Godzilla1960 wrote:
- This decade has been the warmest for the planet since humans have kept records, with 2005 the warmest year on record, followed by 2009 (the warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998).
These are facts, not opinions, not interpretations, not computer models. Are these facts to be ignored?
Sorry, your "facts" are wrong.
http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Mo ... e10866.htmI stumbled upon this the other day though and I found it very interesting....
Quote:
Excerpted from SuperFreakonomics
In a nondescript suburb of Seattle there's a charmless and windowless building that used to be a Harley-Davidson repair shop. A sheet of paper taped to the door reads "Intellectual Ventures". Inside is one of the most unusual laboratories in the world. There are lathes and mould makers and 3-D printers, many powerful computers and a fish tank for zapping malarial mosquitoes with lasers.
Intellectual Ventures (IV) is an invention company. Scientists and puzzle solvers of every variety dream up processes and products and file patent applications, more than 500 a year.
Nathan Myhrvold - a polymath who as a young man did quantum cosmology research at Cambridge with Stephen Hawking - co-founded IV nine years ago. Myhrvold, now 50, recalls watching Doctor Who when he was young: "The Doctor introduces himself to someone who says, 'Doctor? Are you some kind of scientist?' And he says, 'Sir, I am every kind of scientist'. And I was, like, yes! Yes! That is what I want to be: every kind of scientist!"
He did so by playing a variety of roles at Microsoft: futurist, strategist, founder of its research lab and whisperer-in-chief to Bill Gates. "I don't know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan," Gates, an investor in IV, once observed.
In 1999, when he left Microsoft, Myhrvold appeared on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. At the same time he is famously penny-pinching. As he walks through the IV lab pointing out his favourite gadgets, his greatest pride is reserved for items he bought on eBay or at bankruptcy sales. He is a firm believer that solutions should be cheap and simple whenever possible.
His small group of scientists and engineers has sent satellites to the moon, helped defend the United States against missile attack and, via computing advances, changed the way the world works. They have also conducted definitive research in many fields, including climate science. So it was only a matter of time before they began thinking about climate change.
On the day we visit IV, Myhrvold convenes roughly a dozen of his colleagues to talk about possible solutions to global warming. They sit around a long oval conference table, Myhrvold near one end. And more than 10 hours later we emerge having heard the most extraordinary but convincing proposal.
Everyone in the room agrees that the Earth has been getting warmer and human activity probably has something to do with it. But they also agree that the standard global warming rhetoric is oversimplified and exaggerated.
Too many accounts, Myhrvold says, suffer from "people who get on their high horse and say that our species will be exterminated".
When Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, is mentioned, the table erupts in a sea of groans. The film's purpose, Myhrvold believes, was "to scare the crap out of people". Although Gore "isn't technically lying", he says, some of the nightmare scenarios Gore describes - the state of Florida disappearing under rising seas, for instance - "don't have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame. No climate model shows them happening".
But the scientific community is also at fault. The current climate prediction models are, as Lowell Wood puts it, "enormously crude". Wood is a heavy-set and spectacularly talkative astrophysicist in his sixties who long ago was Myhrvold's academic mentor. (Wood himself was a protégé of the physicist Edward Teller.) Myhrvold thinks Wood is one of the smartest men in the universe.
Off the top of his head, Wood seems to know quite a bit about practically anything: the melt rate of the Greenland ice core (80 cubic kilometres per year); the percentage of unsanctioned Chinese power plants that went online in the previous year (about 20%); the number of times that metastatic cancer cells travel through the bloodstream before they land ("as many as a million").
Wood has achieved a great deal in science on behalf of universities, private firms and the US government. He worked on the "Star Wars" missile defence system. Today he is wearing a rainbow tie-dyed short-sleeved shirt with a matching tie.
"The climate models are crude in space and they're crude in time," he continues. "So there's an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can't model. They can't do even giant storms like hurricanes."
There are several reasons for this, Myhrvold explains. Today's models use a grid of cells to map the Earth and those grids are too large to allow for the modelling of actual weather. Smaller and more accurate grids would require better modelling software, which would require more computing power.
"We're trying to predict climate change 20 to 30 years from now," he says, "but it will take us almost the same amount of time for the computer industry to give us fast enough computers to do the job."
Most current climate models tend to produce similar predictions. This might lead one to conclude that climate scientists have a pretty good handle on the future. Not so, says Wood.
"Everybody turns their knobs" - that is, adjusts the control parameters and coefficients of their models - "so they aren't the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty getting funded."
In other words, the economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the models to approximately match one another.
As Wood, Myhrvold and the other scientists discuss the various conventional wisdoms surrounding global warming, few, if any, survive unscathed.
The emphasis on carbon dioxide? "Misplaced," says Wood. Why? "Because carbon dioxide is not the major greenhouse gas. The major greenhouse gas is water vapour." Current climate models "do not know how to handle water vapour and various types of clouds. That is the elephant in the corner of this room. I hope we'll have good numbers on water vapour by 2020 or thereabouts".
Myhrvold cites a recent paper asserting that carbon dioxide may have had little to do with recent warming. Instead, all the heavy particulate pollution we generated in earlier decades seems to have cooled the atmosphere by dimming the sun. That sparked a brief panic over global cooling in the 1970s. The trend began to reverse when we started cleaning up our air.
"So most of the warming seen over the past few decades," Myhrvold says, "might actually be due to good environmental stewardship."
Not so many years ago schoolchildren were taught that carbon dioxide is the naturally occurring lifeblood of plants. Today children are more likely to think of carbon dioxide as a poison. That's because the amount in the atmosphere has increased substantially over the past century from about 280 parts per million to 380.
What people don't know, the IV scientists say, is that the carbon dioxide level 80m years ago - when our mammalian ancestors were evolving - was at least 1,000 parts per million. That same concentration, in fact, is the regulation standard inside new energy-efficient office buildings.
So not only is carbon dioxide plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon dioxide levels don't necessarily mirror human activity. Nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the Earth: ice-cap evidence shows that over the past several hundred thousand years, carbon dioxide levels have risen after a rise in temperature, not the other way around.
Beside Myhrvold sits Ken Caldeira, a soft-spoken man with a boyish face and a halo of curly hair. He runs an ecology lab at Stanford University for the Carnegie Institution. Caldeira is among the most respected climate scientists in the world, his research cited approvingly by the most fervent environmentalists. He contributes research to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel peace prize with Al Gore for sounding the alarm on global warming. (Yes, Caldeira got a Nobel certificate.) If you met Caldeira at a party, you would likely place him in the fervent environmentalist camp himself. He remains thoroughly convinced that human activity is responsible for some global warming and is more pessimistic than Myhrvold about how future climate will affect humankind.
Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight. For starters, as greenhouse gases go it's not particularly efficient.
"A doubling of carbon dioxide traps less than 2% of the outgoing radiation emitted by the Earth," he says.
Caldeira mentions a study he undertook that considered the impact of higher carbon dioxide levels on plant life. While plants get their water from the soil, they get their food - carbon dioxide - from the air.
"Plants pay exceedingly dearly for carbon dioxide," Wood jumps in. "A plant has to raise about a hundred times as much water from the soil as it gets carbon dioxide from the air, on a molecule-lost-per-molecule-gained basis. Most plants, especially during the active part of the growing season, are water-stressed. They bleed very seriously to get their food."
So an increase in carbon dioxide means plants require less water to grow. Caldeira's study showed that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide while holding steady all other inputs - water, nutrients and so forth - yields a 70% increase in plant growth, an obvious boon to agricultural productivity.
"That's why most commercial hydroponic greenhouses have supplemental carbon dioxide," Myhrvold says. "And they typically run at 1,400 parts per million."
"Twenty thousand years ago," Caldeira says, "carbon dioxide levels were lower, sea level was lower - and trees were in a near state of asphyxiation for lack of carbon dioxide. There's nothing special about today's carbon dioxide level, or today's sea level, or today's temperature. What damages us are rapid rates of change. Overall, more carbon dioxide is probably a good thing for the biosphere - it's just that it's increasing too fast."
The gentlemen of IV abound with further examples of global warming memes (ideas that replicate across society) that are all wrong.
Rising sea levels, for instance, "aren't being driven primarily by glaciers melting", Wood says, no matter how useful that image may be for environmental activists. The truth is far less sexy: "It is driven mostly by water warming - literally, the thermal expansion of ocean water as it warms up."
Sea levels have been rising, Wood says, for roughly 12,000 years since the end of the last ice age. The oceans are about 425ft higher today, but the bulk of that rise occurred in the first thousand years. In the past century the seas have risen less than 8in.
Rather than the catastrophic 30ft rise some people have predicted over the next century, Wood notes that the most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a rise of about 1½ft by 2100. That's much less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations.
"So it's a little bit difficult," he says, "to understand what the purported crisis is about."
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