Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

I don't recall ever seeing anything of an environmental nature published in New Science that did not take the pro-anthropogenic global warming position. ...

It’s little things that will fight climate change

Vast regulation would cost us dear; far better to try simple petrol and carbon taxes

I’ve been a green conservative for as long as I can recall. Perhaps my first ecological feelings welled up as a boy when I saw the copses and fields of my rural Sussex neighbourhood torn up for housing developments. The sense of dislocation I felt at seeing familiar places altered, of trees uprooted, ponds drained and woodlands paved was, I realised later, a conservative impulse.

I liked the world as it was. It was a home of sorts and I was happy in it. And when it was changed by the forces of market capi-talism, forces that seemed utterly indifferent to the human impact of their upheaval, the cultural contradictions of conservatism became much clearer to me.

That was a long time ago and I can appreciate now the parochialism and narrowness of my childhood perspective. But the contradiction - or, perhaps, more accurately the tension - between conservatism and environmentalism endures. You can rebrand the Tory party all you want, but green growth is not an easy concept. In practice, it’s hard and costly and, in a recession, much easier said than done.

In America, there are, alas, some residual and powerful forces on the right that still want to insist climate change is not real. I cannot see how an empirical and sceptical review of the data can lead one to the conclusion that warming is a hallucination. And the good news is that, increasingly, the old conservative debate about whether warming is occurring is being replaced by a much more interesting one about what to do if it is.

Should we bear the heavy economic and social costs of trying to mitigate it in the teeth of a global depression? Or should we find creative ways to adjust to and live with it and hope that the faster growth of a less green world might be the long-term key to developing the new energy resources and technologies to restrain it?

To be perfectly honest, I’m unsure. But a lack of certainty does not seem to me to be a crippling disadvantage in this debate. For one thing, the scientists are themselves unsure precisely how much warming will occur and what its potential effects could be. If you read the very careful and much hedged reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), you find that good scientists do not proclaim total disaster with the zeal of Al Gore. They forecast a range of possibilities, with another range of effects, and they freely admit the difficulty of judging which is the likeliest.

Economists, at least the good ones, in turn exercise the same sort of caution. The “cap-and-trade” emissions regulation mantra, which is taken for granted by David Cameron and Barack Obama, can be examined in terms of classic economic costs and benefits. You can do your best to predict how costly it would be to try to prevent climate change by a mandatory capping of carbon emissions and compare this with how costly it would be to do nothing about it - and a whole range of possibilities in between. This is not as exciting or as entertaining as envisioning Manhattan 6ft under water but, in the real world, it’s where adults start to plan the future.

There’s a robust case to be made, if you take this approach, that the economic and social costs of cap-and-trade outweigh the small and rather fragile benefits that restraining climate change would bring. We run the risk of putting a big damper on economic growth (and thereby human well-being), and erecting a complex and often unmanageable regulatory bureaucracy, in order to wring rather minor reductions in global temperature.

Of course, if you believe humans have no right to disrupt the planet’s ecology to this extent and have a moral obligation to leave Earth as we found it, then these arguments are irrelevant.

However, if you see human population growth as it is occurring, and if you accept that billions of Indians and Chinese and Africans will want to improve their lot, and if you think our essential task is to accommodate our own species’ genius and well-being without rendering our planet uninhabitable, you might let your green imagination wander a little. Perhaps a little muddling through might not be so bad. Perhaps new technologies will emerge that would make a massive government attempt to police carbon-emitting industry moot. Perhaps the economic slowdown gives us a breathing space to see if it might happen.

My own tentative view is that, accepting the middle range of options that the IPCC has set out, doing nothing at this point may be the least worst option. And that’s certainly more likely in the US than some may now think. Obama is indeed committed to cap-and-trade in ways that George W Bush never was. However, people forget that Bill Clinton and Al Gore were much more in line with Obama and were stopped from adopting Kyoto by Congress. Congress is still there. And Democrats from the industrial heartland, already reeling from the collapsing auto industry, are in no mood to aggressively land their constituents with another economic burden right now. That’s why, when you look at the congressional schedule, you can see that cap-and-trade is behind healthcare and education in the budgetary process.

The trouble with inaction, of course, is that there is a real risk that warming might unexpectedly accelerate past the middle range of IPCC forecasts. If you look at more recent shifts - and the speed of the Arctic’s disappearance in summer, for starters - the Gore scenario could indeed become likelier. And if that happens, the cost-benefit analysis shifts back in favour of urgent action. Is there a better way to address it?

My own preference is to avoid the bureaucracy of cap-and-trade in favour of a serious carbon and petrol tax that would shift the economic balance towards noncarbon energy. If you gave back the tax revenue through a tax refund, you could avoid depressing growth and help cushion the working poor from higher petrol costs. You need no new bureaucracy to do this " and you’d help drive green decision-making away from top-down government towards more bottom-up human-level calculations.

It’s not as satisfying as a massive government regulatory programme. It tries to counter the worst-case scenarios without assuming them. It hopes that a carbon-hostile tax would prompt a technological breakthrough to solve the problem. And it’s easily reversible if needs be. It’s the kind of green policy that is neither in denial nor in hysteria, and it’s a rough balance between the planet’s needs and humanity’s. Think of it as innovation over regulation - a way to manage the contradictions of conservatism and environmentalism after all.

The Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) was the most recent pre-industrial era warm interval of European climate, yet its driving mechanisms remain uncertain. We present here a 947-year-long multidecadal North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) reconstruction and find a persistent positive NAO during the MCA. Supplementary reconstructions based on climate model results and proxy data indicate a clear shift to weaker NAO conditions into the Little Ice Age (LIA). Globally distributed proxy data suggest that this NAO shift is one aspect of a global MCA-LIA climate transition that probably was coupled to prevailing La Niña"like conditions amplified by an intensified Atlantic meridional overturning circulation during the MCA.

Interannual Variability

In New Zealand and the South Pacific, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a significant source of seasonal and year-to-year climate variability (Nicholls, 1992). Opposite interannual air temperature from detrended time series occur on either side of the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ). The Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) explains up to 40% of year-to-year air temperature variations in these areas. When the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) is positive, mean annual air temperature anomalies are positive in the area south west of the SPCZ (T1 and T3), and negative to the north east of the SPCZ (T2 and T4). (Salinger et al, 1996). Opposite air temperature anomalies occur during the El Niño phase (SOI negative).

Similarly, mean annual precipitation anomalies (Hay et al, 1993) show marked interannual variability, and are also closely associated with the ENSO cycle (Figure 3.4). The SOI also explains over 40% of year-to-year variations in precipitation to the south west and north east of the SPCZ. Near and south west of the SPCZ, above average precipitation occurs when the SOI is positive (La Niña phase), and further to the north east precipitation is below average. Opposite anomalies characterise the El Niño phase.

According to Trouet, a Pacific La Niña mode and a positive NAO mode could have reinforced each other in a positive feedback loop " and this could explain the stability of the medieval climate anomaly.

It contradicts it because it points to the Medieval warming period being a localized event because of natural events as opposed to today when the warming is not localized.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport#report
250Dr. Kelvin Kemm, formerly a scientist at South Africa's Atomic Energy Corporation who holds degrees in nuclear physics and mathematics, refuted climate alarmism in an op-ed titled "No scientific basis for global warming contention." Kemm was also honored with a 2003 National Science and Technology Forum Award for sustained outstanding contributions to Science and Technology. "The global-warming mania continues with more and more hype and less and less thinking. With religious zeal, people look for issues or events to blame on global warming," Kemm wrote in an April 27, 2007 op-ed in South Africa's Engineering News. "Former US Veep Al Gore is being totally simplistic in his movie by just saying that Mount Kilimanjaro's loss of ice-cap volume is a sign of global warming. Most of Al's movie exhibited the same absence of genuine science, and rather presented itself as part of an election campaign," Kemm explained, while noting that warming temperatures did not cause a ice-cap melt on Kilimanjaro. "It is also a scientific fact that there has been no measurable atmospheric warming in the region of Kilimanjaro. Satellites have been measuring the regional temperature since 1979 in the free troposphere between 1 000-m and 8 000-m altitude and they show no troposphere warming in that area. None. So what is causing the ice cap to melt? The answer appears to be trees, or rather lack of them," Kemm wrote. "...Since the locals have cut down so many trees over the last century, there is much less wet air moving up the mountain than there used to be, so less ice forms at the top," he added.

Warmiing is localized today just as it was in the Medieval period. Cooling is likewise localized. Warming and cooling are also localized to hemispheres. See below:

Warmiing is localized today just as it was in the Medieval period. Cooling is likewise localized. Warming and cooling are also localized to hemispheres. See below:

I see warming in both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere at the same time.

One would think even you could compare blue and red areas of the graphs.

Within the last 10 years the southern Hemisphere has been cooling faster than the northern hemisphere. Also, you should have noted that since 1850, warming and cooling periods in each hemisphere were not congruent--sorry about that--were not equal in magnitude.

Because warming and cooling in the last 100 years have not been equal in magnitude doesn't present much of an argument against my statement. I never said all parts were equal nor did I state that localized warming means it warms MORE than other places which are also warmer. You have built a strawman.

Further 100% unscientific research but quite interesting:

April 1, 2009 - 5:45 PM MDT

Oklahoma City OK - 70 degrees farenheit - 12% humidity
Houston TX - 69 degrees farenheit - 70% humidity
Dallas TX - 48 degrees farenheit - 26% humidity
Albuquerque NM - 35 degrees farenheit - 60% humidity

Wild huh?

Yes, it is interesting..

Based on your temperature and humidity we get -

OKC has 1.9 g/kg
Houston has 10.5g/Kg
Dallas has 1.9g/kg
Albuqerque has 2.5g/kg

So, even though the humidity in Dallas is more than double the humidity in OKC, the amount of water vapor is almost exactly the same.

And even though Albuquerque has 60% humidity compared to Houston's 70%, Houston has 4 times the water vapor. Amazing, isn't it? Temperature greatly affects water vapor even if the humidity is the same.