Wednesday, August 01, 2012 1:02:50 AM
The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
By RICHARD A. MULLER
Published: July 28, 2012
Berkeley, Calif.
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature [ http://berkeleyearth.org/ ] project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.
Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.
The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.
Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.
How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a second greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn’t change the results. Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.
It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.
Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period” or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous.
The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org [ http://berkeleyearth.org/ ]. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis.
What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.
Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.
Richard A. Muller [ http://muller.lbl.gov/ ], a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, is the author, most recently, of “Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines [ http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Future-Presidents-Science-Headlines/dp/0393066274 ].”
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Related
Dot Earth Blog: 'Converted' Skeptic: Humans Driving Recent Warming (July 28, 2012)
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/converted-skeptic-humans-driving-recent-warming/
Related in Opinion
More on the Environment
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/environment/index.html
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Searching for Clues to Calamity
Holly Gressley
By FRED GUTERL
Published: July 20, 2012
SO far 2012 is on pace to be the hottest year on record. But does this mean that we’ve reached a threshold — a tipping point that signals a climate disaster?
For those warning of global warming [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ], it would be tempting to say so. The problem is, no one knows if there is a point at which a climate system shifts abruptly. But some scientists are now bringing mathematical rigor to the tipping-point argument. Their findings give us fresh cause to worry that sudden changes are in our future.
One of them is Marten Scheffer [ http://www.aew.wur.nl/uk/staff/MS/ ], a biologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who grew up swimming in clear lowland ponds. In the 1980s, many of these ponds turned turbid. The plants would die, algae would cover the surface, and only bottom-feeding fish remained. The cause — fertilizer runoff from nearby farms — was well known, but even after you stopped the runoff, replanted the lilies and restocked the trout, the ponds would stay dark and scummy.
Mr. Scheffer solved this problem with a key insight: the ponds behaved according to a branch of mathematics called “dynamical systems,” which deals with sudden changes. Once you reach a tipping point, it’s very difficult to return things to how they used to be. It’s easy to roll a boulder off a cliff, for instance, but much harder to roll it back. Once the ponds turned turbid, it wasn’t enough to just replant and restock. You had get them back to their original, clear state.
Science is a graveyard of grand principles that fail in the end to explain the real world. So it is all the more surprising that Mr. Scheffer’s idea worked.
By applying the principles of dynamical systems, Mr. Scheffer was able to figure out that to fix the ponds, he had to remove the fish that thrive in the turbid water. They stir up sediment, which blocks sunlight from plants, and eat the zooplankton that keep the water clear. His program of fixing the Netherlands’ ponds and lakes is legendary in ecology.
Mr. Scheffer and other scientists are now trying to identify the early-warning signals for climate that precede abrupt transitions. Tim Lenton, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter in England, has identified a handful of climate systems that could reach tipping points in the not-too-distant future. These are not so much related to global average temperatures — the main metric for climate-change arguments — as they are to patterns of climate that repeat themselves each year.
El Niño [ http://www.elnino.noaa.gov/ ] is one such pattern — a gigantic blob of warm water that sloshes around in the Pacific Ocean, causing weather changes across wide swaths of the globe. Another is the West African monsoon, which brings rain to the west coast of the continent. Each is subject to behaving like dynamical systems — which means they are prone to “flip” from one state to another, like one of Mr. Scheffer’s ponds, over time periods that vary from a year to a few hundred.
The most frightening prospect that Mr. Lenton has found is the vulnerability of the Indian monsoon. More than a billion people depend on this weather pattern each year for the rain it brings to crops. The monsoon, though, is being affected by two conflicting forces: the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is adding energy to the monsoons, making them more powerful. On the other hand, soot from fires and coal plants acts to blocks the sun’s energy, weakening the monsoons.
This opposition creates potential instability and the possibility that the atmospheric dynamics that bring the monsoons could change suddenly. Mr. Lenton’s analysis shows this could occur in a remarkably short time. The monsoons could be here one year, then gone the next year.
Other possible tipping points are the melting of the North Pole’s sea ice, Greenland’s glaciers and the Antarctic ice sheets, and the destruction of the Amazon rain forest [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/forests_and_forestry/rain_forests/index.html ] and Canada’s boreal forests.
We know that the dynamical-systems idea worked for Mr. Scheffer’s ponds because he achieved real-world results. But why should we believe that the principle explains things like El Niño and the Indian monsoon? The acid test will be whether the real world behaves the way Mr. Lenton says it will. If the Indian monsoon disappears, we’ll know he is right.
What then? The real worst-case scenario would have one such event triggering others, until you have a cascade of weather flips from one end of the planet to another. It wouldn’t be quite as dramatic as Hollywood might want to depict, perhaps, but it would be dramatic enough to rewrite the predictions for sea level and temperature rises that are part of the current consensus. This worst case is highly speculative, but sudden shifts in climate patterns may already be happening.
The policy makers aren’t likely to be discussing dynamical-systems theory anytime soon. Fortunately, scientists like Mr. Scheffer and Mr. Lenton are trying to work out the details of how closely nature hews to these mathematics, what a true tipping point would look like and what we might do if and when we face one.
We need a tipping point in climate politics, where all of a sudden we start paying attention.
Fred Guterl [ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/about.php?author=15 ] is the executive editor of Scientific American and the author of “The Fate of Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Fate-Species-Human-Extinction/dp/160819258X ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/opinion/the-climate-change-tipping-point.html
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Deny This: Contested Himalayan Glaciers Really Are Melting, and Doing So at a Rapid Pace–Kind of Like Climate Change
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=47133 ]">
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=47133 ]" />
By David Biello | July 27, 2012
Remember when climate change contrarians professed outrage over a few errors [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=international-science-panel-recommends-ipcc-reforms ] in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report? One of their favorite such mistakes involved an overestimation of the pace at which glaciers would melt at the “Third Pole,” where the Indian subcontinent crashes into Asia. Some contrarians back in 2010 proceeded to deny that the glaciers of the Himalayas and associated mountain ranges were melting at all. But now, using satellites and on-the-ground surveys, scientists note that 82 glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau are retreating, 15 glaciers have dwindled in mass, and 7,090 glaciers have shrunk in size [ http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1580.html ].
Why? The culprits include rising average temperatures characteristic of ongoing global warming and changes in precipitation, another sign of climate change, according to Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and his colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The study appeared online [id.] in the journal Nature Climate Change on July 15—and is bad news for the hundreds of millions of people who rely on such glaciers to feed water into major rivers [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=back-to-the-future-harnessing ] such as the Ganges, Mekong or Yangtze.
But climate contrarians have moved on, of course. This June, atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the only remaining climate contrarians actually trained in climate science, dismissed the documented 0.8 degree Celsius rise in average temperatures in the past 150 years or so as a small change during a talk at Sandia National Laboratory [ https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/warming_skeptic/ ]. Yet, that small change has resulted in events like chunks of ice double the size of Manhattan breaking free of the ancient Greenland ice sheet last week [ http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/3195-iceberg-born-greenland.html ]. Just a few years ago, an even bigger ice-massif crashed into the sea. Events that once happened every few decades in Greenland [ http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html ] now happen every year or so.
That “small change” has also been enough for weird weather to play havoc around the world, whether it be the epic drought currently over-baking Midwestern corn crops [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=drought-tightens-grip-on-major ] or the torrents of rain unleashed this year on Beijing [ http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2012-07/23/c_131733767.htm ], killing at least 77 people, according to the Xinhua news agency. The list of weather-related disasters continues to get longer with each passing year and, while no single weather event can be tied directly to climate change, our continuing fossil-fuel burning loads the climate dice [ http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/a-fresh-look-at-how-humans-are-loading-climate-dice/ ] in favor of more and more snake-eye rolls such as deadly floods or searing droughts. It’s all unfolding pretty much as predicted by climate scientists in the 1980s [ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-1981-temperature-projection/ ].
What’s also unfolding pretty much as demanded by climate contrarians is a dearth of efforts to address the problem, maybe because we’re all in denial. Global emissions of the greenhouse gases responsible for all this continue to grow [ http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-07/ecjr-gce071912.php ], after taking a brief dip due to the Great Recession. Political and policy efforts to address the climate crisis, whether at the national or international level, seem spent (although there is some hope in efforts to buy time to combat climate change by cutting back on soot). Witness the climate talks in Durban [ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/14/what-really-happened-in-durban-and-will-it-be-enough-to-combat-climate-change/ ], Cancun [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cancun-talks-yield-climate ] or Copenhagen [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-commits-to-greenhouse-gas-cuts-under-copenhagen-accord ]. In the U.S. about the only leader still advocating for action to halt climate change [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 (seventh item at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77869081 )] is Bill McKibben, who has become somewhat of a climate Quixote, tilting for windmills and against the fossil fuel industry.
That industry, particularly titans such as ExxonMobil, has expressly achieved the goals laid out in an American Petroleum Institute memo from the 1990s recently reproduced in Steve Coll’s book Private Empire [ http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/05/01/book_review_steve_colls_private_empire ]:
- Average citizen “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science
– Recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom”
– Media “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science
– Media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints challenging current “conventional wisdom”
– Those promoting the Kyoto treaty [a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions] on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.
All five of those items on the list can be checked off. That’s a big part of the reason why climate change [ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/24/want-to-understand-climate-change-try-this-simple-book/ ] has not featured as an issue in this year’s U.S. presidential election.
What hope there is [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/sunday-review/a-ray-of-hope-on-climate-change.html ] at present for addressing climate change in the U.S. lies in natural gas, dismissed as a nuisance for decades by the oil and coal industries. The “last fossil fuel,” primarily the molecule known as methane, is itself a potent greenhouse gas. However, burning natural gas to generate electricity produces roughly half as much carbon dioxide [ http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-and-you/affect/natural-gas.html ]—the most ubiquitous greenhouse gas—as burning coal does. Already, this year, burning natural gas accounts for as much electricity as burning coal [ http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=7090 ] for the first time in U.S. history, and its use has helped drop U.S. emissions by 430 million metric tons [ http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/news/2012/may/name,27216,en.html ] over the past five years, according to the International Energy Agency.
If fracking for shale gas can work for China [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443437504577544910500662588.html ] too, global emissions could begin to drop (though it appears more likely at present that the U.S. will export highly polluting coal to China [ http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/coal_export_terminals_and_china_should_the_u_s_ship_its_dirty_coal_to_china_.html ] in greater quantities than any shale gas know-how). And if there’s enough natural gas—and there certainly is if we can learn to tap the methane molecules ensconced in icy cages [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=defusing-the-methane-time-bomb ] throughout the world’s oceans—we might even use it to displace oil as the primary fuel for our cars and trucks [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=natural-gas-as-alternative-transportation-fuel ].
At the same time, renewables, such as solar and wind, continue to grow by leaps and bounds, and nuclear power, though it may be moribund in the U.S., is gathering a renewed head of steam in countries such as China [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=china-goes-nuclear-to-avoid-coal-burning ].
None of this will happen fast enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a sufficiently dramatic pace to stop climate change. After all, burning natural gas still means more CO2 molecules in the atmosphere trapping heat. Cheap natural gas will also likely slow the race to develop and deploy alternative energy as well as the sprint (in geologic terms) to a global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius. We’re on track to achieve that over the next 40 years or so, with natural gas or without it.
That means that the people of 2100, or even 2500, will have us to blame if they don’t like the weather. In the shorter term, we’ll all have to learn to adapt to more sea level rise, weird weather, acidified oceans and other climate change impacts. The Earth is different now and will change even more—fewer and fewer glaciers at the Third Pole, less ice at the North Pole and, who knows, a few hardy plants taking root in Antarctica for the first time in millennia. There’s just no denying it.
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
David Biello is the associate editor for environment and energy at Scientific American.
© 2012 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/27/deny-this-contested-himalayan-glaciers-really-are-melting-and-doing-so-at-a-rapid-pace-kind-of-like-climate-change/ [with comments]
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A Skeptic Confirms Substantial Recent Global Warming
Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been a harsh critic of advocates for prompt cuts in greenhouse gases, has finished an independent analysis of 200 years of temperature data and confirms existing studies showing substantial warming of the continents since 1950 -- a trend challenged by many critics of climate science. More at http://berkeleyearth.org/
and on Dot Earth at http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/?s=muller+berkeley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0nKdo4b1os
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Ocean study reveals carbon not sinking
Photo: The study examined how carbon is absorbed from the ocean's surface.
(AAP: Dean Lewins)
By Science Online's Dani Cooper, staff
Updated July 30, 2012 10:17:36
British and Australian researchers have found that one of the world's largest carbon sinks stores carbon differently than first thought.
The Southern Ocean contains about 40 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions absorbed by the world's oceans.
Researchers from the CSIRO and British Antarctic Survey examined the way the Southern Ocean sucks carbon absorbed from the surface layer into the deeper ocean.
Research co-author Richard Matear from the CSIRO says the study shows the method through which carbon is drawn down from the surface of the Southern Ocean to the ocean's interior - or deep waters.
He says it was previously thought this process, known as subduction, happened uniformly across the ocean.
"A conventional thought would be that once it gets out of this surface layer, it's kind of been tucked away and won't appear for a long time; many years of hundreds of years," he said.
"But with this re-ventilation, there's some places where actually it doesn't get put away into the deep ocean for long at all, re-ventilating in the time-scale of a decade."
Using information collected across 10 years from robotic probes known as Argo floats and various sensors, the team has shown subduction happens at specific locations as a result of interplay between winds, currents and massive whirlpools.
Dr Matear says the study also shows the Southern Ocean is not as efficient as first thought in capturing anthropogenic carbon dioxide.
"Once [the carbon] is out of the surface layer it is no longer communicating with the atmosphere so it is buried in the ocean and out of the equation," he said.
"But in many places it is a shallow burial and the carbon gets re-introduced into the atmosphere."
The largest reventilation occurs in the Indian Ocean sector in a band extending eastwards from South Africa to the middle of the basin.
Another hotspot for reventilation occurs east of New Zealand and in the Atlantic zone east of South America.
The findings have particular implications for "ocean fertilisation" projects as it can help pinpoint regions where the carbon-capture approach is most likely to be successful.
Ocean fertilisation schemes involve scattering iron particles on the ocean surface to create a feeding ground for microscopic marine vegetation called phytoplankton.
As the plants gorge on the iron, they suck up atmospheric carbon thanks to natural photosynthesis and create a giant plankton bloom.
These phytoplankton then die and sink to the deep ocean floor - taking the carbon to the ocean floor where it can lie for centuries.
"It actually makes you think about where in the Southern Ocean you could actually implement something like iron fertilisation to enhance carbon uptake because you'd want to avoid these places where you have re-ventilation," Dr Matear said.
Dr Matear says an improved understanding of how the Southern Ocean draws down the carbon will give greater insights into the impact of climate change and future carbon absorption by the ocean.
He says while the movement of carbon from the atmosphere to ocean surface happens rapidly, the transport of the carbon to the deep ocean is a slower process creating a bottleneck.
"The ocean can't keep up with the amount of carbon dioxide we are putting in the atmosphere," he said.
The research has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
© 2012 ABC
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-30/carbon-storage-trends-revealed/4163274
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By RICHARD A. MULLER
Published: July 28, 2012
Berkeley, Calif.
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature [ http://berkeleyearth.org/ ] project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.
Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.
The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.
Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.
How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a second greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn’t change the results. Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.
It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.
Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period” or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous.
The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org [ http://berkeleyearth.org/ ]. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis.
What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.
Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.
Richard A. Muller [ http://muller.lbl.gov/ ], a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, is the author, most recently, of “Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines [ http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Future-Presidents-Science-Headlines/dp/0393066274 ].”
*
Related
Dot Earth Blog: 'Converted' Skeptic: Humans Driving Recent Warming (July 28, 2012)
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/converted-skeptic-humans-driving-recent-warming/
Related in Opinion
More on the Environment
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/environment/index.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Searching for Clues to Calamity
Holly Gressley
By FRED GUTERL
Published: July 20, 2012
SO far 2012 is on pace to be the hottest year on record. But does this mean that we’ve reached a threshold — a tipping point that signals a climate disaster?
For those warning of global warming [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ], it would be tempting to say so. The problem is, no one knows if there is a point at which a climate system shifts abruptly. But some scientists are now bringing mathematical rigor to the tipping-point argument. Their findings give us fresh cause to worry that sudden changes are in our future.
One of them is Marten Scheffer [ http://www.aew.wur.nl/uk/staff/MS/ ], a biologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who grew up swimming in clear lowland ponds. In the 1980s, many of these ponds turned turbid. The plants would die, algae would cover the surface, and only bottom-feeding fish remained. The cause — fertilizer runoff from nearby farms — was well known, but even after you stopped the runoff, replanted the lilies and restocked the trout, the ponds would stay dark and scummy.
Mr. Scheffer solved this problem with a key insight: the ponds behaved according to a branch of mathematics called “dynamical systems,” which deals with sudden changes. Once you reach a tipping point, it’s very difficult to return things to how they used to be. It’s easy to roll a boulder off a cliff, for instance, but much harder to roll it back. Once the ponds turned turbid, it wasn’t enough to just replant and restock. You had get them back to their original, clear state.
Science is a graveyard of grand principles that fail in the end to explain the real world. So it is all the more surprising that Mr. Scheffer’s idea worked.
By applying the principles of dynamical systems, Mr. Scheffer was able to figure out that to fix the ponds, he had to remove the fish that thrive in the turbid water. They stir up sediment, which blocks sunlight from plants, and eat the zooplankton that keep the water clear. His program of fixing the Netherlands’ ponds and lakes is legendary in ecology.
Mr. Scheffer and other scientists are now trying to identify the early-warning signals for climate that precede abrupt transitions. Tim Lenton, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter in England, has identified a handful of climate systems that could reach tipping points in the not-too-distant future. These are not so much related to global average temperatures — the main metric for climate-change arguments — as they are to patterns of climate that repeat themselves each year.
El Niño [ http://www.elnino.noaa.gov/ ] is one such pattern — a gigantic blob of warm water that sloshes around in the Pacific Ocean, causing weather changes across wide swaths of the globe. Another is the West African monsoon, which brings rain to the west coast of the continent. Each is subject to behaving like dynamical systems — which means they are prone to “flip” from one state to another, like one of Mr. Scheffer’s ponds, over time periods that vary from a year to a few hundred.
The most frightening prospect that Mr. Lenton has found is the vulnerability of the Indian monsoon. More than a billion people depend on this weather pattern each year for the rain it brings to crops. The monsoon, though, is being affected by two conflicting forces: the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is adding energy to the monsoons, making them more powerful. On the other hand, soot from fires and coal plants acts to blocks the sun’s energy, weakening the monsoons.
This opposition creates potential instability and the possibility that the atmospheric dynamics that bring the monsoons could change suddenly. Mr. Lenton’s analysis shows this could occur in a remarkably short time. The monsoons could be here one year, then gone the next year.
Other possible tipping points are the melting of the North Pole’s sea ice, Greenland’s glaciers and the Antarctic ice sheets, and the destruction of the Amazon rain forest [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/forests_and_forestry/rain_forests/index.html ] and Canada’s boreal forests.
We know that the dynamical-systems idea worked for Mr. Scheffer’s ponds because he achieved real-world results. But why should we believe that the principle explains things like El Niño and the Indian monsoon? The acid test will be whether the real world behaves the way Mr. Lenton says it will. If the Indian monsoon disappears, we’ll know he is right.
What then? The real worst-case scenario would have one such event triggering others, until you have a cascade of weather flips from one end of the planet to another. It wouldn’t be quite as dramatic as Hollywood might want to depict, perhaps, but it would be dramatic enough to rewrite the predictions for sea level and temperature rises that are part of the current consensus. This worst case is highly speculative, but sudden shifts in climate patterns may already be happening.
The policy makers aren’t likely to be discussing dynamical-systems theory anytime soon. Fortunately, scientists like Mr. Scheffer and Mr. Lenton are trying to work out the details of how closely nature hews to these mathematics, what a true tipping point would look like and what we might do if and when we face one.
We need a tipping point in climate politics, where all of a sudden we start paying attention.
Fred Guterl [ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/about.php?author=15 ] is the executive editor of Scientific American and the author of “The Fate of Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Fate-Species-Human-Extinction/dp/160819258X ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/opinion/the-climate-change-tipping-point.html
===
Deny This: Contested Himalayan Glaciers Really Are Melting, and Doing So at a Rapid Pace–Kind of Like Climate Change
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=47133 ]">
By David Biello | July 27, 2012
Remember when climate change contrarians professed outrage over a few errors [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=international-science-panel-recommends-ipcc-reforms ] in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report? One of their favorite such mistakes involved an overestimation of the pace at which glaciers would melt at the “Third Pole,” where the Indian subcontinent crashes into Asia. Some contrarians back in 2010 proceeded to deny that the glaciers of the Himalayas and associated mountain ranges were melting at all. But now, using satellites and on-the-ground surveys, scientists note that 82 glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau are retreating, 15 glaciers have dwindled in mass, and 7,090 glaciers have shrunk in size [ http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1580.html ].
Why? The culprits include rising average temperatures characteristic of ongoing global warming and changes in precipitation, another sign of climate change, according to Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and his colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The study appeared online [id.] in the journal Nature Climate Change on July 15—and is bad news for the hundreds of millions of people who rely on such glaciers to feed water into major rivers [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=back-to-the-future-harnessing ] such as the Ganges, Mekong or Yangtze.
But climate contrarians have moved on, of course. This June, atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the only remaining climate contrarians actually trained in climate science, dismissed the documented 0.8 degree Celsius rise in average temperatures in the past 150 years or so as a small change during a talk at Sandia National Laboratory [ https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/warming_skeptic/ ]. Yet, that small change has resulted in events like chunks of ice double the size of Manhattan breaking free of the ancient Greenland ice sheet last week [ http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/3195-iceberg-born-greenland.html ]. Just a few years ago, an even bigger ice-massif crashed into the sea. Events that once happened every few decades in Greenland [ http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html ] now happen every year or so.
That “small change” has also been enough for weird weather to play havoc around the world, whether it be the epic drought currently over-baking Midwestern corn crops [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=drought-tightens-grip-on-major ] or the torrents of rain unleashed this year on Beijing [ http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2012-07/23/c_131733767.htm ], killing at least 77 people, according to the Xinhua news agency. The list of weather-related disasters continues to get longer with each passing year and, while no single weather event can be tied directly to climate change, our continuing fossil-fuel burning loads the climate dice [ http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/a-fresh-look-at-how-humans-are-loading-climate-dice/ ] in favor of more and more snake-eye rolls such as deadly floods or searing droughts. It’s all unfolding pretty much as predicted by climate scientists in the 1980s [ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-1981-temperature-projection/ ].
What’s also unfolding pretty much as demanded by climate contrarians is a dearth of efforts to address the problem, maybe because we’re all in denial. Global emissions of the greenhouse gases responsible for all this continue to grow [ http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-07/ecjr-gce071912.php ], after taking a brief dip due to the Great Recession. Political and policy efforts to address the climate crisis, whether at the national or international level, seem spent (although there is some hope in efforts to buy time to combat climate change by cutting back on soot). Witness the climate talks in Durban [ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/14/what-really-happened-in-durban-and-will-it-be-enough-to-combat-climate-change/ ], Cancun [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cancun-talks-yield-climate ] or Copenhagen [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-commits-to-greenhouse-gas-cuts-under-copenhagen-accord ]. In the U.S. about the only leader still advocating for action to halt climate change [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 (seventh item at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77869081 )] is Bill McKibben, who has become somewhat of a climate Quixote, tilting for windmills and against the fossil fuel industry.
That industry, particularly titans such as ExxonMobil, has expressly achieved the goals laid out in an American Petroleum Institute memo from the 1990s recently reproduced in Steve Coll’s book Private Empire [ http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/05/01/book_review_steve_colls_private_empire ]:
- Average citizen “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science
– Recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom”
– Media “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science
– Media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints challenging current “conventional wisdom”
– Those promoting the Kyoto treaty [a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions] on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.
All five of those items on the list can be checked off. That’s a big part of the reason why climate change [ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/24/want-to-understand-climate-change-try-this-simple-book/ ] has not featured as an issue in this year’s U.S. presidential election.
What hope there is [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/sunday-review/a-ray-of-hope-on-climate-change.html ] at present for addressing climate change in the U.S. lies in natural gas, dismissed as a nuisance for decades by the oil and coal industries. The “last fossil fuel,” primarily the molecule known as methane, is itself a potent greenhouse gas. However, burning natural gas to generate electricity produces roughly half as much carbon dioxide [ http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-and-you/affect/natural-gas.html ]—the most ubiquitous greenhouse gas—as burning coal does. Already, this year, burning natural gas accounts for as much electricity as burning coal [ http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=7090 ] for the first time in U.S. history, and its use has helped drop U.S. emissions by 430 million metric tons [ http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/news/2012/may/name,27216,en.html ] over the past five years, according to the International Energy Agency.
If fracking for shale gas can work for China [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443437504577544910500662588.html ] too, global emissions could begin to drop (though it appears more likely at present that the U.S. will export highly polluting coal to China [ http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/coal_export_terminals_and_china_should_the_u_s_ship_its_dirty_coal_to_china_.html ] in greater quantities than any shale gas know-how). And if there’s enough natural gas—and there certainly is if we can learn to tap the methane molecules ensconced in icy cages [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=defusing-the-methane-time-bomb ] throughout the world’s oceans—we might even use it to displace oil as the primary fuel for our cars and trucks [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=natural-gas-as-alternative-transportation-fuel ].
At the same time, renewables, such as solar and wind, continue to grow by leaps and bounds, and nuclear power, though it may be moribund in the U.S., is gathering a renewed head of steam in countries such as China [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=china-goes-nuclear-to-avoid-coal-burning ].
None of this will happen fast enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a sufficiently dramatic pace to stop climate change. After all, burning natural gas still means more CO2 molecules in the atmosphere trapping heat. Cheap natural gas will also likely slow the race to develop and deploy alternative energy as well as the sprint (in geologic terms) to a global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius. We’re on track to achieve that over the next 40 years or so, with natural gas or without it.
That means that the people of 2100, or even 2500, will have us to blame if they don’t like the weather. In the shorter term, we’ll all have to learn to adapt to more sea level rise, weird weather, acidified oceans and other climate change impacts. The Earth is different now and will change even more—fewer and fewer glaciers at the Third Pole, less ice at the North Pole and, who knows, a few hardy plants taking root in Antarctica for the first time in millennia. There’s just no denying it.
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
David Biello is the associate editor for environment and energy at Scientific American.
© 2012 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/27/deny-this-contested-himalayan-glaciers-really-are-melting-and-doing-so-at-a-rapid-pace-kind-of-like-climate-change/ [with comments]
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A Skeptic Confirms Substantial Recent Global Warming
Uploaded by Revkin on Oct 19, 2011
Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been a harsh critic of advocates for prompt cuts in greenhouse gases, has finished an independent analysis of 200 years of temperature data and confirms existing studies showing substantial warming of the continents since 1950 -- a trend challenged by many critics of climate science. More at http://berkeleyearth.org/
and on Dot Earth at http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/?s=muller+berkeley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0nKdo4b1os
===
Ocean study reveals carbon not sinking
Photo: The study examined how carbon is absorbed from the ocean's surface.
(AAP: Dean Lewins)
By Science Online's Dani Cooper, staff
Updated July 30, 2012 10:17:36
British and Australian researchers have found that one of the world's largest carbon sinks stores carbon differently than first thought.
The Southern Ocean contains about 40 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions absorbed by the world's oceans.
Researchers from the CSIRO and British Antarctic Survey examined the way the Southern Ocean sucks carbon absorbed from the surface layer into the deeper ocean.
Research co-author Richard Matear from the CSIRO says the study shows the method through which carbon is drawn down from the surface of the Southern Ocean to the ocean's interior - or deep waters.
He says it was previously thought this process, known as subduction, happened uniformly across the ocean.
"A conventional thought would be that once it gets out of this surface layer, it's kind of been tucked away and won't appear for a long time; many years of hundreds of years," he said.
"But with this re-ventilation, there's some places where actually it doesn't get put away into the deep ocean for long at all, re-ventilating in the time-scale of a decade."
Using information collected across 10 years from robotic probes known as Argo floats and various sensors, the team has shown subduction happens at specific locations as a result of interplay between winds, currents and massive whirlpools.
Dr Matear says the study also shows the Southern Ocean is not as efficient as first thought in capturing anthropogenic carbon dioxide.
"Once [the carbon] is out of the surface layer it is no longer communicating with the atmosphere so it is buried in the ocean and out of the equation," he said.
"But in many places it is a shallow burial and the carbon gets re-introduced into the atmosphere."
The largest reventilation occurs in the Indian Ocean sector in a band extending eastwards from South Africa to the middle of the basin.
Another hotspot for reventilation occurs east of New Zealand and in the Atlantic zone east of South America.
The findings have particular implications for "ocean fertilisation" projects as it can help pinpoint regions where the carbon-capture approach is most likely to be successful.
Ocean fertilisation schemes involve scattering iron particles on the ocean surface to create a feeding ground for microscopic marine vegetation called phytoplankton.
As the plants gorge on the iron, they suck up atmospheric carbon thanks to natural photosynthesis and create a giant plankton bloom.
These phytoplankton then die and sink to the deep ocean floor - taking the carbon to the ocean floor where it can lie for centuries.
"It actually makes you think about where in the Southern Ocean you could actually implement something like iron fertilisation to enhance carbon uptake because you'd want to avoid these places where you have re-ventilation," Dr Matear said.
Dr Matear says an improved understanding of how the Southern Ocean draws down the carbon will give greater insights into the impact of climate change and future carbon absorption by the ocean.
He says while the movement of carbon from the atmosphere to ocean surface happens rapidly, the transport of the carbon to the deep ocean is a slower process creating a bottleneck.
"The ocean can't keep up with the amount of carbon dioxide we are putting in the atmosphere," he said.
The research has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
© 2012 ABC
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-30/carbon-storage-trends-revealed/4163274
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