This came off the BBC blog - address below.
It's written with good humor by someone who appears to know of what he speaks. Harry ******************** http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/02/need _for_a_cooler_climate.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/profile/?userid=13843806 "I am a geologist/hydrogeologist that has been cleaning up toxic sites for over a quarter of a century. In terms of sedimentary deposits climate change, and especially abrupt climate change, is one of the things I have studied at some length as climate change is one of the primary denominators in whether an aquifer (reservoir of fresh water) or an aquitard (a sealing unit of clays and silts) is deposited. And what we know from the past in terms of natural climate change makes this entire argument a lot like two fleas arguing over who owns the dog they are riding on (Crocodile Dundee, 1986). I would hope that you classify me as a denier, even though you could not be further from the truth. But the truth means nothing in this entire debate, and it will not take long to daylight the real deniers here. And that is what makes this such a human exercise. It finally dawned on me recently that this debate is much like a reality TV show. Are such shows really real? Or does reality have much if anything to do with it? Follow me for a while and then answer the question. Back in university, I took an advanced course in psychology in which I learned a stunning fact, that human beings are nine times more susceptible to rumor than they are to fact. A simple proof might be "Which, of all mankind's religions, is the correct one?" Let's see how well you do vis-a-vis the nine times rule. The majority of scientific opinion would appear to center around the predictions of the 20 models IPCC uses to estimate the effects of climate. Would a model result, even hundreds or thousands of model results constitute a fact in your mind? Or would that register as a potential future fact? How many of you have either written or used complex scientific models? How many have used them in a court of law, or discredited them in a court of law? We who have done so commonly consider a model result to be a future fantasy. In the case of climate models, this has been easily demonstrated to be a fact, as the science is nowhere near complete yet to even contemplate replacing facts with potential future facts. Do your homework on the tropopause before going too far down the future fantasy road. When you are done there, do a little more homework on all of the known ocean currents and what we presently know of their cycles before staking your claim to model results. I am in no way saying we are not having catastrophic effects on our planet's ecosystems, I am taking the first step in exploring a type of denial that you may not even be aware that you are committing. Which of course, is what denial is all about. Let's dig into this a little bit. Fact. The earth's temperature and greenhouse gases are tied. This is a fact and cannot credibly be denied by anyone who really knows what they are talking about. it is the truth. But it is not the whole truth. Whereas it has not been credibly demonstrated to me that GHGs can cause a climate change event, the proxy records of the ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland, the oceanic sediment cores, pollen and tree ring data can prove beyond any doubt that in terms of historical data earth's temperature rises, then GHGs rise, earth's temperature drops, then GHGs drop. But even that is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I doubt few of you can handle all of that. Again, we shall see. And when we do you will get to see what true denial is all about, and I predict you will not like it one little bit. The uncontroversial facts roll out like this. We live today in the Holocene Epoch, or the last 11,500 years since we melted our way out of the Wisconsin ice age. It is called the Wisconsin because that is as far south as the miles thick ice sheets made it before T1, or termination 1. All, repeat, all of human civilization has occurred during this brief slice of geologic time. The only written human records that extend beyond 10k years ago are cave paintings. and sea levels have been at least 5-10 meters higher than today during the Holocene. The Wisconsin ice age is the seventh 100,000 year long ice age/interglacial couple dating back 800,000 years ago to the Mid Pleistocene Transition, before which we were on the 41k year clock for several million years. In terms of North American nomenclature, the furthest south the ice sheets ever came occurred in the Nebraskan ice age, prior to termination T4. Now it takes a lot of water to make a miles thick ice sheet that comes that far south, and those of us that study these things in their intimate details know that the swing between these cold/warm couples is about 400 feet, give or take a lot of feet. And we know it is not just down that far either. During the last interglacial, the Eemian, the one where Homo sapiens first appears in the fossil records, a number of sea level highstands are known from both crustally stable locations, such as the Caymans, which have been credibly documented to be somewhere between 20 to as much as 52 meters above present day sea levels. It has also been credibly shown that over half the melting that rocketed us out of the Wisconsin ice age occurred in less than a decade. That would be more than 50 meters in a single decade. What we have learned from all the proxy records is that abrupt climate change is very common in the recent geologic past. And it virtually always occurs with a very rapid period of natural warming followed by rises in GHGs. On the major transitions, ice age/interglacial couples, temperatures abruptly rise and on average, 1,300 years later GHG concentrations rise, temperatures drop off into an ice age, and on average 2,700 years later GHG concentrations drop down. The smallest major climate transition we know of are the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, which on average take about 1,500 years for a full cycle. They average 8-10 degrees C in something like a few years to a decade or so, with outliers running up to 16 degrees C. We have evidence of D-O events dating back some 680 million years. There have been 24 of them since we first popped onto the scene. The last one may have been the Younger Dryas (look it up). In just this interglacial, we know of numerous warmings and coolings, all of which occurred rather suddenly. Agaion, I am not saying we cannot have one of our own, but if you are expecting scientists who have studied this all their professional lives to get all worked up over a 2C and perhaps up to a 5 meter rise in sea level, then you forget our capacity to understand signal to noise ratio. Your future fantasy is decidedly less than the natural known noise, so the question almost begs itself to be asked, how on earth (literally) are you going to be able to tell our future fantasy signal from the superbly well documented natural noise (also referred to as facts)? Which brings us face to face with the nine times rule once again. You must decide which you are more permeable to fact or fiction. Even in science, it is the rare bird that can clearly discern this very thing. I often find I must place things in a context of absolute clarity to even begin to slide the register towards objectivity. I do it with perspective, often contrasting fact with fiction in such a way that it simply cannot be avoided. When so pressed the result is often quite painful for the prejudiced. You find yourself here and the time is now. And by now you should have learned to be careful who you consider to be a denier lest it turn out to be yourself. In just 300 short years, CO2 concentrations are predicted to increase from less than one tenth of one percent to still less than one tenth of one percent. This is the most important thing most of us have ever imagined and we should focus our efforts on this above all else. This just so happens to be what we continue to be sold. Should you buy? Want to gain an understanding of denial? Read on. In 1999 Kofi Annan announced we had just passed the 6 billion mark in human population. Last June Ban Ki Moon predicted human population would cross the 10 billion mark by 2050, making it childsplay for even the mathematically challenged amongst us to easily see doubling of population by 2100. Been hearing a lot about this lately? No? Does it even matter one whit at all? Let's see. Do a little online research and you will soon discover that if a human being does nothing more than consume carbon sources (also referred to occasionally as food) and breathe it will produce a kilogram of CO2. Six billion such hominids will produce 2 gigatons of CO2 per annum. In 2005 the Energy Information Agency of the U.S. Gov. published the fact that all U.S. industrial and transportation emissions of CO2 were 7 gigatons. The cap and trade legislation that did not pass last year would have cut 30% of that by at least 2030, or 2.2 gigatons. Assuming human populations do increase as much as predicted (there's that word again!) then this will be neatly erased somewhere after 2050 just by breathing alone assuming those extra hominids do nothing more than eat and breathe, not work for a living, moving about the planet, participating in sports and taking vacations. Beginning to understand denial yet? I rather doubt it. Whereas the anthropogenic focus is firmly centered on GHG emissions, as many here will attest it certainly should be, precious few will be able to remember Klaus Toepfler of the UN stating in 2001 that at the then rate of triple canopy rainforest devastation the earth would be without any rainforest within just a few decades. The 2005 estimate was 50,000 square miles per year, or an area about the size of Mississippi. That's sustainable right? Are we planting anything near than amount? You better hope we are, because rainforest cutting doubled last year in the Brazilian Amazon alone in order to satisfy the demands of biofuels production. Before 2020, a date well before 2100, the rainforests could well be gone. And this is not a future fantasy, but a hard cold reality of devastation that you can take a fossil fueled flight to and watch today. In your musings on sustainability be sure not to deny this. In the particularly likely event you still exist in a state of denial it has come time for your sucker punches. I will deliver them in the form of stupefying knockout punches that just keep on coming. In the past 3 million years hominid braincase size has gone from roughly 500cc's to the present average of 2,500cc's. You may fantasize that this occurred in a straightline fashion, but that would be denying the massive body of research into human origins that consistently speculates that this occurred in response to reliable, abrupt, dramatic and unavoidable global climate change. In denial or not, we are not only likely to be the result of climate change it could very well be that we are dependent on it to "smarten" us up. Think of a long slow 90k to 95k year slide into a global deep freeze as an opportunity for the braincased challenged amongst us to make that thing which modern hominids have quaintly defined as a fatal mistake. To sum up, whereas GHGs do not appear to have ever caused a climate change event for the past 680 million years, that is no reason to suspect it cannot do so in compliance with our will. Measuring it will be a cinch. All you have to do is develop tha ability to distinguish our maximum future fantasy 2C and 6 meter signal from the natural up to 16C and 52 meter signal produced from the aforementioned reliable, dramatic and unavoidable natural global climate change. All of this while completely ignoring (denying) rainforest devastation which can be observed in perhaps one tenth the timeframe by the geometrically increasing human population. Now do you understand denial? I think not. In our zeal to create a more perfect world we will spend trillions sequestering a gas which has never caused a climate change before while funding all manner of things which cannot hope to cope with the coming billions of hominids while 13 of our 16 largest cities squat on estuaries, the only known incubators of life in the universe. Every penny not spent on fusion research will turn out to be a penny squandered. Remember, fusion has sustainably supplied the known universe with all of its energy and material needs for at least the past 6 billion years. In the final analysis, while I watch the comical adherence to impossible to prove model predictions I find myself thinking what we really need is another ice age. It is the only thing known to smarten members of the genus homo up. And it may not be so long in coming. At 11,500 years old this interglacial, the Holocene, is getting a little long in the tooth. No other interglacial dating back to the MPT has lasted this long. Just last year we saw the solar flux drop below what we have believed is the lowest possible for the sun. We also saw the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation switch to their cool modes. You probably think this winter is just an anomaly, right? So this is another fact/fiction permeability test for you. The sun has gone very quiet as we enter solar cycle 24 at the same time as the two largest oceanic current cycles have both switched to their cool modes. In case you had not noticed these facts, you may soon come to understand that if GHGs can do what some may believe they are capable of, they had better get about doing it. We are overdue for both an ice age and an intelligence upgrade. "
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