Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
26 November 2010, a Friday
If you went to know why people are confused about global warming, read
this headline:As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.
And then the text well into the story:
Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.
So named because a Canadian seaman named Sewell went aground here, no doubt. But when it is the land doing the actual sinking, is it really correct to call the result a rise in sea level? If one were to come in now and dump several billion cubic yards of MORE fill into the original filled-in march the city was built on, would you then say that sea level was falling? Of course not.
Scientists engaged in the fields of geology and oceanography know that the east coast, in general, is what we call a submergent coast, as in
this explanation:Primary coasts are divided into two categories: submergent coasts and emergent coasts. Submergent coastlines result from a general sea-level rise and crustal subsidence (a lot of heavy sediment on top of the bedrock is forcing the bedrock deeper into the earth). Most of the eastern United States has submergent coastlines. One example is the Chesapeake Bay. Emergent coastlines result from the land being lifted, either by tectonic activity or rebound from the weight of heavy glaciers, which exposes the former sea bottom bit by bit forming continuously new shoreline.
Wait a second...melting glaciers sufficient to cause upward crustal movement? That’s right. Which should give you a hint that this has been going on quite a long time and rising sea levels are old news rather than the stuff of modern-day panic. Sea levels, in general—not merely local apparent rises—have been rising for about 12,000 years or so as the truly gigantic continental glaciers have melted. And yes, they were so very big and so very heavy that the earth’s crust, relieved of their weight, has been rebounding upward in places as a result. Now that’s one hell of a lot of melted ice, folks.
But when the cities of the eastern seaboard were built, and especially in subsiding marshes like Norfolk, few people paid attention to things like this...if they even knew about them.
Another thing not mentioned in the oceanography item was the effect of the westward movement of the North American tectonic plate, which extends eastward all the way to the mid-Atlantic ridge, the area of sea-floor spreading. On its western edge, however, the North American plate is overriding the Pacific, Juan de Fuca and Cocos plates, which in general all pushe the North American plate up as it submerges the other three down beneath it to the point where they melt and create the west coast volcanoes. (
This isn’t a bad place to go for a quick and simple look at the plates.)In general, then, you can think of the westward-moving North American plate as being tilted slightly upward on the west and down a bit on the east...another apparent "rise" in sea level caused by land movement rather than extra melted glacier water being added to the seas,.
Hopefully you can see by this that making an alarming claim that climate change is the reason Atlantic coastal cities are feeling the effects of "rising" sea levels is, well, at the very least far too simplistic. Not explaining these things to people because you want to sell them carbon credits, instead, leads to this kind of response:
...the residents of coastal neighborhoods here are less interested in the debate than in the real-time consequences of a rise in sea level.
When Ms. Peck, now 75 and a caretaker to her husband, moved here 40 years ago, tidal flooding was an occasional hazard.
"Last month," she said recently, "there were eight or nine days the tide was so doggone high it was difficult to drive."
Larchmont residents have relentlessly lobbied the city to address the problem...
Are there fast-talking encyclopedia salesmen any more? My wife and I bought our first set when we were both in college and could ill-afford them, but he was just sooooo good...almost as good as the guy who sold us our super-duper vacuum cleaner.
Those guys are lobbyists now trying to sell cap-and-trade to your congressmen. And Ms Peck would no doubt add her voice if she believed it was going to make her high tides "lower," you can count on that!
"We are the front lines of climate change," said Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer who lives on Richmond Crescent near Ms. Peck. "No one who has a house here is a skeptic."
Nor should he be a skeptic, because climate change is a fact of life, as are rising sea levels. But does the "science and technology" writer, notably not identified as an actual scientist, know that the warming and general rise in sea level has been going on for thousands and thousands of years, and why it has been happening for so long, or did he learn his climate change science only by watching Al Gore’s film?
...Norfolk has hired the Dutch firm
But to judge by the strong preference in Larchmont for action at any cost...
Action at any cost! You can see that those people are ripe and just begging for a fast-talking snake-oil salesman to come along and promise that he has their salvation in his bottle. Action at any cost, that’s the ticket to preach for your own success--at least, if you’re the salesman. By the time they learn they’ve paid far too much for a solution which will not work you’ll be comfortably well off much further down the road.
Bjorn Lomborg, the self-described "skeptical environmentalist," is willing to ascribe much more global warming to the activities of mankind than I am, but his MA and PhD are in Political Science and he is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Even so, he has the right idea when it comes to arguing that we should be careful and not act in haste as we figure out which actions will result in the best results for the least cost.
As for his beliefs about the science of warming/climate change, try
this from "Watts Up With That?":Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and "Cool It," is right about the need to focus on critical health and economic priorities. But he is wrong about human carbon dioxide emissions causing what is now being called "global climate disruption."
By demonizing the gas of life, in league with
Al Gore and Bill Gates, Lomborg commits several serious scientific errors.
As independent scientists, with broad training in mathematics, physics,
chemistry, geology and geography, we know CO2 is not a pollutant, and the
notion of "carbon-free" or "zero-carbon" energy is inherently harmful and
anti-scientific.
If nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, helium or any other nontoxic gas is pumped
into a chamber containing air and a growing plant, the response is barely
measurable. By contrast, if more CO2 is added, the plant and its root system
benefit enormously, displaying enhanced growth and more efficient use of
available water and nutrients.
Far from having detrimental effects, carbon dioxide has decidedly beneficial impacts on plants, aquatic and terrestrial alike, and a new study connects enhanced plant productivity to greater bird species diversity in China. How, therefore, can anyone conclude that human carbon dioxide is a pollutant that must be eradicated?
At least as far back as Sun Tzu it was known that in order to win the battle the victor first needs to dictate the grounds on which it will be contested and define the terms of combat. One of the smartest things the anti-carbon people have done, from a tactical sense, was managing to get the nine scientists on the Supreme Court to declare carbon dioxide to be a pollutant. After this has been successfully accomplished, eradicating carbon dioxide follows as a logical necessity.
Zero-carbon activists respond to these facts by asserting that human CO2 emissions cause "dangerous global warming." They are wrong about this, too.
If rising atmospheric CO2 levels drive global temperatures upward, as they insist, why is Earth not suffering from the dangerous "fever" that Al Gore predicted? Instead, after mild warming at the end of the twentieth century, global temperatures have leveled off for the past decade, amid steadily rising carbon dioxide levels.
This has been one of my own points for quite some time. As a geologist/geophysicist by training I know a couple of things not widely talked about in the average global warming (or climate change) discussion.
One is how long ago the current warming trend began. Another is that there have been a large number of previous cooling/warming/cooling/warming/etc cycles throughout geologic history, all prior to the advent of industrial carbon-producing man. Yet another is the fact that carbon dioxide levels have been much higher than they are today, but life on earth flourished. Even during the current generally-warming phase there have been variations both up and down, the Roman Climate Optimum and the Medieval Warm Period believed to be warmer than temperatures are today.
None of this matches with any graph of carbon dioxide concentrations. The branch of geophysics which has to do with interpreting seismic data, in particular, has spent enormous effort in creating mathematical techniques for comparing the data ("signal") portion of adjacent seismic records while eliminating the non-data ("noise") portion. Frankly, the math involved there is well above my pay grade, but I do understand the results.
And the degree to which temperature variations correlate with carbon dioxide concentrations scarcely exists at all.
In fact, one of the biggest mysteries of the whole argument over carbon, at least to me, is how the anti-carbon people have so successfully obscured this simple fact: the curves don’t really match up very well.
Even worse, though, is the fact that we have lost or destroyed a lot of the original raw temperature data for various reasons and as a result have only manipulated ("adjusted") with no way to check, verify, or duplicate the results. Some ‘scientists’ have even refused to share ‘their’ data with others. The resulting arguments have not been pretty.
Most certain of all, atmospheric carbon dioxide is not the "climate control knob" that anti-hydrocarbon alarmists assert, and it is irresponsible for Lomborg to claim his socio-political agenda will provide a low-cost solution for the global warming "problem."
The scientific reality is that even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been unable to demonstrate a cause-and-effect scientific connection between rising human CO2 emissions and dangerous warming.. To support global limits on CO2 emissions, in the absence of real-world data showing clear cause and effect, is scientific and policy incompetence on the highest order.
Imagine a drug company seeking FDA approval for a new drug, based on an analysis that says simply: "Our supercomputers say the drug is safe and effective. We have no clinical data to support this, but can think of no reason actual results would contradict what our computers predict. Moreover, failure to license the drug will be disastrous for patients suffering from the targeted disease." Failing to demand actual dose-and-response studies, before licensing the drug, would be gross negligence on FDA’s part.
And, they finish with my typical argument, interestingly enough:
The central issue is not whether rising CO2 levels will cause a warmer planet. The fundamental concern is whether globally warmer temperatures are factually worse (or better) for human societies — and more (or less) damaging to the environment — than colder temperatures (like those experienced during the ice ages and Little Ice Age).
Bjorn Lomborg, Al Gore and Bill Gates need to consider the likelihood that, driven by changes in solar activity and ocean circulation, Earth will cool significantly over coming decades. Damaging the global economy with ineffectual carbon dioxide controls, in a futile quest to "stop global warming," looks stupid now.
Viewed later, with hindsight, it will be judged outrageously irresponsible.
Throughout human history, warmer has always been better for the human race than colder has. The Roman Climate Optimum spread the rule of law and western civilization across half of the globe. The Medieval Warm Period produced the Renaissance. The Little Ice Age produced famines.
As for proposed solutions to perceived problems, remember again this 1975 article from Newsweek, at the time one of the most influential publications in the western world:
"There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production...
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. ...
The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. ... They are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. ...
Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about 7 degrees lower than during its warmest eras—and that the present decline has taken the planet a bout a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900...
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot might..."
Let’s mercifully draw the curtain on speculations which "might" cause A or B to happen even while the problem, C, isn’t exactly certain, because, as the article says, that would be outrageously irresponsible.
I mean, we all know that the temperature decline which the Newsweek article graphically depicts between 1942 and their April 28, 1975, publication was also a period of the greatest growth spurt in the history of the industrialized world to that point, as nations first created huge steel plants to build tanks and planes to fight WWII, then created more industry to rebuild Europe, then enjoyed the explosive golden years of American growth following the end of WWII.
And don’t forgot that industrial plants at that time were far, far less worried about or constrained by environmental restrictions controlling actual pollution, much less ordinary carbon dioxide. Look at old pictures of Pittsburgh when steel plants were at their belching best and smog in LA was so bad that when I returned back there from Utah, in 1962, I literally could not see to drive downtown, my eyes watered and stung so badly.
And yet temperatures all this while were dropping to the point where climatologists were worrying about a return to Little Ice Age conditions and considering covering the polar icecaps with black soot.
So, okay, you say, but what if there was a lagging effect...that the turnaround of temperatures after the 1975 article was a result of all of that industrial growth I just mentioned?
Not a bad point, except for the rest of the graph. See, it did not begin in 1942, it began in 1882. And between 1882 and 1942 temperatures ROSE even further than they fell between 1942-75.
So what produced the very large temperature increase from 1882-1942 if there is a 33-year lagging effect in the case of carbon dioxide? And how did carbon dioxide changes produce the downward turnaround in 1942, in that case?
If you don’t get anything else out of this discussion I would hope it leaves you wondering how and why the anti-carbon people are arriving at the conclusions that they say they are.
In 1975 Newsweek worried about cooling thusly:
The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
Since the results never did become grim reality, and in fact were exactly the opposite of what was feared, maybe it’s time we rewrote that conclusion.
The hastier the planners move to cope with something lacking any kind of known reality, the more difficult will they find it to recover from the damage caused by their errors.
Their money-graf on Lomborg is well-put.
His insistence that we prioritize expenditures is spot-on when applied to genuine environmental and societal problems. However, it is irrelevant when the problems are mythical — or devised to advance ideological agendas.
It's a lame-duck session. Time is running out. Unemployment is high, the economy is dangerously weak and, with five weeks to go, no one knows what tax anyone will be paying on everything from income to dividends to death when the current rates expire Jan. 1. And what is the president demanding that Congress pass as "a top priority"? To what did he devote his latest weekly radio address? Ratification of his New START treaty.
Good grief. Even among national security concerns, New START is way down at the bottom of the list. From the naval treaties of the 1920s to this day, arms control has oscillated between mere symbolism at its best to major harm at its worst, with general uselessness being the norm.
The reason is obvious. The problem is never the weapon; it is the nature of the regime controlling the weapon. That's why no one stays up nights worrying about British nukes, while everyone worries about Iranian nukes.
It’s a variation on the theme that guns don’t kill people, people who decide to use them to kill others do. I’m not really sure how many guns I have owned in my life, I should stop and think about that. I got my own .22 when I was 12...and I still have it. I have another .22 pump inherited from Dad. When I was old enough for deer season I bought a Remington lever-action .30-.30. Somewhere along the line I owned a .303 Enfield and a .30 M1 carbine I still miss. I’ve owned a number of pistols, including a 7.65 mm German Luger I also miss, a military .45 which was stolen in a home burglary, a 9 mm Beretta and currently a 9 mm S&W. Oh, yeah...somewhere in there I owned a Ruger .357 Magnum. Oh, and another Ruger .22 rifle, come to think of it.
I not only never killed anyone with any of those guns, I never even shot at anyone.
I only loaded one once in anticipation of trouble. One of my best friends was a violent drunk and one New Year’s Eve party at our house he went overboard. I insisted on driving him home after, when he wanted to drive downtown and continue partying, and when we got to his house, where he lived with his parents, a violent argument ensued. Disgusted, I tossed down his car keys and left. Unknown to all of us, they bounced off where I threw them and disappeared into a snowbank.
Half an hour later the phone rang. It was my friend, demanding his keys. I said I didn’t have them, maybe his father did. He told me no, his father was too frightened of him to lie and he had just fired a shot through their kitchen wall to make sure of that. He said he thought I was lying and he was coming to see me. Well, in his condition he was as likely to start shooting first and talking later, so I loaded my .357 and put it on the headboard just in case.
He never showed up, to no one’s great surprise, it was a long walk in deep snow for someone as drunk as he was, and the next morning he remembered none of it. Max was my best friend in those days, but even so I had to keep in mind that his civilized exterior was only a thin veneer easily dissolved in alcohol.
The Russians are no longer an existential threat. A nuclear exchange between Washington and Moscow is inconceivable. What difference does it make how many nukes Russia builds? If they want to spend themselves into penury creating a bloated nuclear arsenal, be our guest. ...
The worst thing about this treaty, however, is that it is simply a distraction. It gives the illusion of doing something about nuclear danger by addressing a non-problem, Russia, while doing nothing about the real problem - Iran and North Korea.
The argument is that if we don’t make a deal with the Russians then maybe they won’t help us with Iran and North Korea. I can’t see how you can rely on that kind of friend no matter what you give them.
What’s that? Why were Max and I good friends? I don’t really know, now that I think of it, we just were. He was a loose cannon in the strictest sense of the word and almost got me arrested one night and kicked out of college later that week, but he survived until that New Year’s Eve. I was married by then, though, and got the word that I needed to reconsider some things, one of which was Max...well, all of you married men know how things like that go.
Oh, probably the real game changer was the night when we were in our cups and he asked me why I wasn’t afraid of him? I didn’t know how to answer. He said that surely I knew he could beat the hell out of me if he wanted, right? I suspected that might well be the truth since he was what they used to call a "berserker" who lost all control past a certain point and won all of his many fights that I knew about. I finally said that it never had occurred to me that he’d even want to do something like that to me, which avoided directly answering his question. He looked at me for a long time and said nothing and I looked at him a bit differently after that, too.
I’ve often wondered what happened to Max. I heard, many years later, that he had joined AA and straightened out his life, but I never saw him again after I left and went to work for Standard Oil.
I’ve had some interesting friends. My best college friend married my first wife after we were divorced, and following him was a bartender whose job I took over when he was picked up one afternoon and sent to the Utah state prison. Two of my other closest friends—I was best man at their wedding—were murdered in the Caribbean by people who were technically pirates. Their story appeared on television.
Okay, we appear to have drifted off somewhere...