene moraines. They accomplished this by measuring minute levels of the chemical isotope beryllium 10 in the rocks, which is produced when cosmic rays strike rock surfaces, and builds up over time. The researchers were thus able to pinpoint exactly when glaciers in New Zealand's Southern Alps began to recede, exposing the rocks to the cosmic rays. From the results, they constructed a glacial timeline for the past 7,000 years and compared it against historic records from the Swiss Alps and other places north of the equator. They found that within that timeframe, the glaciers around Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak, reached their largest extent about 6,500 years ago, when the Swiss Alps and Scandinavia were relatively warm. That's about 6,000 years before northern glaciers hit their Holocene peak during the Little Ice Age, between 1300 and 1860 AD. That finding was a surprise to some scientists who assumed that the northern cold phase happened globally. The record in New Zealand shows other disparities that point to regional climate variations in both hemispheres. The new chemical and analytical protocols are expected to allow scientists to accurately date glacier fluctuations throughout the Holocene, rounding out the climate picture on the continents. "With this measure we can go to almost any mountain range on earth and date the moraines in front of the glaciers and produce a similar chronology," said co-author George Denton, a glaciologist at the University of Maine and an adjunct scientist at Lamont-Doherty. Overall, glaciers around the world have been declining since about 1860, with the exception of a brief advance in Switzerland in the 1980s, New Zealand in the late 1970s through today, and a few other places. Changes in wind and sea surface temperatures are thought to be causing these regional fluctuations. Currently in a wet phase, New Zealand is expected to swing back to a warmer, drier phase in the next few years, causing the glaciers to retreat once again. The study also received funding from the Comer Science and Education Foundation, and the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology. Other researchers involved in the study were: Michael Kaplan and Roseanne Schwartz, also of Lamont-Doherty; Aaron Putnam, University of Maine; Robert Finkel, CEREGE, France; David Barrell, GNS Science, New Zealand; Bjorn Anderson, University of Oslo; Andrew Mackintosh, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; Trevor Chinn, Alpine and Polar Processes Consultancy, New Zealand; Christian Schluchter, University of Bern, Switzerland. -NSF-

The CRU hack

Filed under:

• Climate Science

— group @ 20 November 2009

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

There are of course lessons to be learned. Clearly no-one would have gone to this trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of European butterflies. That community’s internal discussions are probably safe from the public eye. But it is important to remember that emails do seem to exist forever, and that there is always a chance that they will be inadvertently released. Most people do not act as if this is true, but they probably should.

It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people should not have been so open with their thoughts, but who amongst us would really be happy to have all of their email made public?

Let he who is without PIN cast the the first stone.

Update: The official UEA statement is as follows:

“We are aware that information from a server used for research information
in one area of the university has been made available on public websites,”
the spokesman stated.

“Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm
that all of this material is genuine.

“This information has been obtained and published without our permission
and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from
operation.

“We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved
the police in this enquiry.”

Dammthematrix wrote:

The data is there for EVERYBODY to see, and anyone knowing how to do simple maths can easily work out the rate of growth of the emissions

So, let's do the math and see how much of this is caused by antrhropogenic emissions.  After all your graph certainly makes it looks like mankind has had a dramatic effect.  To make it simpler, we will concentrate on changes in the last 5 years since that should have been the largest change due to the exponential growth you show on your graph.

First we need a few things:

• From here, you find that the atmoshperic concentrations of CO2 have gone from 378 ppm in 2005 to 386 ppm in 2009.
• We also need the number of mols of atmosphere around the earth, which you can find here (lots of other places with roughly the same number if you google a bit): 1.81e20 mols of atmosphere
• Next we need the weight of CO2 per mol, which I calculated to be 44.00095 g/mol  (calculated from atomic weights)
• Anthropogenic C02: 7,000,000,000 tons (from your graph)

The calculations:

Number of mols of CO2 in 2005 = 1.81e20 * (378 /1,000,000) = 6.84e16 mols C02

Number of mols of C02 in 2009 = 1.81e20 * (386/1,000,000) = 6.99e16 mols C02

Number of mols of C02 increase in atmosphere from 2005-2009: 6.99e16 - 6.84e16 = 1.5e15 mols C02

Number of mols of Anthropogenic C02 generated in those 4 years: (7,000,000,000 tons C02 * 4 years)  * 1,000,000 g/ 44.0095 g/mol = 6.36e14 mols of C02

Increase in C02 attributable to man: 6.36e14/1.5e15*100 = 42% (assuming 100% stays in the atmosphere - highly unlikely)

So now lets look at what could be done, particularly here in the US.  Of the 7,000 MMt, about 20% is attributable to the US.

42% * 20% = 8.5% is caused by all activity in the US.  So if the US cut 25% of all carbon output (Copenhagen max reduction) , we change at most 2.1% of the CO2 atmospheric increase.

So, before we go about spending billions (trillions) to make this small a change shouldn't we determine if the temperature change is really anthropogenic in nature and not just long term natural fluctuations?  There is clear evidence that we have had much cooler and much warmer times on earth (when man was not a factor) and much higher and lower concentrations of CO2.  There is also a fair amount of evidence that CO2 concentrations may be the result of temperature changes rather than the cause.  

Also, if you believe we are at Peak Oil, then CO2 emissions from all humans is going to drop substantially,well at least until we chop down all the trees to burn.....

Note, the numbers above showing the potential impact of man are much higher than if you work at it from other angles.

Notice anything common to everything in the Crash Course.....?

I think it looks very similar to this peak oil graph. Which I believe means if we do nothing, C02 concentrations will naturally drop as we run out of oil (unless of course man isn't actually responsible for the higher concentrations of CO2).  So how will we do the great wealth transfer after peak oil? :-)