Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[CapelDodger]

As others have stated it will be interesting to see where we are in 5 years or so when the solar energy is on the upswing, the Arctic has much more open water and another large El-Nino happens.

The glory-days of denial are clearly over. As we know, given the noise in the system, it's quite likely that a decade with little or no warming can occur but it's unlikely that there will be two in succession. Deniers were lucky to have Long Decade (to coin a phrase) from the hot outlier of 1998 to the La Nina year of 2011. 2011 was the warmest La Nina year on record. There's a very good chance that the next El Nino year will the warmest as well, and even a broadly neutral year will be of no comfort to deniers. And this, of course, is only relevant to surface temperatures, not to what's going on.

Despite the best efforts of deniers to concentrate everyone's attention on graphs, polar bears (thriving) and the sins of Mann, more and more people are noticing that stuff's going on. Stuff that people like us said was coming and the deniers said wasn't. That (large) part of the denier audience which doesn't get out much will stick with it but outreach is becoming ever more difficult.

 

[r-j]

One has to apply a little reasoning. If the Asian Brown Cloud was responsible for Himalayan glacial ice-loss (as has been occasionally postulated) then it would apply at both high and low altitudes.

That doesn't meet the Verifiability requirement. You can make up something, but that doesn't make it true. (which is also true for the following)

Black soot, theorized to cause melting of glacier ice, perhaps has multiple mechanisms. Albedo change would only be a factor at low altitudes, as constant/frequent snow would prevent any effect at higher altitudes. The heat trapping effects of soot/air pollution would also be far less at high altitudes. The moisture comes from the oceans, so local heating isn't the factor for an increase in precipitation.

Does particulate matter from burning cause cloud formation? Is there any direct connection in ice mass with la nina/el nino phases? Can this even be measured? What is the future likely to hold if ice increases up high, but melting increases down low?

And did you know they are painting rocks white to try and change the albedo? To try and increase ice and decrease snow melt?

I know that wandered all over. It's a lot like the topic.

 

[Warmer1]

Given the level and measure of contrarian confuddlement we've witnessed here so far, evidently not enough to hire competent opposition.

That just cracked me up! You're the best Trakar!

I mentioned that I am seeing a lot of bogus sites on the internet and here is an example of how bad it is getting

http://www.real-science.com/ click on Imagery of climate change in Greenland and you end up on

this page http://www.real-science.com/imagery-climate-change-greenland

Although that page is just rediculous there will be many deniers that enjoy the pictures and futher buy into the idea that this is all a hoax. For future generations this is just criminal.

So that was http://www.real-science.com/ and there is also Real Science linked to http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/

This garbage is just getting cloned all over the internet. Given the fact that it is hard to change a persons' opinions once they are formed it is like a race to get to people first with an opinion.

There was a report today that Canada is being dishonest about science and it is likely due to the fact that the tar sands, the oil and gas fields and the shale plays are probably the most important economic driver in the western provinces and perhaps Canada as a whole.

From the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16861468

"Canadian government is 'muzzling its scientists"

"The protocol requires that all interview requests for scientists employed by the government must first be cleared by officials. A decision as to whether to allow the interview can take several days, which can prevent government scientists commenting on breaking news stories.

Sources say that requests are often refused and when interviews are granted, government media relations officials can and do ask for written questions to be submitted in advance and elect to sit in on the interview.

'Orwellian' approach

Andrew Weaver, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, described the protocol as "Orwellian".

 

[r-j]

Is there a politic thread about the consequences of global warming? And the battle over polluting the planet and causing climate change?

 

[CapelDodger]

That doesn't meet the Verifiability requirement.

I really don't care what requirements you erect as barriers against cruel reality. It does meet a rationality requirement, and also the parsimony requirement - which is to say, it doesn't rely on magical qualities of black carbon being hand-waved into existence.

I know that wandered all over. It's a lot like the topic.

Global warming is indeed all over the place. The clue is in the word "global".

 

[Trakar]

I really don't care what requirements you erect as barriers against cruel reality. It does meet a rationality requirement, and also the parsimony requirement - which is to say, it doesn't rely on magical qualities of black carbon being hand-waved into existence.

Global warming is indeed all over the place. The clue is in the word "global".

I don't know that I would rule out any role, whatsoever, for carbon black in the high mountain snow and ices changes that are occurring. It is apparent, however, that the mechanisms and changes occurring in the amount of water being held in these reservoirs is more complex and the result of more variables than originally considered.

Not that it is uncommon among denialists, it is a quite common general human tendancy to look for, and hang on to, simple patterns of action and behavior when we look at complex phenomena. Even among those of us who have looked at the confluence of phenomena that are both the effect and causatives for climate change, I think Capel is doing well to remind us all not to get caught up in the paradigms of early understandings and to be open to where new discoveries and information lead us. Global climate change is variable in its effects and impacts due to where it occurs, as the climate changes the mechanisms and mechanics of action, in many areas, change as well. The same area, 4 degrees warmer, may have dramatically different changes and causes of changes going on than when conditions were cooler a few decades earlier. We have to be careful about trying to lock nature into the patterns of our own limited understandings and conceptions of what has, is, and will occur.

The distortion of the denialists is often to carry this concept to extremes and to try and say that because things change, and the reasons that things change is changing, that there is little or nothing we can say about what is happening and what the overall impact will be. This is only somewhat accurate when we are talking about the daily, weekly and annual expressions of these climate change conditions. As we expand the timeframes to decades, centuries and millenia, the minor expression differences tend to average out, and using the geologic record as our rubric, predicting the long-term changes we can expect to result from varying ranges of atmospheric GHG compositions become much more clearcut and is supported by the evidences of past planetary climate changes.

 

[Trakar]

Is there a politic thread about the consequences of global warming? And the battle over polluting the planet and causing climate change?

Every thread that opens in the political discussion of public policy tends to devolve to a debate of the science and arguments over whether there is even a problem to disscuss, which gets the thread tossed in to this thread.
If you would like to discuss public policy and the impacts and issues involved, it is probably better to start it here than to wait for it to get thrown back into here.

The mainstream science consideration is that global climate change is occurring and the average annual temperature of our planet is trending warmer at a geologically unprecedented rate due primarily to the massive amounts of previously sequestered carbon that our society is currently dumping into the surface environment and atmosphere of our planet. If you wish to discuss public policy options given this mainstream science understanding, I'm sure that many of us would be happy to join that discussion. If you would like to challenge the mainstream science understandings, please feel free to tread the well trodden paths where many have walked and stomped before you.

 

[Trakar]

...And did you know they are painting rocks white to try and change the albedo? To try and increase ice and decrease snow melt?...

I know such basic level engineering has been discussed, I was not aware that there had been any serious efforts at implementing them. I've wondered if a similar process of converting sands into slightly larger 3-4mm glass spheres and then dumping and spreading layers of such across the northern sog lands might not actually help slow down and moderate some of the high arctic changes we are currently witnessing.

 

[Trakar]

Regarding the GRACE ice-mass report, this has, as I expected, made an appearance in the denier world.


Does Fox News Believe Himalayas are Located at Earth’s Poles?
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/17/427706/fox-news-himalayas-earths-poles/

I expect to hear more of this as the Arctic melt season gets underway. Deniers feel the need to say something during that (their least favourite) season, and Antarctic sea-ice simply isn't working for them any more. Another short-term expedient played out.

Since I'm in prediction mode :

"No recent warming" will remain prominent for some years yet, with all graphs presented ending in 2011 and many in 2009.

Mann will be accused of forging the Heatland (sic) documents.

McIntyre will make an FoI request (nay, demand) for any and all emails Mann may have ever sent or received which contain the words "Heartland" or "Institute".

Refusal of the above-mentioned FoI request will be taken as proof that Mann did indeed forge the Heatland Institute documents.

If we didn't have the recent past as a guide such would seem ludicrous, now, that seems a conservative assessment of likely behavior! (bet you didn't think anyone would ever accuse you of being "conservative" did you?!)

 

[uke2se]

I don't know if this has been posted before, but here goes:

A fairly short (about 20 minutes) lecture on the various means of denial of climate change that people partake in, and why they do so. I found it very balanced (but then, I'm probably biased), as the lecturer argues how environmentalists took on the issue of climate changed and then locked the public discussion of the issue as an environmental issue.

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:



Homepage of lecturer

 

[CapelDodger]

I don't know that I would rule out any role, whatsoever, for carbon black in the high mountain snow and ices changes that are occurring.

Neither would I, but the pattern of the ice-volume change overall (loss lower down and gain higher up) doesn't fit carbon-black it as the main factor. At the same time it's what we do expect from regional warming.

I recall when deniers liked to talk about Greenland (they thought it was a safe bet, one long-gone poster here even used to describe it as the canary of climate-change) and were full of this very point - that ice-loss low-down would be compensated by increased precipitation high up. None of us quibbled with that point, obviously. As it happens, Greenland has turned out to be rather more dynamic than any of us expected, so deniers only bring it up now with reference to Vikings.

... I think Capel is doing well to remind us all not to get caught up in the paradigms of early understandings ...

Glad to be of service .

 

[CapelDodger]

If we didn't have the recent past as a guide such would seem ludicrous, now, that seems a conservative assessment of likely behavior! (bet you didn't think anyone would ever accuse you of being "conservative" did you?!)

Life is just one long surprise. Thankfully. I smiled through many variations of "bourgeois cretin" at university so I can certainly take this at my age.

It seems I've called one wrong : it's Dr Peter Gleick who's been accused already. Apparently this goes back to his having an op-ed in Forbes magazine, invading what the denier-machine regards as its turf. I don't know that he's a particularly prominent climate scientist, but he is a communicator, which is another outrageous intrusion. I trust the band of old conservative men are keeping a watch on their blood-pressures, we'd hate to see any of them drop from the perch over this.

Whatever happened to Al Gore as the fount of all evil? I guess Obama has eclipsed him as the bete-noire du jour for US American conservatives.

 

[CapelDodger]

And did you know they are painting rocks white to try and change the albedo?

Do you know who they are?

 

[r-j]

Of course!

A friend of mine told me about it. Sources say it is already working.

 

[Trakar]

Of course!

A friend of mine told me about it. Sources say it is already working.

Any sources beyond those advocating it as a solution?

Looks like a very limited trial in the Andes with little more than anecdotal references to success at this point, but please do supply any respectable links or papers you are aware of, or can find.

 

[r-j]

All quotes from http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/07/04/glacier.peru.paint.climate/index.html

Andy Ridgwell from the School of Geographical Sciences at the UK's University of Bristol says that it will take several years to find out whether the experiment will achieve anything significant.

Which is how experiments work. What is being reported is a lowering of temperatures where the rocks are white. It's called physics I thinl.

"If it's at all feasible, then it is an interesting thing to try. If you can get some glacier mass re-established then you can have that water supply buffering that glaciers provide," Ridgwell told CNN.

I painted my old roof white, and am getting ready to do the new one. It lowers the temperature on the roof in the summer from 180 to around 110F. There is a noticeable cooling effect around the house as well. The energy saved on AC costs already paid for the cost of the paint.

The albedo effect may have helped cool the area around the city of Almeria, in southern Spain.

The expansion of greenhouse farming in the area, which started in the 1970s, has grown to cover nearly 30,000 hectares of land around the city. And in the summer the roofs of the greenhouses are whitewashed, so that plants inside don't overheat.

In 2008, Pablo Campra, from the University of Almeria, reporting in the Journal of Geophysical Research, found that that the Almeria region had experienced a drop in temperature by an average of 0.3 degrees Celsius from 1983 to 2006.

This was compared to an average temperature rise of around 0.5 degrees Celsius throughout the rest of Spain during the same time.
Campra concluded that the temperature fall may have occurred because of the growth of greenhouse horticulture in the region.

This is the sort of thing that just seems like common sense. Yet I have had multiple people, who all express a great concern over warming, dismiss the idea of painting roof white.

Either they say "it won't work", or "it looks horrible", or some other excuse. Then they drive off in their gas guzzling SUV with the AC on.

 

[temporalillusion]

My question would be are the positive effects of albedo change (assuming there are some) enough to offset the negative effects of manufacturing all that white paint. Mining the stuff that titanium dioxide is common in will generate CO2.

 

[r-j]

Somebody who knows physics could probably figure out how much how much white is needed to stop or reverse warming.

I remember in the seventies the talk about spreading black soot on the arctic to cause it to melt, to stop the coming ice age. They also talked about using nuclear bombs to blow up ice and change the global balance, to stop an ice age.

 

[r-j]

Some people seem to just come up with an idea, build a computer model, then declare that is how things must be. In regards to cooling things down by making roofs white:

The model found that more white roofs means less surface heat in cities (which is obvious enough to anyone who’s sat in a car with a black interior in the sun). Lower local temperature means less water evaporates and rises up to eventually form clouds, says lead author and Stanford University researcher Mark Jacobson. The decrease in clouds allows more sunlight to reach the Earth’s surface, leading to higher temperatures overall.

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00032.1

"Lower local temperature means less water evaporates and rises up to eventually form clouds"

Do these experts not know anything about how the world even works? According to their ideas, cities cause clouds. Like a big city is some sort of source for water vapor. Now the particulate pollutants, that certainly could cause more clouds, but Hotlanta is not the source of rainfall in Georgia. Or the clouds.

 

[BenBurch]

I have done my bit for albedo change; I installed white "Energy Star" roofs on my buildings last year.

Saved me quite a bit of air conditioning costs last summer.

If in fact we changed all homes to white roofs as they came around to roof renewal time, we could save a LOT of electricity.