kate said - January 4th, 2009

A friend emailed me this HuffPo article Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted by Harold Ambler, which I could not wait until morning to refute. Or rather, find the scientific refutations and quote them.

In point form:

- It’s all a big lie: Actually, the science is in. “Global warming is not an output of computer models; it is a conclusion based on observations of a great many global indicators.” (grist.org has a list of indicators with links to observational data), not just in the conclusions from the IPCC (I’ll get to the challenge on the methodology in a minute), and ALL the international organizations that support their findings.

In a review of studies published in peer-reviewed journals on the subject of climate change, none were found to dispute its validity. ”The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.” as reported in Science Magazine, 2004.

- Semantics of the term ‘Climate Change’ and the ‘Mann Hockey-Stick’ controversy: Yes, the climate is always a-chagin’. But. (from grist.org)

"Noting that something happened before without humans does not demonstrate that humans are not causing it today.
For example, we see in ice core records from Antarctica and Greenland that the world cycled in and out of glacial periods over 120Kyr cycles. That climate cycle's timing is fairly well understood to be caused by changes in the orbit of the earth, though the mechanism behind the response has not been conclusively established. These orbital cycles are regular and predictable and they are definitely not the cause of today's warming. The other important difference between the glacial-interglacial cycles and today is the rapidity of the current change. The rate of warming is on the order of 10 times faster today than in the ice cores.
Such rapid warming on a global scale is quite rare in the geological record, and while it may not be entirely unprecedented, there is strong evidence that whenever such a change has happened, whatever the cause, it was a catastrophic event for the biosphere".

And the hockey stick thing – (read about the controversy in depth here), but what you need to know is “there are dozens of other temperature reconstructions. They tend to show more variability than the original hockey stick (their sticks are not as straight), but they all support the general conclusions the IPCC TAR presented in 2001: late 20th century warming is anomalous in the last one or two thousand years, and the 1990s were likely warmer than any other time in that period.” (from link cited above, 2006).

- CO2 follows temperature, rather than leads: I recommend this article from realclimate.org (2007) for the full scientific explanation, but basically, CO2 acts as an amplifier once a warming event has taken place, exaggerating the effect and producing a feedback loop. "The greenhouse gases are best regarded as a biogeochemical feedback, initiated by the orbital variations, but then feeding back to amplify the warming once it is already underway. By the way, the lag of CO2 of about 1000 years corresponds rather closely to the expected time it takes to flush excess respiration-derived CO2 out of the deep ocean via natural ocean currents. So the lag is quite close to what would be expected, if CO2 were acting as a feedback."

- Water Vapour makes a way bigger difference: “Atmospheric levels of water vapor, (...) cannot be directly controlled by people; rather, they are determined by temperatures. The warmer the atmosphere, the more water vapor it can hold. As a result, water vapor is part of an amplifying effect. Greenhouse gases like CO2 warm the air, which in turn adds to the stock of water vapor, which in turn traps more heat and accelerates warming. Scientists know this because of satellite measurements documenting a rise in water vapor concentrations as the globe has warmed.
The best way to lower temperature and thus reduce water vapor levels is to reduce CO2 emissions.” from the Environmental Defense Fund

- The Counter-theories – Svensmark, the Maunder Minimum, and sun spots: Svensmark’s experiment suggested that cosmic rays play a big part in cloud cover, and therefore daily weather and temperature trends. But “to show that cosmic rays were actually responsible for some part of the recent warming you would need to show that there was actually a decreasing trend in cosmic rays over recent decades - which is tricky, because there hasn't been” (which is just the last of a few complaints on the conclusion that Svensmark draws, itemized here - realclimate.org, 2006). You can read more about the problem with the ‘sun spot’ theory here.

- Climate is complicated: Yeah, it is, but it’s not the same as predicting the weather. Several models (even from days of yore) have been, over time, proven correct, the point being that modeling is possible and valid though, obviously, like all science (on anything), always imperfect. That doesn’t mean the general idea and observations (on so many, many fronts) are wrong, it just means they aren’t perfectly exact.

- Stop worrying about the Arctic, it melts and re-grows all the time: Yes, but what we have now is an ongoing loss (see this graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center), moreover, glacier patterns aren’t proof of global warming, but it “is just one piece of evidence that is consistent with global warming.” grist.org, 2006.

Sure, it feels better to say that it's a natural trend and technology will take care of us and I really like my car, and any scientifically minded person will freely acknowledge that they might be wrong. But if they're not, who wants to be the guy who screwed over everyone's grandkids because he just couldn't take the bus? (or vote for government officials who would use tax dollars to increase funding to green programmes, or support green businesses, or recycle, or or or).

Fun additional reading – debunking Wired’s weird ‘green’ science from last summer (wherein readers were told that AC took less energy that heat, endangered species were bad, and they need not be ashamed of their SUV - conclusions largely attributable to bad math, bad methodology, and, well, egotism). I was quite disappointed with them, I usually enjoy the mag. It was such a shock to see that issue.

images from www.middlebury.edu, columbia.edu, www.ehponline.org,