Wow these posts are getting WAY out of control. I hope nobody else is actually suffering through reading this book.
So no matter how you look at it, there is always some degree of faith involved.
The whole point of science is that no faith is required. You can verify for yourself.
We constantly recheck our results against new data to verify existing ideas and search for new ones. Science is designed to be self-correcting, to constantly seek the right answers. The fastest way to a Nobel Prize is to overturn a long-standing and widely-held theory, so every scientist on earth is always looking for cracks in the armor. We're trying to prove each other wrong.
I'm not even convinced of this. I'm going to file this into the 'premise' category.
Okay, file away. The other great feature of science is that it is remarkably well documented. Every month there are thousands of new peer-reviewed articles presenting the most recent findings and current understanding, and that continuous record of state-of-the-moment understanding is preserved for all posterity to see. You can go back and read the first hand reports of discoveries throughout the 1970s as these issues were investigated and argued over and finally resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
That history documents how humanity first figured out that Earth's climate has long varied in a repeating cycle, and we appeared to be heading (very very slowly) into another ice age. Then a few years later the data started to show definite signals of warming, and everyone was like WTF is going on here? Why is this happening? More data showed the correlations between past climate cycles and other features of the planet, like the composition of the atmosphere trapped in bubbles in ancient ice cores, and we were already measuring changes in the current atmosphere. We already conceptually understood that increasing CO2
should increase global temperatures, but at the time nobody thought we could actually change the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. Then we started doing the math on gigatons of carbon the planet was actually burning vs gigatons of carbon being cycled by natural processes, and it was a rapidly rude awakening.
All of these papers, unfolding over 20 years, are now publicly accessible online. You can remain unconvinced until you go read them.
Based upon what? I'm not saying you are wrong here, I just don't know, and I don't know how we could know.
Go check out the link I posted, it's chock full of the methodologies NASA used to publish those charts:
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/The "how" of natural cycles is all geology. Coastal areas have recorded cyclically rising and falling sea levels as the ice caps have raised and lowered the oceans. Using radioactive dating of the rocks in those layers, you can time the cycles shown in the rocks. They are the same everywhere on the planet.
The
Milankovitch Cycles are natural climate variations due to wobbles in the Earth's orbit, like the way a spinning top wobbles. They have known periods (there is more than one way to wobble) that we can now measure accurately with modern equipment like spaceborn GPS. They line up neatly with observed cycles in the rocks.
All of these different cycles have been described and documented, along with the evidence and the contemporary debate over them, in the scientific literature. It's good to be skeptical of claims for which you haven't seen any evidence, so I'm not trying to be critical. I'm just saying that this evidence does exist, and every single person who has ever looked at it has agreed that is sound. That's how science works. We all argue with each other until we all agree on something, then we write it down and move on to arguing about something else.
I'm sorry, Sol, but I just can't buy that statement. I can believe that you believe that it is true, but you can't convince me of that same certainty. I believe that the Earth is just too complex of a system, and there are way too many unknowns that we, by definition, cannot incorporate into those kinds of calculations.
This isn't rocket science. When the US military started designing heat-seeking missiles, they had to figure out how to let the missile follow a heat signature in a way that would not be obscured the obvious absorption bands of water vapor and CO2 in the atmosphere, or else the missiles wouldn't work over any significant distances. We already knew that water vapor and CO2 blocked these wavelengths. You can measure that yourself at home, so it's not like this is some esoteric calculation that only brainiacs can do.
This may be one reason that the climate models keep missing their mark, there is still another non-negligible factor we aren't yet considering.
"Climate models" is a big term encompassing lots of different things. A model of radiative balance of the atmosphere is easy for any first year physics student to get right, and it clearly predicted global warming as early as the 1890s. A coupled atmosphere/ocean circulation model that accounts for four billion years of shifting continents and evolving concentrations of every chemical constituent, which is something that exists, is pretty much a crapshoot and is really only useful for investigating possibilities, not simulating actual history.
So when somebody says "climate models are wrong" you need to find out what models they're really talking about. They do different stuff, using different mathematical representations and simplifications, and they are useful in different ways.
None of them will ever be as good as the fully 3D real world version we're running in real time, right now. We're conducting the grandest experiment of all time, with our only home, without any understanding of what's going to happen. Just pull the ripcord and see what happens? Hope it turns out okay?
So long as we don't ever hit that "catastrophic tipping point" humanity can adapt. Nature, generally, might be another question; but I'd put my money on survival. And the idea that grapes could be grown in the Britain again doesn't sound like hardship to myself.
It's the tipping points people worry about. I agree that gradual warming and sea level rise are very manageable. Destabilizing the WAIS? Not so much, unless you think 16 feet of sea level rise in ten years is manageable. It's not really a matter of how fast it happens, when you're talking about losing half of Florida and most of Bangladesh.
And there are LOTS of these tipping points. The WAIS is the smallest of the four global ice sheets. Permafrost melt in the arctic is a positive feedback loop, where warming causes melting which releases methane which causes warming which causes melting... Boreal forests and rainforests are fundamentallly necessary to global climate, but cannot just relocated to more appropriate latitudes as climate warms because there is no land at those latitudes. Sea ice, like in a snowball earth, melts away to reveal dark water which absorbs more heat than ice-covered water, warming further and melting more ice. Melting arctic ice change the salinity of water that drives the global ocean circulation conveyor belt, and too much ice melt reduces the density until that water stops sinking and cuts off ocean circulation, at which point we'd be well and truly fucked in an unrecoverable way.
As much as I'd like to believe James Hanson, I see lots of positive feedback loops in our climate system that do NOT want be pushed into action.
This is why I like you.
I thought it was because of my dashing good looks.
But can it adjust?
I don't think anyone knows that for sure. If the sudden influx is too fast, and life can't adapt slowly, we might see sudden disruption for a few thousand years until thing get stabilized again. Like adding a bunch of CO2 to the atmosphere raises CO2 in the oceans, which lowers the pH and prevents coral reef formation, and coral reef support massive ecological diversity that regulates oceanic microbe populations, and I don't think anyone claims to understand what happens to global ocean chemistry if you just wipe out every coral reef.
There have been periods in the past where the entire global ocean went anoxic, and everything in it that breathes oxygen died. It sorted itself back out eventually. Just a few tens of thousands of years, a momentary flicker on a geologic time scale.
What if that tech was biological, such as an engineered alge or some such?
Now we're talking about geoengineering. Google ocean fertilization and read about some of the unintended consequences of causing massive algae blooms in the ocean. Yes, it totally sequesters carbon. Then that algae dies and coats the bottom in layer of decaying much, which soaks up all of the oxygen in the water and everything there dies. Perturbing carefully balanced ecosystems is a dangerous game.
I wasn't referring to biomass for energy production, but as construction materials; such as favoring a wood composite wallboard over gypsum drywall
Houses are just a seasonal fungus, temporary structures that rise and fall almost too fast for earth to notice. Wood rots instantly in air, on the scale of the global carbon cycle. If you're going to sequester carbon, you have to do it somewhere permanent. What pretty much means in carbonate rocks, or injecting it back into the oil domes that it came from.
How much is a very important question also, because the correct answer matters to whether action to avert warming is more likely to cause human suffering than doing nothing
I'm of the opinion that the human suffering is already a baked in fact, and it's just a matter of when. We'll see at least five or ten degrees of warming eventually, unavoidably, it's just a matter of whether it takes 100 or 1000 years to get there.
I'm hoping it's more like 1000. The more time we can buy ourselves to work on other solutions, the less suffering there will have to be. I'm not sure I understand the argument for burning more carbon because we're unsure of how bad it's going to get. It's going to get bad, and it's going to get worse the more you burn, so every reduction you can do now helps, at least a little. Most of our reductions, like solar panels and electric cars, are easy to implement, economically profitable, widely available, and clearly beneficial. Why fight those?
