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Two Items on Global Warming
I thought this article in the New York Times was interesting. I quote some of it below. (Note: breaks in the article are not shown.)
Continue ReadingFor decades, Kerry Emanuel, the meteorologist and hurricane specialist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was known as a cautious centrist on questions of global warming and hurricane ferocity.
Professor Emanuel asserted often that no firm link had been established between warming and the intensity and frequency of hurricanes.
But in August, two weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Professor Emanuel wrote in the journal Nature that he had discovered statistical evidence that hurricanes were indeed affected by global warming. He linked the increased intensity of storms to the heating of the oceans.
Q. Because last year's hurricane season was so intense, many people declared: "Ah, ha! Global warming!" Were they right?
A. My answer is, Not so fast. That may have been a contributor. But the fact we had such a bad season was mostly a matter of chance. On the other hand, though the number of storms globally remained nearly constant, the frequency of Atlantic storms has been rising in concert with tropical ocean temperature, probably because of global warming.
There is no doubt that in the last 20 years, the earth has been warming up. And it's warming up much too fast to ascribe to any natural process we know about.
We still don't have a good grasp of how clouds and water vapor, the two big feedbacks in the climate system, will respond to global warming. What we are seeing is a modest increase in the intensity of hurricanes.
I predicted years ago that if you warmed the tropical oceans by a degree Centigrade, you should see something on the order of a 5 percent increase in the wind speed during hurricanes. We've seen a larger increase, more like 10 percent, for an ocean temperature increase of only one-half degree Centigrade.
Q. There are scientists who say of fossil fuel consumption and global warming, We may not have all the evidence yet, but we ought to be acting as if the worst could happen. Do you agree?
A. It's always struck me as odd that this country hasn't put far more resources into research on alternative energy. Europeans are. France has managed to go 85 percent nuclear in its electrical generation. And the Europeans have gotten together to fund a major nuclear fusion project. It almost offends my pride as a U.S. scientist that we've fallen down so badly in this competition.
Q. Would you ever buy a house on the beach?
A. I'd love to! But if I could do that, I'd insist on paying for my risk. And I'd do what is now being called "the Fire Island option," which involves putting up flimsy houses that you don't mind losing to a storm. You don't insure them.
And then there is this post by Carl Zimmer. Here's the first paragraph.Last year was the hottest on record, or the second hottest, depending on the records climatologists look at. The planet has warmed .8 degrees C over the past 150 years, and scientists are generally agreed that greenhouse gases have played a major part in that warming. They also agree that the warming will continue in the decades to come. Many experts are concerned that warming may make two unpleasant things more common: extinctions and diseases.
6 comments:
The link between global warming and weather patterns is interesting. Do you suppose we all owe an apology to our fellow Floridians?
I've been pondering a lot about human impact on the world, and wondering if perhaps we take too much credit for what's going on with it. Do you suppose we would have taken the blame for the ice ages that have occurred throughout the earth's history? I wonder if we sometimes forget that we are witnesses of a living earth that has gone through extreme changes in the past, and will continue to change, regardless of our existence. Species came and went well before we began cutting down the rainforests. I'm definitely not trying to ignore the fact that we DO have an impact, and I strongly believe in being wise stewards, but honestly, nothing's going to stay the same (and never has), so why are we now to blame? Kind of egotistical, don't you think?
Climate scientists are well aware of the natural fluctuations that have have occured on Earth. They've examined climate data including that of ancient climates as recorded in ice cores, sediment cores, and so forth. (See here). If I understand the consensus correctly, they are saying, "Look, we've never seen anything like this in the history of the earth. The data suggest, but don't prove, that human activity is to blame. Is this an experiment we want to do?"
Oh yes, this looks like a good resource.
Thanks for the links. My next pondering has been, do you suppose the earth could have been created with a physical expiration date in mind?
You mean aside from the burning out of the sun or something? I don't know, but the earth has had some tough days in the past.
In the subtext under the sensational headlines, some of these articles concede that metrics for evaluating climate have been around for less than a hundred years. Seems hardly enough information to warrant some of the claims being made.
Studies of peripheral evidence from tree rings and ice cores extend certain data to marginal usefulness, but the scope of such data is limited and subject to a lot of conjectural interpretation. Tree rings, for example, give some indication of climate conditions for a few thousands of years. But such data do not map directly into metrics clearly related to climate factors. Other things can directly affect plant growth.
Climate science has been transformed into a political football, and sacrificed a great measure of objectivity in the process. If these super-star scientists ever had any humility to begin with, the hubris has apparently overwhelmed it all.
How will we ever know if global warming is a real problem, or just another contrived cause borrowed to justify yet another bloated grant proposal?
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