Saturday Morning Essay: Surf's Up In England

Brought to you by Peet's store-bought...

"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"  Henry David Thoreau.

Always far, far ahead of his time.  The principles of global warming, through the greenhouse effect and the capacity of various atmospheric gases to absorb and re-emit infra-red radiation (depending upon peculiarities of their molecular bonds), were actually worked out in 1857 by an Irish contemporary of Thoreau, the physicist John Tyndall.  Presumably, since the pure scientific discovery did not threaten any big fossil fuel companies, Tyndall's work did not give rise to a Denialist movement, and I'm not aware that he was charged with participating in a liberal hoax and conspiracy.  He just figured it out, and even calculated that it was water vapor that was the strongest gaseous contributor to heating the troposphere.  

I've been reading a lot lately about the psychological effects of abrupt climate change.  To wit, people are freaking out at the disruption of normal patterns.  It is not normal, for example, for 75-foot waves to break onshore in Cornwall, on England's south coast.  

John Nissen, writing in Ecologist, notes:

 The long spell of wet weather here in the UK this winter is due to a stuck pattern of the polar jet stream, such that it frequently passes over us. Meanwhile the mid-US has been experiencing an extreme cold spell, as the jet stream meanders southwards in a gigantic loop. Strong scientific evidence suggests that this jet stream behaviour, producing an increasing frequency of weather extremes at mid-latitudes, is primarily driven by Arctic warming; global warming is only a secondary, compounding factor.

Mr. Nissen then urges prompt action to avert "abrupt climate change."  I know that his intentions are good, but um...if it's already happening, if it's attributable to Arctic amplification, then isn't abrupt climate change here?  Which, I must say, is a complete bummer, because if it's here, then it's here for reasons that will never go away during any relevant lifetime or era.  What's going to put the ice back at the North Pole?

Paul Beckwith is a great explicator of the phenomenon.  It's good we have people like Paul or we would be left only with the analyses of contemporary life offered by such august bodies as the Council of Morons at the New York Times, who seem unaware that the fundamental conditions of human life have changed.  Personally, I think this is newsworthy, but then what do I know?

Paul Beckwith explains abrupt climate change and Arctic amplification with an economy of effort that reflects, in my view, a deep understanding.  (He's a chess master, and thus thinks with a clear logic.)  The jet stream, in its classic formation of yesteryear, depended on a temperature gradient between the Equator and the North Pole.  The consistently warm weather at the Equator tended to flow north toward the cold Arctic.  The rotation of the Earth deflected this flow eastward, or to the "right," because of Coriolis force (principles first worked out by Richard Feynman, using a few idle moments of his immense intelligence).  These dynamics tended to keep the eastward flowing jet stream in the Northern Hemisphere within a fairly tight band, with predictable peaks and troughs.

With the Arctic warming 4 or 5 times faster than the Equator, however, the gradient has broken down, and what Paul calls a general "equilibration" of temperature in the Northern Hemisphere means that just about any kind of weather can happen anywhere at any time. The jet stream is a meandering, lethargic, unpredictable mess, plunging southward, streaking northward, breaking into pieces. Arctic cold in Georgia, drought in California (except that right now we're having an "atmospheric river" storm which is dumping huge amounts of rain on the Bay Area), and waves at Cornwall which make the breakers at Maverick's in Half Moon Bay seem puny by comparison.

A little too late for "averting" anything, I think.  We're into adaptation, and as with everything else about climate change, arriving decades ahead of the formal, model-based predictions.  The Denialists appear to have been right about the climate scientists after all: their models were way off.  They were much too optimistic.

Saturday Morning Essay: The President Goes There: Climate Change Is Real.

The President's brave pronouncement was greeted by bemused tweets from polar bears, such as #longdistanceswimmer:  "Do tell."  Bark beetle #chewylarue sent a message from the Kenai Peninsula to beetles still working the decimated forests of East Texas:  "Dudes!  It's like Vegas up here - virgin spruce, females on the loose. Head north before they do something."

There is not much danger of that, not yet anyway.  A few more Tallahassee blizzards or 100 percent melting of the Arctic ice cap might bring people around, but the media-narcotized American populace hasn't figured anything out yet.  "Climate change is real."  Okay, so what's that mean? I thought Kim Kardashian's butt was real too, and where did that get me?

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.  

In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.

Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/01/europe-dumps-global-warming-efforts.html#JcAPejPsHaQkym8i.99

Sometimes I find myself strangely reassured by contrarian voices, such as Mike Shedlock's blog at Mish's Global Trend Analysis.  Mike is sharp on issues such as the real state of American employment, falling gasoline usage (because of our broke-ass status), and other ideas that cut against the grain of the feel-good mainstream media.  Look what Mike has to say about "global warming hysteria:"

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years. 
In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.
Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

I had not seen that old hoary argument trotted out in a while: the Earth has cooled since 1998; how can global warming be underway if it's getting colder? Which U.N. Report does he mean?  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is itself a U.N. institution; is that what he means, the IPCC itself, which up until I read Mish's dismissal of the hysteria I had understood as definitely among the hysterics. 

Rather, I am against carbon trading schemes, taxpayer funding of green energy, and other silliness based on global warming hysteria.

• In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.  
• In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.
• Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/01/europe-dumps-global-warming-efforts.html#HKKSdBHsebXTmqWa.99

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.  

In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.

Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/01/europe-dumps-global-warming-efforts.html#QmfSbSZL3SALJd0w.99

Rather, I am against carbon trading schemes, taxpayer funding of green energy, and other silliness based on global warming hysteria.

• In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.  
• In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.
• Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/01/europe-dumps-global-warming-efforts.html#HKKSdBHsebXTmqWa.99

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.  

In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.

Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/01/europe-dumps-global-warming-efforts.html#JcAPejPsHaQkym8i.99

Denialists love 1998 because it is such a good starting point for them.  It was an extraordinarily hot El Nino year, and smashed temperature records worldwide; thus, if you begin there, it seems that the "rate of change" has slowed in comparison, say, to

One can clearly see the extreme year 1998, which (thanks to the record-El Niño) stands out above the long-term trend like no other year. But even taking this outlier year as starting point, the linear trend 1998-2013 in all four data sets is positive. Also clearly visible is 2010 as the warmest year since records began, and the minima in the years 2008 and 2011/2012. But just like the peaks are getting higher, these minima are less and less deep. - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/01/global-temperature-2013/#more-16736

the rate of change from 1997 to 1998.  Of course, one must point out that it's an extraordinarily stupid thing to do, and I will never be able to read Shedlock again without...well, I'll just stop there.  I'll never be able to read Shedlock again.

Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam,  a brilliant atmospheric scientist and mathematician (German, notice) sums it up by noting that the recent slowdown in the "rate of change" is because of a persistent La Nina pattern which has countered the relentlessly rising CO2 and methane levels. This is not a cause for rejoicing, since signs of a returning El Nino are now at hand.  If this occurs about the same time that China is forced to curtail smokestack releases from coal-burning plants (so the Chinese can resume breathing outdoors), we will see a sudden quantum jump upward in average temperature.  China and India are probably holding down world temperatures by about 1 degree C with aerosol emissions, in effect, power plant "volcanoes." And when all of that happens, we can count on the mouth-breathing Shedlock to call it all "natural variation." 

One can clearly see the extreme year 1998, which (thanks to the record-El Niño) stands out above the long-term trend like no other year. But even taking this outlier year as starting point, the linear trend 1998-2013 in all four data sets is positive. Also clearly visible is 2010 as the warmest year since records began, and the minima in the years 2008 and 2011/2012. But just like the peaks are getting higher, these minima are less and less deep. - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/01/global-temperature-2013/#more-16736

One can clearly see the extreme year 1998, which (thanks to the record-El Niño) stands out above the long-term trend like no other year. But even taking this outlier year as starting point, the linear trend 1998-2013 in all four data sets is positive. Also clearly visible is 2010 as the warmest year since records began, and the minima in the years 2008 and 2011/2012. But just like the peaks are getting higher, these minima are less and less deep. - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/01/global-temperature-2013/#more-16736

The warming effect of greenhouse gases is not really an "hypothesis."  Without the simple physics of the greenhouse effect, life here would be very much like the no-life on the moon.  It's astounding that people like Shedlock don't see something so obvious.  If a new high jump record is set, do they begin questioning the law of gravity?  One problem that it brings up, and this is the essence of Mr. Obama's attempt to say something rational in a country which is, overhelmingly, so frigging stupid: a guy like Shedlock sees global warming as an annoyance because all he wants to think about, and all he wants to do, is to make money. Since Obama is speaking to a legislative group that is controlled by people with exactly the same attitude, his diffidence (while appalling) is more understandable. It's human nature.  If you're at the convocation of cardinals in the Vatican voting on a new Pope, you feel funny abstaining from a vote because you're an atheist.  Such is the power of culture-wide ignorance, such as that which prevails in the United States.  There are a great many science-denying imbeciles in the Congress, particularly on the Republican side, where idiocy is worn as a badge of honor and as a talisman of membership.

As for Mr. Shedlock's other anecdotal gotcha, about Antarctica, I guess he's nailed us there. We could point out a few things. If the world isn't warming why is the Arctic ice going away?  It is going away; even George Will doesn't say much about that anymore, and think how dumb he is.  Also, an important distinction: Antarctica is a continent.  This means, Mr. Shedlock, that it's made out of land. It is hard for the warming ocean to flow under the ice on Antarctica because the ice is on land. The ice is thousands of feet high.  At the other pole, the area you would call Arctica, there is no land. It is all water, liquid or frozen (the frozen part is called "ice.")  If you look at a globe, you will see that Arctica is surrounded by lots of land, which has less thermal inertia than water, and I'm sorry to be so technical.  Also, the large bodies of water with access to Arctica (these bodies of water are called "oceans") are free to flow into, over and under the ice at the North Pole.

So the two poles are different.  Greenland, by the way, is in the North, and it's melting fast. But yes, one must concede your point, Mr. Shedlock. A research ship got caught in the ice pack off Antartica.  Doesn't sound much like global warming to me, either, Mish!  Or at least it won't until in a few years they hold America's Cup at the North Pole.

In such a country, with legions of Moes, Larrys & Curleys holding forth, it does seem brave to proclaim that climate change is real. Sad, but true.

Most scientists will argue that taking 1998 as the starting point automatically begets a false conclusion, as this year was particularly hot, thanks to strong El Nino conditions transferring heat from the oceans to the atmosphere.
“Taking 1998 as the starting year is a joke,” says Pieter Tans, a climate scientist who worked on the IPCC report. “Why not 1997 or 1999? Anyone doing this gets an ‘F’ grade in introductory statistics.
“It is too early for us to be able to say that the human-caused warming has stopped.  I fully expect the long-term warming to continue because we know that our activities are causing the greenhouse gases to increase, and we can calculate based on very well understood physics, how the GHGs retain heat in the atmosphere.”
He adds: “There is no ‘Greenhouse Warming Hypothesis’. The warming expectation follows directly from established physics and chemistry.”
- See more at: http://www.rtcc.org/2013/09/23/global-cooling-how-will-the-ipcc-explain-15-year-temperature-hiatus/#sthash.oWEUdHsj.dpuf

Most scientists will argue that taking 1998 as the starting point automatically begets a false conclusion, as this year was particularly hot, thanks to strong El Nino conditions transferring heat from the oceans to the atmosphere.
“Taking 1998 as the starting year is a joke,” says Pieter Tans, a climate scientist who worked on the IPCC report. “Why not 1997 or 1999? Anyone doing this gets an ‘F’ grade in introductory statistics.
“It is too early for us to be able to say that the human-caused warming has stopped.  I fully expect the long-term warming to continue because we know that our activities are causing the greenhouse gases to increase, and we can calculate based on very well understood physics, how the GHGs retain heat in the atmosphere.”
He adds: “There is no ‘Greenhouse Warming Hypothesis’. The warming expectation follows directly from established physics and chemistry.”
- See more at: http://www.rtcc.org/2013/09/23/global-cooling-how-will-the-ipcc-explain-15-year-temperature-hiatus/#sthash.oWEUdHsj.dpuf

Rather, I am against carbon trading schemes, taxpayer funding of green energy, and other silliness based on global warming hysteria.

• In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.  
• In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.
• Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/01/europe-dumps-global-warming-efforts.html#HKKSdBHsebXTmqWa.99

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.  

In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.

Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/01/europe-dumps-global-warming-efforts.h

Weatherwise, It's Such A Cuckoo Day

Many on the Mouth-breathing Right have used the recent spate of extremely cold weather in the Midwest and Northeast, and "mega-storm" Hercules (currently pounding the hell out of the west of England with hurricane winds and fifty-foot waves), as further proof that this whole "global warming" theory is a giant hoax.  Let me begin by saying, as always: I hope they're right. 


On the off chance they're not, the scientifically curious among you may wonder what the connection is between "Arctic amplification" (our melting of the North Pole, in effect) and extreme weather events in the mid-latitudes.  Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, a leading light in the field of jet stream perturbation caused by the relative loss of the temperature gradient between the equator and the Arctic, explains her take on the matter in the video following.  You may have something better to do, like watching a "Jersey Shore" re-run. On the other hand, if you're curious why the weather will be disturbingly weird for the rest of your life, and for at least the next one thousand years, you might be interested in Dr. Francis's brief presentation:

Let's let Ol' Blue Eyes take it on home...

....so just say the word,
and we'll catch that bird
to beyond the Milky Way!
Come fly with me, let's get the hell away.

[Bridge]
Once I get you up there,
Where the air is ionized,
You'll be surprised,
And hor-ri-fied.
Once I get you up there,
You'll be holding me so very near
You might even hear
All the angels sneer
Because of the weather!

[Rousing finish, con brio!]

Weatherwise, it's such a freaky day,
The tro-po-pause is a long-lost cause,
We've screwed the pooch I'd say!
It's perfect for a swinging Kool-Aid punch...to-day!
Come fly with me -
Pack up let's fly away!

Saturday Morning Saturday Morning Essay: Extinction, Reconsidered

Brought to you by Peet's French Roast coffee...

Naturally, as a supporter of the scientific method, I hasten to add that the Thursday edition of my Saturday Essay was about a global warming paper that apparently had no refereeing or peer review. The writing was definitely over the top; I've been reading a lot about global warming over the last couple of years, and I don't know of anyone else, no matter how dire a spin they choose to place on the available data and reasonable extrapolations thereof, who's talking about the oceans boiling and 120 degree C air temperatures in the year 2080.  I just thought that Mr. Light (the author) provided a rousing, angry, human-bashing finish right up there with some of the best dyspepsia of Kurt Vonnegut on a downer day.  Who can resist that?

Perhaps the paper in question was an example of the increasingly common "open access" method of publishing scientific articles.  Indeed, the research scientist from the Great Southwestern University is so familiar now with this particular end-run around academic quality control that he's written a hilarious parody, "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down & Publish My Own Papers."  A sample:

I'm gonna sit right down and publish my own papers,
And make believe they're peer reviewed
Referees they drive me nuts
They're ad hoc & anonymous
Nerds strokin’ their libidos
Shootin their little torpedoes...

No doubt peer review brings out the snark in a lot of competitive academics.  On the other hand, maybe it makes it a little tougher to scare the shit out of your readers with unfounded claims.

Anyway, I favor the "intellectual commons" approach to discourse championed so eloquently by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty.  An idea should stand or fall on its own merits, and must withstand the most withering criticism if it is objectively true.

I actually found the paper in question on a thread commenced by Guy McPherson on Facebook.  It was Christmas, a slow news day, and the Near Term Human Extinction loyalists were out in force. The conclusions of this "paper" on the "methane bomb" were apparently accepted at face value by almost anyone, except a couple of "Extinction Deniers" who tried valiantly to inject some scintilla of hope, only to be attacked mercilessly for their Pollyannish addiction to "hopium" (as in hopium of the masses, I guess).

Speaking of Russian political history, it always astounds me how those of the Left hand side of things always manage to arrange themselves into warring factions. The Russian revolutionaries all opposed the Czar, but their hatred for his cruel despotism eventually took a back seat to the internecine struggles among the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Trotskyites.  Recall that Trotsky was eventually assassinated more than 20 years after the Revolution by a Stalinist hit man who found him in Mexico City.  The global warming movement has become sort of like that, too. 

Personally, I am failing to see the upside of accepting the inevitable extinction of humanity 16 years from now.  Especially when the hard science really does not point in that direction.  I know the situation is bad; I know that humans have never resided on Earth when the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was at 400 parts per million.  I know what the "hockey stick" of recent temperature trends looks like.  It's scary what has happened to the ice masses of the Earth in so short a time frame. I'm not a global warming denier.

Still, to help things along, I posted a link on that thread to David Archer's analysis of recent methane papers, an analysis I discussed previously here at the Pond.  David Archer knows his stuff.  He describes in considerable detail how the methane beds and permafrost were formed in the Arctic Circle and along the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.  He uses Henry's Law to support his argument that methane clathrates could not have formed at any depth shallower than 250 meters of Arctic water. The deeper they are, you see, the better, since dissolution of methane bubbles in the water column as they make their way to the surface is an important buffer, along with the fact that methane hydrates at depth are more resistant to melting in the first place.

I like Henry's Law.  Henry's Law governs the solubility of gas in liquid under varying conditions.  When you open a beer bottle, or pop a champagne bottle (maybe Tuesday night?) and hear that "pfft" or "pop" - that's Henry talking to you.  That's the sound of the carbon dioxide escaping into the room, CO2 that has come out of solution.  If you leave the beer bottle on the counter, eventually the beer will go flat, meaning the partial pressure of the CO2 in the beer will equilibrate with the CO2 level in the room.  I was thinking: if you had done that little experiment in 1966 (perhaps the first time I would have done so), the beer would be flatter than it would be today.  Not enough to notice, but still. Three cheers for global warming!

Others on the Facebook thread picked up my act of supreme dissidence (Objective Intellectualism, always a crime under totalitarian regimes, requiring re-education), and it got back to Guy.  I was in trouble now:

Guy McPherson: "^ Infused with hopium, as is customary at Real Climate. They favor the "it'll all be okay" approach forwarded by the corporate media and the corporate governments of the world. As we approach the brick wall, they propose accelerating."

I don't think that's fair, and not just because I like David Archer.  I find him a humane and circumspect fellow who really knows his stuff.  Questioning whether we'll all be dead in 2030 is not the same, in my view, as saying "it will all be okay."  

I guess that's what I get for being a Trotskyite.  But I'm still thinking: if David Archer is wrong, take him on directly and disprove his analysis.  Sittin' right down and publishin' your own papers is one thing; taking pot shots with only ad hominem attacks may be a good deal worse.

Saturday Morning Essay: On Graduating from Global Warming Class

Brought to you by Peet's French Roast...

From a paper provocatively entitled "The Non-Disclosed Extreme Arctic Methane Threat" by Malcolm P.R. Light, published a few days ago (https://sites.google.com/site/runawayglobalwarming/the-non-disclosed-extreme-arctic-methane-threat):

The Earth is a giant convecting planet, the underlying molten magma being heated by deep seated radioactivity and the oceans and atmosphere are its cooling radiator which allows the Earth the facility to vent this heat into open space (Windley, 1984; Allen and Allen, 1990). Mother Earth has carefully held the atmospheric temperature within a stable range necessary for oceans to exist for at least 4 billion years and nurtured the earliest bacteria to evolve into today's space faring humans (Calder, 1983).

The fouling up of the Earth's cooling radiator from Human emissions of greenhouse gases derived from fossil fuels will be counteracted by Mother Earth in her characteristic fashion by emitting vast volumes of deadly methane into the atmosphere from the Arctic regions. This will lead to the total extermination of all harmful biological species that produce greenhouse gases in the same way that Mother Earth did during the Permian and other extinction events. In this case however we have totally tipped the balance with our extreme carbon dioxide and methane emissions so that there will be no chance of recovery for the Earth in this time frame, because the methane release will cause the oceans to begin boiling off between 115oC and 120oC (Severson, 2013) in 2080 and the Earth's atmosphere will have reached temperatures equivalent to those on Venus by 2096 (460oC to 467oC)(Wales, 2013; Moon Phases, 2013).

Mankind's greed for fossil fuels will have completely destroyed a magnificent beautiful blue planet and converted its atmosphere into a barren, stiflingly hot , carbon dioxide rich haze. The earth will have moved permanently out of the magical zone (Circumstellar habitable zone, Goldilocks zone) where life (some of it probably highly intelligent) also exists elsewhere in the myriad of other solar systems that are located within the far reaches of our Universe.

Well, I must say, sir:  that's really bringing it.  Mr. Light is not shying away from identifying Who Fucked It Up.

With my course credits in hand, I naturally feel empowered to comment.  This is not the way we discussed things in my virtual class room.  David Archer, that is to say, who is a very skilled teacher, did not conduct the class with his hair on fire, and while we did discuss the fate of the other two "Goldilocks" planets (Venus and Mars), and we did touch on the topic of oceans boiling away and Venus suffocating beneath a blanket of CO2 so thick it's actually kind of like an atmospheric ocean, we did not talk about Earth in the same terms, now or in the future.  The future being 2100, because it's sort of alarmist to talk about shorter time frames.

I prefer the statelier pace of global warming discussed in class.  Such as the "Slug Theory," which is about the rate at which we belch CO2 into the atmosphere.  Essentially, we have an atmospheric "budget" for doing so, and given the long-lasting nature of CO2 once it's up there, in some senses it doesn't matter how fast you emit it.  It's the total load or "slug" that is introduced that matters. Currently, under this approach, we have emitted about half that budget since the beginning of the Industrial Age (about 500 gigatons of carbon).  To keep global average temperature below the Magic Level of 2 degrees C increase, what we consider (probably unjustifiably) the safe range, we should avoid emitting any more than that amount again until we stop CO2 emissions altogether.

You can kind of sense that's absolutely the wrong thing to tell a species like Homo sapiens.   You can have 14 drinks for the week, you tell the alcoholic on Sunday, and as many as you want (up to 14) on any given day, so long as you do not exceed that maximum.  You can be assured your alkie will knock back ten drinks on Monday followed by the remaining four on Tuesday, followed by various acts of subterfuge to get around the limit for the rest of the week. (The drunk will be seeking "alcohol credits" by talking a teetotaller out of beginning a life of boozing.) This is more or less exactly the approach followed by the nations of the Earth since they began the dog & pony shows of "CO2 reduction" a couple of decades ago. 

The Slug Theory is nice and linear, it has some pretty solid science behind it (climate sensitivity to CO2), it's given activists like Bill McKibben a full-time job, and it makes President Obama sound...presidential when he talks about "80% reductions by 2050" with a straight face.  It also places humans in a better light.  Sure, in our youthful exuberance about fossil fuels we went way over the line and blew through our allowance, about 531 gigatons so far.  But now that we know what sort of mess we've made, we'll begin the process of building solar panels on the moon which will microwave their electricity back to Earth (a proposal as one part of a new energy regime to make up for the terawatts of energy we will lose when we stop burning fossil fuels).

Then this damn methane shows up like The Masque of the Red Death at Prince Prospero's crib.  Natalia (or Natasha) was rueful about spoiling the party when we talked about this on the shores of the Laptev Sea.

"Is shame," she said.

"Is damn shame," I answered.  "Is ruining a lot of perfectly good geophysics textbooks."

"Is I know," murmured Natasha, stricken.

Well, I'm sure we'll still get to build the lunar solar panels; but first we have to build this Star Wars array of methane blasters up here in this godforsaken tundra.  Manned, or boyed, by a couple of 13 year-old American X-Box fiends powered not by fossil fuels, but by industrial quantities of Pringles and Jolt Cola.

Saturday Morning Essay: The New IPCC Report

Brought to you by Peet's French Roast...

Here's your money shot from the new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

Quite elegant in its presentation.  About 800 scientists, actually trained to within an inch of their lives in relevant fields of climatology, atmospheric physics, meteorology, oceanography, and paleontology, have concluded to the 95% confidence level that the predominant cause of global warming since 1950 has been the influence of human beings.  The 95% confidence level is sort of the gold standard of statistical analysis; you can almost say, in a way, that if you don't believe this, you don't really believe anything at all except shit that you yourself make up.

Making shit up, of course, is the stock-in-trade of those legions of the Dark Force known as Right Wing Think Tanks.  All of our "controversies" in the United States are generated by Right Wing Think Tanks; we think we're engaging in some sort of two-sided "discourse" on issues, but we're not.  There is reality, and there is the world of disinformation promulgated by Right Wing Think Tanks.  It's really as simple as that.  The propaganda machines of Big Oil, the Koch Brothers, the Pete Petersen Foundation - they're all in on it.  Grinding out falsehoods 24/7 to promote a financial agenda.

You can see that somewhere around 2050, the future lines begin to diverge markedly.  The Report concludes, however, that if strong mitigation (mostly, reduction in CO2) were to begin, you know, soon - then global average temperature rise can be held below 2 deg. C in 2100.  Because of the lag time between emission of CO2 and its effect on climate, we cannot wait until 2050 to begin reducing emissions.  It takes about 30 years before the effects show up, and once the temperature rise is established, it's effectively permanent.

That's the good news within the Blue probability band.  Within the Red band, involving "business as usual," you can see that global average temperature might rise 6 deg. Centigrade by 2100.  Try to imagine that.  This is a consortium of climate scientists from about 125 countries, trying to limit themselves to the most scientifically verifiable results possible (being "conservative," in other words), and in the results of their report they are behooved to tell us that the average global temperature 87 years from now (the length of one long life) will be about 10 degrees F. warmer if we keep living the way we're living now.  Just for starters, this means that the entire ice sheet atop Greenland will melt, resulting in a 7 meter rise in sea level.  That's significant.  For example, I live near San Francisco Bay, but I'm not currently living in San Francisco Bay. 

Blue Pill or Red Pill?  The summary at Realclimate.org, available right here on the Pond's blogsite, is very clear and informative.  The blogmeisters at Realcimate, guys like Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley, who were pilloried by mouth-breathing petroleum whores like Joe Barton of Texas, have been thoroughly vindicated in their warnings many years ago.  I ask you whether the Red Band does not in fact show alarming signs of forming a parabolic curve?

As The Most Interesting Man in the World might be paraphrased:  Stay Blue, my friends.

We're At About 99 Monkeys

I was feeling satirical, looking around on the Web for stuff on Joe Barton, the Republican from Texas who persecuted those three climate scientists during the Bush Administration over the "hockey stick."  Some statistician with no climate science training wrote to Barton and said their analysis was full of holes, so Barton put out a request to see everything all three of these guys had ever done - all their research, all their papers, all their funding, all their notes, all their methods, etc.  Fortunately, a lot of people went to bat for them and called Barton off before he could do too much damage.  As a result, the Realclimate.org blog (which is on my blog) was founded by Raymond Bradley and Michael Mann, who were the two main authors of the "hockey stick" analysis that was a part of the IPCC report way back in the early 1990's.  Barton, of course, like James Inhofe of Oklahoma, is on the payroll of Big Oil & Gas, and it was always Bush's idea of a sick joke to put people with no training in charge of the major "environmental" and energy committees, especially if they were openly hostile to AGW theories.

So as a man with a Kindle (and a PaperWhite at that), I got Bradley's book, "Global Warming & Political Intimidation," and began reading. Bradley goes very deeply into the methods used by climate scientists to determine temperature patterns in the days before thermometers and regular record keeping.  It's very, very complicated, involving "proxy" data sets like ice cores, corals, lake sediment, and tree rings, and then correlating these proxies on a worldwide basis to build a picture of past climate.  Fortunately, Michael Mann, a good Berkeley undergrad, Yale PhD in physics, applied math, and geology, knew how to do it, and his methods have held up well since their original publication in Nature.  But I got to thinking: how much more difficult is it to do this kind of work in this country with these Congressional morons looking over your shoulder trying to find the slightest hesitation or expression of doubt?  And how much does that chill the necessary research?  And did, in fact, the influence of people like Joe Barton, James Inhofe and Dana Rohrabacher doom the human race to near term extinction?

Hear me out on this one.  As a result of this official Denialism, what I most feared back in 2000, when Bush was elected, may in fact be coming to toxic fruition.  We could not afford those eight years (nor five more of Obama's go-along complacency), and disaster may lie in the not too distant future.  I started reading around on the Web, following Bradley's leads, and a major omission from American reporting began to take shape.  Russian and European scientists talk about it all the time, and it's on the news over there, but in America we have what you might think of as "Al Gore-ism," where nothing is ever said that might sound "hopeless." Our attitude about global warming is equivalent to the Victorian attitude about sex: it's okay, as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.

What I'm referring to is the problem with methane release in the Arctic Circle and in Siberia.  This has been given a once over lightly approach by the IPCC, and is essentially never mentioned in America's popular discourse.  A curious omission, since the survivability of Homo sapiens may be at stake.  For example, methane plumes from the Siberian permafrost were, up until about two years ago, about a meter across.  They were everywhere, and Russians for fun would dig holes in an ice-covered lake and then set fire to the escaping gas.  These methane plumes are now a kilometer across.  Methane is bubbling up out of the shallow waters (in general, less than 50 meters deep) of the East Siberian Ice Shelf, out of the permafrost (which is thawing) and from the shallow waters of the Arctic Ocean north of Canada. They were held in check for millions of years in the form of methane clathrates (a frozen state), and buried in the sediments beneath the permafrost and in the ice shelves.  With the Arctic warming, the ocean is transmitting heat to the submerged stores and the warmer climate in general in Siberia is thawing the permafrost.

The quantities are enormous.  CH4 has a life in the atmosphere of only 12 years, versus CO2, which is essentially permanent once it's up there.  Methane breaks down into CO2 and water vapor (mainly), so it winds up greatly adding to CO2 concentrations.  But it's what it does in the short run that may make all the difference.  In the short run it has a heat-trapping capacity which is 100 times that of CO2.  Ice core studies from the Younger Dryas demonstrate that the order of events, as the climate emerges from an ice age, is that CO2 concentrations rise first, and this sets up the warming which begins freeing up methane from exactly the places it's coming now.  When this process starts, it has the capacity to raise global temperature by 1 degree C per year. This is rapid transition, "non-linear" change, or runaway greenhouse, take your pick.  The correlation between massive methane release during such transitions and temperature rise is much more closely related than the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature increase, at least according to the studies of some researchers who have looked at such historical data (or who have dared to look).

For what amount to political reasons, the conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has chosen to "lengthen out" the effect of methane over a 100-year scale, so that its heat trapping qualities can be correlated to CO2, which is usually measured over such a period.  Over 100 years, methane is about 22 or 23 times more powerful, but methane's far more powerful short-term effects have been given short shrift.

As Steven Chu said, once he quit working for Obama and could speak his mind again, we are right now on the verge of beginning the runaway phase of global warming.  CO2 is like kindling - it sets the stage, but as long as you only focus on CO2, you can get the idea that we need to do something now to avoid a problem in 2100 or so.  This may be tragically wrong.  The original Kyoto Protocol (and the Club of Rome) were right to sound the alarm when they did.  With complete cessation of fossil fuel burning by 1990, we might have headed this catastrophe off.  But we had guys like Barton, Inhofe and Rohrabacher giving our scientists a hard time, and making them pull their punches, so the worst CO2 emitter on Earth could carry on with business as usual.

Poke around on the Net and see what I mean.  Look at the website of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group. They want to create clouds above the Arctic for a massive albedo effect as a desperate measure to keep the water up there cold enough to hold the methane in check. Go to YouTube and key in "methane plumes in Siberia."  It's horrifying, the scariest stuff I've ever read.

The problem always was that it took the latest science too long to become established.  The usual process of research, writing, submitting, peer review, revision, resubmission, etc, and then eventual inclusion in an IPCC compendium meant that it could take 5 years for the latest research to see the light of day.  The atmosphere of Denialism made scientists leery of ever saying what they really thought about what they were finding out. It made the process much more conservative than it should have been, and it means the IPCC reports were always consistently underestimating the real scope of the problem.  And now we have methane plumes a kilometer across belching CH4 into the atmosphere, with gigatons to follow.

My desire to be satirical about this went right out of me.  I don't know what to think now. This all has the quality of a bad dream.

The suspicion is that there may be no Arctic sea ice at the end of this summer.  All that dark water, absorbing heat, thawing methane, trapping heat, leading to more thawing, in a death cycle of feedback loops. My fearless prediction is that in about a year, the problem of methane release will break through to general American consciousness, and then, for a while, we won't be talking about gun control or Kim Kardashian's butt implants. And when the problem becomes that obvious, I would advise Joe, Jim & Dana to maintain a very low profile.  Probably on a private island.

Saturday Morning Essay: Meanwhile, Up in the Troposphere

Brought to you by Peet's House Blend....

Actually, "worrying" about the economy is a nice distraction from real problems, such as global warming.  It's all in how you look at things, as Pablo & Salvador depict above.

Did you hear?  The world has achieved another milestone: 400 parts per million.  The monitoring station up on top of Mauna Loa recorded a full day's CO2 measurements where the average came in at 400 ppm.  We did it!  (Or, more appropriately:  Good Lord, man, what have we done?)  Don't worry.  That number will drop somewhat over the summer as the world's forests and other greenery snarf up a few million tons of that CO2 and photosynthesize it.

Then it will be back, higher than ever.  Higher than it's been in three million years, which, if you're playing along at home, you know is longer than human beings have been around.  For right now, however, it's kind of cool that the CO2 component of room air, .04%, matches up so perfectly with the Keeling measurements high up in the Hawaiian tradewinds.

Currently, the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 levels is doubling about every 30 years or so, which allows some easy math.  The "heritage" level of CO2 (around 1750, at the dawn of the Industrial Age) was about 280 ppm.  So, we've pumped another 120 ppm into the atmosphere during these first 260 years or so, but obviously we were just getting started.  280 + (120 x 2) = 520 ppm in 2043.

James Hansen & Co. have modeled some possible outcomes based on these increases in terms of "sensitivity" to CO2 concentrations.  Basically, 3 to 4 degrees C equates to a CO2 concentration of 520.  That's not good, not good at all.  It would be much better to hold the line where we are, although, of course, we won't.

But we should.  For the love of God, man, we should.  We may get a little more cooperation from....well, from ourselves when the deep ocean heating that has been going on over the last decade begins bubbling up to the atmosphere again.  That's where Earth has been parking the additional heat, but it's been masked by a persistent La Niña in the Pacific Oscillation.  I've noticed that myself over the last five years or so, out here next to the rim of the Eastern Pacific.  I suppose that buffer will dissipate (sort of built into the word "oscillation"), but I hope Earth takes her own sweet time.

It's Mother's Day tomorrow.  Don't forget Mother Earth in your remembrances.

Chasing Ice on a Bad Knee

I recently viewed the film "Chasing Ice" about....well, let me allow the film maker, James Balog, to tell you what it's about:   

"Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of climate change. Using time-lapse cameras, his videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate."

That seems like a modest enough goal.  The purpose of my blog, by the way, is as part of my mission to change the tide of history by goofing around on the Internet.  But damn, those tides are persistent!

Anyway, Monsieur Auteur, I can relate.   James Balog is a tall, lean man with flowing hair who has been a photographer for National Geographic and who gazes into the stark northern sunsets with fierce determination.  He has a pretty wife and an adoring daughter who both simply accept that this important man must expose himself to the harsh climate and pitiless terrain of Greenland's glacier country in order to get the story in pictures.  Yes, Mr. Balog does seem startlingly like the lionized protagonist of The Bridges of Madison County, although unlike that fictional hero, Mr. Balog cannot "move like a panther" as his haunches ripple because he's got a messed-up knee that they keep operating on. 

The movie is about 80 minutes long, but only about 15 minutes are devoted exclusively to Mr. Balog's bad knee.  The rest of the footage is about two things: (1) How difficult it is to set up reliable time-lapse photography stations in Greenland, Alaska and Iceland; and (2) Taking unnecessary risks by rappelling into deep crevasses to get pictures of the interior of glaciers that you can see perfectly well already from up above.

The time lapse photography demonstrates, as the Mission Statement proclaims, that the glaciers in Greenland, Iceland and Alaska are retreating very fast.  Q.E.D., the climate is warming.  Mr. Balog himself was a skeptic as recently as 20 years ago because he didn't think puny "man was capable of altering the Earth's climate."  I've always thought that was about the stupidest rationale for climate change denial I've ever heard.  I first began reading about rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere in the book Moment in the Sun in 1969 (when the levels were only 6% above baseline levels, as opposed to about 35% now), and the one thing that never occurred to me was that "mankind" was not capable of changing the fundamental chemistry of the atmosphere.  I mean, why aren't we?  We spend all day, every day, releasing carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, digging up fossil fuels which took millions of years to form (storing carbon as they did so) and then releasing the stored gases all at once, at a pace thousands, millions of times faster than natural cycles. This was one of the main points of the late, great Barry Commoner's books, which, of course, no one paid any attention to.

Maybe if Barry had talked more about his bad knee, if he had one.  Anyway, the northern glaciers are retreating fast - you can see it in the time lapse photography.  It occurred to me, however, that the problem with this kind of "proof" is that it creates (along with the work of Al Gore) another unscientific straw man for the Deniers to attack, if they think of this line of attack and if they can be bothered to watch the graphic evidence of James Balog's bad ACL damage.  Namely, the retreat of the glaciers is subject to a set of positive feedback loops which takes it out of a linear relationship with actual atmospheric temperature rise.

James Balog, distracted and confused by the pain medication he must routinely take for his arthritic lower extremity, never mentions the mechanics of glacier melt and "deflation" and leaves you to think that the glaciers are rushing into the northern Atlantic (or Pacific, in the case of Alaska) simply because of warm air, "calving" icebergs of phenomenal size and at an unprecedented rate.  The warm air certainly starts the process.  But those interior "waterfalls" which Balog unnecessarily risked his life in order to see better (or at least from a different angle) are, I know from other reading, one of the main positive feedback loops that make glacier retreat nonlinear with actual temperature rise.  Essentially, all of the ice melt makes its way down to the interface between the bottom of the glacier and the bedrock beneath the glacier, and a kind of slip 'n slide is formed which accelerates the glacier toward the (warming) ocean water. 

Because he was on the DL, Mr. Balog was not there when two of his young colleagues, who had camped out in the Greenland ice country for 17 days waiting for a massive calving event, were eyewitnesses to one of the largest glacier break-offs in recorded history.  It was awesome and frightening to watch on film.  A chunk of glacier larger than Lower Manhattan, and with vertical cliffs higher than its tallest skyscrapers, churned and rolled and collapsed into the Atlantic, with a deep, rumbling roar that sounded very much like the end of the world.

Anyway, all ribbing aside, hats off to Mr. Balog.  It's a nice piece of work.  Impressionistically, his film gets the job done.  Who's got time for the science? Although, increasingly, the positive feedback loops are the problem as far as attempts to model climate change with computer simulation, so it would have been good to discuss such complexities in this film, since they're relevant to what was photographed. The softening tundra in Siberia and northern Canada giving up their vast stores of methane (a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2), the seabeds giving up their methane in response to warming oceans, the loss of albedo because of all the melting ice - it's very difficult to account for the multivariant interplay between all of these forcing events, and it's why climate scientists, more than the general public, are scared out of their wits.  Their models keep getting superseded by reality, and it's all in the wrong direction.

Global warming is only the weirdest, most dangerous development in the history of human civilization that we're talking about, after all.  Not only are there no easy answers, at this point there may not be any answers at all.  As Bill McKibben has written, no matter what we do now, we've only got about a 50/50 chance of averting catastrophic temperature rise.  And that's if we actually started doing something now, which I'm sure we will once the "economy recovers." 

The Crisis of Global Warming Passes

It will hit 88 degrees here today in Northern California and 90 tomorrow, according to my usually reliable iPhone temperature app.  That's pretty warm for mid- to late October around here. Not that I'm one of those scientifically illiterate guys who think "weather" is the same as "climate" or anything like that.  I understand the difference.  Still, it's somewhat worrying, you know?  A little weird.

However, I think it must be my imagination because I watched the debate between the two presidential candidates who are allowed on mainstream television last night and the words "global warming," "climate change," or even "weather" were never mentioned.  Not a single, solitary time.

Since the Arctic ice depletion this year is the greatest in recorded history, and there are many other signs of warming, ocean acidification, collapse of marine life, and migration of infectious diseases and tropical insects into formerly temperate climates, one would think that in the course of such a debate climate change would at least merit a passing comment.  You might think about it this way: let us say that you're uncertain about the reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  Shouldn't the issue at least be aired out?  It does have to do with the viability of Earth as our natural habitat, and that seems important.  Granted, you've been influenced by the dissenters, who at this most point are mostly Freeman Dyson, a very elderly mathematician who dabbles in atmospheric science mainly to irritate people (especially his wife); and Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric scientist at MIT.  Unfortunately for Denier Orthodoxy, the shock troops of AGW skeptics were dealt a heavy blow recently when Richard Muller, a prominent UC Berkeley scientist, changed his mind.  As reported by the Chronicle:

 "The hot issue of global warming got hotter Monday when a UC Berkeley physicist, once a loud skeptic of human-caused climate change, agreed not only that the Earth is heating up, but also that people are the cause of it all."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/UC-climate-change-skeptic-changes-views-3748148.php#ixzz29ZK4ipMI

For the Denial movement, scientists can be very unreliable supporters since they have this distressing habit of changing their minds in the face of new evidence.  I suppose this is why there is such a perfect congruence between the base of Denialism and Evangelical religion, where Denialism is an article of faith (so to speak).  If you can believe that present life forms were simply placed here on Earth about 6,000 years ago by some Guy you read about in a book, then Denialism is the classic piece o' cake. Evidence?  What's that got to do with anything?

Still, one may deride the scientific bona fides of such skepticism, but one thing you gotta admit:  the AGW deniers are in charge in this country.  They don't need Muller, they don't even need Lindzen (who actually wobbles a lot - his argument seems to be that AGW is real, but it's not so bad).  They don't need anyone, since they disproved Evolution by devising their own "probability" science.

It works, too.  The heavily upholstered Candi Crowley, last night's moderator, certainly never brought the subject of climate change up.  Not a single questioner (the good citizens of Nassau County, N.Y.) were allowed to broach the subject (the moderator and CNN know, you see, what questions will come to the floor); and I imagine that the campaigns knew in advance that neither side would be "embarrassed" by a direct question on AGW because that would force them to commit themselves, one way or another.  So Romney can pretend to disbelieve in AGW, to please his salivating, know-nothing base; and Obama can be assumed to believe in such malarkey, to placate his "liberal" supporters.

It's just better, in this country, not to talk about it.  Maybe if we ignore it, it will simply go away.  Let's develop all these fossil fuel sources, coal, oil, natural gas, as fast as we can so we become "energy independent," and release all of that pent-up carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a fevered rush.  That was the message.  Better yet, if Obama is in charge of the release, the greenhouse gases, as I wrote on another occasion, will be "Liberal CO2," which I've shown is much safer than Conservative CO2.

Among the civilized and educated nations of the world, the United States of American does indeed dwell within a cocoon of profound ignorance.  It is eerie to behold it on such brazen display as last night.  One candidate, Romney, proposes a mathematically impossible plan of getting rid of whole categories of taxation without, somehow, increasing America's $1 trillion per year deficits.  He pays no political price for such nonsense, of course, because the mathematically impossible is just as easy to believe, in this country, as Creationism or the existence of a stable climate.

The Greenhouse Effect & Fat Tail Distributions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j1KGHOvSkM

Somewhat unAmericanly, when I am interested in scientific data beyond my own cognizance or competence, I find myself consulting sources of information where the people writing about the subject know something, you know, about what the hell they're talking about. This is not actually a bad approach to the arcane and complicated, I find. When in doubt, read something by someone who has studied the subject thoroughly and has come to some honest conclusions about what he or she has looked into. Following such a practice, of course, can place one at odds with the predominant style of opinion-formation in this great land of ours, which might be called blowing it out your barracks bag.

For example, on this global warming issue, which has been relegated to the back burner, so to speak, I read the comments by trolls on various websites and come away with an impression, which is certainly not based on an unskewed sample (because AGW denialists, by their very nature, patrol the vast Internet looking for opportunities to wreak destruction on future generations with a triumphant display of their conventional ignorance and borrowed "gotcha" points, a current favorite being the "solar maximum" argument), and I wonder: does anyone have a simple way to explain the extremes in either direction which seem to be plaguing the world weatherwise? (Today's Secret Word, and I'm sorry Groucho Marx's bird can't drop down to reward you.)

It's been cold and snowy back East this year, although probably not a lot different from the weather which prevailed in the Northeast at the end of "a Little Ice Age" around 1970 (this period of abnormal cold also was present in New England during Thoreau's life there, as reflected in Walden's descriptions of intense cold and deep Pond freezing), so people look at all those snow-blowers and conclude that global warming is a hoax. My own surmise, which is confirmed to a degree by what I read (see above) is that the introduction of all that "forcing energy" in the form of trapped solar infrared radiation would naturally power more violent winds, more copious uptake of ocean evaporation, more of everything, and in cold weather months you would get exactly what we're seeing, blizzards and howling winds, although not necessarily record cold temperatures. All of this happens against a backdrop of an inexorably warming Earth, because there is also no doubt that year after year, the planet is setting records for "warmest year on record, warmest decade on record," et cetera.

The graph above is an elegant depiction of how this works. The bell curve of temperature has been shifted to the right by global warming, reflected as the red curve on the x-axis. The y-axis represents the distribution of weather events, with most of them clustered around the normal range, as is the case (by definition) with bell curves. Along the x-axis, under the fat tails, we can see the effect of skewing the average temperature to the right (warmer). The probabilities of events associated with abnormally warm temperatures (Australia's floods, Russia's epic heat wave destroying 30% of the wheat crop, China's wells going dry), increase in likelihood because the region of distribution (the "fat tails) has been enlarged. Meanwhile, because the average temperature of the Earth has increased on a constant basis, the ongoing problems continue at an accelerating rate (the cascading meltdown of Greenland, Himalayan and South American glaciers, the softening of the tundra, chunks the size of Massachusetts breaking off Antarctica).

It's a kind of dismal consolation, but at least this graphic depiction enables one to grasp why we're seeing the patterns we're seeing. The destruction already caused by AGW seems pretty far advanced, but one can cling to the hope that educated countries outside the theocratically-inclined United States might still organize to do something about it.

Homo Sapiens Commits Suicide in Copenhagen

Just for the record, I think life is meaningless and always have. Of course, when making such a statement, one should define what one means by "meaning." Okay, I think I can do this by contradistinction. To borrow a trick used by religious people, for example, who prove the existence of God by a kind of process of elimination: they can't think of any other way to explain the existence of the Universe, so they say someone must have created it. The psychologically-attuned will immediately recognize this as an instance of massive, teleological projection. It is typical of the arrogance of human beings to believe that anything mysterious must nevertheless be within human ken, and that absolutely nothing could be beyond our comprehension. So we're actually able to "think up" the way the Universe started.

So, by contradistinction (in this definition of "meaning"): I don't believe any of that. I don't think the human corpus has a "soul" or that this nonexistent soul has a destiny, that it's on a preconceived journey mapped out by a Supreme Being, or any other religious notion. Why such things would give life "meaning," I have no idea, but if that's what is meant by "meaning," then I disagree.

I think we're just here, like other species, and that's all we can say. Among mammals (and all other life forms on Earth) we have the most complex central nervous systems, and we have this apparently unique ability to conceptualize. Our mistake (which many make, I mean) is in believing that this limited ability to conceptualize would nevertheless be adequate to understand, or co-extensive with, the complexities of the Universe. Why should such a congruence exist? It's why I believe that Einstein's meditation, that "the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it's comprehensible," was actually a subtle and ironical joke. What this greatest of all conceptual thinkers was actually saying was that the Universe is incomprehensible to us, but that we have a facility for mathematical modeling of Reality which has deceived us into reducing the Universe into a simulacrum of itself which we take for the real thing, yet that real thing remains beyond our understanding. So that the Universe, by presenting itself to our senses in such a way that it appears understandable, remains hidden from us. All we are doing is manipulating the data received by our senses and deducing, incorrectly, that this is the same thing as Reality. The so-called Copenhagen Hypothesis, which holds (I think correctly) that one cannot separate the observer from the observed, and that no "independent" reality exists which can be accurately observed by a so-called objective observer, is a metaphor for this basic impossibility.

So we return to Copenhagen to finish off the human race. It is not surprising that humans were not able to deal with climate change, because we did not evolve to deal with "conceptual" problems except as subjects for thinking. We cannot act in the face of an unseen danger. When the danger of global warming can be seen in its immediacy, it will be too late. Oddly enough, David Letterman, talk show host and insightful thinker, has been saying all along that "we're screwed" and we'll never deal with global warming. His informed and politically-motivated guests, such as Al Gore and James Hansen, took issue with this view, but Dave never varied.

Dave was right, the rest were wrong. One should take genius where we find it. Don't ask me how Dave knew, but he did. The remaining question concerns how great a tragedy this will be. The main problem I see, insofar as the ecosphere is concerned, is that the die-off of Homo Sapiens will inevitably take a lot of other "innocent" species with it. Some estimates say 50-60% of all mammals, birds and fish, for example. Still, with humans gone, the sun will still have just about as much time left in its Main Sequence as it has had since the formation of the solar system. So there is plenty of time left for evolution before the Big Finish. The PBS special entitled "After We're Gone" demonstrated how little time it will really take for all evidence of human civilization to disappear from the Earth, and for nature to reclaim a more natural state from the human artifacts currently in place. Even the Pacific Garbage Patch or Gyre will eventually degrade and stop killing marine life.

I'm not one of these people, like Kurt Vonnegut and Gore Vidal, who regard humans as a "virus" that the Earth is trying to get rid of, or "burn off." That's a little too ontological for the likes of me. We're not a "mistake." In Kurt's case, it was just the depression talking. There are many ways that a species finds its way to extinction, and global warming may be ours (disease or nuclear war being a couple of other routes). I was thinking that it's perhaps true that humans would not actually die off completely anyway, even with global warming (unless we have the runaway greenhouse effect called "going Venus"). We might just be reduced to a smaller, tropics-loving group with a rich gene pool. You know, of the kind found in East Equatorial Africa.

Why not criminalize AGW Denial?

Anyone who reads the report from the Copenhagen conference on global warming, which concluded a few months ago, and is not absolutely terrified by the impending disaster of global warming - is (a) not paying attention or (b) has a death wish. It can be linked to the right through RealClimate.org. 2500 of the best climate scientists (and other academics and researchers working on the problem) from Berkeley, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Beijing and Japan, to name a few, met to review the current state of climate science. 1400 papers were presented and a synthesis report was issued. The bottom line can be stated thusly: things are considerably worse than they looked two years ago when the IPCC report was issued, and if we are not to slip irreversibly over the 2 degree Centigrade "guardrail" (beyond which serious questions arise as to human viability on Planet Earth), then immediate and drastic reductions in CO2 emissions must begin.

I've been following RealClimate for several years now and I have detected a change in tone. In the early days, under assault from Right Wing blowhards such as James Inhofe in the Senate and Joe Barton in Congress, and amid the general indifference of the Bush Administration, scientists at RealClimate and elsewhere (such as the U.S.-China conference I visited at Berkeley a few years ago) were shrill and frustrated in their attempts to "defend" their "case," trying mightily to get people to take the problem seriously. The case has now been made so thoroughly, so irrefutably, that a different problem has arisen: how to avoid the complete demoralization of the public concerning remedial action. That is, there is no guarantee at this point, no matter what we do including the immediate cessation of all CO2 emissions (which is not likely - I just saw a car drive by my office window - oops, there's another one), that the threshold will not be crossed.

Still, if we're going to try to deal with any problem in our society and in our world, we should try to do this - deal with the catastrophe of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). It is more important than health care, more important than Nutcase Kim in N. Korea, more important than Iran, more important than the Saudi terrorist cells plotting to blow up another American building. Yet dealing with it seems to run up against an innate human resistance to confronting any problem which does not present tangible and immediate problems for daily life. In evolutionary terms, we're just not wired to react to "theoretical" dangers that gradually overtake us.

In my own small way, I was trying to think of something that would give this issue greater visibility, and I think I may have hit on something. It arises from my adversarial training and experience, you could say; I'm not really much into "bipartisanship" like Barack. I don't think you can necessarily cajole and sweet talk cretins like James Inhofe and Joe Barton into seeing things reasonably. I watch George Stephanopoulos some Sunday mornings, and there's George Will, given a national forum on "This Week." He's an AGW Denier. Maybe he writes belletristically, maybe he enunciates his opaque sentences with gravitas, but let me ask a question: if George Will appeared on "This Week" one Sunday and told us he had devised a cure for late stage lung cancer in his kitchen over the weekend, the viewers would regard him as a lunatic. Yet when he weighs in on a scientific subject more complicated than cancer research, he is treated seriously.

AGW is about as "controversial" a theory among actual scientists at this point as evolution and the Copernican solar system. Given its multifactorial, positive feedback loop nature, it is extraordinarily complicated. But the general trend is becoming clearer and clearer. The air and seas are getting hotter, the oceans are acidifying and dying, and we're in for a world of hurt. If we carry on as we have since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we will endure a kind of self-inflicted genocide. So it occurred to me: why not follow the lead of those European civil law countries which have criminalized denial of the Holocaust? For example,

§ 3h. As an amendment to § 3 g., whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.^[11]

is an operative and relevant part of Austria's Anti-Denier statute. Germany, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic and numerous other countries have similar laws. It is true that these "civil law" countries have never regarded free speech with quite the same reverence that we say we do in common law countries such as Great Britain and the USA, although I have noticed in the last few years that the Bill of Rights is increasingly regarded as optional by our political class. But even in days of yore, when we believed in civil liberties, one could not yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater without violating the criminal law. And we've always had laws against defamation, which restrict free speech as well.

You can do as much as a ten-year stretch in Austria for the violation described above. Penalties and fines vary from country to country, but the offense is taken seriously wherever it's on the books. So if Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma wants to announce to the world that global warming is the greatest hoax in the history of mankind, and does so on the Senate floor while the C-Span cameras are rolling, charge him with AGW Denial. He can defend himself - all he has to do is to convince the jury that he's right. Same for George Will - let's see what that opinion is made of, George! Lay it all out for us, because surely you're not contributing to the likelihood of human extinction on the basis of your Right Wing, pro-business attitudes, right? And thinking of Patrick Buchanan, who on MSNBC from time to time "grossly plays down" global warming and also has a disturbing tendency to lionize the Third Reich, and gave us the benefit of his opinion in a 1990 piece that it would have been impossible for Jews to die in the gas chambers of Treblinka - maybe we could get a twofer: try him here for AGW Denial and then extradite him to Austria, where, after doing his stretch, he could make daily pilgrimages to Der Fuhrer's Geburtshaus.