An Even More Inconvenient Truth
We all know that 1998 was the warmest year on record, and that 5 of the warmest years ever occurred in the last ten years.
We all know this, and we’re all wrong.
An intrepid gentleman by the name of Steve McIntyre investigated some anomalies with the official NASA weather records, and discovered a mistake…a big mistake. A mistake that has been acknowledged by NASA, which has issued new figures. And the results?
According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.
Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900. (World rankings of temperature are calculated separately.)
So does this mean global warming is a myth?
Not at all…first of all, the affected data is for the United States only, and not worldwide. Secondly, the preponderance of evidence would seem to indicate that the earth is in a severe warming cycle, and that man-made causes are a significant contributor.
What this episode should remind us of, though, is the fact that most scientific theories are fluid, and their conclusions necessarily tentative. You should always beware of true believers and people who use science for partisan and ideological purposes (in this case, I’m speaking of the anti-globalism, anti-capitalist tinge to the ‘green’ movement worldwide).
To reiterate – I’m convinced global warming is real, and that action should be taken…but what action is still very much a matter of proper public debate, free of scare tactics – from both sides…
UPDATE 12:07 a.m.: Still more convincing of the verity of global warming are the trends of the data over multi-year periods, and using this criteria, as this post points out, the conclusion that there is a strong warming acceleration is still pretty unavoidable. Again, those who are using this new data for ‘proof’ that global warming is wrong or overstated are misguided – the much more prudent reaction is to use extreme caution whenever someone is too certain of their conclusions (from either side of the issue) and unwilling to admit, in the manner of Al Gore, that a debate even exists as to the severity and solutions…
In the spring, I took an environmental science course. The professor (chemistry dept) who taught the class believed global warming did exist. She also brought in, as a guest lecturer, the professor from the civil engineering department who specializes in air pollution. He stated that the “hockey stick” graph Al Gore uses in An Inconvenient Truth which shows the changes in the earth’s temperature compared to the changes in carbon emissions has an incredible amount of “noise” (which Gore fails to mention or display). He also presented us with a plot of the fluctuating temperature of the sun (yes, it changes), juxtaposed with the earth temperature plot. The two were almost a perfect match, quite unlike the hockey stick. This, of course, doesn’t mean that global warming isn’t happening. It just indicates that it’s happening naturally.
Also, the idea of “carbon swapping” — you, know, I plant some trees and you pay me for the CO2 the suck up so you don’t have to feel so bad about driving a Hummer which is the basis of the Kyoto protocol — as far as I can tell from what we learned in the class, is baloney, too. It’s not the releasing of carbon gases into the air that’s (if we assume that they affect the earth’s temperature more than the sun) the problem, per se. Of the carbon gases released into the air (not counting the other “greenhouse gases,” such as water vapor), carbon emissions from fossil fuels are about 3% released into the atmosphere. The problem is that this is an imbalance on the cycle. A tree takes in 120 units of CO2, expels 60 and is eaten by animals which expel another 60, for a perfect balance.* In any case, trees suck up as much CO2 as they expel one way or another, so planting more of them just adds more to the movement of carbon, but does not change the balance. Actually, the ocean sucks in more carbon than it expels.
Also, Putin signed the Kyoto protocol against the advice of the best climatologists in Russia whom he assembled to study it simply because under the treaty, Russia would be allowed to emit up to its 1990 levels. The economy, as you know, had since collapsed, so they could “sell” all of their non-carbon emissions to the shmucks in Western Europe who don’t understand the carbon cycle.
If you believe that carbon emissions are responsible for global warming (I’d at least give this position the benefit of the doubt — it’s worse if it’s true and we do nothing than if it isn’t and we do something anyway), the best approach is to actually try to — gasp! — cut emissions, or in other words, focusing on biofuels (which release carbon, but as part of the natural cycle discussed above — sugar inhales 100 units of CO2 and exhales 50 while alive, then the other 50 are released when it’s burned.* And Brazilian sugar-based EtOH is a lot more efficient than the corn-based stuff we have, so we should end our subsidies to Iowa, related to the previous thread, yet another reason we need electoral reform in the primaries.
*All numbers are arbitrary.
Of course, Al Gore sees nothing wrong with buying carbon offsets from a company he owns. So not only don’t they work, they cost him nothing.
The problem I always had with the “Global Warming” crowd was that their policies haven’t changed since they were the “Global Cooling” crowd: raise taxes and regulate everyone’s life.
I guess I believe it’s an awful strange brand of science that insists there is no room for disagreement.
For those open to reviewing the opposite position I’d recommend:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3028847519933351566
Good post, Mark.
I know you won’t like it, but I have to say that I find tremendous similarities between the “global warming sceptics” and the Iraq war supporters. They both seize upon tiny bits of “good news” (1998 was 0.02 degrees cooler than 1934, instead of 0.01 degrees warmer. Woohoo!) and completely ignore the preponderance of evidence.
Aaron said:
I think you need to use the word “sequestration” somewhere in that paragraph. Otherwise, everything you say completely misses the point.
Way back in the Cretaceous period, huge amounts of carbon were sequestered, over the course of millions of years, in plant biomass. This was buried deep underground, and we are now busy releasing it back into the atmosphere, over the course of a few centuries.
Your statement about the carbon cycle is half correct. If there’s no net increase in plant biomass (i.e., if the trees get get eaten/burnt/… in their entirety), then you haven’t actually sequestered any carbon. Similarly, the carbon taken up by the ocean has to go someplace (fixed as calcium carbonate, mostly by shellfish) if you want it to actually be sequestered.
So you should be particularly worried when you read about massive die-offs of coral reefs due to warmer, more acidic oceans. (The immediate product of absorbing carbon dioxide into water is carbonic acid.)
Well, Jacques, you have a point about Iraq war supporters…but opponents of the war are equally stubborn about ’seeing’ good news (though they have the advantage in that the good news is far outweighed by the bad)…
Any scientist worth his salt reading the Scientific papers (not the pop culture warming alarmism journalism) of the 70s and 80s, would concede that there was possibility of a deleterious effect called Anthropogenic Global Warming through GHG effects.
The effect was not large, it was barely discernible, above the random noise of normal weather variation. But if kept up for a couple of hundred years, it could truly prove to have harmful consequences, after the initial beneficial effects wore off.
Any scientist reading the scientific (not pop culture warming journalism), papers of the late 90s and 2000s would say it is not a problem if it ever was. A lot of the assumptions are turning out to be mistaken or exaggerated. The total effect has been downgraded by more than one third; and more downgrading is sure to occur when cloud effects of increased solar wind is understood and incorporated. The IPCC, hardly a AGW denier, reduced the effect by 35% already, and promises to incorporate the cloud effects when understood.
Instead of a few hundred years before real problems appeared, it now would take three times as long, or 500 -600 years for these deleterious effects to emerge, if things kept warming due to Mankind.
Informed science anticipates further revisions downward in GHG ability to change the climate. If predictions are correct, it will decline form one third to one tenth of the original fears of the 1980s. Then the change won’t be deleterious for ten times as long, or a few thousand years. This would keep up if Mankind stayed on its same course, and continued to burn Oil.
Does anyone really believe than Mankind will be finding all his Energy from only Coal and Oil, two thousand years from now ? Or even two hundred years from now ? Or maybe even twenty years from now ?
The new orbiting solar satellites launched in the 21st century, are increasing th knowledge of our Sun in leaps and bounds. We now know that the sun is a variable Star that varies its output slightly, on lots of short periodicities varying from the decal to centennial, and millennial and multi-millennial..
The Earth warms and cools in response.
Fascinating.
Could you provide some links/citations to actual peer-reviewed scientific papers that back up your contentions?
Thanks in advance.
It’s good, Mark, to see you being so reasonable about this when so many others on the right are jumping to the pre-90s complete denialist position over it. I’d take issue with this doing anything to cut down those who are “certain” about global warming, since they never expressed the certainty attributed to them by the denialists, and since they’re constantly open to new information in the debate. But even those quibbles, Mark, are minor after reading the idiocy that is Ace of Spades and Instapundit.