This is Hansen et al’s end of year summary for 2009 (with a couple of minor edits). Update: A final version of this text is available here.
If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?
by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, and Ken Lo
The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology.
Figure 1. (a) GISS analysis of global surface temperature change. Green vertical bar is estimated 95 percent confidence range (two standard deviations) for annual temperature change. (b) Hemispheric temperature change in GISS analysis. (Base period is 1951-1980. This base period is fixed consistently in GISS temperature analysis papers – see References. Base period 1961-1990 is used for comparison with published HadCRUT analyses in Figures 3 and 4.)
The global record warm year, in the period of near-global instrumental measurements (since the late 1800s), was 2005. Sometimes it is asserted that 1998 was the warmest year. The origin of this confusion is discussed below. There is a high degree of interannual (year‐to‐year) and decadal variability in both global and hemispheric temperatures. Underlying this variability, however, is a long‐term warming trend that has become strong and persistent over the past three decades. The long‐term trends are more apparent when temperature is averaged over several years. The 60‐month (5‐year) and 132 month (11‐year) running mean temperatures are shown in Figure 2 for the globe and the hemispheres. The 5‐year mean is sufficient to reduce the effect of the El Niño – La Niña cycles of tropical climate. The 11‐year mean minimizes the effect of solar variability – the brightness of the sun varies by a measurable amount over the sunspot cycle, which is typically of 10‐12 year duration.
Figure 2. 60‐month (5‐year) and 132 month (11‐year) running mean temperatures in the GISS analysis of (a) global and (b) hemispheric surface temperature change. (Base period is 1951‐1980.)
There is a contradiction between the observed continued warming trend and popular perceptions about climate trends. Frequent statements include: “There has been global cooling over the past decade.” “Global warming stopped in 1998.” “1998 is the warmest year in the record.” Such statements have been repeated so often that most of the public seems to accept them as being true. However, based on our data, such statements are not correct. The origin of this contradiction probably lies in part in differences between the GISS and HadCRUT temperature analyses (HadCRUT is the joint Hadley Centre/University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit temperature analysis). Indeed, HadCRUT finds 1998 to be the warmest year in their record. In addition, popular belief that the world is cooling is reinforced by cold weather anomalies in the United States in the summer of 2009 and cold anomalies in much of the Northern Hemisphere in December 2009. Here we first show the main reason for the difference between the GISS and HadCRUT analyses. Then we examine the 2009 regional temperature anomalies in the context of global temperatures.
Figure 3. Temperature anomalies in 1998 (left column) and 2005 (right column). Top row is GISS analysis, middle row is HadCRUT analysis, and bottom row is the GISS analysis masked to the same area and resolution as the HadCRUT analysis. [Base period is 1961‐1990.]
Figure 3 shows maps of GISS and HadCRUT 1998 and 2005 temperature anomalies relative to base period 1961‐1990 (the base period used by HadCRUT). The temperature anomalies are at a 5 degree‐by‐5 degree resolution for the GISS data to match that in the HadCRUT analysis. In the lower two maps we display the GISS data masked to the same area and resolution as the HadCRUT analysis. The “masked” GISS data let us quantify the extent to which the difference between the GISS and HadCRUT analyses is due to the data interpolation and extrapolation that occurs in the GISS analysis. The GISS analysis assigns a temperature anomaly to many gridboxes that do not contain measurement data, specifically all gridboxes located within 1200 km of one or more stations that do have defined temperature anomalies.
The rationale for this aspect of the GISS analysis is based on the fact that temperature anomaly patterns tend to be large scale. For example, if it is an unusually cold winter in New York, it is probably unusually cold in Philadelphia too. This fact suggests that it may be better to assign a temperature anomaly based on the nearest stations for a gridbox that contains no observing stations, rather than excluding that gridbox from the global analysis. Tests of this assumption are described in our papers referenced below.
Figure 4. Global surface temperature anomalies relative to 1961‐1990 base period for three cases: HadCRUT, GISS, and GISS anomalies limited to the HadCRUT area. [To obtain consistent time series for the HadCRUT and GISS global means, monthly results were averaged over regions with defined temperature anomalies within four latitude zones (90N‐25N, 25N‐Equator, Equator‐25S, 25S‐90S); the global average then weights these zones by the true area of the full zones, and the annual means are based on those monthly global means.]
Figure 4 shows time series of global temperature for the GISS and HadCRUT analyses, as well as for the GISS analysis masked to the HadCRUT data region. This figure reveals that the differences that have developed between the GISS and HadCRUT global temperatures during the past few decades are due primarily to the extension of the GISS analysis into regions that are excluded from the HadCRUT analysis. The GISS and HadCRUT results are similar during this period, when the analyses are limited to exactly the same area. The GISS analysis also finds 1998 as the warmest year, if analysis is limited to the masked area. The question then becomes: how valid are the extrapolations and interpolation in the GISS analysis? If the temperature anomaly scale is adjusted such that the global mean anomaly is zero, the patterns of warm and cool regions have realistic‐looking meteorological patterns, providing qualitative support for the data extensions. However, we would like a quantitative measure of the uncertainty in our estimate of the global temperature anomaly caused by the fact that the spatial distribution of measurements is incomplete. One way to estimate that uncertainty, or possible error, can be obtained via use of the complete time series of global surface temperature data generated by a global climate model that has been demonstrated to have realistic spatial and temporal variability of surface temperature. We can sample this data set at only the locations where measurement stations exist, use this sub‐sample of data to estimate global temperature change with the GISS analysis method, and compare the result with the “perfect” knowledge of global temperature provided by the data at all gridpoints.
| 1880‐1900 | 1900‐1950 | 1960‐2008 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meteorological Stations | 0.2 | 0.15 | 0.08 |
| Land‐Ocean Index | 0.08 | 0.05 | 0.05 |
Table 1. Two‐sigma error estimate versus period for meteorological stations and land‐ocean index.
Table 1 shows the derived error due to incomplete coverage of stations. As expected, the error was larger at early dates when station coverage was poorer. Also the error is much larger when data are available only from meteorological stations, without ship or satellite measurements for ocean areas. In recent decades the 2‐sigma uncertainty (95 percent confidence of being within that range, ~2‐3 percent chance of being outside that range in a specific direction) has been about 0.05°C. The incomplete coverage of stations is the primary cause of uncertainty in comparing nearby years, for which the effect of more systematic errors such as urban warming is small.
Additional sources of error become important when comparing temperature anomalies separated by longer periods. The most well‐known source of long‐term error is “urban warming”, human‐made local warming caused by energy use and alterations of the natural environment. Various other errors affecting the estimates of long‐term temperature change are described comprehensively in a large number of papers by Tom Karl and his associates at the NOAA National Climate Data Center. The GISS temperature analysis corrects for urban effects by adjusting the long‐term trends of urban stations to be consistent with the trends at nearby rural stations, with urban locations identified either by population or satellite‐observed night lights. In a paper in preparation we demonstrate that the population and night light approaches yield similar results on global average. The additional error caused by factors other than incomplete spatial coverage is estimated to be of the order of 0.1°C on time scales of several decades to a century, this estimate necessarily being partly subjective. The estimated total uncertainty in global mean temperature anomaly with land and ocean data included thus is similar to the error estimate in the first line of Table 1, i.e., the error due to limited spatial coverage when only meteorological stations are included.
Now let’s consider whether we can specify a rank among the recent global annual temperatures, i.e., which year is warmest, second warmest, etc. Figure 1a shows 2009 as the second warmest year, but it is so close to 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 that we must declare these years as being in a virtual tie as the second warmest year. The maximum difference among these in the GISS analysis is ~0.03°C (2009 being the warmest among those years and 2006 the coolest). This range is approximately equal to our 1‐sigma uncertainty of ~0.025°C, which is the reason for stating that these five years are tied for second warmest.
The year 2005 is 0.061°C warmer than 1998 in our analysis. So how certain are we that 2005 was warmer than 1998? Given the standard deviation of ~0.025°C for the estimated error, we can estimate the probability that 1998 was warmer than 2005 as follows. The chance that 1998 is 0.025°C warmer than our estimated value is about (1 – 0.68)/2 = 0.16. The chance that 2005 is 0.025°C cooler than our estimate is also 0.16. The probability of both of these is ~0.03 (3 percent). Integrating over the tail of the distribution and accounting for the 2005‐1998 temperature difference being 0.61°C alters the estimate in opposite directions. For the moment let us just say that the chance that 1998 is warmer than 2005, given our temperature analysis, is at most no more than about 10 percent. Therefore, we can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that 2005 is the warmest year in the period of instrumental data.
Figure 5. (a) global map of December 2009 anomaly, (b) global map of Jun‐Jul‐Aug 2009 anomaly. #4 and #2 indicate that December 2009 and JJA are the 4th and 2nd warmest globally for those periods.
What about the claim that the Earth’s surface has been cooling over the past decade? That issue can be addressed with a far higher degree of confidence, because the error due to incomplete spatial coverage of measurements becomes much smaller when averaged over several years. The 2‐sigma error in the 5‐year running‐mean temperature anomaly shown in Figure 2, is about a factor of two smaller than the annual mean uncertainty, thus 0.02‐0.03°C. Given that the change of 5‐year‐mean global temperature anomaly is about 0.2°C over the past decade, we can conclude that the world has become warmer over the past decade, not cooler.
Why are some people so readily convinced of a false conclusion, that the world is really experiencing a cooling trend? That gullibility probably has a lot to do with regional short‐term temperature fluctuations, which are an order of magnitude larger than global average annual anomalies. Yet many lay people do understand the distinction between regional short‐term anomalies and global trends. For example, here is comment posted by “frogbandit” at 8:38p.m. 1/6/2010 on City Bright blog:
“I wonder about the people who use cold weather to say that the globe is cooling. It forgets that global warming has a global component and that its a trend, not an everyday thing. I hear people down in the lower 48 say its really cold this winter. That ain’t true so far up here in Alaska. Bethel, Alaska, had a brown Christmas. Here in Anchorage, the temperature today is 31[ºF]. I can’t say based on the fact Anchorage and Bethel are warm so far this winter that we have global warming. That would be a really dumb argument to think my weather pattern is being experienced even in the rest of the United States, much less globally.”
What frogbandit is saying is illustrated by the global map of temperature anomalies in December 2009 (Figure 5a). There were strong negative temperature anomalies at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, as great as ‐8°C in Siberia, averaged over the month. But the temperature anomaly in the Arctic was as great as +7°C. The cold December perhaps reaffirmed an impression gained by Americans from the unusually cool 2009 summer. There was a large region in the United States and Canada in June‐July‐August with a negative temperature anomaly greater than 1°C, the largest negative anomaly on the planet.
Figure 6. Arctic Oscillation (AO) Index. Positive values of the AO index indicate high low pressure in the polar region and thus a tendency for strong zonal winds that minimize cold air outbreaks to middle latitudes. Blue dots are monthly means and the red curve is the 60‐month (5‐year) running mean.
How do these large regional temperature anomalies stack up against an expectation of, and the reality of, global warming? How unusual are these regional negative fluctuations? Do they have any relationship to global warming? Do they contradict global warming?
It is obvious that in December 2009 there was an unusual exchange of polar and mid‐latitude air in the Northern Hemisphere. Arctic air rushed into both North America and Eurasia, and, of course, it was replaced in the polar region by air from middle latitudes. The degree to which Arctic air penetrates into middle latitudes is related to the Arctic Oscillation (AO) index, which is defined by surface atmospheric pressure patterns and is plotted in Figure 6. When the AO index is positive surface pressure is high low in the polar region. This helps the middle latitude jet stream to blow strongly and consistently from west to east, thus keeping cold Arctic air locked in the polar region. When the AO index is negative there tends to be low high pressure in the polar region, weaker zonal winds, and greater movement of frigid polar air into middle latitudes.
Figure 6 shows that December 2009 was the most extreme negative Arctic Oscillation since the 1970s. Although there were ten cases between the early 1960s and mid 1980s with an AO index more extreme than ‐2.5, there were no such extreme cases since then until last month. It is no wonder that the public has become accustomed to the absence of extreme blasts of cold air.
Figure 7. Temperature anomaly from GISS analysis and AO index from NOAA National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center. United States mean refers to the 48 contiguous states.
Figure 7 shows the AO index with greater temporal resolution for two 5‐year periods. It is obvious that there is a high degree of correlation of the AO index with temperature in the United States, with any possible lag between index and temperature anomaly less than the monthly temporal resolution. Large negative anomalies, when they occur, are usually in a winter month. Note that the January 1977 temperature anomaly, mainly located in the Eastern United States, was considerably stronger than the December 2009 anomaly. [There is nothing magic about a 31 day window that coincides with a calendar month, and it could be misleading. It may be more informative to look at a 30‐day running mean and at the Dec‐Jan‐Feb means for the AO index and temperature anomalies.]
The AO index is not so much an explanation for climate anomaly patterns as it is a simple statement of the situation. However, John (Mike) Wallace and colleagues have been able to use the AO description to aid consideration of how the patterns may change as greenhouse gases increase. A number of papers, by Wallace, David Thompson, and others, as well as by Drew Shindell and others at GISS, have pointed out that increasing carbon dioxide causes the stratosphere to cool, in turn causing on average a stronger jet stream and thus a tendency for a more positive Arctic Oscillation. Overall, Figure 6 shows a tendency in the expected sense. The AO is not the only factor that might alter the frequency of Arctic cold air outbreaks. For example, what is the effect of reduced Arctic sea ice on weather patterns? There is not enough empirical evidence since the rapid ice melt of 2007. We conclude only that December 2009 was a highly anomalous month and that its unusual AO can be described as the “cause” of the extreme December weather.
We do not find a basis for expecting frequent repeat occurrences. On the contrary. Figure 6 does show that month‐to‐month fluctuations of the AO are much larger than its long term trend. But temperature change can be caused by greenhouse gases and global warming independent of Arctic Oscillation dynamical effects.
Figure 8. Global maps 4 season temperature anomalies for ~2009. (Note that Dec is December 2008. Base period is 1951‐1980.)
Figure 9. Global maps 4 season temperature anomaly trends for period 1950‐2009.
So let’s look at recent regional temperature anomalies and temperature trends. Figure 8 shows seasonal temperature anomalies for the past year and Figure 9 shows seasonal temperature change since 1950 based on local linear trends. The temperature scales are identical in Figures 8 and 9. The outstanding characteristic in comparing these two figures is that the magnitude of the 60 year change is similar to the magnitude of seasonal anomalies. What this is telling us is that the climate dice are already strongly loaded. The perceptive person who has been around since the 1950s should be able to notice that seasonal mean temperatures are usually greater than they were in the 1950s, although there are still occasional cold seasons.
The magnitude of monthly temperature anomalies is typically 1.5 to 2 times greater than the magnitude of seasonal anomalies. So it is not yet quite so easy to see global warming if one’s figure of merit is monthly mean temperature. And, of course, daily weather fluctuations are much larger than the impact of the global warming trend. The bottom line is this: there is no global cooling trend. For the time being, until humanity brings its greenhouse gas emissions under control, we can expect each decade to be warmer than the preceding one. Weather fluctuations certainly exceed local temperature changes over the past half century. But the perceptive person should be able to see that climate is warming on decadal time scales.
This information needs to be combined with the conclusion that global warming of 1‐2°C has enormous implications for humanity. But that discussion is beyond the scope of this note.
References:
Hansen, J.E., and S. Lebedeff, 1987: Global trends of measured surface air temperature. J. Geophys. Res., 92, 13345‐13372.
Hansen, J., R. Ruedy, J. Glascoe, and Mki. Sato, 1999: GISS analysis of surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 104, 30997‐31022.
Hansen, J.E., R. Ruedy, Mki. Sato, M. Imhoff, W. Lawrence, D. Easterling, T. Peterson, and T. Karl, 2001: A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 106, 23947‐23963.
Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, R. Ruedy, K. Lo, D.W. Lea, and M. Medina‐Elizade, 2006: Global temperature change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 103, 14288‐14293.
Hank (739), thanks for your accuweather link concerning the Pine Island Glacier. I have been surprised that there has been no comment about the brief report on the PIG in the January 22nd issue of Science. This is not a paper, but a news report from the AGU meeting. As I read it, the PIG has detatched from its submerged grounding line ridge. That would seem to be serious, since there is a 250 km basin behind the ridge, which is now receiving warmer water. The link is here:
http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/AGU-2009-briefs-Kerr2.pdf
Polar ice study results coming, read some reports and watch for the conclusions
CFU@745 “What? Did you expect the line to straighten out like pulling on a wrinkled sheet or something???”
actually if you look at the graph of US temperature [not anomolies] Bill linked, it does exactly straighten out when “pulled on”, with the long term mean dead flat – your response isn’t very helpful to his request for understanding – nor is Ken’s I think, judging by Bills response to that – makes me curious too, just how that 110 year record of [October?] yearly temps relates to the “big picture”
Bill (749) wrote:
“Can I conclude that the contiguous USA has not warmed on average,over the last 100+ years, but the ocean has?”
Here’s a good analysis at a laymans level:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998.htm
Bill says: 5 February 2010 at 2:59 PM
“Thanks for the explanation, thats clearer for me. Can I conclude that the contiguous USA has not warmed on average,over the last 100+ years, but the ocean has?”
No, not really, but you can conclude that we’re borrowing time from the ocean but just like Citibank it’s not going to be infinitely patient when it comes to payback. Eventually the word will come back “Transaction declined.” Expect reminder notices first.
Bill : “Can I conclude that the contiguous USA has not warmed on average,over the last 100+ years, but the ocean has ?”
You can conclude that the globe has, Bill.
A denier/skeptic asked me WHY 1934 was so warm? After perusing this forum and US meteorological sites I am still unable to explain why. Would someone fill me in please, mark
> 751
Thank you Ron Taylor.
Yeek! That link points to a page from the “Newsfocus” of
http://www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 327, 22 JANUARY 2010 reporting a presentation at the recent AGU on work done a year ago. Was this reported elsewhere earlier?
—excerpt follows—
“… An unmanned autonomous submarine has discovered a sea-floor ridge that may have been the last hope for stopping the now-accelerating retreat of the Pine Island Glacier, a crumbling keystone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ridge appears to have once protected the glacier, but no more. The submarine found the glacier floating well off the ridge and warmer, ice-melting water passing over the ridge and farther under the ice. And no survey, underwater or airborne, has found another such glacier-preserving obstacle for the next 250 kilometers landward….
… At the meeting, glaciologist Adrian Jenkins of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and colleagues described how the instrument-laden Autosub3 cruised for 94 hours along 510 kilometers of track beneath the floating portion of the Pine Island Glacier in January 2009. The sub found a 300-meter-high ridge across the ocean cavity formed by the floating end of the glacier. Deep, warmer water was overtopping the ridge and passing through the gap between floating ice and the ridge top on its way to melting back more of the glacier. That gap has been growing, Jenkins said, perhaps since the 1970s. An aerial photograph from 1973 shows a bump in the ice where the ridge is now known to be, suggesting that the ice was then resting on the ridge and no warmer water could have been getting through….”
I just ran a linear regression of continental USA (NASA GISS) temperature anomalies for 1880-2008. The regression equation was:
Anom = -10.2973 + 0.005332 Year
with R^2 = 18%. The coefficient on the Year term was significant (t = 5.21) at well beyond the 99.9% confidence level.
So it bleeding well HAS warmed, and significantly. Not as fast as the rest of the globe, but the trend is UP. Real, significant, and up.
For the benefit of us ‘non-experts’ is that the same as using : ‘Data used to calculate Contiguous United States mean temperatures are from the USHCN version 2 data set’.? Thanks
Bill, it’s the same as “any complex and varying picture will over small areas suitably selected, show whatever conclusion you’d like to see.
Why ask about US only temperatures? Are you going to end up saying “well, it doesn’t matter if the world burns up, God is protecting the US!”?
mark conley says: 8 February 2010 at 6:41 PM
“A denier/skeptic asked me WHY 1934 was so warm? ”
That’s an old one. 1934 is the warmest year on record in the contiguous United States, comprising some 2% of the globe.
The answer is variability, as always. But the audience for that infection is not supposed to think about context, they’re supposed to go away thinking only “wow, 1934 was the warmest year” with no further understanding. Getting stuck on “why” is key to making sure the infection is planted in the mind of the audience.
See here for more details of how this misunderstanding was created:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/1934-and-all-that/
http://www.skepticalscience.com/1934-hottest-year-on-record.htm
[Response: Yes, yes…. but. It is still an interesting question. What controls annual temperature in the US? ENSO? amount of winter snowpack? soil moisture anomalies? It doesn’t have to be a climate driver, but maybe there are particular things that helped make a randomly warm year into a scorcher – what was the state of the dust bowl? (and the answer is not Oklahoma), what were black carbon emissions like? (the peak in the greenland ice cores is around this time) , what about the North Pacific SST? etc. Maybe someone can go back and see what they thought at the time? – gavin]
Re: #747
Ray,
You wrote “I do not accept this.”
I understand. It’s not easy to accept.
However, if we are honest we don’t simply follow the science to happy places, we follow the science where it leads. An honest appraisal of what we know about climate science today is that the ice sheets will destabilize, and that process is likely already underway.
Thus, we cannot avoid the “risk” of higher sea levels. We should, if we’re honest, accept that “risk” as “highly likely to be unavoidable.”
All I can say is, we have to separate emotion from rationality.
Now, as to your concept of slowing things down to buy time, that brings us back around to the other unavoidable truth, and this will also address CFU, who chose not to deal with the reality of my observation about mass behavior:
There are zero examples in human history of mass voluntary change to a less efficient, more expensive behavior,
[Response: Not true. What about the switch from leaded petrol? seatbelts? breast milk to bottle in the 1970s (admittedly not a good idea), deli coffee to Starbucks in the 1990s? – gavin]
and certainly the odds of getting that change out of humanity when it deals with such a vital aspect of behavior: Access to energy, must be even worse.
We can talk about war rationing, except we have utterly failed to frame AGW in such a “win or lose” manner, and I’m sure we will never succeed at trying to.
The steady dripdripdrip of CO2 increases, which is at the heart of it all, is too obscure to react to. That’s just the fact of it.
So combine those two things: 1) we are past the tipping point for destabilization and headed the wrong way; 2) mass human behavior change with regard to energy consumption is not subject to immediate change, and we are where we are.
That’s just the way of it.
“What controls annual temperature in the US? ENSO? amount of winter snowpack? soil moisture anomalies? It doesn’t have to be a climate driver, but maybe there are particular things that helped make a randomly warm year into a scorcher – what was the state of the dust bowl? (and the answer is not Oklahoma), what were black carbon emissions like? (the peak in the greenland ice cores is around this time) , what about the North Pacific SST? etc. Maybe someone can go back and see what they thought at the time? – gavin]”
Fair enough and here’s a cool paper speaking mostly to drought but with some very interesting paleo and model insights:
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/pub/cook/Cook_etal_2007.pdf
Hank (758), thanks for picking up on the Pine Island Glacier report. I tried to draw attention to it on another thread, but failed. The apparent loss of the grounding ridge would seem to have enormous implications for the future of West Antarctica. Its “weak underbelly” seems to be collapsing. It would explain the 4x acceleration of the glacier in the past few years.
Re: 762
There was a dramatic reduction (~30%) in sulfur dioxide output from 1930-1932 in the US associated with the reduction of coal use at the beginning Great Depression. http://capita.wustl.edu/CAPITA/CapitaReports/GlobSEmissions/GlobS1850_1990.htm
Re: #763
Gavin,
The threshold we would have to be looking for in those examples would have to come somewhere close to what is being asked of humanity today. Seitching to unleaded added a few cents a gallon and you only had to do it on newer cars. You could keep your old care and burn leaded. Same with seatbelts. Manufacturers installed them when ordered to, and it was not a very big deal to ask car riders to use them. Certainly it was not “more expense for less efficiency”; in fact, the numbers supported that it was an easy way to make your ride safer.
I’m sure that you and I basically agree on the enormity of the task, and I say again there is no example on record of humans behaving in such a way.
Other than in times of war.
> somewhere close to what is being asked
There’s what you’re afraid of, Walt? That something’s being asked that will cost us here and now in the short run and benefit someone else later, eh?
What’s being asked is that we make the change to _not_wasting_resources_.
Simple as that. What’s new is that we can actually be aware of our impacts and the wasteful result of “business as usual” — and the benefits of acting smarter.
It does not seem unreasonable to say that the recent surge of activity in the doubter camp as set newspaper coverage of climate change back a fair distance.
Take this article about “snowpocalypse” in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/science/earth/11climate.html?hp
All of a sudden there’s a resurgence of tit-for-tat as reporters feel compelled to press their thumbs on the uncalibrated scale of “balance”.
As Ray and others say, the facts don’t care. Unfortunately by extending all this dithering we’ll be manufacturing even more facts than we want or need.
Re: #768
Hank,
When you use words such as “afraid” I understand that you aren’t paying any attention at all to what I’m saying nor to climate reality.
If we believe what we’ve been told, we are past the tipping point for ice sheet destabilization. As evidenced by the last 20 years of efforts to get humans to care about this and make difficult, expensive, radical changes in their relationship with energy, we are going to continue to do those things, for the foreseeable future.
I could easily turn your question around: What makes you (and so many others) afraid to face these bare, irrefutable facts?
“When you use words such as “afraid” I understand that you aren’t paying any attention at all to what I’m saying nor to climate reality.”
If you think what you’ve been saying is climate reality, it seems like YOU aren’t paying any attention to what you’re saying either.
“I could easily turn your question around: What makes you (and so many others) afraid to face these bare, irrefutable facts?”
you’d have to come up with some irrefutable facts and where they’ve been ignored first.
Walt, the committed warming now much less than it will become if we go on with business as usual.
You still have time to stop indulging yourself before you make thing much worse for your grandchildren.
Don’t you understand what you’re throwing away?
Time. The time to adapt. You’re pushing the rate of change faster and faster and that’s always something you can stop doing.
Walt asks:”As evidenced by the last 20 years of efforts to get humans to care about this and make difficult, expensive, radical changes in their relationship with energy, we are going to continue to do those things, for the foreseeable future.
I could easily turn your question around: What makes you (and so many others) afraid to face these bare, irrefutable facts?”
Trying to get people to make these changes requires something I like to call leadership. You are right to point out that we have not seen much of this in the past 20 years (and hence have reason to “fear” more of the same), that is no reason to give up. The consequences are too severe.
For anyone new to the subject, here’s the key information–this is the point people focused on their own immediate comfort don’t want to think about.
We know the end point depends on the total carbon burned.
Above, you see the leap from denial-one (nothing we do could cause a problem so we can keep burning carbon) to denial-two (it’s certainly too late for anything we do to make a difference so we can go on as we were) — the mark of greed is the people who can do this with no intervening period of concern or responsibility for the result.
What they ignore is the rate of change, which they can still push faster and faster by continuing to burn carbon carelessly.
You can find this explained many places. Here’s one:
https://regtransfers-sth-se.diino.com/download/f.thompson/migrated_data/EandH/nature08019.pdf
—-excerpt—-
LETTERS
Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions
towards the trillionth tonne
Myles R. Allen, David J. Frame1,, Chris Huntingford, Chris D. Jones, Jason A. Lowe, Malte Meinshausen, & Nicolai Meinshausen
Global efforts to mitigate climate change are guided by projections
of future temperatures(1). But the eventual equilibrium global mean
temperature associated with a given stabilization level of atmo-
spheric greenhouse gas concentrations remains uncertain(1–3),
complicating the setting of stabilization targets to avoid poten-
tially dangerous levels of global warming(4–8). Similar problems
apply to the carbon cycle: observations currently provide only a
weak constraint on the response to future emissions(9–11). Here we
use ensemble simulations of simple climate-carbon-cycle models
constrained by observations and projections from more compre-
hensive models to simulate the temperature response to a broad
range of carbon dioxide emission pathways. We find that the peak
warming caused by a given cumulative carbon dioxide emission is
better constrained than the warming response to a stabilization
scenario. Furthermore, the relationship between cumulative
emissions and peak warming is remarkably insensitive to the emis-
sion pathway (timing of emissions or peak emission rate). Hence
policy targets based on limiting cumulative emissions of carbon
dioxide are likely to be more robust to scientific uncertainty
than emission-rate or concentration targets….
Walt, do you hear more and louder screaming from a toddler being towed away from the shiny they’re currently interested in, or when they’re not interested in the shiny?
AGW denialists are toddlers screaming about their toys. As long as it looks like screaming will get them their toys back, they’ll do it. And giving in just makes them more determined to scream louder next time.
And, if you wish, take into account the hack of the CRU emails. Since then you would EXPECT more noise and, since people often let others do the thinking for them, and the theft IS news after all, you would expect some fence-sitters to move away.
So how significant is the change seen?
Could it be explained with the media push to throw a controversy out there?
It’s not unlikely, is it.
Walt Bennett,
A very relevant example of a voluntary switch in behavior:
http://www.lbl.gov/publicinfo/newscenter/features/2008/EETD-alaska.html
I’d call savings of 40% in a little over a month pretty significant.
Re: #772
Hank,
Listen to yourself. You keep talking as though it will make any difference.
Do you really think the problem is that we haven’t talked about it enough yet?
You, or somebody, is going to have to come up with a way that humanity can change mass behavior in ways that they never have before.
I submit to you that you have yet to do that. You keep engaging in these zero sum assertions that the other side simply ignores.
What’s your next move?
Re: #773
t.p.,
There is no doubt that reason, logic and morality lie on the side of those who want to slow GHG emissions. My point is, So what? Who’s listening? Who’s making changes? Who is even slowing down the growth in their emissions?
For all of China’s efforts, and they are quickly becoming world leaders, they will still emit more GHGs each year than the year before for the foreseeable future, as will almost every industrialized nation, barring things like massive economic contraction.
Yes, alternatives are coming online. Probably in 20 or 30 years we will be much less dependent on fossil fuels.
The question before us would seem to be: How can we make rapid, radical changes so as to avert loss of ice mass leading to higher sea levels? In other words, how much effort, expense and change, how soon?
Give me a straight answer.
It’s impossible.
If we are to believe the science, it’s probably already too late, but just in case it’s not, we really have to make massive changes now.
Well, look around you.
I could rest my case right there.
So either we start admitting what inning we’re in, or else this is all just wasted time while the changes go right on happening.
People are so confused. Trying to make something out of all this snow, other than the obvious: Warmer and moister air has a lot more energy, as we’ve been saying for years. These storms are in fact capable of being due to global warming, and it’s not even difficult to grasp.
And yet people are confused. In 2010. Four years after AIT. 22 years after Hansen Goes To Congress.
You get my ten foot snowdrift, pal?
It’s over. They won.
What’s the new plan?
Re: #774
Hank,
What you call a “leap” brings to mind a very short trip.
Nothing could be less true.
These two forces have been battling it out for decades, and the fact is that from a policy standpoint they have forced a stalemate, and as we all know, that means the BAU scenario did in fact unfold, well past the year 2000, and likely will for a few more decades.
Please slow down and think about what you write, and it would behoove you to spend a little more time thinking about where we are and how we got here.
Your dismissiveness courts humiliation, and I say that to you only as a proxy for the much larger group of those who continue to deny reality.
Warmers, in many ways, have become the deniers.
Re: #775
CFU,
There is so much blame to go around, isn’t there? The media, for sure, paid lobbyists, for sure, heads of oil companies and coal companies and so forth, people who are too lazy to learn and instead rely on biased sources of information…
Interesting discussion. It all comes down to…mud.
We’re good at creating mud. Then we like to wallow in it.
Call deniers toddlers if you like. Warmers are not necessarily more mature, nor more honest. When scientists get sucked into policy debates, the whole discussion quickly turns to mud.
Lots and lots of mud.
Re: #776
Ray,
I agree that innovation can take place on certain scales, especially under specific conditions.
So, one plan would be to blow up all the generating plants and then insist that they be replaced by cleaner sources.
As I said, if we turned this into a war, there would be a chance to make quick, massive changes.
My point, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is that talking about it has gotten us nowhere, and there is no way to honestly assert, anymore, that we can hold things down to what the scientists say we must.
There’s just no way.
Walt Bennett said: “Call deniers toddlers if you like. Warmers are not necessarily more mature, nor more honest. When scientists get sucked into policy debates, the whole discussion quickly turns to mud.”
Walt, that is nihilism. There are people who are right on the facts, and there are people who are wrong on the facts, whether through ignorance or willfull misrepresentation. The two groups are in no way equivalent.
Re; #781
Ron,
If you believe that, and I’m sure you do, then you are naive.
And you drink Kool-Aid as much as the deniers do.
Both camps have a ton of dirty laundry. At this minute you are being lied to as much by the “solutions” camp as you are by the denier camp.
I hope you learn to understand that.
Sorry Walt, but I think you are nuts. I believe what I said. At age 72, and having worked and lived in a number of different cultures, I have seen pretty much everything, so am hardly naive. But I do think there is an inherent level of integrity in the self-correcting nature of the scientific process. Do individual scientists ever lie or make mistakes? Of course. But I have great trust in consistent conclusions from multiple independent lines of evidence that stand up over time. If you can’t bedlieve that, then you can’t believe anything.
And, by the way, it is easy to demonstrate the egregious lies of the knowledgeable deniers. I have never seen anything of the kind among climate scientists who support AGW.
> You keep talking as though it will make any difference.
Talking, I do in my spare time, between getting things done.
Nothing any one person can do will make any difference.
Everything we do makes the difference.
How do you want it to come out?
Ray posts a great link to a great example above of smart behavior choices.
Brief excerpt follows:
How do you save electricity in a hurry? One way to do it is to call in Berkeley Lab scientist Alan Meier, who wrote the book Saving Electricity in a Hurry while on leave to the International Energy Agency.
“… countries can quickly reduce electricity consumption without harming the economy as much as blackouts or unplanned curtailments. The strategies are diverse, unique and often surprisingly cheap. They include mass media campaigns — where a good joke can save a megawatt — improvements in equipment efficiency, and quickly adjusting electricity prices.”
“Call deniers toddlers if you like.”
I didn’t need your permission, but thanks anyway.
” Warmers are not necessarily more mature, nor more honest.”
Yes they are. Whether they *necessarily* are I can’t say, but they are more mature and more honest.
Have a look at monckton’s rants and compare with Michael Mann’s. They’re about the same position within the anti-science and pro-science groups.
PS what does all that guff about AIT have to do with anything???
“Warmers, in many ways, have become the deniers.”
Well since you haven’t given anything to deny except your unsubstantiated toddler rant, what is there to *be* denied?
781 Walt Bennett wrote: “My point, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is that talking about it has gotten us nowhere, and there is no way to honestly assert, anymore, that we can hold things down to what the scientists say we must.
There’s just no way.”
I believe that you’re wrong. I believe we are moving in the right direction and that we will get there. Just to show that I put my money where my mouth is:
I’ll bet you $100 that by the end of 2015 we’ll have 100GW of installed wind power capacity.
Re: #784
Ron,
Scientists, for the most part, do honest work.
Where has their honest work gotten us on AGW? Not too far. People are more confused than ever.
If you insist that the only reason for that is that deniers lie, then you are oversimplifying and yes, naive.
The solutions business has always looked for ways to make the most alarmist claims. Politicians do the same. The Left is as interested in your business as the Right is, they just want you for different reasons.
And they’ll both tell you anything to convince you.
More equivalency? One wants to radically disrupt society to save the planet, the other wants to leave society alone at the possible expense of the planet.
Today, in 2010, if you can assure me that one path is more moral than the other, let’s have that discussion.
Re: #785
Hank,
How I “want it to come out” is irrelevant.
That’s my point. An open-eyes gaze upon the landscape may be harsh and may be frightening, but I prefer to continuing to lie and deny.
Re: #787
My snark detector went off, please be careful.
You can pick one denier and one warmer and make your point.
I can do the same and make mine.
Re: #788
Denialism is rampant in the warmer camp.
If you follow the narrative from 2006 til today, we’ve missed every target.
So what do they do? Move the target.
You’re going to let them keep getting away with that?
Walt Bennett says, “So, one plan would be to blow up all the generating plants and then insist that they be replaced by cleaner sources.”
Well, or you could save a whole lot of C-4 and just raise the price charge per kW-hr. I think that is the difference, Walt. I’m not a bomb-thrower.
I also think that it’s unlikely we’ll hold CO2 levels down below dangerous levels. However, perhaps we can hold them below catastrophic levels. And perhaps we can buy time by slowing the rate of growth–because right now time is what we need. There are no viable, validated geo-engineering schemes. None. All I’m saying is that since we have none and it will take time to build some–how much, we know not–then maybe it makes sense to quit digging or at least dig a lot more slowly.
I think the experience in Juneau shows that it’s possible to live just fine on a whole lot less energy. Europe already does it. So does much of Asia. There is a whole lot of low-hanging fruit. By all means let’s look into geo-engineering, but let’s try and buy ourselves time to do so by harvesting that low-hanging fruit and conserving NOW.
Re: #794
Ray,
I don’t disagree with a word you’re saying, except to note that it’s not happening and it’s not likely to happen.
So, let’s talk about what’s real.
Re: #794
Ray,
To elaborate, I fully encourage a migration to cleaner fuels, especially if they can reach a point of being economically consistent with current methods of creating and supplying energy.
I believe we ought to be inventing a new national electric grid. I believe we ought to provide strong tax incentives for oil companies to become energy companies and invest in future technologies.
But keep in mind, mistakes have been made. Using corn for ethanol turns out to be a real bad plan. So we need to make sure we don’t incentivize a new approach that actually creates problems of its own.
Speed is the enemy of thoroughness. If we move too fast we can make matters worse.
So, it’s tricky.
And if we jack up the price of oil with no access to a better way to spend the money, all we do in the short term is create intolerable social conditions.
Speed is the enemy of thoroughness.
Unfortunately, we are in the late innings of the game, and everybody wants speed. I assure you that we will not change the law: If we go too fast we can really, really mess things up.
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
David Brin puts it quite well:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/2/9/835542/-The-Real-Struggle-Behind-Climate-ChangeA-War-on-Expertise
—excerpt follows—-
“… all the major recommended actions to deal with Global Climate Change are things we should be doing, anyway.
That’s the most bizarre aspect. I’d listen patiently to GGC Deniers and strive to answer their endlessly refurbished narratives, if they would only say the following first:
“Okay, I’ll admit we need more efficiency and sustainability, desperately, in order to regain energy independence, improve productivity, erase the huge leverage of hostile foreign petro-powers, reduce pollution, secure our defense, and ease a vampiric drain on our economy. Waste-not and a-penny-saved and cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness used to be good conservative attitudes. And so, for those reasons alone, let’s join together and make a big (and genuine*) push for efficiency.
“Oh, and by the way, I don’t believe in Global Climate Change, but these measures would also help deal with that too.
“There, are you happy? Now, as gentlemen, and more in a spirit of curiosity than polemics, can we please corner some atmospheric scientists and force them into an extended teach-in, to answer some inconvenient questions?”
When I meet a conservative who says all that (and I have), I am all kisses and flowers. And so will be all the atmospheres guys I know. That kind of statement is logical, patriotic and worthy of respect. It deserves eye-to-eye answers.”
—–end excerpt——
Ya know, I wish Brin and the Contributors and other climate and science and science-fiction bloggers would collaborate on a single list somewhere, for people who’d sign up for his program as stated there.
It’d be real progress.
Walt, I read your earlier posts and was surprised at how much I agreed with. Yes, I agree that not much has changed, or is likely to change for the next few years. But when sea level rise really begins to take off, when temperatures resume their rapid climb, when severe weather conditions can no longer be ignored, then the process of change will also take off in an exponential way. It is the old business of being able to fool part of the people all the time and all the people…you know.
You are assuming that public psychology will remain more or less fixed. I think you are in for a big surprise.
For some people, a picture may be more effective than text.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_2fgn3xZDtkI/S3OxtwJPGPI/AAAAAAAACy0/AgETNf-2F_k/s1600/MillionaireSTRIP(web).jpg
Doable, and affordable:
http://islandpress.org/bookstore/details.php?prod_id=1992
Climate 2030
National Blueprint for a Clean Energy Economy
03/01/2010; Publisher: Union of Concerned Scientists
212 p. 8 x 10; ISBN: 9780938987086
“… Among the solutions modeled are increased energy efficiency, greater contributions from renewable energy, increased vehicle efficiency, increased investment in research, development and deployment of existing and new low carbon technologies, smart growth incentives and the implementation of an economywide cap-and-trade program.
The analysis shows that the technologies and policies pursued under the Blueprint produce dramatic changes in energy use and cuts in carbon emissions. It also shows that consumers and businesses reap significant savings on their energy bills, while the economy continues to grow robustly.”