Most parts of the world save Africa had a particular week when the first Homo sapiens walked in from some other place and looked around for the first time. It took several generations to find camping ground near moving water and to figure out what you can put in your mouth and what animals want to put you in theirs, but eventually humans adapted to each new land.
New lands adapted to us in return. The first few thousand years after human colonization were catastrophic for species that couldn’t adapt to the two-legged social toolmakers. The dawn of humanity coincided with a major extinction spasm. Eventually, the species that survived reached a detente with humanity that survived more or less until today.
One reason why humans reached a relative peace with the remaining species is that for most of our history we could only modify the world’s environment to a certain degree. The kind of profound changes that could wipe out species more adaptable than Smilodon or Megatherium only joined the human toolkit during the last two centuries.
On a positive note, some of the earliest, obvious side-effects have already come and gone. Cities once blackened by soot – London or my hometown Pittsburgh – now sport clean air and rivers that are if not drinkable, then at least (on a good day) swimmable. Whales have bounced back. American pesticide use became safer and more sensible since Rachel Carson wrote her book.
The issues that we managed so far share two important characteristics. First, negative effects stood up and announced themselves. It’s hard to ignore when a river catches fire or half of your kids have respiratory disease from the coal soot.
Second, a solution needs to be relatively obvious and practical. It isn’t that hard to make a pulping plant stop dumping mercury into the sea or fence off an area to logging when stripping it would cause floods and encourage fires.
By contrast, if people profiting from death can credibly sow doubt then you can bet they will sow for all they’re worth. Unfortunately, the CO2 greenhouse effect is just that kind of issue. For nearly half a century after scientists first recognized the potential risk of supercharging the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, evidence remained intangible enough for Philip Morris-style doubtmongering to pay off handsomely. At the same time practical solutions to greenhouse warming are notably impractical.
That semi-invisible phase of greenhouse warming is now over. Gardeners and naturalists notice plants blooming months earlier, altitude-limited species moving higher and latitude-restricted species showing up farther north. Glacier ice is in retreat nearly everywhere on Earth save for the deep-frozen interiors of Antarctica and Greenland. Farmers are having a hell of a time predicting what the local climate will do to their crops from year to year.
Take three news bits that I noticed in the past week.
* Arctic sea ice may reach its lowest level in history this summer.
A number of predictions have been issued in the past several months, all indicating that 2008 has at least a decent chance of beating out 2007 for the title of the greatest summer sea ice loss on record.
In fact, some experts have concluded that the North Pole itself may be covered by water, rather than ice, during the peak of the annual melt season at the end of the summer, and that the Northwest Passage could be ice-free for a time as well.
* Massive arctic ice shelves aren’t doing very well.
Dramatic evidence of the break-up of the Arctic ice-cap has emerged from research during an expedition by the Canadian military.
Scientists travelling with the troops found major new fractures during an assessment of the state of giant ice shelves in Canada’s far north.
[…] One of the expedition’s scientists, Derek Mueller of Trent University, Ontario, told me: “I was astonished to see these new cracks.
“It means the ice shelf is disintegrating, the pieces are pinned together like a jigsaw but could float away,” Dr Mueller explained.
According to another scientist on the expedition, Dr Luke Copland of the University of Ottawa, the new cracks fit into a pattern of change in the Arctic.
“We’re seeing very dramatic changes; from the retreat of the glaciers, to the melting of the sea ice.
“We had 23% less (sea ice) last year than we’ve ever had, and what’s happening to the ice shelves is part of that picture.”
These two stories together underline why the arctic sea is a particular problem for dealing with greenhouse warming. The key word is albedo.
The “greenhouse effect” is a normal part of the world’s thermostat. On average the Earth reflects about 30% of incoming sunlight. Snow reflects up to 80%, land reflects 10-40%. Importantly, open water reflects less than 10%, meaning that almost all of the light energy that reaches open water stays to warm it. If CO2 and other molecules in the atmosphere didn’t transform light energy into heat, because energy mostly bounces off our planet, most of the Earth would be about as warm as the antarctic ice cap.
There are two ways of tinkering with the global heat balance that are pertinent to our discussion. First, if you increase the light-absorbing gas in the air then less light energy will escape into space. That’s the greenhouse effect.
The second way of tinkering with the thermostat is to change the surface of the Earth so that it absorbs more light energy. By far the most effective way of doing that is to transform snow-covered sea ice with its tiny albedo into open water. This has nothing to do with greenhouse warming per se, but the effects add up. Open water created by CO2-mediated sea ice melting will add that much more warming to the global system, causing what edumificated types call positive feedback.
* Finally, local spots of acidified ocean have started showing up much sooner than expected.
Climate models predicted it wouldn’t happen until the end of the century.
So Seattle researchers were stunned to discover that vast swaths of acidified sea water are already showing up along the Pacific Coast as carbon dioxide from power plants, cars and factories mixes into the ocean.
In surveys from Vancouver Island to the tip of Baja California, the scientists found the first evidence that large amounts of corrosive water are reaching the continental shelf — the shallow sea margin where most marine creatures live. In some places, including Northern California, the acidified water was as little as four miles from shore.
“What we found … was truly astonishing,” said oceanographer Richard Feely, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. “This means ocean acidification may be seriously impacting marine life on the continental shelf right now.”
This is pretty weird, but that has more to do with timing than effect. We already know that cramming the atmosphere with CO2 will acidify the ocean. That is because the dissolved form of CO2 is H2CO3, carbonic acid. More CO2 in the atmosphere means more carbonic acid in the surface ocean. Eventually, when the ocean equilibrates entirely with the atmosphere the ocean should drop by 0.5 pH points, a significant enough drop to threaten hundreds of species (including coral) that depend on basic ocean water to stabilize their calcium carbonate shells.
Ocean acidification will eventually disrupt the hell out of marine ecosystems. In fact it was measured in the Pacific years ago, but nobody expected that Iraqis would resist foreign occupation acid waters would move inland this fast. Combine this with the anoxic ‘dead zones’ that have become increasingly common and I wouldn’t go long on the Pacific salmon fishery.
Bot LaBeer
And God said unto
Bill CosbyNoah: How long can you tread water?Mac from Oregon
Oh crap… it is a train.
JL
OT..but I need to congratulate for completing his thesis. So should we now say Dr. Tim?
nightjar
Great post Tim, Excellent research and analysis. But you might want to get input from“> World Reclowned global warming expert Congresscritter Dana Rohrbacher on the subject.
and I hope this link works
nightjar
Once again
Paul
I think you have it wrong. It’s well known that the world was made in 7 days; it was on Sunday that Adam and Eve walked around and saw that it was “all good”.
Here you are confusing things all over again; remember ; Sunday is a DAY not a WEEK.
Acid? Continenal shelf? I don’t believe either of these terms are mentioned in the Bible. Does it say anywhere in the bible that ” . . .Moses went forth to the continental shelf .. . “? I don’t THINK so.
Or . . . . “Pharaoh punished the Israelites by splashing their bodies with acid rain . . .” ? ? ? I don’t think so.
Next thing you’ll be hauling out nonsense about carbon-dating, and the planet being older than the 6000 years we all know is its exact age.
Go to conservapedia.org to get your facts straight.
passerby
Tim, I enjoyed your analysis.
Did Rohrbacher say “dinosaur FLAGELLANCE”??
Rohrbacher’s admitting we don’t know this and we don’t know that but, it’s not keeping him from holding forth like he’s some kind of authority.
And let that be a lesson to us all:
Just because someone speaks with authority, doesn’t mean they are an authority.
T
jnfr
Thanks for pulling that all together, Tim. I know it’s depressing, but it’s also essential that we all look long and hard at what’s happening with this earth (and ocean).
nightjar
Yup. PC for Dino Farts.
Louise
Thanks for the update, Dr. Tim. I appreciate your mentioning gardeners. My mom (age 79) and her gardening cohorts have been noticing significant, unusual changes for years now. When digging, weeding and planting are your primary avocation, and you count on with certain seasonal cycles for decades, you notice when something shifts. Few people listen to you when you tell them about it, though.
QuickRob
NEWSFLASH! It hasn’t gotten any warmer in like 10 years, and it looks like it still wont be getting any warmer in the coming years.
So long as hundreds of esteemed climatoligists have so much doubt in the story you are selling, I see no reason why I should trust some blogger.
As for someone’s grandmother noticing the warming, that’s hilarious – since its not warming. It’s funny how making people think about, and pay close attention to, something can make them hallucinate into seeing whatever phenomenon the nightly news wants them to notice.
It. Is. Not. Warming.
QuickRob
I won’t stick around for the argument. Not because I’m “afraid”, just because it’s a waste of time. I’m not an expert, neither is Tim F., neither is your grandparents. The only fact, besides the fact that CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere, is the fact that on average it’s not any warmer than last year or the year before.
Happy Memorial Day!
SamFromUtah
Not because I’m “afraid”, just because it’s a waste of time.
Uh huh.
Magnus
You all see that pretty line receding, far above us? That’s the brink. Welcome to free fall.
And no, we haven’t invented the parachute yet.
(Now pray, very hard, that this is not the truth.)
Xenos
There won’t be an argument, becuase you are nto addressing the substance of the post.
On average, you say, there is not much warming. What has already been observed, in many areas, are dramatic changes in weather patterns, and a risk of mass extinctions. But it is all OK, you suggest, because the phenomenon is casually referred to ‘Global Warming’, and, as you say, it is not warming up that much. Yet.
So, in conclusion, piss off.
kdaug
I love it when the climate change deniers (like Rohrbacher) say “well, the earth was a lot hotter/colder in the past”.
They’re absolutely right.
But humans weren’t on the planet back then.
In fact, right after the earth formed, it was several hundred degrees hotter.
No life AT ALL on the planet back then.
What part of “compatable with human life” do these people not understand? No one’s claiming that the earth will be destroyed – just that it won’t have people on it (roaches, no prob).
w vincentz
Good info Tim.
The oceans are fucked.
Wait til the tundras thaw a bit and unleash the contained methane.
Sadly, it might be too late to prevent further consequences. CFC’s are continuing to damage the ozone though they’ve been banned for quite a while. PCB’s continue to find their way into fatty tissue in all species (thank you, GE!), and DDT is still applied to many crops and many areas in the third world for “mosquito control” despite the known consequences. At least germany took the lead in banning a pesticide that is responsible fo honey bee colony collapse disorder. Hasn’t happened in the US yet, but what do we know? Dioxins in the Great Lakes anyone?
4tehlulz
Obligatory solar activity post.
nightjar
They don’t WANT to understand because they just don’t care. With people like Quickrob and Rohrbacher it’s all about ideology, wingnut ideology. It’s the same ole “I’ll get mine and fuck the future I’ll be dead” mindset we see in all there scratchings here on planet earth. They’re rapidly becoming dinosaurs themselves all 25% of them in America. Not enough Dino farts to heat the pot they stew in.
Tim F.
Thanks for sharing, QuickRob. Next time link your source.
Tim F.
Some things are so obvious that you don’t need to point them out.
Wrong. I have a relevant Master’s degree.
And btw, your “hundreds of climatologists” includes a) weathermen who are technically known as ‘meteorologists’ and who don’t know their ass from a GCM, and b) scientists who don’t even know that they’ve been dishonestly put on the list. Creationist groups pull the same trick.
You’d be surprised how much people who spend their life in contact with the earth notice. For example, more than a nut like you.
joel hanes
The current human population of the Earth is too high by about a factor of ten to be compatible with a first world lifestyle for most people.
It’s too high by maybe a factor of two to be compatible with our current pattern of resource consumption.
This kind of disequilibrium does not persist. Since humans have not chosen to use foresight and avoid the situation, consequences will ensue : famine, epidemic disease, war, catastrophic floods — these horsemen will correct the situation. And we’re not going to enjoy the process.
Aldo Leopold tried to counsel us. The Club of Rome warned us. Paul Erlich warned us. Jimmy Carter tried to get us to change. We chose not to listen.
It’s going to be an interesting century, in the Chinese-curse sense of the word “interesting”.
xephyr
QuickRob, just in case you had second thoughts about your hasty, sans backbone exit, here’s a quick and easy link that addresses most of the BS that tries to pass for legitimate counterpoint on AGW: http://www.realclimate.org As for the human impact on this (once) garden of eden in general, it’s really an IQ test, and one we seem to be failing rather miserably. If the glimmerings of environmental awareness that began decades ago hadn’t been sidelined by so many clueless and greedy fools, we might be much further along the green path by now.
daddy4mak
good post Tim. informative.
daddy4mak
good post Tim. you made me read the whole thing.
MNPundit
Hmm what about Orbital Mirror groupings to reflect the energy, source of like artificial ice? That might help slow the damage at the poles.
Magnus
For a slightly less doom-y post: Orbital mirrors assume that launching things will be equally easy in the future. In a future of higher sea-levels and more chaotic weather, this is not a way to bet.
(I said *less* gloomy…)
Tim F.
Dude, orbital mirrors are an incredibly bad idea. To be useful they would have to shade, what, 1% of the illuminated surface of the Earth? 5%? Even if we position it in the gravity stasis point between the Earth and Sun it would have to be hundreds of miles across. The ghost of Arthur C. Clarke wept.
People need to realize that there is no technological fix to climate warming. We can either prevent it or else strap in and enjoy the ride. Since I think our window for doing something useful already closed, I’m not invested in activism the way that I once was.
rachel
Sources? He ain’t got no sources. He don’t need no sources. He don’t have to show you any stinkin’ sources!
mightygodking
People need to realize that there is no technological fix to climate warming.
Not necessarily true. The smokestack method (prevent short-term global warming by creating global cooling – simulating volcanic eruptions) has a bit of potential for getting us past the hump, assuming we actually commit to alternative energy and carbon dioxide reductions.
Of course it comes with its own ecological costs which are not insignificant, but those costs are likely lesser than the alternative, so…
ThymeZone
I like this argument.
It reminds me of “Evolution? Millions of years ago? Oh yeah? WERE YOU THERE?”
I didn’t think so.
— Mark Knopfler
sglover
To the best of my knowledge, natural processes spawned by human-caused climate change almost always seem to involve positive-feedback, i.e., exacerbating, changes — and on an immense scale. Declining arctic albedo is one example. Another is northern hemisphere peat bogs, which are expected to release enormous amounts of CO2 and CH4 as temperatures rise.
Last I heard, large tracts of Amazonian forest are in drought. Most biomass in that ecosystem is tied up in living matter (as opposed to northern temperate forests, where it’s mainly in soil and decaying matter). The theory is that if the forests die, they regenerate only very slowly. Meanwhile, the dead foliage will be another big source of CO2.
The ONLY negative-feedback, ameliorating, response I’ve heard of is the ***possibility*** of an increase in cloud formation, which would increase the earth’s albedo.
If anyone has other information, with examples, I’d love to hear it. Various prestigious fools love to yammer on about the financial system and such, but to my mind the (very alarming) events in that little world are really just an echo of industrial civilization’s crisis of sustainability.
I didn’t used to think this way: I used to believe that technological whiz-bangery would save the day. But now, when I look at the likely future, I’m glad I’m about 50 with no kids, closer to the end than the beginnings. I think we’re leaving an awful world for the kids who are now just entering it, and who may very well find themselves in the locust phase of human history.
TenguPhule
Never have so many words been raped of all meaning by an asshole of a nincompoop since Darrell treaded these threads.
TenguPhule
I call dibs on his ribs when we’re forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. A lifetime of sitting on his ass means there’s plenty of meat on those bones.
bernarda
Google Earth has a collaboration with the British government on climate.
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/05/climate-change-in-our-world.html
“Today we are pleased that the British Government is launching with Google Earth Outreach, and in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Antarctic Survey, new layers in Google Earth that utilize geographical information to show how climate change will affect our planet and its people.”
Grumpy Code Monkey
Tim F. is an expert, but like all the rest of the “experts” he’s been bought off by the New World Order types (headed by Al Gore) with promises of hookers and blow, so you can’t trust anything he says anyway.
Ice shelves are breaking up, but that’s not due to warming. Tree lines are moving up, but that’s not due to warming. It’s all sunspots, yeah, that’s the ticket. Sunspots.
JR
And when calamity surrounds us and it is found that the answers were not in Genesis, it will be claimed the answers actually were in Leviticus.
All the destruction seeded by the “conservative” faithful today will yield a poisoned harvest which will then be blamed on gays and gay marriage.
It’s always worked for them before.
Tommy
Tim F. is clearly not an expert. CO2 does not “absorb light energy”. It’s molecules as well as those of other “greenhouse gases” like water vapor and methane are transparent to incoming “light” energy but are excited by the outgoing long wave radiation that Earth emits and that excitation causes the gases to radiate energy at Earth. This second source of warming is what increases the temperature. (Skeptics may Google “radiative forcing” for verification of this.)
That said, his points on the change in albedo and ocean acidification are valid.
4tehlulz
Or we can go for the shortcut and have a regional nuclear holocaust.
India/Pakistan/China three-way should be good enough, I think, though we’d have to make our own clothes again….
Faux News
Hint to Quick Rob: just go ahead and quote the Drudge Report. He likes to put screaming headlines on his web announcing that April and/or May “WAS THE COLDEST AND RAINIEST MONTH IN 30 YEARS!!!!!!”
So you see? If April or May was real cold or rainy then there is no global warming right?
Another hint to Slow Rob: keep saying “global warming”. Never say “global climate change”.
Jack
Thanks Dr. Tim,
I recently read that the oceans are starting to max out in their abilities to absorb CO2, which means we lose a significant offset of our own pollution. It would seem that this, along with albedo, the decline of old growth forests, and deterioration of the permafrost puts us pretty close to the tipping point of no return. To paraphrase W, we’ve done a Heckuva a Job as stewards of our planet.
QuickRob
Yesterday it was “warming”, today it’s “changing”…
Tim F. an expert…sure. I don’t need to prove the sky isn’t falling or the oceans aren’t rising or somehow I won’t be caught in between the two of them…I’m not the one making implausible and unrealistic claims built on shoddy, questionable science, trying to extrapolate politically-motivated conclusions from ocean acidification.
I’m just making the obvious point that alarmist, ridiculous claims almost always turn out to be unfounded, and so long as hundreds of experts (whom I don’t care enough to link to or name yet Tim somehow already knows they are stooges, liars, or morons) think Tim F. is full of “it”, then I am comfortable agreeing with them, irregardless of Republican policy or creationism or whatever meme some jackass in the comments above referred to.
I’m not here for a productive conversation, clearly. (Please quote and reply to that last sentence so we can all be on the same page.) I am here because every echo chamber needs the problem child who points out, ahem, “inconvenient truths”…like the FACT (look it up, it’s easy to find) that the world is NOT warming. Which is the foundation to the alarmist case.
Oh, I forgot…it’s “changing” now. Repackaged. Moved goalposts, as bloggers love to say.
Doesn’t anyone here realize that the only thing “constant” in the climate equation is “change”? And for Tim F. and any other hack blogger to make these statements about cause and effect when the REAL experts can’t agree does nothing more than point to foolish arrogance.
But never mind me…
QuickRob
Apologies if I double posted, database spookiness
TenguPhule
TenguPhule
That word does not mean what you seem to think it means.
nightjar
Some REALLY disturbing trends on the Ocean.
scarshapedstar
Yeah but like I heard on Fox News that temperatures fluctuate and stuff? Vote McCain!
Tim F.
You don’t have to link to it, QuickRob. I already know what petition you are talking about. The “climatologists” on the list are either weathermen, dishonestly added climate experts or a very few (as many as three) genuine climate experts who are all near or past retirement age. Shocker! Every new-ish idea (plate tectonics, for example) has some old-guarders who never give up what they were taught in grad school.
Over the last hundred years the climate has warmed significantly. Over the last fifty years the climate warming has been particularly alarming. The simple fact is that for a system like the global climate, ten years is a relatively short window to make any definitive statement.
Try it for yourself. Pick a random sample of ten-year windows in the last 100 years’ global average temperature record and see how many show an obvious upward trend. Some do, a whole lot of them do not. A couple will even show a non-significant decrease. And yet somehow the overall trend has moved inexorably upwards. When you learn the meaning of stochastic variability within a trend, grasshopper, then you will have truly snatched the pebble from between your ears.
This is yet another uninformed statement. We developed agriculture under a multi-thousand year regime of remarkable climate stability. The few brief and relatively minor deviations (e.g., the Little Ice Age) caused major disruptions in civilization. To put it in fewer syllables, change is something we don’t have much experience with and that we don’t want.
Blue Raven
As an aside, I wanted to step back and admire the rare appearance of a correct quotation pattern from African Queen.
Mikkel
Tim, don’t you think that this is even worse than the ice caps melting? (I assume that it is accurate but might not be, I’ve only seen it in mainstream news publications although it would be in sync with the noticing increased acidification.) And don’t get started on permafrost methane.
dbrown
QuickRob
name me just one peer-reviewd climinatoligist’s who says GW is not a fact – I’ll save you the time: zero. Being ignorant is common amoung a lot of people (my self very much included), but stupid is ignoring facts – if you believe anything you say, prove it. Otherwise, your view is a lie and you are worse than just being a liar: you are lazy and posting ignorance to make claims that you believe to be true but are far too afraid to question. Be a man, learn facts and defend them.
rachel
Oh no, it’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Birdzilla
Antarctica is getting colder and has ben if there realy is such thing as GLOBAL WARMING how come antarctica is getting colder? GLOBAL WARMING IS A LIE