Comment post #3

In response to a post at Lean Left citing a report about new research dismissing the claim that increased solar activity is the cause of global warming, a commenter brought up the speculation that Mars and Pluto have also warmed, which supposedly shows that people aren't involved in global warming because, of course, there are no people on Mars and Pluto. Someone else linked to a story positively refuting that contention, but that of course was not the end of it. The first person came back with:

We also don’t know why the oceans stopped warming this past 4-5 years even though CO₂ output continued to increase.

He also linked to a story published in The Australian citing a radio interview with a woman from a think tank arguing that the Earth is actually cooling "if you take 1998 as your point of reference." (Which is a ridiculous argument; of course the Earth is cooling if you take as your stating point the hottest year on record. It's interesting how conservatives always want to get to choose when the clock of history both starts and stops.) The commenter insisted "we really don’t understand how climate works very much at all. It casts doubt on the idea that CO₂ causes warming." That's where I came in.

I did just a few minutes of digging to come up with this regarding that linked bit in The Australian, now to be filed under the heading “consider the source.” Working from the inside out:

- The Institute of Public Affairs, where interviewee Jennifer Marohasy (who is a biologist, not a climatologist) works, describes itself as Australia’s “Leading Free Market Think Tank.” It’s a right-wing, corporate funded think tank that is known as a climate change denier.

- Marohasy’s interviewer, Michael Duffy, is a right-winger hired for Counterpoint[, the Australian radio show which broadcast the interview,] specifically for that reason.

- The Australian, where the column [to which the commenter linked] appeared, is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. empire.

- Column author Christopher Pearson calls himself a “radical libertarian.”

- His column is cited here by one of our resident deniers.

Kind of a perfect storm of mutually-reinforcing ideology.

As for the other link, about how “the oceans stopped warming,” the article mentions a variety of possibilities, including a “hiatus” in warming, loss of heat to the atmosphere as part of the El Nino cycle, the ocean still warming but at a different depth than being measured, even misinterpretation of the data. None of the possibilities mentioned questions either the overall warming trend or the role of CO₂ and it is at best disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

Indeed, that last bit - misinterpretation - calls to mind another time the deniers harped on a supposed anomaly to claim climate change was bogus: when one layer of the atmosphere appeared to be cooling when the models said it should be warming. It turned out it was warming; the initial results has failed to make a correction required by changes in the measuring satellites’ orbits. So may it yet prove to be here. We’ll have to see.

In any event, as the article does make clear to anyone who reads it without “Gotcha!” in mind, even if it turns out that the oceans have not warmed over the last few years, it provides no evidence at all against climate change because, contrary to what seems to be the notion, there is no straight-line relationship between CO₂ concentrations and global warming in general, much less one aspect (ocean warming) in particular. It is a connection, a pattern, but not one that operates on a precise schedule such that a rise in CO₂ levels in a given period must give rise to equivalent warming in that same period.

(Which, I note in passing, makes it amusing how the nanny-nanny naysayers, who not long ago were saying that 100 years of weather records was “not enough” to argue for climate change are now trying to make flat declarations based on spans of five or ten years.)

Finally, it is true that there is much still to be understood about the incredibly complex fluid dynamics of the Earth’s climate. But some is known - and what is known points in one direction: The planet is warming and if we do not take steps necessary to slow or stop that warming, the consequences will be disastrous for human society.

Which, not surprisingly for anyone who has been through one of these "debates," just generated another, different, set of stale claims, all of them referenced in my next reply. (By the way, I should mention that my quotes of the commenter are only very slightly edited, they are pretty much everything he said.)

It would help if you could obtain a basic grasp of science and scientific method before continuing this conversation.

If we can’t predict things with this scientific theory then how how can it be science? If you can’t make a prediction and test for it you can’t conduct an experiment.

First, stop confusing experiment - which is a scientific method - with the whole of science. Controlled experiment is a way of learning about life, the universe, and everything, but it is not the only way. (If it was, then much of, for example, astronomy, cosmology, and relativity physics would not be science.) Another way is to observe, establish hypotheses, make predictions about what will be seen or found through further observation, then see if you’re right. (Which is why astronomy, etc., are science.)

Second, climatology does make predictions about global climate change and it is another example of disingenuousness to suggest I said anything to the contrary. If you know anything about scientific method, then you are familiar with “error bars” and “confidence levels.” Global warming theory does predict with a very high level of confidence (which is about as certain as scientists ever get about something not already observed under controlled laboratory conditions) that increasing CO₂ concentrations will lead to further warming. But there is a range of uncertainty about how much of an increase in the one will lead to how much of an increase in the other and over what time span. In fact, because CO₂ is not the only forcing (factor tending to push effects in a certain direction) on global warming, it’s clear that there is, as I already said, no straight-line relationship between the two.

That does not mean there is no connection, it does not mean that there is no general pattern, it does mean that you can’t say that “this much of an increase in CO₂ this year will lead to this much warming next year.” Which is why both “the oceans haven’t warmed in a few years” argument and the “we’re not setting records every year” argument are both bogus.

Haven’t ice core samples shown that CO₂ increases have followed periods of warming rather than preceded them?

Apparently so, but it’s irrelevant because it has nothing to do with CO₂ being a climate forcing. The most it would show is that CO₂ concentrations did not initiate those cycles. But they did contribute to them and the facts remain that over the course of history, temperature and CO₂ levels have risen and fallen pretty much in tandem and there is a well-established mechanism for CO₂ to add to the greenhouse effect and so enhance warming. Higher CO₂ levels lead to warming. Period.

[W]hat caused those global warming and cooling periods millions of years ago, certainly not burning fossil fuels?

Again with the ignorance. Large-scale cycles of warming and cooling (with smaller cycles of cooling and warming within them) are old stuff to scientists. Don’t come off like you think you’ve come up with something no one else has noticed; you only make yourself look lame.

The issue here is simple: The Earth has its natural cycles. By pouring unprecedented amounts of CO₂ into the environment, we are screwing around with those cycles. Yes, the Earth no doubt could take everything we throw at it and re-establish its own climate equilibrium - but that could easily take millennia. Suppose it took 10,000 years, no, suppose it took just 1000 years. That’s almost nothing to the Earth, the rough equivalent of 15 minutes to someone who’s lived 100 years. But to us, a thousand years of climate disruption could easily be devastating.

Which brings me to this:

How do we know the consequences of warming will be disastrous for human society?

The IPCC has laid it out in necessarily brutal language. Increased droughts. Crop failures. Hunger. Inundated coastlines - which is where most of the human population lives, leading to a dramatic increase in refugees. Disrupted economies. Resource wars. A greater number of more severe storms, as weather events become concentrated - i.e., you may, for example, get the same amount of rain but get it in a small number of destructive, raging storms rather than a large number of ordinary rainstorms. The spread of disease and crop blights as areas previously too cold for certain pests become warmer. The list goes on.

The IPCC does say that certain areas will actually benefit in the short term but even those areas in the longer term will suffer. The idea that some people advance, that all the “bad stuff” will happen “over there” somewhere leaving “us” unaffected, is not only grossly immoral it is shamefully short-sighted and ultimate delusional.

Will all that necessarily happen? Of course not and no scientist worthy of the name will guarantee that all hell will break loose. But is it, based on best current knowledge, best current understanding, a reasonable forecast of what will happen if we don’t act, even more, one that can be made with a high level of confidence? Absolutely. Period.

Final point:

The Global Climate is always changing.

Don’t be childish.

That lead to the denier grousing that I was "belittling" and "insulting" him and suggesting that as a result he was unable to consider to my arguments. Others chided him for being oversensitive but also noted that it is frustrating to hear the same arguments every single time the issue comes up. My own response on that line:

Perhaps my language was somewhat intemperate, but the truth is, your comments made it clear to me that you are criticizing a scientific result without understanding the process by which it was achieved, something like criticizing the route I drove from Redruth to Mousehole without knowing where they both are - which for for the sake of the illustration I’m assuming you don’t.

Note that this was not a matter of understanding the science - you don’t have to be a climatologist to have a sufficient understanding of global warming - but the process. It certainly appeared, that is, that you were simply reciting arguments made by others without understanding either those arguments or their refutations.

And yes, that made me impatient, as did the arguments based on the frankly banal observations that there was climate change before there were humans and that climate is not static. (Parenthetical note on the latter: I continue to assume you’re not confusing climate with weather.)

As others have said, you’re making arguments we have heard over and over again. It’s hard to stay calm and dispassionate when faced yet one more time with the same arguments that have been positively refuted long ago. How would you feel if every time you mentioned, say, space travel someone responded with arguments about crystalline spheres and how the moon landings were faked?

The bottom line here is that the science of global warming is, in an overall, general, sense, settled. Global warming is real, it is happening, it is related to CO₂ levels, CO₂ is a forcing, we are screwing with the climate. The remaining questions - and there are questions here - revolve around exactly what the effects will be, exactly how bad they will be, exactly when the impacts of various effects will be felt, and exactly how dramatic our response has to be to head off the worst. (That last point bears repeating: It is not if dramatic action is needed, but just how dramatic it needs to be.)

I’ll also second [another commenter's] contention that he and I can both be harsh. In fact, there is one topic I will no longer discuss here because every time we tried we wound up having to apologize to each other a couple of days later. In comparison to some of what we’ve thrown at each other, hell, here I was damned polite.

Finally, a footnote related to your remark about land and growing seasons: A one-meter rise in ocean levels, which is within the range projected for the next 100 years, would inundate one-third of the world’s arable land.

One final argument was raised, a refinement of the "how do we know the warming will be catastrophic" argument. However, it, too was based on incorrect information and a misunderstanding.

Why is it wrong to look at the warming from 1000-1300 and see increased prosperity of human civilization and the population of Europe double in that time period, and then turn around and say, we know that this warming will destroy us?

The so-called “Medieval Warming Period” c. 1000-1300 did not exist.

It was at most a time of some slightly warmer periods in an overall millenium-long (or longer) cooling trend. (Remember how I mentioned small reverse cycles within larger ones?) In particular, what data exists simply does not support the contention made by some of the naysayers that temperatures were as warm or warmer than now; in fact they ranged up to about 1 degree C. (1.8 degrees F.) colder and none were as warm. And even those periods of moderation appear to have been a regional event, unlike the worldwide changes being seen now.

There were various reasons for European growth during the period you mention, including greater political and social stability, improved technology, and the breakdown of the feudal system. A period of global warming such as we’re seeing now was not among them.

And there is one more reason why we shouldn’t use 1000-1300 C.E. for sociological predictions of climate impact: It was, as sometimes it’s necessary to point out these sorts of things, 700-1000 years ago. Politically, socially, culturally, environmentally, scientifically, technologically, we simply do not live in that world. History can be a good teacher - but its wisdom is not limitless and the past remains, as L. P. Hartley famously called it, “a foreign country” with which we must first share a language to obtain what wisdom there is.

Footnote: If you like, you can read the original post and all comments at this link. Most of the links included here were not in my comments at the site and I have corrected a couple of grammatical errors.

Footnote Two: Subsequent to this exchange, I had to retract the assertion that a one-meter rise in sea level would inundate one-third of the world's arable land because while I had seen the figure in more than one place, I could not find any "official" source, that is, one that could cite actual scientific data. I did find figures for certain countries showing a 15% to 20% loss of arable land via inundation, but nothing saying 33% worldwide.

I would, however, note that the actual loss of arable land from sea level rise is more than just what is flooded; salinization of lands, deltas, and water supplies will spread the effects further. Additionally, including all effects of global warming (including such as increased drought) will lead to the loss of far more arable land than sea level rise alone; it could, for example, be a contributing factor to the loss of as much as 75% of Africa's rain-fed cropland.