Part III of this six part series, is below. For the full series, click:
- Part I – Palin’s Assertions
Part II – The Basic Science, in Stark Contrast
Part IV – “Political” is Whatever I Don’t Like, and Science is Whatever I Assert
Part V - Real Editorial Debate, and the Costs/Benefits Myth
Part VI - The Hacked E-Mail “Scandal” Scandal, and the Real Issues: Palin’s assertions, the Post’s Misleading Promotion, and the Ensuing Misinformation Driving Our National Debate
Part III – Climate Variability, Threshold Effects, and How to Subvert Informed Discussion
As noted in Part II, the long term temperature trend has been warming. In fact, including 2009, the eleven warmest years on record will all have occurred in the last thirteen years.
But at the same time, the earth hasn’t gotten warmer “each” year,” leading some to question whether global warming has been exaggerated” — at least according to the prominent display box accompanying the Post’s December 5 article, noted above, that Palin linked to.
Perhaps the “some” that the article refers to is Sarah Palin — and of course Washington Post expert scientist and climatologist George Will. It is difficult to say however, because an email to both of the article’s authors and the newspaper’s ombudsman, asking “which scientists” said certain things that the article attributes to “some scientists” (along with who these “some” in the display box refers to), was never substantively responded to.
The fact is that a few years are virtually meaningless in comparison to the longer term trend. Climate is not monotonic, nor remotely so; that is, climate does not necessarily shift in the exact same direction in each successive year (or even years) no matter how powerful the underlying trend, although it can. And no competent scientist believes that it is.
More importantly, climate can also be wildly, unpredictably, erratic. In fact, the higher the concentrations of heat trapping gases, and the more rapidly, from a geologic perspective, that they are increasing, the more likely it may be that it might become more erratic, even with a clear underlying trend, as the climate shifts. It is even conceivable that this would include extremes.
For example, consistent even with worse case scenarios, or “tipping points,” we might even see mild cooling for several years, and then, sudden, almost unimaginable, breakneck speed warming (or, perhaps more likely, just the latter, without the former.)
How? Shifting ocean patterns or other natural variability might temporarily mask anthropogenic effects, before reversing itself and only adding further to them. Then, as ice caps and glaciers melt, warmer water rushes down cracks, bringing pressure and heat (ice also melts faster in water than air), increasingly speeding up the glacial melting process; the heat reflecting albedo of the white snow and ice is then lost, leading to more heat absorption and further warming; warmer water expands even further, raising water levels even higher; the cooling effects of icebergs in the ocean may initially be increased as more and more ice breaks off into the sea, and then reduced, and then eliminated as more and more ice disappears, leading to an increasingly rapid transition to warmer water; warming water also tends to retain less carbon dioxide, meaning even more stays in the atmosphere, thus trapping even more heat; the hoped for ‘cooling’ effect of increased cloud cover in some areas due to increased evaporation instead is offset or outweighed by the increased greenhouse effect of far more water vapor; melting permafrost (and perhaps even warmer ocean currents acting on ocean bottom methane clathrates), releases even more methane, particularly in the carbon riddled bogs of the Siberian Tundra, while heat and drought fires over the warmer Eurasian peat bogs release their stored carbon in the form of even more CO2, and so on and so forth…
As these things build, critical thresholds are met; what was once slow suddenly snowballs, and suddenly change runs rampant throughout the system. And anti science skeptics (those not under water) throw up their hands and go “Dang, we didn’t know! We’re so surprised!!” Or perhaps the most extreme ones blame this, too, on “natural, cyclical, environmental trends.”
The possibility of tipping points, mocked in Palin’s piece by calling the irrelevant CRU hacked email “scandal” a “tipping point,” is very real. The idea of radically fast changes in the earth’s temperature is also very real.
Also keep in mind that while climate change may seem abstract, a rise of just 6 to 9 degrees globally, depending on how much of it emanates from frozen areas (as so far seems to be the case) could see oceans rise around 80 feet. That would be bad. The global economic costs of this alone would dwarf anything we have ever seen, or likely ever even contemplated. And the earth has made these shifts before, without man’s input.
But how likely are such scenarios? We don’t know. But numerous leading scientists, including NASA’s now ideologically bastardized but traditionally straight laced and super solid James Hansen, believe it is likely. (Another compelling case for extreme change, among many, is made here.)
What we do know, as a matter of basic atmospheric chemistry and climate science, is that it is invariable that we will have some sort of effect, whether we can ever precisely measure that effect or not. We also know, as a matter of basic science, that this effect is likely to be increasingly large — and not on a linearly correlated scale (as almost nothing in nature is) – the more we add to these atmospheric levels. This also directly conflicts with what ideologically driven groups have presented, and media institutions such as the Washington Post have posited, as if positing a falsity is “debate.”
Such “tipping point” or threshold effect type suggestions are simply reasoned speculations. But what are not speculations are the basic atmospheric gas and climate facts covered in part II, from which you can play armchair scientist, and draw your own conclusions regarding how likely things are, and/or what we should do about it. But you can’t do this if you don’t know the basic science. And we can’t make good decisions, as a society, as a country, as a world, with bad information.
Yet the Washington Post, a once flagship Fourth Estate institution, is now instead serving up more bad information under a mistaken notion of debate, and helping to further promulgate an already high level of bad information on the subject. And it is doing so, all while further legitimizing and popularizing a leading conveyor of that bad information.