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Friday, October 09, 2009

Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming - A High Level View

Instead of just looking at the science of climate change, I've analyzed it from several different perspectives. In a nutshell, this is what I've found.

Science

Common sense tells me that the fact that we exist and are the result of life having evolved over billions of years indicates that the climate is quite stable as far as life forms are concerned. This is especially true given that "[f]ive hundred million years ago carbon dioxide was 20 times more prevalent than today"[1] and that the climate has been adequately stable to support evolution and ecosystem diversity through catastrophic disasters such as meteor strikes and massive volcanic eruptions.

It is true that common sense isn't always correct. However, when a proposition defies common sense, I require an especially rigorous burden of proof on those making the proposition. That burden of proof is nowhere close to being met.

Global temperatures are affected by the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. All else being equal, a doubling of the concentration of CO2 will increase the average global temperature by 1.2 degrees Celsius[2]. An increase of 1.2 degrees Celsius is very unlikely to be catastrophic.

The scientific case for catastrophic man-made global warming rests on a set of computer models called General Circulation Models (GCMs). These models incorporate positive feedbacks that amplify the warming due to CO2. In other words, a little bit of warming due to CO2 becomes much more warming because of hypothesized effects such as increased water vapor (water vapor also traps heat). Instead of 1.2 degrees Celsius for a doubling of CO2, the GCMs, with the positive feedbacks predict much larger warming, in the range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius per CO2 doubling[3].

These feedbacks, while plausible, are not proven. Indeed, some of the effects expected by the GCMs from such feedbacks have not been observed in the real world. For example, while the models predict the warming of the tropical troposphere to be 2 to 3 times larger than the warming of the surface, this relationship has not been observed[4]. In fact, recent research[5] based on measured Sea Surface Temperatures and measured outgoing radiation indicate an overall negative feedback which means that there could be substantially less than 1 degree increase in temperature resulting from a double of CO2. Also, using finer cloud simulations within the existing GCMs seems to reduce the predicted temperature increases[6]. The above are just a sampling of numerous articles that cast doubt on the more extreme global warming predictions.

There are other plausible explanations for whatever warming occurred last century. For example, changes in solar activity may have significant impact on cloud formation[7] in addition to its small, direct effect on temperature. To date, relatively little effort has been expended on researching these alternate explanations, but they are, in my opinion, plausible, and not disproved.

In summary, the science of Catastrophic Global Warming defies common sense, has not been proven, and alternate explanations have been neither adequately researched nor disproved.

Economics

Any significant climate change (in either direction) will produce winners and losers, both in terms of life forms in general and human life in particular. However, given the observation that the density of both life and humanity are much higher in very warm climates than very cold climates coupled with the fact that the GCMs predict that most of the warming will occur in colder climates[8] leads me to doubt predictions of severely adverse economic impacts from global warming.

One of the most dire and well known economic analyses of climate change is The Stern Review[9]. It concludes that we should immediately begin investing at least 1% of global GDP in order to reduce CO2 emissions and that an investment of this magnitude (over $400 billion per year) will produce positive future returns by reducing the impact of climate change.

However, in my opinion, the Stern Review and other economic analyses with similar findings are seriously flawed. First, the Review "depends decisively on the assumption of a near-zero time discount rate combined with a specific utility function. The Review’s unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of assumptions that are consistent with today’s marketplace real interest rates and savings rates."[10]. In other words, the Review assumes far, far lower interest rates than can be found in the real world. Spending large sums of money on preventing CO2 emissions will adversely affect billions of people now, miring substantial numbers of those in prolonged poverty. Note that this spending, to be effective, also assumes some level of efficiency. Unfortunately, governments are not particularly good at efficiency.

A second problem is that the Review seriously underestimates future innovations which will mitigate the impact of climate change. If one considers the technological progress that has been made in the last century and projects it forward to the next hundred years, it seems nearly certain that humanity will be ever more connected, mobile, and able to cope with the environment. It's also far from clear that CO2 emissions will continue to increase as predicted. Other technologies such as solar, geothermal, nuclear fission and fusion, etc., will continue to become more cost effective and may displace fossil fuels as energy sources anyway.

In addition, there are likely to be some benefits to warming and these benefits are downplayed in the Stern Review. For example, other economic studies conclude "that moderate warming is an overall benefit to mankind because of higher agricultural yields and many other reasons."[11] This fits with the observation that mankind does better where it's very warm rather than where it's very cold.

Politics

Even if the upper end of the predicted warming occurs and even if the economic analyses like the Stern Review are accurate, it's far less clear that it's useful to take action if only a few rich countries are willing to do anything about.

India and China have flat out refused to reduce future emissions with India even questioning the science of global warming[12][13]. As these countries represent nearly ½ the global population, it make little sense for much smaller countries such as the United States to live substantially less well in order to slightly slow the rate of increase of CO2, especially given that the per capita increase in CO2 emissions in the United States is slowing anyway[14].

There is no reason to get governments involved. If taking action is such a good idea, people can act individually and in non-government groups in order to reduce their carbon footprints. If there are only a few skeptics who don't follow, those few skeptics will have limited impact. In other words, if you think reducing carbon footprints is a good idea, by all means, reduce yours.

There's very little evidence that the world will be able to take significant concerted action anyway. For example, Lomborg[15] shows that the Kyoto Treaty (if the signatories had actually lived up to there promises) would have only delayed the climate change due to CO2 emissions by six years out of 100.

Religion

Catastrophic Global Warming has all the trappings of a religion. The god is “Gaia”, the pope is Al Gore, the priests are (most) climate scientists, they know the Truth (with a capital “T”) with certainty, the message is essentially “Repent or the end is nigh!”, Creationism is alive and well since “Gaia” is apparently supposed to have a specific CO2 level and associated climate, and heretics are dealt with nastily.

As such, Catastrophic Global Warming should be subject to the same Separation of Church and State doctrine as other religions. The believers should, of course, be free to proselytize and live their own lives according to their beliefs, but should not be allowed to impose their beliefs on the rest of us via government taxes and regulation, and should not be free to proselytize in our children's schools.

The concept that if we don't take action against CO2 emissions then we're immoral is not fundamentally different than any other religion that claims that you're immoral if you don't believe in God and live your life according to the Dogma of that religion. There is no objective morality here, Carbon Dioxide has no morally correct level, and there is no morally correct global temperature or climate.

Furthermore, when subjective opinions are stated as objective fact with the goal to control the behavior of others, that is a significant evil. When the majority or even a vocal minority imposes its subjective beliefs on others, that is tyranny and is a major evil.

Summary

Taking action to reduce CO2 emissions in the United States in order to prevent the possibility of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming makes little sense from any rational perspective. The science is not adequately well understood, economically it makes little sense, and it's not politically possible on a global scale. If people wish to choose that as a religion, that's fine, as long as their beliefs aren't imposed on the rest of us.

References

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

[2] Committee on the Science of Climate Change, National Research Council. Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, pp 6-7.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10139&page=6

[3] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, p 38.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf

[4] Lindzen, R.S. (2007) Taking Greenhouse Warming Seriously, Energy & Environment, 18, pp 937-950.
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/230_TakingGr.pdf

[5] Lindzen, R.S., Choi, Y.S. (2009) On the Determination of Climate Feedbacks from ERBE Data, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 36, No. 16. (26 August 2009), L16705.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009GL039628-pip.pdf

[6] Wyant, M.C., Khairoutdinov, M. & Bretherton, C.S., 2006. Climate sensitivity and cloud response of a GCM with a superparameterization. Geophys. Res. Lett, 33, L06714.
http://eos.atmos.washington.edu/pub/breth/papers/2006/SPGRL.pdf

[7] Svensmark, H., T. Bondo, and J. Svensmark (2009), Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 36 L15101.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL038429.shtml

[8] Houghton, J.T., Ding, Y. et al, (2001): Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Publications of the IPCC, p 384.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/384.htm

[9] Stern, N., (2008): The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, Cambridge University Press.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/stern_review_report.htm

[10]Nordhaus, W., (2007): The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, Journal of Economic Literature Vol. XLV, pp. 686–702
http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/stern_050307.pdf

[11]Happer, W. (2009): William Happer Testimony to Senate Energy Committee, February 25, 2009
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=84462e2d-6bff-4983-a574-31f5ae8e8a42

[12] Lamont, J. et al. (2009): India Widens Climate Rift with West, Financial Times, July 23, 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c2896b88-77bd-11de-9713-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

[13] Taylor, P. (2009): China, Russia, Now India: Reject Global Climate Controls,
Los Angeles Examiner
http://www.examiner.com/x-3089-LA-Ecopolitics-Examiner~y2009m7d6-China-Russia-Now-India-Reject-Global-Climate-Controls

[14] Energy Information Administration (2001): World Energy Use and Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 1980-2001, Department of Energy
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/carbonemiss/index.html

[15] Lomborg, B. (2001): The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cambridge University Press, p. 302

11 comments:

Bret said...

In case anybody is wondering, I put all the references at the bottom because I intend to cut and paste this into emails and other media as needed, and those other media don't always support links.

Harry Eagar said...

'the warming that occurred last century'

This was not observed. Those who like to finding warming do it by extrapolating from an extremely small sample.

It is not certain that there was global surface warming on the last century, and even less certain that there was warming over the past 2 centuries.

Otherwise, as far as the science goes, that's what I have been publishing in the MSM for over 20 years.

Bret said...

Harry,

I agree with your feedback and added the word "whatever" before "warming". This post was already much longer than I hoped and I just don't have enough room to get into the problems with tree ring reconstructions and problems with ice bore hole reconstructions and weather station siting problems and on and on and on...

Instead I wanted to gloss over that because even if there's been significant warming, there are many other possible reasons why it might have occurred other than positive feedbacks from CO2.

Did you see the article in the BBC today titled What happened to global warming??

Even the bigger MSM companies are starting to tentatively present the possibility that CAGW may not have such a solid case after all.

David said...

Very nice summary, particularly the difference between the first order effects of increases CO2 (which are pretty well-supported by small) and the second-order effects (which are conjecture unsupported by the historical record).

The religious nature of AGW was driven home for me when it turned out that increased CO2 levels have always followed increased warming. The "fact" that increased CO2 levels preceded warming was the smoking gun of AGW, as demonstrated by Al Gore in his film. But when the truth turned out to be the opposite, the AGW folks didn't pause for a second. Now the historical relationship between CO2 and warming is entirely irrelevant. If the evidence changes and the conclusion doesn't, that's religion.

If even the AGW crowd is coming to think that we're now 10 years into a 30 year cooling period, then we should just start building nuclear power plants as fast as we can. They pay for themselves without reference to AGW and, if heating does start up again in 20 years, we will have reduced our CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP.

Hey Skipper said...

These feedbacks, while plausible, are not proven. Indeed, some of the effects expected by the GCMs from such feedbacks have not been observed in the real world.

This is a sword that cuts both ways, of course. It could be that the lack of confirmatory observations means the feedbacks are even worse than expected. No, I don't believe that to be the case, only that it is possible.

More damning, though (and this doesn't require peer review, or a degree in climate science) is that GCMs model climate, but the feedbacks may well reside in weather. A warmer atmosphere contains more water vapor, which is a GHG, which should make the climate warmer. However, a more humid atmosphere is also typically more unstable, which leads to more thunderstorms (i.e., weather), which are heat engines that, among other things, take warm air from the lower atmosphere and hurl it towards space. Weather satellites rely on the IR signature of convective activity to make observations.

Of course, the IR signature is an increase in radiated heat brought about by convective weather brought about by increased humidity due to increased surface temperature: climate change countered by weather.

BTW, next time someone mentions Venus as an example of runaway GHG driven global warming, ask them how warm the Venusian atmosphere is at the 1000mb level (that is, the altitude in Venus's atmosphere where the pressure is the same as Earth at sea level). Ans: roughly 100 degrees F, not far off earth's average sea level temperature, with the difference almost completely accounted for by Venus's relative proximity to the sun.

There are other plausible explanations for whatever warming occurred last century.

Yes, there are. But what I want to know is what explanations discriminate between the warming that has occurred over the last 50 years, and the preceding (at least) 150 years. (BTW, I'm not trying to threadjack; it is the only way I could toss a picture into the discussion.)

However, given the observation that the density of both life and humanity are much higher in very warm climates than very cold climates coupled with the fact that the GCMs predict that most of the warming will occur in colder climates[8] leads me to doubt predictions of severely adverse economic impacts from global warming.

One of the reasons I am an AGW skeptic is that we desperately need it to be wrong. If apocalyptic AGW is correct, we are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. There is no way to "bend the curve" (for some reason, typing that makes every one of my teeth hurt) on CO2 without dramatically reducing energy usage, yet doing so will result in widespread impoverishment. No representative government would survive such an imposition. Which means there is only one way to get to that end: eggs to omelettes.

Catastrophic Global Warming has all the trappings of a religion.

Just as Orrin censored anything detracting from his religious narrative, so too do warmenist blogs. All the things that are awful about religion (well, okay, except for the funny hats) are true about warmenism.

There is also one other thing. Religions exist because they divorce themselves from material reality. There is no set of facts that could disprove Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, et al.

Equally, what set of facts would disprove warmenism?

Well, it isn't quite as bad as all that. Like Communism, Warmenism is a revealed materialist religion. Unlike revealed spiritual religions, Warmenism makes specific claims. Among other things, it has made a big deal out of Arctic ice extent. If that returns towards "long" term normality -- which it has been doing over the last couple years -- the church will still have plenty of adherents, but little wind in its sails.

Bret said...

Hey Skipper wrote: "It could be that the lack of confirmatory observations means the feedbacks are even worse than expected."

I think the probability of this is near zero since "[c]ommon sense tells me that the fact that we exist and are the result of life having evolved over billions of years indicates that the climate is quite stable as far as life forms are concerned..." We wouldn't be here if the feedbacks were worse.

Hey Skipper wrote: "...a more humid atmosphere is also typically more unstable, which leads to more thunderstorms..."

Does it? For example, it doesn't seem to lead to more hurricanes.

Hey Skipper wrote: "I'm not trying to threadjack..."

Threadjack away. I consider the post-Judd alliance to be one large blog.

Hey Skipper wrote: "One of the reasons I am an AGW skeptic is that we desperately need it to be wrong."

Nah. It's relatively easy to cool the earth by purposely introducing various aerosols into the atmosphere. Indeed, if anything, we should fear natural cooling because it's much harder to heat the atmosphere.

Hey Skipper wrote: "Warmenism makes specific claims."

Yes and no. Surely you've noticed that "Global Warming!!!" has morphed into "Climate Change!!!". Well, the climate is changing (mostly due to natural causes) and man probably plays some small role even if we don't really know what that role is, so refuting this religion will be like trying to nail jelly to the wall.

Harry Eagar said...

I've said this before, but I think I'll repeat it.

Edward Lorenz, the chaos theory guy, is a meteorologist, and he invented chaos theory to explain why he couldn't predict the weather more than a few days out.

In his Danz lectures, he said he didn't know whether climate, as opposed to weather, is chaotic or not.

I say it is antichaotic. We seem to be pretty sure that the inputs have changed enormously over billions of years -- from no oxygen to 35% to 21%, to take one example. Yet, as Bret observes, the climate hasn't varied outside a range of (it looks like) 10 degrees either way.

Something is centering the temperature around 60F.

I think it would be more profitable for climatologists to reframe the question they ask from what makes climate change to what keeps climate from changing?

Bret said...

Harry,

Though I haven't seen him explicitly write it, I think that Lindzen comes at it from the "what keeps climate from changing" point of view. His ideas and papers sure seem built around that premise, don't they (like the iris hypothesis, for example)? Spencer is another one.

Harry Eagar said...

Yes, or pretty close.

Spencer has a recent post at Watt's Up with That which suggests that natural changes are being ignored, which is sort of the flip side of what I suggested.

Hey Skipper said...

"...a more humid atmosphere is also typically more unstable, which leads to more thunderstorms..."

Does it? For example, it doesn't seem to lead to more hurricanes.


As a pure matter of fact, more humidity does mean more atmospheric instability. Well, strictly speaking, if I remember my Meteorology for Stupid Pilots from 30-ish years ago, a humidity gradient is required for atmospheric instability, and the more humid a volume of air becomes, the more likely it will be to interact with drier air, thereby creating instability.

Air mass thunderstorms and hurricanes are both heat engines, but there are a number of reasons hurricanes would not form -- high altitude wind shear, for instance -- that would not get in the way of thunderstorms.

Recently, there was a report showing the effects of global warming, using power outages as a proxy.

Ignoring the report's validity, or lack thereof, for the moment, it proves my point. Climate models are not about weather, but, presuming the climate models are correct, climate induced changes in weather constitute the negative feedback the climate models, because they deal with climate, are missing.

This is a sword that has two edges, but they both cut the same way. IF the climate is warming, then there will be more convective activity, which acts to counter the warming. However, if there is not more convective activity, there is not more negative weather feedback, but that also means the climate is not warming.

Speaking of weather as a negative feedback that will not show up as climate: Noctilucent clouds. Reflexively attributed to climate change, they are also very reflective.

"One of the reasons I am an AGW skeptic is that we desperately need it to be wrong."

Nah. It's relatively easy to cool the earth by purposely introducing various aerosols into the atmosphere.


Perhaps. However, the apocalyptic strain of AGW (BTW, being an AGW skeptic proves, contra David, that heresy is not a Christian phenomena.) simply won't abide that solution. Serious religious belief of any kind is incompatible with modernity.

"Warmenism makes specific claims."

Yes and no.


No, Yes. AGW does make specific material claims: a progressively ice free arctic is currently the most loudly proclaimed prophecy. Hurricane frequency also comes to mind.

Since all religious belief is, by definition, divorced from first order knowledge, to the extent AGW is religious, it will be correct only by accident.

So far, the success rate of AGW predictions is vanishingly small, while the material claims are getting increasingly strident. I think what the Arctic does in the next five years will either condemn us to penury, or reveal AGW to be the latest example of religion in all its preposterous glory.

erp said...

Anecdotal sure, but interesting.

This summer has been by far the hottest and most humid of the 20 summers we've spent on the east coast of central Florida and with only six weeks to the official end of hurricane season, it may also be the only totally hurricane free summer so far.

Not even a tropical storm to bring a smile to the faces of the meteorologists.