Thursday, September 22, 2011

Do you people really beleive you can stop the world from changing?

Where I work, we look at different types of rocks that are 1.5-2 miles under the earth. Everyone of these rock formations were formed when there was an ocean over these lands. I live about a thousand miles from the current beach. These formations were formed millions of years ago before humans were around and then the changes in the earth forced these different structures under the surface. So, we know the earth has been changing for it's entire life. Why do you alarmist global warming people feel we can just stop earth in its tracks when it has been changing millions of years before humans?Do you people really beleive you can stop the world from changing?
By David Evans

5/28/2007



I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened that case. I am now skeptical.

In the late 1990s, this was the evidence suggesting that carbon emissions caused global warming:

1.Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, proved in a laboratory a century ago.

2.Global warming has been occurring for a century and concentrations of atmospheric carbon have been rising for a century. Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit.

3.Ice core data, starting with the first cores from Vostok in 1985, allowed us to measure temperature and atmospheric carbon going back hundreds of thousands of years, through several dramatic global warming and cooling events. To the temporal resolution then available (data points more than a thousand years apart), atmospheric carbon and temperature moved in lockstep: they rose and fell together. Talk about a smoking gun!

4.There were no other credible causes of global warming.

This evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions.

The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too.

I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; there were international conferences full of such people. We had political support, the ear of government, big budgets. We felt fairly important and useful (I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet!

But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence above fell away. Using the same point numbers as above:

2.Better data shows that from 1940 to 1975 the earth cooled while atmospheric carbon increased. That 35 year non-correlation might eventually be explained by global dimming, only discovered in about 2003.

3.The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved. By 2004 we knew that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the direction I had assumed in 1999 ?it runs the opposite way!

It took several hundred years of warming for the oceans to give off more of their carbon. This proves that there is a cause of global warming other than atmospheric carbon. And while it is possible that rising atmospheric carbon in these past warmings then went on to cause more warming (%26quot;amplification%26quot; of the initial warming), the ice core data neither proves nor disproves this hypothesis.

4.There is now a credible alternative suspect. In October 2006 Henrik Svensmark showed experimentally that cosmic rays cause cloud formation. Clouds have a net cooling effect, but for the last three decades there have been fewer clouds than normal because the sun's magnetic field, which shields us from cosmic rays, has been stronger than usual. So the earth heated up. It's too early to judge what fraction of global warming is caused by cosmic rays.



There is now no observational evidence that global warming is caused by carbon emissions. You would think that in over 20 years of intense investigation we would have found something. For example, greenhouse warming due to carbon emissions should warm the upper atmosphere faster than the lower atmosphere ?but until 2006 the data showed the opposite, and thus that the greenhouse effect was not occurring! In 2006 better data allowed that the effect might be occurring, except in the tropics.

The only current %26quot;evidence%26quot; for blaming carbon emissions are scientific models (and the fact that there are few contradictory observations). Historically, science has not progressed by calculations and models, but by repeatable observations. Some theories held by science authorities have turned out to be spectacularly wrong: heavier-than-air flight is impossible, the sun orbits the earth, etc. For excellent reasons, we have much more confidence in observations by several independent parties than in models produced by a small set of related parties!

Let's return to the interaction between science and politics. By 2000 the political system had responded to the strong scientific case that carbon emissions caused global warming by creating thousands of bureaucratic and science jobs aimed at more research and at curbing carbon emissions.

But after 2000 the case against carbon emissions gradually got weaker. Future evidence might strengthen or further weaken it. At what stage of the weakening should the science community alert the political system that carbon emissions might not be the main cause of global warming?

None of the new evidence actually says that carbon emissions are definitely not the cause of global warming, there are lots of good science jobs potentially at stake, and if the scientific message wavers then it might be difficult to later recapture the attention of the political system. What has happened is that most research efforts since 1990 have assumed that carbon emissions were the cause, and the alternatives get much less research or political attention.

Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. Climate change has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly blames carbon emissions, to the point of silencing critics.

The integrity of the scientific community will win out in the end, following the evidence wherever it leads. But in the meantime, the effect of the political climate is that most people are overestimating the evidence that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming.

I recently bet $6,000 that the rate of global warming would slow in the next two decades. Carbon emissions might be the dominant cause of global warming, but I reckon that probability to be 20% rather than the 90% the IPCC estimates.

I worry that politics could seriously distort the science. Suppose that carbon taxes are widely enacted, but that the rate of global warming increase starts to decline by 2015. The political system might pressure scientists to provide justifications for the taxes.

Imagine the following scenario. Carbon emissions cause some warming, maybe 0.05C/decade. But the current warming rate of 0.20C/decade is mainly due to some natural cause, which in 15 years has run its course and reverses. So by 2025 global temperatures start dropping. In the meantime, on the basis of models from a small group of climate scientists but with no observational evidence (because the small warming due to carbon emissions is masked by the larger natural warming), the world has dutifully paid an enormous cost to curb carbon emissions.

Politicians, expressing the anger and apparent futility of all the unnecessary poverty and effort, lead the lynching of the high priests with their opaque models. Ironically, because carbon emissions are raising the temperature baseline around which natural variability occurs, carbon emissions might need curbing after all. Maybe. The current situation is characterized by a lack of observational evidence, so no one knows yet.

Some people take strong rhetorical positions on global warming. But the cause of global warming is not just another political issue, subject to endless debate and distortions. The cause of global warming is an issue that falls into the realm of science, because it is falsifiable. No amount of human posturing will affect what the cause is. It just physically is there, and after sufficient research and time we will know what it is.

______________________________...

David Evans, a mathematician, and a computer and electrical engineer, is head of Science SpeakDo you people really beleive you can stop the world from changing?
A VERY good question, the reason humans are going to destroy the world is because the size of our brains to our body size is massive. In the past, there never was a species as smart as us, or as violent. Humans have become the most aggressive creatures on the planet and have a ruthless need to go everywhere and anywhere. All we need to do is find a new way of propulsion that isn't going to annihilate earth for our children, we dont need to stop or make any epic changes.



(my answer is the best because you can understand it and read it in one sitting too)Do you people really beleive you can stop the world from changing?
Thank you John. You make an excellent point.



With respect to Global Warming the only way that we can stop the component of Global Warming that is caused by carbon dioxide emissions is to stop all fossil fuel use worldwide.



In a modern economy that is not realistic. More recycling, hybrid automobiles and turning out more lights will not cause a sufficient reduction in co2 output to stop the component of Global Warming that is caused by co2 emissions.



For my friends in the environmental movement who think that is possible to stop co2 emissions, I challenge them to stop heating water and to bathe in cold water for a while.



That usually brings them back to reality fairly quick.



Yes, we must accept the fact that Global Warming and climate change is inevitable and we should be planning how to adapt to the changes rather than to continue to promote the fantasy that we can stop Global Warming and climate change.Do you people really beleive you can stop the world from changing?
I don't believe I on my own can do much. But YES a collective effort can lessen the negative impacts of all these fossil fuel and toxic waste on our health. I dunno, I guess we will see in the end, won't we.Do you people really beleive you can stop the world from changing?
The second part of your question%26quot;should we adapt%26quot; is the reasonable approach.

I don't think there is anything wrong with reuse,recycle etc.

If heating/cooling a home or driving a car for less and reducing pollution are the result of scientific study,who loses?

Who wins this debate is not important at all.Do you people really beleive you can stop the world from changing?
It's quite simple. We're not talking about freezing the planet in its current state for the next 6 million years. The evidence shows that humans are accelerating global warming, and we simply want to stop accelerating it before it does irreparable harm to all species adapted to the current climate. We want to let the Earth's climate change naturally without humans altering it siginificantly.Do you people really beleive you can stop the world from changing?
People are fools and they are easily led.Do you people really beleive you can stop the world from changing?
I do not think any reputable scientist is suggesting we can STOP the change. But we can SLOW the change. Slowing it will give us much needed time to prepare for the disasters that are coming.



It is also clear that the population growth rate is so unfathomably quick, and the rise in producing global warming gasses is rising even faster than the population (due to increased wealth in what were the poorer nations like China and India) that there is a stunningly large amount we can do as a planet to either increase or decrease the rate of change.



For all of the Earth's history, until about 10,000 years ago, the amount of change that any living creatures did to the ecosystem was negligible. In the last 100 years, the changes that humans have done have been enormous. And if we just go at whatever pace our personal wealth dictates (rather than acting with restraint for the benefit of the greater good) the next 100 years will show more than double the increases in changes and destruction to this Earth done by our existence here, than that of the last 100 years.Do you people really beleive you can stop the world from changing?
nobody is trying to stop change, simply to let it happen naturally, at its own pace. the problem with people is that somehow, in our arrogance, we think we can improve on what took nature millions of years of trial and error to perfect. no matter what we think, we aren't that special! we need to take a deep breath and stop acting like locusts. the world did just fine without us for millions of years and since we went high tech it's going to hell in a handbasket - fast.

there's nothing wrong with change and with adaptation to change. those are the tools that have always been used to improve pretty much everything in nature. what is wrong is that humans are always trying to direct and speed up the change. we took it in a few wrong directions and now, if we had any sense, we would back off, be as invisible as possible, and let things recover their balance their own way. we pushed the fast forward a few too many times, and the change is too fast. we may be able to buy enough time to adapt to it with our climate controled enclosures and sunscreen, and the rest of our high tech toys. but the rest of the planet's living things can't adjust that easily. and how long can our technology sustain us when they can no longer keep up? even if our technology can sustain us, do you like the idea of living your whole life in a star trek episode, getting your food from a synthesizer that can create an apple, but can't create the taste you crave, never being able to get any closer to a field of wild flowers than the holodeck? well i don't.

the thing with locusts is they have a way of being gone and leaving nothing behind but death and devastation. i'd like to leave something better when i'm gone. i'd like to know that i gave something back when i had to take, and when i made a difference, it was for the better. so call me an alarmist if you will, because i think we're out of control. let me quote some (modified) Shakespeare at you, and then you can call me a nerdy alarmist: There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your science.

things that can't be measured or observed. things you can't even begin to comprehend or predict. and yet they are very real. we've been poking the bear for a while now. maybe it's time to back off before we get mauled.