GLOBAL WARMING, pt 3 - Questions and Answers

"The scientific agenda has moved from improving the predictions to thinking about what are the chances of something awful happening."

Any visit to a major blog will eventually see some sort of mention of global warming, and in the comments this inevitably will result in debate and discussion over various aspects of it. This debate continues at dinner tables, classrooms, water coolers, and sporting events around the world. The topic of global warming has become so popular and well-known that even magazines such as Sports Illustrated which have absolutely nothing to do with science have had cover stories on the topic.

In these discussions there are repeated themes, specific arguments that come up again and again, often without resolution. Some of them are hysterical proclamations, some are insulting and dismissive, some are informative and curious. The biggest problem we face in this debate is that so few are informed but so many have incredibly strong opinions and believe they've learned it all.

I'm no climatologist or atmospheric expert, I have no degree in meteorology, and while I took classes in these fields in college I didn't specialize in them and it has been over twenty years since that point (they still were considering global cooling at that time). I am, however, an accomplished researcher and can tap into the thoughts and information of people who are experts and more informed in this field.

IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was a body of scientists and bureaucrats who met at the United Nations to study the trend and potential effects of global warming in the future. This body was formed in 1988 by two United Nations bodies: the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program. It is open only to members of these two bodies, but specific experts are invited to testify and give their opinions. This is how the UN describes this body:

The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy, although they may need to deal objectively with scientific, technical and socio-economic factors relevant to the application of particular policies.

Review is an essential part of the IPCC process. Since the IPCC is an intergovernmental body, review of IPCC documents should involve both peer review by experts and review by governments.

The very inception and design of this organization is to find out what effects humans are having on climate change and its risks. The presumption, then, is that humans are affecting climate change and thus there are risks from this effect. Whether this is true or not, and how true, we'll look at in a moment, for now this fact is just something to consider when you read and think about their reports.

The IPCC has released four reports and one supplemental report from 1990 to 2007. Each one tried to examine the amount of effect humans have on the global climate and how much danger and risk this creates for the planet and its inhabitants. The first report noted that the planet's overall temperature as best we can measure seems to be rising, by about .3 to 1.5 degrees celsius over the last century. It suggested that CO2 levels are increasing and contributing to this rise, and that this would continue and worsen over the next century.

These themes continued for the next three reports, with the 1998 and 2001 reports growing in their stridency and tone of warning and castrophe. Each subsequent report was more dire, increasing the warnings and stated concerns. The water levels would rise and cause flooding, the temperature could make earth nearly unlivable for humans, the famines and starvation will be epic, and so on.

The 2001 report is the one that is most talked about and is the report which Vice President Gore based his movie and traveling Powerpoint lectures on. Among the report is the prediction that in the next hundred years global temperatures will increase by 1.4 to 5.8 Celsius, the sea level will raise by 0.1 to 0.9 meters, and that these effects will cause glacial melting, flooding, and reduced productivity of farmlands resulting in famine.

The worst of these predictions assume no changes in behavior and human activity in the next century, the best presume an aggressive campaign to reduce emissions and human impact on the climate. Thus, at best, this report suggested that the sea will go up by a foot, and the temperature will raise by about 2 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit, if we all aggressively reduce emissions, everywhere. This is where Al Gore gets his data and makes his predictions, this is the basis for An Inconvenient Truth that he wants every schoolkid everywhere to have to watch.

The 2007 report - based on the most recent data and study - is a bit less dire and alarming. The sea flooding was dropped from up to twenty feet to about 23 inches at the most (the low end is around 7 inches). The most the temperature is predicted to possibly increase has been lowered by .5 degrees Celsius. The effect of various factors was shifted as more has been learned about what forces have effect on our environment. These effects are called "forcing" and are described as ways that different factors increase or decrease warming. For example, in the 2001 report, we have this chart:

As you can see, the chart admits that the further to the right you move, the less science understands about the factor involved, and thus how much it affects the forcing.The line is static temperature (no change), the bars above it are effects that increase the temperature, ones below decrease. Solid color bars are what science can detect and understands at present, and the lines are what is predicted or expected from modeling.

In the 2007 report, solar effects are increased, human effects decreased by 25% and the negative forcing of aerosol haze (particulates in the atmosphere that block the sun's radiation and thus heat) have increased. In other words, as scientists continue to debate and study this, the more they understand and the more accurate their information becomes. Less guesswork, more comprehension.

Q&A
Now with that as a groundwork, here are a few common questions or points brought up about Global Warming in debates that you'll see and hear.

Q: Are humans causing global warming?

Short answer: in the past global warming wasn't caused by humans, but humans have an impact on the environment.

This is the big question, some would have you believe that it is absolutely certain and there is no longer any debate. Some would have you think that scientists are unanimous in this, that the reports are in and it's all over but the screaming and running about in panic.

There is no question that humanity, like all other creatures on earth, affect their environment. We build buildings, heat our homes, dig up coal, cut down trees, lay down highways, and so on. In this process, like trees giving off oxygen and beavers building dams, we affect the world around us. Pollution is visibly evident in the atmosphere around big cities, you can see them from a distance. Some areas are so bad that they cause respiratory problems. Some are pristine and pleasant to live in.

The question is how much does this affect the world and how much are we impacting the climate? To answer this, the first thing we have to understand is how big the Earth is. This is a bit difficult to comprehend because of the vast size and lack of things to compare it to. The human mind best understands things relative to others: Bob doesn't look so tall until Mary stands next to him and only comes up to his chest. So measurements like 24,901.55 miles around with a surface of 197,000,000 square miles and 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg weight don't really mean very much on their own. The fact that the atmosphere alone weighs 1.16 x 10^19 pounds or around 6 million billion tons is impressive but difficult to really understand.

If you pick up a cue ball from a pool table (be sure no one is playing that table first), you can see that it's very smooth, almost glassy with a nice reflection off it. If you were big enough to pick up the earth the same way, it would be even smoother because the highest mountain and lowest trench in the ocean are smaller in variation than the surface of a cue ball. Sure, the cue ball is smooth, but when you zoom in with a microscope, it looks like the badlands. As we know, mountains are enormous, the ocean is terrifyingly deep with crushing pressures at the bottom. Yet these variations are actually not very large compared to the entire mass of the planet. That gives you one idea of how very vast the Earth really is.

If you walked around the equator, assuming you could walk, Christ-like, on the water, it would take you about 345 days to get back to where you started. Without stopping or slowing, at an average human walking speed of 3 miles an hour.

With these ideas in mind, think about human pollution a bit.

Humanity produces a lot of pollution, but relative to the size of the planet and the total of the atmosphere it actually is a very tiny amount. Below you can see how this relates to the main concern of climate change: CO2. Our impact on the planet can be significant, nearby heavy concentrations of humanity, but when you get away from those areas, you notice a change. twenty miles into rural areas from the biggest city on earth and the pollution is just not there, even if the wind blows toward that part of the world, it's greatly diluted by the bulk of the atmosphere.

This isn't unreasonable if you think about it, stand near a girl wearing perfume, you can pick it up, right? Move a few feet away, not so much. Outside of about 10-2o feet (depending if she's a teenager who bathed in the stuff), you can't pick it up at all unless the wind is blowing directly at you. Why? Because there's so much volume of air compared to the particulates that make up the smell of perfume it has dispersed and is undetectable by humanity. This is a small scale version of what happens to cities.

There's solid evidence that the world warmed up about 1 1/2 degrees Celsius in the last 100 years. The assumption is that industrialization has caused this, that increased greenhouse gasses are trapping more heat in the atmosphere and making the planet warmer overall.

The problem this runs into is that in the past there have been warming periods as well, much warmer than at present. Last week I pointed out that scientists (and anecdotal evidence) tell us that the temperature has spiked and dropped in history, such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warm period.

If human activity caused this warming which isn't as bad as the previous periods, what caused the previous raises in temperature? Humanity probably is contributing to the warming, to some degree, but by how much? That leads to the next question.

Q: What about all that CO2 in the atmosphere?

Short answer: the ocean is the primary cause

The levels of CO2 in earth's atmosphere, as best can be understood by present science, appears to be higher than it has been for some considerable time. Some scientists claim that it is the most in 650,000 years. Others disagree, and the problem is it's difficult to be exactly confident based on ice core estimates.

Now for some math. Bear with me, it will be quick and relatively painless:

Scientists estimate that humanity produces 12,127,700,000 metric tons of CO2 a year at present, compared to an estimated 1,190,480,000 metric tons a year in past centuries. Scientists also believe that each acre of forest can absorb and eliminate 1.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Given that there are an estimated 9,884,215,240 acres of forest on the planet, that means 15,814,744,384 metric tons are absorbed by forests alone. Add to that the approximately 50,000,000,000 metric tons of CO2 the plankton absorb and the rest of the plant matter on earth (moss, grass, shrubs, bushes, flowers etc) and you have over 70 billion tons of the earth's CO2 being absorbed of 12 billion humans produce.

In other words, the earth's plant matter comfortably and easily absorbs the total of human emissions and have plenty to spare.

“This is one of the grand unsolved puzzles in climate research,”
-Thomas Stocker, a climate modeler at University of Bern
So there's something wrong here: CO2 levels are increasing, according to science. Well, there are other sources of CO2 production as well:

• Volcanos alone produce an estimated 500,000,000 tons of CO2 a year, which goes up significantly when an eruption occurs ( scientists believe between May and October of 1980, Mt St Helens alone produced about 100,000,000,000 tons - more than all humanity combined for a full year).
• Rotting matter produces CO2,
  
• animals produce CO2 just like humans as they breathe. The UN estimates that up to 20% of the CO2 is produced by farm animals.
  
• Certain effects such as the Arctic areas which warm to release trapped CO2 also increase the total.
• And the ocean is a factor.

Yes, the ocean releases CO2, it is a titanic battery of sorts, storing CO2 when it is cooler and releasing it when it is warmer. Take a look at this chart comparing CO2 levels with global temperatures.
As you can see, as the temperature goes up worldwide, the CO2 levels go up worldwide. There is, in fact, a slight lag of 50 or so years between the temperature gain and CO2 increase. Why is this? Because the ocean's enormous storage of this greenhouse gas takes time to release. Because the oceans are so very large and deep, they take a long time to warm up significantly and thus release more gas. Oceans cover 3/4 of the earth's surface and are the primary weather-causing and weather-controlling agent other than the atmosphere its self - and much of how the atmosphere behaves is because of the oceans.

Some dismiss this offhand, such as the global warming site RealClimate, who points out that the oceans absorb CO2. They do, and to what degree no one is sure, so I didn't add that to the information above with the trees. The thing is, oceans also release CO2 that has been absorbed, and as temperatures rise, the release increases relative to the absorption.

In past warming periods, scientists estimate that as much as half the increase of carbon dioxide was from oceans. Even the 2001 IPCC report concluded (emphasis mine):

Thus, the terrestrial biosphere does not cause the difference in atmospheric CO2 between glacial and interglacial periods. The cause must lie in the ocean, and indeed the amount of atmospheric change to be accounted for must be augmented to account for a fraction of the carbon transferred between the land and ocean.

In fact, water's ability to absorb and store CO2 reduces the warmer it gets, and thus, the carbon dioxide is released - this is scientifically demonstrated and is actually part of many chemistry textbooks.When you combine this with news such as this, the picture becomes clearer:

Since 1970, carbon monoxide emissions in the U.S. are down 55%, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Particulate emissions are down nearly 80% and sulfur dioxide emissions have been reduced by half. Lead emissions have declined more than 98%.

So we have a big increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, but despite great increases in human production of the gas, the bulk of it in the past has come from the oceans - as much as half, according to scientists - and since the mechanisms of the planet can absorb so much CO2 so easily, the increase seems to be most likely tied to the ocean.

CO2, by the way, comprises about 5% of greenhouse gasses. Water vapor is the biggest culprit by many times over, and it's not rising by very much. Even the scientists who worked on the IPCC report had this to say:

• It is not clear how much is the actual anthropogenic contribution to a changed radiation budget (again, even the sign of the anthropogenic effect is not known).
• Even if the anthropogenic radiative forcing was better known, it is theoretically unclear by how much the temperature should have varied in response.

For more on the relation of temperature and CO2, this site has extensive links and information.

Q: So What's causing the warming then, smart guy?

Short answer: the sun, which is the primary cause of warming for all planets in the solar system.

The reason Earth is warm at all is because of the Sun's constant radiation. Little more than a gigantic nuclear explosion, the sun is so hot that at around 93,000,000 miles (the distance from Earth) it is still so hot it will burn and cook your skin if you are exposed too long. It is so hot that it causes the entire planet to warm by as much as 70 degrees between night and day. It is so hot that it maintains a livable temperature, and is absolutely understood to be the reason for warming on earth.

The question is whether it is an increase in greenhouse gasses which trap the sun's warmth and cause a slow, constant increase in temperature or if it is an increase in solar radiation and heat that causes this increase. Global Warming activists insist it is human-caused CO2 emissions that is the problem. Scientists are beginning to wonder, especially after a study from the Danish National Space Center that showed evidence that the Sun is the primary cause of global warming, and has likely been in the past.

The easy way to answer this is to look outside our solar system orbit. If humanity is causing global warming and not the sun, then Earth would be warming but the other planets ought not to be, at least not at the same time. And that's not what we find. Pluto is warming, the furthest from the sun yet still affected by its raging fires. Venus is warming. Mars is warming. Jupiter is showing signs of warming, as are several of its moons. Even Neptune might be warming, based on recent observation.

"one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything" (when faced with several solutions of equal validity, usually the simplest is the best)
-Occam's Razor

Again, RealClimate tries to dismiss this by giving a list of various reasons why each of these planets, at the same time, is warming while Earth does in a manner independent of the Sun. The attempt is to dismiss the possibility that the sun is causing this. Yet, evidence shows that the sun is influencing warming on the earth and thus should be on the other planets. If they all are warming at once, is it really more reasonable that every single planet is warming at the same time coincidentally from various, unrelated, independent causes? One or two planets I could buy, but nearly the entire solar system, at once? My comments to this end were conveniently deleted from the RealClimate website.

For the last 100 years, the sun has undergone significant increases in coronal activity and fluctuations in its magnetic field. This fluctuation is affecting our magnetic field as well, reducing it. Along with these fluctuations has been an increase in "sun spots" and cosmic ray bombardment of the earth.

There's been an observable relationship between the increase in cosmic rays (taken from meteorite samples) and the temperature of the earth. Basically it works like this: the magnetic field of the Sun partly screens the Solar System from cosmic rays. The greater the magnetic field, the more sunspots will appear on the star. More sunspots means less cosmic rays which means fewer clouds which means warmer temperatures.
Sunspots seem to appear in cycles, with more then less, and the longer this cycle occurs, the more the planets heated by the sun will warm. The sun, the engine of the entire planet's warming, is the primary cause of global warming and through it the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. Human activity is probably significant enough to add to this to some small degree, but it is not the cause of global warming.

For more on this topic, Sciencebits has an excellent article with significantly more information, charts, and links.

Q: What is the practical effect of Global Warming?

Minor so far, not likely to be much in the future; no one can predict very accurately.

Many predictions have been made regarding global warming's likely effects on the planet. One of the more unfortunate and amusing ones was that 2006 would be the "worst storm season on record" as the effects of warming changed the climate and more storms of greater power occurred. This was following up on 2005, which actually was one of the worst on record, with more storms than many years in the past.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that "the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season will be very active with up to 10 hurricanes"

Turned out, of course, that it wasn't. It was one of the mildest on record, and the response? Well, global warming made it milder. This is part of why it's so hard to take many of these predictions seriously: the people who say this kind of thing are trying to have it both ways. It will work out this way because of global warming. It didn't? Well, that's because of global warming. That's not science, that's mysticism, it's impossible to disprove if your pet cause fits all possible explanations.

Increased warming is predicted for each year, but for the last 8 years it's actually been globally slightly cooler, according to the World Meteorological Organization:

The temperature of the last five years in decreasing order are: 1998, 2005, 2002, 2003 and 2004.

See that trend? 2006 continued it, and the prediction for 2007 is that despite El Nino's affect on the climate, it will be cooler this year than 1998 as well. The problem is, this is reported a bit differently. For example, WMO reports those as the "five warmest years" on record. 2006 is reported as the sixth warmest year.

That's technically true, but it's like a home announcer trying to cover up that for six games in a row, the team has scored less by pointing out that these are the top five scoring games ever. Yes, 2006 was the warmest year in the last century or so... but it's cooler than 2005, 2004, 2003, etc... a trend that is continuing. In other words, as the chart I started this essay out with two weeks ago showed: we're cooling.

Global Warming is even by the IPCC's latest report not as bad as expected and the effects that were predicted in the 1990s aren't coming to pass. The truth is the science is too complex for scientists to even predict tomorrow's weather for where you live, let alone what the entire planet will be like in 100 years. Or even 1.

Next week: the questions continue, with more answers, including lists of scientists, the way global warming advocates live, what about those computer models, and what about that weather outside, anyway?

*UPDATE: My calculation on walking around the earth was off by a factor 24: I forgot to divide by hours! Also some minor formatting change and a dumb astronomic mistake Daryl pointed out for me, thanks!

This is part three of a series on Global Warming.
Part One: Science
Part Two: Temperature
Part Three: Questions and Answers B
Part Five: What and Why

Essays