[Paddlewise] Global Warming mini-rant (was: Re: Global warming

At 03:41 PM 8/9/00 +0000, SRI wrote:

>Anyway, the subject of global warming is of great interest to me.  I have
>been trying to learn more about it, but I find information hard to get.
>Lots of the sources seem to be "fringe" groups with too much rhetoric and
>not enough straight factual info.  Anyone know how one might really learn
>about this subject?  TIA.

Mark,
My website, Your Planet Earth, is designed to be an educational resource 
for issues revolving around sustainability. Climate change is probably the 
biggest problem global society will face in terms of sustainability. At 
least, all other problems will be made much worse as a result of climate 
change. YPE collects daily news stories on issues such as climate change, 
and has a glossary that attemts to explain a lot of the issues that revolve 
around climate change and give the "straight facts" without rhetoric and 
with as many references to scientific literature as possible. Go ahead and 
check it out... http://www.yourplanetearth.org

Regarding Jackie's post that listed the summary of Crowley's recent paper 
in Science, there is a post about that on my website as well. 
http://www.yourplanetearth.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/14/1641242&mode=thread
This paper was interesting for two reasons. One is that it used a less 
complex form of climate modeling that allowed the computer to simulate 
climate for 1000 years. The standard form of climate models (called General 
Circulation Models or GCMs) are too complex and would require too much 
computer time to simulate conditions on that time scale. Crowley's model 
effectively reproduced observed climate temperatures during that 1000 year 
run, which is quite impressive. This had not been done before.

The second interesting thing about Crowley's paper is that because the 
model worked so well, he was able to test the difference between natural 
variability and man-made forcing (i.e. CO2 and other greenhouse gases). 
Natural variability is the term that describes all changes in temperature 
resulting from cycles in solar output, tidal cycles, and volcanic eruptions 
(to name a few). (Incidently, El Nino and La Nina are also natural 
variability on a 3-5 year timescale). Using his model, Crowley was able to 
show that natural variability accounts for all observed temperature changes 
until the latter half of the 20th century. At this point, the only way to 
model the observed temperatures is to add man-made greenhouse gas forcing 
to the model. It is interesting to see how their words dance around a 
little bit when making this claim. It tends to rile people up, but no 
reputable scientist argues this point anymore. Humans are causing global 
warming, and there is no way to dispute that now.

The scary thing about it all is that CO2 has a lifetime in our atmosphere 
of 120 years. That means that whatever CO2 is there now will continue to 
warm the earth for our great-great-granchildren. So far, the current amount 
of anthropogenic CO2 has produced only about 20% of the total warming that 
it will eventually create. In other words, if we stopped emitting CO2 cold 
turkey, the Earth would still warm up another 4-5 degrees C from what is 
already there (in our best estimate). But we are doing anything but 
stopping CO2 emission. Instead, the pace of emission is rising exponentially.

Is there a solution to all of this? You bet, there are lots of little 
solutions that hopefully will all add up to make a difference. And the cool 
thing (no pun intended) is that if took it seriously, all of the solutions 
would actually save us a lot more money than it would cost to implement 
them in the long run. But it will mean that fossil fuel companies would not 
be able to rake in their $billions by selling oil and coal, and it is going 
to take a lot of political will power to make them give that up.

Kevin

Kevin Whilden
Your Planet Earth
http://www.yourplanetearth.org
(206) 788-0281 (ph)
(206) 788-0284 (f)

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