An Introduction to Climate Change

From Logical Science

 

(ROUGH DRAFT)

 

Goal: To simply describe what we know about the past.  The past is full of events that we know that happened.  After people understand the past they can make a judgment about the future.  This article will try to avoid making opinions of it’s own and stick to facts by merely saying who has said what.

 

The History

 

The Idea of greenhouse gases is not a new idea.  Joseph Fourier wrote a paper about greenhouse gases in 1827.  John Tyndall discussed climate change in the 1860’s.  Svente Arrhenius calculated global warming potential due to CO2 in 1896 and it’s put effect between 4-5.7 degrees Celsius.  A full timeline can be seen here and here.  There is no debate in the scientific community about the existence of greenhouse gasses even among the climate change skeptics.  And there is no debate that greenhouse gas levels are rising even among the climate change skeptics.  The general idea of climate change via greenhouse gases has been around and widely accepted by scientists for quite some time.

 

Modern Day

 

The Vostok Ice core retrieved from Vostok Station (Google map) by the Russians was our primary tool for looking at what the atmosphere was like 400,000 years ago.  As porous snow consolidates into ice, the air within it is trapped in bubbles in the ice. This process continuously preserves samples of the atmosphere.  The pockets of air trapped within the ice can be analyzed with gas chromatography or mass spectrometry.  The deeper you drill into the ice, the older the ice core is.  The concentration of greenhouse gases can then be compared to temperatures over the last 420,000 years.  In 2005 a core was dug up at Concordia station (Google map) by the French and the Italians and it has been analyzed up to 650,000 years ago.  The Japanese are hoping to expand this data to a million years with yet a third core from Dome Fuji station.  Numerous ice cores from Greenland, the Andes, the Himilayans, Tibetan plateau, mountains in equatorial Africa, and many other sites have also been retrieved and analyzed.[J1][2][3][4]  A wide variety of techniques can be used to derive the temperatures and even the amount of solar radiation hitting earth in the past.  Since this is an introductory text most of those techniques will be discussed here.  However, Ice cores can be used to calculate the temperature by measuring the concentration of the radioactive isotopes deuterium and oxygen-18.  In Antarctica a cooling of one degree Celsius results in a decrease of 9 parts per thousand in the abundance of deuterium.  This is an amount which is easy to measure.  The deuterium results can be crosschecked with the oxygen-18 as well as numerous other techniques.  Also, current CO2 levels are 26% higher than they have been in the 650,000 years preceding the industrial revolution.  The chart below shows the data collected from the Vostok ice core.  As you can see the temperature and the CO2 measurements are strongly correlated.  This 650K year old core produced results matching the Vostok ice core. 

 

 

 

The Hockey Stick

 

When temperature, global population, and CO2 content is plotted in a side by side graph there also appears to be a strong correlation.  The chart on the right  is widely accepted among climate change proponents and has been confirmed via a dozen independent models/reconstructions from different groups.  However some skeptics have spent a considerable amount of time attacking the hockey stick.  The leading skeptics of the hockey stick have had their work discredited in a peer review journal published by the American Meteorological Society.   The website www.realclimate.org is written by real climate scientists.  It has written many articles on this: Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick" Dummies guide to the latest “Hockey Stick” controversy   More advanced data can be found here: False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick Hockey sticks: Round 27 What If … the “Hockey Stick” Were Wrong? Temperature Variations in Past Centuries and the so-called "Hockey Stick"

 

The Scientific Consensus

 

While the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is in some sense a political organization because it is the brainchild of the United Nations and oversees possible responses to climate change, it is not alone in its findings.   Naomi Oreskes touts in one of her lectures that “The results of the IPCC have been affirmed by every major American scientific society with relevant expertise.” (Video; 40:18-40:57)  The following are the major scientific societies she was talking about:

 

• American Geophysical Union (AGU)
• American Meteorlogical Society (AMS)
• American Association for the advancement of Science
• U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS)

 

In addition, a paper published in the premier scientific journal Science describes a survey of peer review journals from 1993-2003 containing the words “global climate change”.  Of the 928 papers surveyed not a single paper disagreed with the scientific consensus.  Naomi Oreskes describes her paper via an op-ed in the Washington Post.^1,2

 

"We read 928 abstracts published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 and listed in the database with the keywords "global climate change."  Seventy-five percent of the papers either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view. The remaining 25 percent dealt with other facets of the subject, taking no position on whether current climate change is caused by human activity. None of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."

 

 In 2001 the Royal Society (UK) released a joint statement signed by 16 different countries which claimed the IPCC is the "world’s most reliable source of information on climate change and its causes”.  In 2005 the National Academy of Sciences' of 11 countries, including all of the G-8 countries, signed a press release affirming the IPCC's findings and urged all nations "to take prompt action to reduce the causes of climate change".

Media, Politics, and Science

 

While the general public’s infatuation with famous people can be benign, sometimes this infatuation can be exploited by those with a political agenda.  This is especially true when famous people are used as experts when they have no relevant training on the topics being discussed.  In the past Meryl Streep, an actor with a degree in drama, testified before Congress as an expert on the dangers of Alar on apples.  Her campaign was based on a report by an environmental group called the NRDC which was titled ``Intolerable Risk: Pesticides in Our Children's Food.''.  Her campaign caused a massive public uproar.  A United Nations panel which had seven World Health Organization (WHO) and seven Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) members concluded in 1989 that Alar was “not oncogenic in mice”.  The British Parliament appointed an expert panel and concluded that there was “no risk to health”.  The EPA expressed serious concerns with the NRDC’s claims against Alar.  Numerous articles were written in the premier journal Science defending Alar.  There were even studies questioning the safety of organic apple juice due to natural carcinogens from fungus. [J8]  Despite all of this, the public outcry became so great that Alar was banned.  Fourteen years later she still refers to Alar as "rocket fuel".  Ironically enough, if Meryl Streep wanted to avoid all forms of rocket fuel she would have to give up a lot of foods.  This is because apples naturally produce methanol which was used to fuel Germany’s V2 ballistic missiles and still is used to fuel Indy race cars.  Ethanol, which is found in vodka, beer, and wine, has also been used as rocket fuel. 

 

Regardless of your position on Alar, one might conclude that Congress might be more efficient with their time by only holding hearings with people that are equipped to fully understand the material they are presenting.  For instance, the sixteen year old Ryan White fully understood the material he presented before Congress regarding his experience living with HIV.  However, most drama majors simply do not have the background required to fully understand cancer research.  When in search of truth, it is often wise to avoid dramatic events that helped cause the regrettable circuses of the past.   This simple consideration should be especially important given the limited amount of time usually placed on testimony or a hearing.

 

Today a similar trend of mistaking celebrities with experts can be seen.  Sometimes the views of the celebrity roughly line up with the scientific consensus.  For instance, Fox news spent most of their time interviewing Jeffrey Nachmanoff who helped write The Day After Tomorrow during their special titled “The Heat Is On: The Case of Global Warming” yet limited their interviews with scientists to a few people measuring glaciers.

 

At other times the agenda being pushed conflicts with the opinion of every major scientific institute on the planet.  In Washington this phenomenon is truer now than ever before.  Fossil fuels are a multi-trillion dollar business and energy companies carry a lot of weight in America’s capital.  The companies carry so much weight that environmental groups have created databases such as www.exxposeexxon.com and www.exxonsecrets.org to keep track of which congressmen and scientists receive money from Exxon.  It also keeps track of which scientific journals and institutes are funded with oil money.  Countless entries on this topic have been made at www.sourcewatch.org.  Even websites such as FactCheck.org have started to address the issue.  Numerous Senators and tens of thousands of scientists believe that it is because of vested interests like Exxon that policy makers are have been choosing the advice of a celebrity over every major scientific society on the planet and even publicly denouncing major scientific institutions altogether.

 

Michael Crichton’s novel has numerous inaccuracies regarding climate change, misrepresentations of USAID’s and numerous other foreign aid organizations stance on DDT, completely overlooked problems with the long-term effectiveness of DDT vs malaria, and much more.[J8]  Despite all of these problems with his arguments, his novel is being cited by both laymen and politicians over the word of scientists.  Crichton, while certainly very well educated, garners all of this attention and power despite a complete lack of experience in a field relative to climate change and numerous false statements.  Even Senate Committees (VIDEO) are being held for Crichton and other skeptics.   A more detailed discussion of Crichton’s book and testimony can be found here.

 

These skeptics have refused to put money where their mouth is by not accepting bets with climate change proponents even when climate scientists offered the skeptics a generous 2:1 payout.  The arguably most prominent of the skeptics, despite boasting he would bet on the climate via a reason magazine interview, refused to accept a bet unless he was given 50:1 odds.  Less than a month after Katrina hit New Orleans, the Senate Committee on Environmental & Public Works held a committee to discuss the role of science in predicting and even preventing environmental disasters in the future.  The centerpiece of this meeting was Michael Crichton and his book “State of Fear”.  His book is a work of fiction that portrays scientists as using weather machines to attack the earth in order to get grant funding.  James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate committee, started the hearing with a statement that appears to denounce the very foundation of how every major scientific organization operates and then embraces a Crichton’s book. (1:30-3:00):

 

“… the three objectives I had was to set, make our decisions on sound science.  Too often there is a policy that is involved in that.  You see this type of research that gets funded by grants, discretionary grants, that get awarded.  It’s pushing people’s political agenda many times as opposed to concentrating on sound science.  I’m particularly interested in reading the testimony of Dr. Michael Crichton.” … “the book I’ve enjoyed the most is his State of Fear.  I’ve tried to say that it is required reading for this committee …”

 

Detailing the exact motivations of and the arguments provided by Inhofe and Crichton is beyond the scope of this article.  However, Senator Boxer made some comments which describe a behavior that is common in Washington.  She displayed a chart which had a list of organizations containing tens of thousands of what she called “real experts” supporting climate change on one side and a list of skeptics on the other.  She said all but two of the skeptics were funded by oil companies.  Much of the information in her statement can be affirmed with this press release given by the National Academy of Sciences.  The following is a quote:

 

 

I think we all agree that higher ocean temperatures result in stronger storms.  I suppose the disagreement is what is the cause of higher ocean temperatures.  But in truth if you look up who lines up on each side of this, I don’t think there is a disagreement among the real experts that the key contributor to rising ocean temperatures is global warming.  The leading scientists around the world have overwhelmingly accepted this proposition.  I have a chart here I’d like to show you….You see here the organizations that support the existence of climate change.  National Academy of sciences, American Geophysical Union, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, American Meteorological Society representing 48,000 members now.  National Sciences Academies of France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and China.

            Now on the other side you have individuals.  I won’t go through their names, but they are from different institutes.  George marshall institute, competitive institute, cato institute… (inaudible listing of institutes)   Every one of these except two are supported by a huge oil company.  So lets get it straight as to who sits on what side.

 

  Senator Clinton read an excerpt from a petition signed by 49 Nobel Laureates, 63 National Medal of Science recipients, 175 members of the National Academies, and over 9,000 other scientists criticizing the misuse and politicization of science in Washington.  The following is what she read in her formal statement:

 

 

When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions. This has been done by placing people who are professionally unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts and on scientific advisory committees; by disbanding existing advisory committees; by censoring and suppressing reports by the government’s own scientists; and by simply not seeking independent scientific advice. Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front.

 

Senator Lautenberg (25:20-27:00) also requested some input from scientists from a respected institution such as the NAS.  Despite these retorts, no voice from a widely respected scientific organization like the National Academy of Sciences was present.  Using non-experts as experts doesn’t stop there.  Fred Barnes, a staunch Bush supporter who writes for The Weekly Standard, claims Crichton was also one of President Bush’s advisors for climate change and claims they were in “total agreement” in his book Rebel-in-Chief.¹

 

            To add to the confusion, Steven J. Milloy, a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, Exxon, and a host of other companies that have had problems with the EPA, runs a website called www.junkscience.com.  This website has made extensive attacks on climate scientists.  Paul Schur, director of media relations for Fox News, has said, "Fox News was unaware of Milloy's connection with Philip Morris. Any affiliation he had should have been disclosed."  Paul Thacker, from The New Republic writes "But, whereas Scripps Howard fired Fumento and apologized to its readers, Fox News continues to look the other way as Milloy accepts corporate handouts,"  James Hansen, a climate scientist and the head of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies responds "The question is, 'Why does a major news organization employ such a hack?'"  Milloy has gained a lot of fame for posting obituaries of scientists.  After cancer specialist and director of National institute of health Dr. David Rall died, Milloy wrote "As far as David Rall is concerned, he was a bad guy when he was alive -- shamelessly promoting the bankrupt notion that human cancer risk can be predicted by poisoning rats with chemicals.”   He also makes an attempt to debunk environmental cancer research in it’s entirety by adding this comment: “Because cancer clusters are usually unexplainable except that they occur by chance, state public health departments view cluster investigations as wild goose chases.”  If his statement was true, then neither asbestos nor the ingestion of diethylstilbestrol could have been linked to cancer clusters.  Needless to say, the content on his website rarely agrees with the scientific consensus.  While questions about his ethical practices are easy to raise, he holds a M.S. in biostatics and therefore the intricacies of much of his methodology require both far more effort and scientific background to discuss.  Such an advanced topic does not belong in an introductory text such as this article.

 

Even when scientists are heard they often aren’t heard correctly.  In 1975 Newsweek ran a global cooling story that inaccurately portrayed what scientists were thinking.  On Sunday, April 2, 2006, George Will writes in the Washington Post that ‘Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation."’ and ‘"a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" (Science, March 1, 1975)’.  The second quote from his article isn’t from Science, but from Science News.  What George Will doesn’t understand is that while their names may be very similar neither of these sources is the prestigious peer review journal Science.  Despite numerous attempts to debunk this myth by both realclimate.org and analysis of peer review journals that denies these predictions were ever made, these myths still perpetuate via online discussions, major American newspapers, and even the BBC.  The situation is so bad that when the Senate Environmental Committee (VIDEO) meets with key witnesses on climate change such as fiction writer Michael Crichton, these myths about the scientific consensus and even grossly out of context quotes from scientific papers are used to debunk the credibility of the scientific community. 

 

Then there are natural phenomena such as the mars ice cap melting.  Many newspapers and websites say this is proof of the sun being the cause of climate change.  They do this even though there has been a recent decline in recent solar activity and scientific journals say the heating is almost certainly regional and caused by a 105 year long orbital cycle, topographic forcing, and more.  [J1, J2, J3, J4]     Skeptics will also claim that human related CO2 pales in comparison to volcanoes.  However, the scientists at realclimate.org say volcanoes only produce “0.15 Gt/year of carbon, compared to about 7 Gt/year of human related sources”.  When Mount Pinatubo erupted, it was on of the largest and most violent of the 20^th century.  There was no spike in CO2 levels following it’s eruption according to measurements at the Mauna Loa observatory.  In fact, there was almost a 66% decrease in the annual CO2 growth rate following the 1991 eruption.

 

According to numerous polls, the vast majority of Americans believe climate change is real and only a small minority think steps shouldn’t be taken.  A recent ABC, Time, and Stanford University poll puts those that believe that climate change is happening at 85%.  Every major scientific organization with relevant expertise affirms the IPCC’s CO2 driven climate change projections either implicitly or explicitly.  Yet given all of these facts, the small group of skeptic scientists has a disproportionate amount of influence among both Congress and the mass media.  Many Senators, scientists, and ABC broadcasts (VIDEO) attribute this phenomenon to the millions spent in Washington by oil companies like Exxon.  ABC news reported a 1998 American Petroleum Institute memo has even blatantly stated "Victory will be achieved when average citizens “understand” (recognize) uncertainties in climate science."  Even president Bush’s former chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Philip Cooney, was a former American Petroleum Institute oil lobbyist.  Numerous mainstream newspapers ran stories showing proof of Cooney editing statements by white house science advisors to remove warnings regarding to climate change.  Cooney resigned two days later and was then hired by Exxon Mobil. ^{1, 2, 3}   Exxon does not fund any alternative energy research.  

 

The above is found on page 4 of this PDF which can be found here.

 

Similar memos have popped up from the IREA which have detailed fund raising events for skeptics and even think tanks like CEI which is well known for misrepresenting peer review journals.^1,2.  Professor Curt Davis claimed CEI has made "a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate, They are selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims. They are not telling the entire story to the public." ¹  Stanley Lewandowski, IREA's general manager, admitted that global warming is real to the washington post.  However, said he didn't think it was as big of a deal as scientist claim and only wanted to keep Congress from regulating carbon emissions.¹

 

            Dr. James Hansen, arguably the best climate scientist on the planet, told CBS in an interview that his research was being suppressed by the Whitehouse.  Dr. Rick Piltz resigned (VIDEO) from the Whitehouse due to former and current oil lobbyists editing his work.  Since that time, Congressman John Culberson (R-TX) has circulated a letter cosigned by dozens of congressmen and senators claiming Bush’s 2007 budget “Eliminat[es] virtually all scientific research funded by NASA".   In Febuary of 2006, the statement “To understand and protect our home planet” was  removed from NASA’s motto by the Whitehouse.

 

Impact

 

An ocean current called the thermohaline belt circulates warm water around the world.  It is responsible for Europe’s balmy weather despite being so far north.  Melting icecaps could change the ocean in a way that would stop this ocean current and cause Europe to become much colder.  According to Dr. Wood the UK would be “substantially colder than that experienced during the 'Little Ice Age'”.(9)  Recent measurements have shown the flow of this belt to have decreased by 30%. [J5] The excess CO2 is also increasing the oceans acidity by turning into carbonic acid and could "banish all coral by 2065". 10, 11, 12  And when the cost of a single hurricane can be more than $200 billion and warm oceans fuel hurricanes, the cost of idleness can become expensive.

More than our planet is at stake.  The United States consumes one-fourth of the world's energy. China, India, Germany, Japan and Bangladesh have a combined population of 2.9 billion, and together consume less energy than the United States, with a population of 290 million.  Times are changing.  China is becoming very oil and energy hungry.  While citizens of China are standing in mile long lines for gas, their country is buying up oil sands in Canada.  The cost of energy is projected to go up.  Even more is that the threat of oil prices tripling is giving Iran leverage in its quest for nuclear weapons.  Oil helped a dictator in the past with Iraq’s oil for food scandal, it can certainly help a dictator or a terrorist in the future.  There is also the problem of peak oil.  Companies like Chevron are making websites such as http://www.willyoujoinus.com that are begging people for help in the quest to find alternative energy.  They are warning everyone that it is getting extremely difficult to find and produce more oil, the world is consuming much more than it discovers, and making statements such as "Corporations, governments and every citizen of this planet must be part of the solution as surely as they are part of the problem".  They literally saying "We need your help" and "we can’t do it alone." Much more info can be found here.

 

Solutions

 

With China and other nations developing at a rapid pace, both the cost of energy and the environment had been of growing concern for many.  One thing is for certain, changing the behavior of a population is a difficult task.  Some people simply will not change their lifestyle.  The physics Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley and many other scientists have called for an energy Manhattan project.  Even military brass have called for action.1  Something similar to the Apollo program would do.  A five cent to ten cent gas tax on every gallon of gasoline would be enough to pay for the program.^{2, 3, J5}  For a list of promising technologies that could be used to combat or even solve the energy crisis and climate change please see this list.  Although President Bush did propose a 22% increase of energy research funds during is Jan, 2006 State of the Union address, this increase has often been described as a "a welcome reversal in the continuing decline in the real value of expenditures on research and development in energy." as funding levels are simply a return to where they were in 1995.

 

Acknowledgements:

 

Thanks to Zeno, Dr. Gavin Schmidt from the NASA Goddard Institute, Dr. John Feeney from 2+2 LLC, and many others for their feedback and their voluntary or even involuntary help with this article.

 

Sources

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