The advocate will pick up any piece of apparently useful data and without doing any analysis, decide that their pet theory perfectly explains any anomaly without consideration of any alternative explanations. Their conclusion is always that their original theory is correct.
The scientist will look at all possibilities and revise their thinking based on a thorough assessment of all issues – data quality, model quality and appropriateness of the the comparison. Their conclusion follows from the analysis whatever it points to.
Anything important still has to run through Congress. Thus, I imagine, the statement last week referring to doing what’s “politically possible”.
Gavin[ re 156]
When you say that CO2 is increasing due to human activity, do you attribute it completely to the activity of burning of fossil fuels, or would you attribute some of it to the missing forests and peatlands etc , and if so, what proportion do you calculate to be due to the massive deforestation activities and destruction of the peatlands, that are still going on— and the huge increase in the built environment which displaced rural land?
Do you agree with Drew Shindell, of Nasa Goddard Institute for Space, whose article published recently in Nature Geoscience , shows that ‘black carbon is responsible for 50% or almost 1degreeC increased Arctic warming from 1890 to 2007’, and that ‘the climate-warming effects of these short-lived pollutants have largely been ignored by scientists and regulators focusing on climate policy’ —-that ‘decreasing concentrations of sulfate aerosols and increasing concentrations of black carbon have substantially contributed to rapid Arctic warming during the past three decades?
Hiram Levy of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said , ‘We found that these short-lived pollutants have a greater influence on the earth’s climate throughout the 21st century than people thought.’
I have been smeared—- told I was stupid—- and accused of being in the employ of the fossil fuels industry—-every epithet some of your regulars could think of—–when I asked on repeated occasions why the AGW consensus believers were so hell-bent on taking the most drastic of measures—even to the extent of considering all sorts of weird geo-engineering schemes—and emissions trading schemes that would cause damage to already floundering economies, and losses in living standards——all focus on the CO2, but very little in comparison on the enormous depletion of the forest sinks—the deliberate burning of huge tracts of forests and the destruction of peatlands, that happened during the timeframe in question, and continue now.
Politicians who wanted to do what this research now recommends, were pilloried and sneered at by environmentalists and AGW true believers, who wanted only to hear from those politicians who were cashing in on the sensationalist stories about CO2 and the killing of the planet.
In Australia, a Prime Minister whose administration started a program called The Global Forest Initiative, seeded with $200million, intended to help countries like Indonesia , and others around the world, to move away from the burning and destruction of rainforests and peatlands—and who, at the same time, was funding every type of renewable technology, from solar, wind, wave etc to geothermal and CCS—- was subjected to the malign attentions of Al Gore, who came to Australia, not once, but twice during our election campaign , and directly told Australians that , if they wanted to ‘save the planet’, they needed to ditch the government and vote for Gore’s pal and preferred choice —and so enough of those susceptible to the ‘Inconvenient Truth’ juggernaut did just that.
And re [134]:
You’ve said in your blog on the ‘lag’, that the warming at the termination of an ice age in the past was initiated by some unknown cause that set in train the first 800 years of warming, that the resulting warming was the cause of the rise in CO2, and then from then on, the CO2 amplified the warming—– yet there’s no deliberation now about whether the initiating factor in this warming could be the same as then , and not CO2.
Your response to the comment by Mike N is about the fact that the CO2 amplifies the warming , but why is there no discussion about the basic cause?
I see a lot of references to Spencer like the one above
stroller Says:
4 April 2009 at 12:32 PM
but no actual cite. I found a few blogs talking about some paper submitted to GRL, and a paper that will appear in Energy and Environment, and mentions without cite of a letter in Geophysical Research Letters. But Google Scholar isn’t finding a paper in a journal. Must be one here somewhere.
Gary S-J wrote in 245:
Thank you for the update.
Unlike earlier ice shelves, I understand that this one doesn’t have much in the way of glaciers bottled up behind it, so it shouldn’t have any appreciable impact upon sea level. However, that was 5° latitude south of Larsen B which collapsed in early 2002, and it is 5° latitude north of where the West Antarctic Peninsula ends and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet begins. And the base of WAIS is below sea level.
Ne’min’, here it is:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2007GL029698
“… During the composite oscillation’s rainy, tropospheric warming phase, the longwave flux anomalies unexpectedly transitioned from warming to cooling, behavior which was traced to a decrease in ice cloud coverage. This decrease in ice cloud coverage is nominally supportive of Lindzen’s “infrared iris” hypothesis. While the time scales addressed here are short and not necessarily indicative of climate time scales, … their behavior should be considered when testing the convective and cloud parameterizations in climate models that are used to predict global warming….”
Even better, put Triana up and measure the damned thing.
_______________
“SIGMAS U.S.” says ReCaptcha
PS, I tried to make this work but just managed to cause the link to be eaten, it’s gone from View Source, so here it is the old way:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinion/ssi/images/Toles/s_04052009_520.gif
Krugman says maybe we need to invest in a new bubble to make the economy revive. Toles points out that we’re living in a bubble right now. Good place to invest for the future.
Commenter “truth” — your repetitive false assertions that (1) measures to reduce CO2 emissions through a rapid transition from fossil fuels to clean renewable energy sources will cause economic devastation, and that (2) so-called “AGW consensus believers” are unaware of or ignore the problem of deforestation, have ceased to be annoying and have become merely boring.
#252 truth, i think the opinion is that forests don’t matter in the long run because those trees will eventually die and send carbon to the atmosphere. Is this right?
#252 truth
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/index.html
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/co2_human.html
Black Carbon
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20050323/
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2003/dec/HQ_03420_black_soot.html
re drastic measures
I don’t know anyone hell bent on drastic measures and what is a drastic measure when it is a reasonable response to a problem? Context and relevance are key.
http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/pdf/US_ghg_final_report.pdf
Who is suggesting weird geo-engineering schemes? And do you mean weird as in it won’t work or help, or weird in that you think its weird based on your apparently limited perspective, or both, based on the proposal in question?
You seem to be wrapped up in the idea that this is all about religion and true believers but you don’t seem to understand the relevant contexts of the things you are talking about in relation to the things you apparently either don’t know or don’t understand. That may be why lots of folks have looked at your statements and concluded they are irrelevant or less relevant.
Maybe you should start your own blog, this one does its best to discuss the science and you want to concentrate on the politics.
As to your response to 134
What do yo mean by basic cause? Do you mean the Milankovitch cycles? Pay attention, and do some studying if you wish to increase the relevance of your questions.
BTW, if your so hung up on the truth, post your real name.
Commenter “truth” at #252.
That you call yourself “Truth” makes me instantly not believe what you are saying. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.
(This comment by Theo H (aka “Uncertain”))
On public debate…
Here in the UK, in the local and the national more mass-readership press there is a constant drizzle of letters that say:
The BBC should first show “An Inconvenient Truth” and then the anti-warming “The Great Global Warming Swindle” documentary (See Real Climate archives for the Swindle film) and then vote by texting “yes” or “no” to a central number. This, the writers say, will settle the matter for good.
I’m not joking, and the real problem is that those who write such letters appear to be reasonably literate and intelligent people.
Greenpeace are advocates, and with reference to the Wilkins Ice Shelf doing what it’s doing, this is one of their comments from their website today.
“To put it in context, it’s probable that the current reduction in ice-shelves in the region has no precedent in the last 10,000 years, and it is certain that this minimum has not been reached at any time in the last millennium.”
Are they bullshitting, over-egging the cake? “…no precedent in last 10,000 years…”. Can a RC-friendly glaciologist give me her/his take on this?
Greenpeace are advocates. This is part of their take on the Wilkins Ice Shelf from their website today.
“To put it in context, it’s probable that the current reduction in ice-shelves in the region has no precedent in the last 10,000 years, and it is certain that this minimum has not been reached at any time in the last millennium.”
As advocates, is Greenpeace over-egging the cake?
[Response: No. That’s about the size of it. – gavin]
john, hank, timothy, barton, gavin – all you real scientists out there:
i still meet people who say, “how do we KNOW CO2 increases temperatures?”
give me a one (or maybe two) sentence answer. i appreciate all your detailed complex well-linked multi-paragraph answers, but… what is a one or two sentence answer a layman rhetorician can give?
MikeN’s wrong earlier: 3 April 2009 at 1:21 PM
MikeN’s wrong again:
5 April 2009 at 1:39 PM
MikeN, the odd notion that forests don’t matter because the trees die can’t survive the slightest attempt at educating yourself. Why not try?
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&q=biogeophysical+cycle+CO2+forests&as_ylo=2009
The problem is rate of change. The only direct influence we have on the rate of change is the rate of burning fossil carbon.
The fossil fuel burned so far is responsible for about 200 percent of the current warming. The biosphere has taken care of about half of that so far — by increasing the amount of CO2 taken out of the atmosphere. The biosphere can’t keep removing CO2 even half as fast as we’ve been adding it.
No matter how many forests we lose to budworm, or grow on former tundra — and all that is being studied — it’s small compared to the total amount of CO2 from fossil fuel being burned.
When your bathtub drain can’t keep up with the water pouring in, and the tub is starting to overflow, do you reach for the sponge?
Not if you can reach the faucet, eh?
Turn it down, then turn it off, then start mopping up the mess.
Imagine all you want, but there is no such thing as a frictionless machine, and never will be. Thus rendering perpetual motion impossible and the downgrade of all matter and energy in the universe irrevocable. And while the sun will continue to exist for billions of more years, the Earth’s crust is continually degrading and taking technological interventions into account will be completely depleted and exhausted well before that time. The technology itself is degrading as well of course, besides being made of increasingly unstable and inferior resources because of this depletion. Assembled in China.
Computers for example are very cheaply made, designed to be disassembled and reassembled continually. Any bronze-age typewriter is a more quality product then the latest computer.
Gavin and most others:
The title and content of this thread has demonstrated slopshod use of language, and little appreciation of what science ‘is’:
To oversimplify. Science is composed of two activities; the building of ‘models’ of ‘reality’ (hypotheses, theories, ideas, etc.) by ‘theoreticians’ and the checking of how well the models fit ‘observation’ by ‘experimentalists’ (sometimes one and the same person).
A theoretician looks at the ‘world’ and based on ‘regularities’ one thinks one perceives, he/she builds a model with words and/or symbols. The scientist must be an ADVOCATE for his model, otherwise why should anyone else bother to pay any attention to it.
Experimentalists try to find observations that are pertinent to the model to see if the model can be supported or refuted. But they also would not pay any attention to it if they had not been persuaded by the theoretician’s ADVOCACY that the model was somehow worthy of attention (useful, or alternatively, somehow dangerous).
So ADVOCACY is at the heart of science; it can’t be dispensed with. It plays a major role in scientific motivation.
Gavin says: “It’s not the model that says CO2 cause warming, it is the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that cause warming. This has been measured in laboratories for over 140 years.”
But all of established physics (science) concerns models which, from repeated observation, generate great confidence (but not absolute certainty) that they are ‘right’. So it’s models all the way down!
Non-scientist advocates as well as scientists can misuse rhetoric to mislead their audience. And that’s what has to be guarded against – NOT ADVOCACY.
Freeman Dyson, a great scientist, published an article in the journal, Energy, volume 2, in 1977, titled “CAN WE CONTROL THE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE?”
So he’s been paying careful attention to the problem about as long as Jim Hansen.
The estimates that business as usual will lead to from about 2ºC to 5.5ºC global increase in temperature by 2100 is predicted with about 95% confidence. That means that there’s about 2.5% chance that the warming will be less than 2ºC. That appears to be where Dyson is placing his bet. That doesn’t necessarily make him crazy – or even ill-informed, but merely quite probably wrong.
re #260
maybe that’s unrealistic… how ’bout a 4 sentence (max) explanation of how we KNOW co2 increases temps?
walter crain (260) — “how do we KNOW CO2 increases temperatures?”
John Tyndall measured it in his laboratory in 1859 CE. The experiment is sufficiently simple that you can replicate it at home. Tyndall’s work has been extended, repeatedly, over the last 150 years; we know.
Will that do?
[reCAPTHCA reminds us: “helping NATURE”.]
Walter Crain wrote in 260:
Walter,
I am not a scientist and I don’t pretend to be.
However, for the past century and a half we have known that CO2 absorbs and radiates longwave thermal radiation. As such it reduces the rate at which thermal energy is able to leave the climate system, thermal energy keeps entering at the same rate. Conservation of energy says that the amount of thermal energy in the system has to climb, and it will keep climbing until the radiation emitted from the surface increases to the extent that the rate at which energy leaves the system is equal to the rate at which energy enters the system.
Or to put it another way, its like a insulation for your house which reduces the rate at which heat can escape your house. With the furnace going at the same rate, the house will naturally become warmer until the rate at which heat leaves your house is equal to the rate at which heat enters it. And there are other analogies — Hank suggests one involving you bathtub. If you keep the faucet in the same position (which corresponds to keeping solar irradiance constant), but begin to cover the drain (which corresponds to putting more carbon dioxide in the air), the bath tub will begin to fill up as water (thermal energy) is entering at the same rate but escaping at a reduced rate. The more it fills up the more water pressure which will increase the rate at which water flows out (just as the total thermal radiation radiated by an object is roughly proportional to temperature to the forth power) until it is equal to the rate at which water enters the bathtub..
However, a picture is worth a thousand words. But I will give you the long explanation first:
Now for the short explanation…
Of course I am still cheating on your two sentence limit, but maybe I can at least get an “A” for effort.
*
Captcha fortune cookie: Gotham across
(I’m fond of Batman so I couldn’t resist.)
RE: MikeN #528 5 avril 2009 at 1:39 PM (and the previous comment you refer to):
The estimates that I’m aware of indicate that 40-45% the increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1850 is due to deforestation, and deforestation, primarily in the tropics, currently accounts for 20-25% of human-caused CO2 emissions. As David Benson might point out, William Ruddiman would suggest that the contributions due to deforestation began well before 1850.
Individual trees die and decay, but forests at the landscape scale are “permanent” carbon stores. These are vulnerable to direct deforestation by humans as well as declines resulting from climate change, expected to be mediated by insects, disease, drought and fire.
Back to the original topic. At Chris’s site, see the comment by John Philip (April 2, 2009 @ 3:48 am) and follow-ups (to expand on #79 here). It seems Watts is much more inclined to block contrary comments than admitted here.
Further, I find the logic at WUWT interesting. The criticism comes up that Lindzen has used outdated data. It later transpires that he has in fact referred to the more recent data elsewhere. This somehow makes it all right. To me this makes the charge of dishonesty more plausible. Who uses outdated data to make a point without at least explaining why they are not using the updated version? Certainly not someone making a purely scientific case.
Response in message 233. You know, when a critic claims that a certain place is colder, the global warming advocates all cry that it is anecdotal. When you claim that the world is warming because of N. H. summers, isn’t that just as anecdotal?
If, as you say, you have written papers on the Holocene climatic Optimum, then you are being disingenuous in claiming in any way that today’s weather is unusual or out of the ordinary. [edit]
[Response: Oh please… Try reading them before getting on your rather illinformed high horse. -gavin]
Jim Eager@250, The response written beneath my post in 233 basically says to me that they don’t have an issue with what I am saying, that the seas were higher and the world warmer, the permafrost more melted and the Siberian treeline further north than today. If that is so, what is the big deal about global warming? We have been there before and to act as if this current warming is something unsual or to be feared is just to act irrationally.
Remember, Jim, that response said some of them had written articles about what I am pointing out, the Holocene Climate Optimum. Thus, they know all this and still love to tell a good scary story to those less knowledgeable. I am a geophysicist, that is why I know these things.
#260 walter crain
I’m not a scientist either, but you certainly don’t need to be a scientist to understand climate, but it does take some work to understand the various major components.
Here are two sentences (but I cheated with semicolons)
Solar radiation comes into our atmosphere and hits the earth; the solar radiation translates into heat energy and emits long wave infrared back to the atmosphere and toward space.
CO2 absorbs the radiation in the lower atmosphere and thus warms the atmosphere; that energy is then slowly absorbed by the oceans thus warming the entire system… then the feedbacks…
Glenn, reading your comments and your “Holocene deniar” posts through your link, you really need to educate yourself on what gavin is saying.
The High northern latitudes were clearly warmer in mid-Holocene a few thousand years ago than recently, for orbital reasons (more summer sunshine). Globally averaged harder to call–still a lot of uncertainties in southern reconstructions but not anything like + 3 C. IPCC AR4 Chapter 6 has better details. The Greenland response was retreat behind modern position, poorly constrained, but with sketchy evidence for kilometers to maybe tens of kilometers, and suggestions of sea level rise up to half a meter. We are talking about futures of several C with much more than that in the Greenland vicinity. Further, the warmer it is, the more influential temperature becomes. If you have no melting on top, then a bit of warming may do nothing; if you have the ice almost too warm, and warming causes a bit of thinning that lowers the surface and warms more, there is a threshold beyond which the ice sheet cannot survive, so in general the effect of a 1 C warming is expected to be larger if the temperature before the warming is higher, so you can see why there is concern (not a scare tactic).
In fact it has been warmer in Greenland in the past and the ice sheet responded. Greenland actually doesn’t care why it was warmer. If it continues to get warmer then the ice will melt, and the longer-term response time in a much higher CO2 world is to be substantial Greenland melt and sea level rise.
Rick Brown (272) — On my own this time, I am confident that deforestation was well advanced during the Medieval Warm Period:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/books/21book.html?ref=science
and substantially reversed during the great plagues following in Europe and the Americas. Don’t know about elsewhere in the world.
Glenn Morton (275) — Actually sea levels were not, on average higher then; highest now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Sea_Level.png
so this might suggest to you that the rest of your ideas are misinformed. To put the matter of CO2 concentrations in better prespective, look at what was going on about 15 million years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
with CO2 concentrations about the same as we have now.
263 entropy man, that’s ludicrous. A modern computer has tolerances measured in microns. Disk drives and chips are far better than a few mechanical levers. I’ve used typewriters and they tend to get tangled when one types too fast. That’s why the qwerty keyboard was developed – to slow people down since primitive typewriters couldn’t handle the speed.
omg! glenn morton!
i knew that name was familiar. did you write those “talkorigin” articles? about looking for noah’s flood in the geologic column? the geologic column in north dakota? those are great articles.
Um…the submarines sufacing near the poles. I was indeed incorrect and typed in the wrong date. There was an attempt in the 1930s to travelunder the North Pole. It was the 1950s when a sub came up near the pole several times:
“As early as 1959, the first US submarine to surface at the North Pole, the USS Skate, did so in late March, and surfaced at 10 other locations during the same cruise, each time finding leads of open water or very thin ice from which to do so. It did a similar cruise a year earlier in August 1958, again finding numerous open leads within which to surface. Here is a photo of the Skate during one of its surfacings in 1959. As can be seen in all three photos, the flat new ice is scarcely different between 1959 and 1999, while the 1987 photo shows the extent to which open water can occur.”
More:
For example, one crew member aboard the USS Skate which surfaced at the North Pole in 1959 and numerous other locations during Arctic cruises in 1958 and 1959 said:
“the Skate found open water both in the summer and following winter. We surfaced near the North Pole in the winter through thin ice less than 2 feet thick. The ice moves from Alaska to Iceland and the wind and tides causes open water as the ice breaks up. The Ice at the polar ice cap is an average of 6-8 feet thick, but with the wind and tides the ice will crack and open into large polynyas (areas of open water), these areas will refreeze over with thin ice. We had sonar equipment that would find these open or thin areas to come up through, thus limiting any damage to the submarine. The ice would also close in and cover these areas crushing together making large ice ridges both above and below the water. We came up through a very large opening in 1958 that was 1/2 mile long and 200 yards wide. The wind came up and closed the opening within 2 hours. On both trips we were able to find open water. We were not able to surface through ice thicker than 3 feet.”
Phil (#273),
I’m finding that if you are exceptionally polite, then your comments will get through on Watts’ blog. Unless you are denying any aspect of global warming in which case posters seem to be able to go for it boots and all, especially if they are abusing Al Gore (a big topic all through the comments).
For example, at the end of a post refuting an earlier poster’s denial that sea levels are rising (in which he used this plot as proof – Ha!), I wrote the following:
Watts, snipped out the word [denialist] but left the rest there.
One of my earlier post was quite sober and well considered, but I said that given the black is white, up is down nature of the poster’s assertions, he must be either very confused or dishonest. The whole post was deleted.
Anyway, I would encourage others to trundle over there now and again, pick articles or posts that are particularly silly, and very carefully and succinctly demolish refute them. There are a lot of people hooking into that blog who need to get an occasional glimpse of what rational science-based discussion actually looks like. It first I thought that it was going to do my head in, but it turns out to be fun because you get such lame returns. Just remember to be exceptionally polite and never flippant. This is actually a good thing since your audience are the very people we need to convince. Don’t get angry at BS arguments. Others will be able to compare the BS with what you have said and make up their own minds.
Glenn Morton: Sure, the Earth has survived Ice Age to interglacial transitions. But, as has been pointed out to you, back then there was no civilization around with massive cities built on coasts, back then when local climates changed humans weren’t tied down to property, houses, and farms to they were free to migrate or die, back then ecosystems weren’t already strained to the breaking point with pollution and restricted from free migration by giant asphalt roads and cities… the Earth also survived the Ice Age, but most people wouldn’t be too keen on giant walls of ice wiping out Canada.
You should consider adding some perspective to your knowledge of geophysics.
You were answered earlier – we’ve got six billion today highly dependent on agriculture and physical infrastructure, not a handful of hunter-gatherers.
Rather than making clear to us that you’re full of yourself, please educate us poor dumb mortals as to why we’d expect impacts to be the same given the vast difference in the human role on the planet today vs. the Holocene.
And how do you know that populations then weren’t severely impacted, anyway? Do you think humanity’s history on this planet is one of cheerful, upward advancement in technology and our ability to “tame” nature without any setbacks due to changes in climate, etc?
Humanity survived. I believe humanity will survive the change we’re seeing, too. That doesn’t not mean that humanity will not SUFFER, however, and if you want to simply cavalierly wave that off as not being important, well … (bad words hurled in your general direction).
#274 Glenn, I had the same reaction, then I realized that NH means Northern Hemisphere, not New Hampshire.
#272, my question is, when an individual tree dies, for its lifetime did it remove carbon from the air in total, or did it only remove carbon, and then when it dies, all that carbon goes back into the atmosphere?
Walter, I’m not a scientist and don’t pretend to be. I’ve read about this and made the effort to look things up. Follow the “Start Here” link at the top, and read the History (first link under Science in the right hand column). Click the links under Contributors in the right hand column, and look at their publications. Read. Don’t ask for answers from some guy on a blog and assume they’re reliable.
> Glenn Morton
_The_ Glenn Morton? The petroleum/creationist guy?
i don’t know. glenn morton the geology guy is/was a regular mainstream “billion-of-years” geologist. those articles are great.
hank,
re 287, 269. i’m not planning on parroting whatever someone here says. i’ll research it and square it with my knowledge. i’m just looking for some “rhetorical gems” that coalesce the complex issue into a few convincing sentences.
Glenn (275), The ‘big deal’ is that there were not nearly 7 billion humans around then that had to deal with how post glacial sea level rise would wreak havoc on trillions of dollars of their built coastal infrastructure, or with how shifts in rain and snow fall amount and timing would impact on their ability to feed that many people.
You are hardly the first geologist to pop into RealClimate to dismiss the potential impact of current climate change compared to Earth’s long-term history, and I’m quite sure you will not be the last. One thing they have had in common is a seeming inability to appreciate the impact of climate change on human time scales. It seems difficult for them to fathom that every single thing we know as civilization and technology beyond simple stone and bone tools, including the intensive agriculture that allows 6+ billion humans to survive, developed over the last 10,000 years of relatively stable climate.
The Human species has been through climate change of the magnitude of an ice age, but not yet Human civilization. Yet even during the relatively stable Holocene we know that the entirley natural range of climate change contributed to the collapse of human societies. Anyone who dismisses the potential of climate change to put literally billions of people at risk is being foolish. And anyone who shows up and announces that “nothing bad happened to the world at all” is being breathtakingly foolish.
MikeN, nope.
Google has a pretty good natural language query engine nowadays. Type your question into the Scholar search box and you’ll generally find the research on the subject.
A few examples:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7210/abs/nature07276.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7146/abs/nature05847.html
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/07-2006.1
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2006.09.003
Remember, read the footnotes, read the “cited by” or “articles citing this” links. Don’t listen to some guy on a blog, read for yourself. Read up on your own area of the world, wherever it is.
One more for MikeN
http://eco.confex.com/eco/2008/techprogram/P11207.HTM
Check each of those sites for related information.
For Glenn Morton:
> what is the big deal about global warming?
> We have been there before and to act as if this
> current warming is something unsual …
It’s the rate of change that is unique to the present situation.
http://www.springerlink.com/index/GQ7UGH9EQAA8MGNL.pdf
Estimates of the damage costs of climate change,
Part II. Dynamic estimates
RSJ Tol – Environmental and Resource Economics, 2002 – Springer
… speed of adaptation. Common sense suggests that the impact reacts more than linear to the rate of climate change …
You’re a geologist. You know the rates of change differ. But you need to read the evolutionary biology along with the geology, e.g.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=rate+of+climate+change+plankton+deep+sea+calcium
glenn, others,
is there a time period/temp that could be thought of as having “optimum” conditions for life on earth – maybe defined by # of species or biomass or some other criteria?
MikeN #285 Re: trees
Bearing in mind that I’m just some guy on a blog, here’s how I think it goes. Your question about the overall carbon balance of the life and death of an individual tree isn’t the most relevant or interesting one, but to a first approximation, yes, when the wood in an individual tree decays or burns, as much carbon is released as was absorbed during the tree’s life. Some small fraction can be incorporated into stable compounds in the soil or converted to charcoal, potentially persisting for thousands of years. Erosion can carry these to deep ocean sediments where they can be incorporated into sediments and pretty effectively isolated in the geosphere. Over very long time periods, this adds up.
What’s more relevant is what goes on at the level of a forested landscape. With a given species composition, climate and disturbance regime (timing, intensity, etc. of fire, logging, etc.) a landscape will store a characteristic amount of carbon, with different stands across that dynamic landscape storing varying amounts depending on how recently they’ve experienced a disturbance of a what severity. As the interval between disturbance increases, or the severity of the disturbance decreases, the landscape will store more carbon, and vice versa.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, forest landscapes managed on short-rotation clearcut forestry store only a fraction of the carbon stored by pre-settlement forest landscapes where the majority of forest stands were old-growth (apparently storing as much carbon per acre as any forests in the world) and where the primary source of disturbance – stand-replacement fire – occurred at intervals of a few to several hundred years.
I’ve summarized much of this material, with abundant citations, in a paper (The Implications of Climate Change for Conservation, Restoration and Management of National Forest Lands) that can be downloaded (PDF) at http://www.defenders.org/climatechange/forests.
Re:254
I am very disappointed that the accounts in the popular press do not include any local sea temperatures. From http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.4.2.2009.gif, I surmise that local sea temperatures may have something to do with the process. I note that the last few Aprils have had warm surface sea temperature anomalies in the area, but no discussion of the topic in the news releases.
Re comment by Rick Brown below:
RE: MikeN #528 5 avril 2009 at 1:39 PM (and the previous comment you refer to):
The estimates that I’m aware of indicate that 40-45% the increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1850 is due to deforestation, and deforestation, primarily in the tropics, currently accounts for 20-25% of human-caused CO2 emissions. As David Benson might point out, William Ruddiman would suggest that the contributions due to deforestation began well before 1850.
Rick–my timing is off, since I am ecologist on sabattical in Europe and it’s now morning here. The data show that deforestation has made a negligible contributon to CO2 increase and that virtually all of the increase is due to burning fossil fuels.
For quite a while, deforestation in the tropics was offset by increased forests in North America and Europe. Have you ever read about how Vermont, for example, was mostly pasture land for sheep before the railroads went through in the US west?
However, since forests are now fairly stable in the temperate zone, whereas deforestation in the tropics is accelerating, I expect that changes in forests will become a net source of CO2. However, while changes in vegetation are somewhat important, they are small relative to effects of burning fossil fuels. I have to admit that my data on effects of land use mainly come from ecology text books and I have not read the most recent studies. However, my understanding is that once the industrial age was well underway, burning of fossils fuels as been by far the main contributor to atmospheric CO2. I am sure that other readers on this blog can come up with current estimates.
[Response: Not sure where you are getting your numbers, but the deforestation component is more like 20% of the total (currently ~2GtC/yr, compared to ~7GtC/yr from fossil fuels. See this figure for instance. – gavin]
I surmise that the intent is to come up with a less pejorative label than “deniers”. (Personally I think that serves quite well, but there’s no harm in considering alternatives.)
I agree with Jeff in Ohio (#1) that “advocate” is the wrong word for this use. An advocate can be rigorous and even correct.
As Andrew suggests (#22), “ideologue” is a possibility. Some others that come to mind (not entirely satisfying) are: “beclouder”; “doctrinist”; “garbler”; glossifier”; and “zealot”.
Glenn Morton Says (5 April 2009 at 7:02 PM):
“…the seas were higher and the world warmer, the permafrost more melted and the Siberian treeline further north than today. If that is so, what is the big deal about global warming?”
I thought of a practical experiment that will perhaps illuminate one important point of difference. Visit Yosemite, take the bus to the top of Glacier Point, and hike down the trail back to the valley. If you’re in decent shape, your knees may be a little sore that night, but no big deal, right? So the next day you take the bus up again, and instead of hiking, you walk over to the cliff edge and jump off. Shouldn’t be any problem, should it? Same elevation change, and as you say, after all, you’ve been there before…