Blogito, Ergo Sum - Global Warming Update 01-17-07

Remember the 'scientists' who don't even want the anti-global warming scientists to be heard any longer because all of the major scientists are in agreement? This from an article by Robert I. Bradley Jr:

The emotional, politicized debate over global warming has produced a fire-ready-aim mentality, despite great and still growing scientific uncertainty about the problem. For example, recent issues of Science magazine (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science) have questioned three of Al Gore's pet alarms: more intense hurricanes, disruption of the Atlantic Ocean's climate-regulating currents, and a rapid rise of sea level.
    After the devastating 2005 hurricane season, a hypothesis emerged that heated waters from an enhanced greenhouse effect translated into more intense hurricanes. Many hurricane specialists disagreed, but the newborn hypothesis made headlines. Then the unusually mild hurricane season of 2006 followed. And the Nov. 10, 2006, issue of Science reports: "The best theory and modeling still indicate that ocean temperature has only a minimal direct effect on storms."
    The very next issue of Science neutered another popular alarm: that melting ice from the enhanced greenhouse effect would disrupt the Atlantic "conveyor belt" responsible for Europe's mild climate. This hypothesis, several years old, also made headlines. But the title of the Nov. 17 article says: "False alarm: Atlantic conveyor belt hasn't slowed down after all."
    An accelerating rise in sea level is another scare that is prominent in Al Gore's book/movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." But an article in the Nov. 24 issue of Science says current observational data indicate melting ice sheets "presently contribute little to sea-level rise."

So...let's talk about "ice ages" a bit, shall we?

Let me begin by saying that I may have misrepresented--perhaps even misunderstood--man's involvement over the last million years or so, but part of that is terminological...the difference, for instance, between an "ice epoch" or "era" and intermittent periods of advancing glaciation and retreat ("global warming") during the shorter "ice age" periods.

For reference at this point I am going to lean heavily on an article by Patrick Hughes in the December 1993/January 1994 issue of Weatherwise titled "Children of the Cold". I was not familiar with either the author or the publication before I came across him while researching the career of Alfred Wegener, and know precious little about him except that he was a former managing editor of the magazine and an exceptionally lucid science writer. His article was forwarded to me, after much effort of Carol's part and exceptional cooperation on hers, by Margaret Benner, because I couldn't see to find it using their internal search engine.

Please check out their site at www.weatherwise.org. It's a superb site and looks like a worthwhile subscription, I wish my budget allowed for such frills.

Anyhow, Mr Hughes reminded me that man has been through more warming and cooling oscillations than I had been thinking about, since we consider that the Pleistocene glaciation was an EPOCH, which Hughes describes as "a series of epic ice ages separated by much shorter periods of relative warmth", whereas I was thinking of the whole thing as an ice age. This series of ice ages began more than two million years ago, with the earliest humans showing up about 1.3 million years ago and Darryl Hannah questing for fire about 800,000 years ago while inventing face-to-face, ah, human interaction, eventually leading to the necessity for hairspray and its resulting damage to the ozone layer...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

As Hughes notes, we live in one of these short interglacial respites and thus, he says, future ice ages are almost a certainty. In fact, we're due to start one soon. We've come to recognize during the last million years or so a "rhythmic regularity about every 100,000 years", and thus man would have been building fires to keep warm during the last half-dozen or more.

Since we have to read earth's history book from pages written in layers of rocks and ice, the further back we try to go, and the older the pages are, the worse condition they are in, just like books in any human library. Thus we know more about recent times than we do the ancient past, not to mention the fact that it is only in the most-recent eyeblink of human history (not to even mention geologic history) that man has developed instruments of even rudimentary capability. Why, we've only known how to measure temperatures more precisely than "hot, warm, cool, luke-warm and ouch, dammit!" for a couple of centuries or so...and yet we're trying to figure out how warm or how cold it was 2 million years ago just to get to the beginning of the Pleistocene, while the first ice epoch that we recognize from the earth's damaged pages goes back about two BILLION years!

If you don't get anything else out of this, if it's too much "science" for you and the large number of years seem meaningless, just get this much:

There have been at least four major ice EPOCHS that we recognize during the earth's history, the most recent one before our present time ending around 240 million years ago. Man showed up a bit over 1 million years ago. Between each epoch the globe warmed back up again. Even warmer than it is today.

Thus by no conceivable stretch of the imagination could man have possibly engineered any of the previous periods of global warming between the ice EPOCHS, not to mention the numerous warming/cooling 100,000-year cycles which took place before he even discovered fire.

In short, Algore is selling you one gigantic bridge to nowhere, he's working on a pork project to dwarf any and all that have ever come before him!

I'm sorry I can't reproduce the graph from the Weatherwise article, but even a cursory glance shows that since the end of the last ice epoch, 225-240 million years ago, the earth warmed CONSIDERABLY until about 110 million years ago, then started cooling. The cooling has sharply accelerated during the last 50 million years or so.

What causes these ice epochs, not to mention the smaller fluctuations within them that we call ice ages? Well, we're still puzzling that one. For one thing, thanks to Wegener's sounding off about it, we have discovered that the continents have moved around quite a lot during earth's history, forming supercontinents and then breaking apart again, only to re-form another supercontinent. When these continents were located over polar regions, things changed from when they were not. Let me quote from Hughes:

"The last ice era before our own lasted from about 300 to 240 million years ago. Glaciers and ice sheets covered southern South America and much of Africa, India, Antarctica and Australia. At the time, these continents composed a supercontinent called "Gondwanaland". As first one, then another continent moved over the South Pole, glaciers and ice sheets expanded and contracted accordingly. There is evidence of at least 100 cycles of glaciation but there may have been many more."

Next came the supercontinent we have named Pangaea, which stretched from pole to pole. Again, from Hughes:

"Pangaea began to break up some 200 million years ago and the continents to move toward their present positions. Some 50 million years ago, ocean-bottom temperatures began to fall sharply, and 10 million years later small glaciers appeared in Antarctica. By 20 million years ago, that continent (twice the size of the United States) was covered by an ice sheet. Glaciers appeared on the mountains of Alaska some eight million years later, and by three million years ago, Greenland was covered by an ice sheet."

Well, we know for sure that things have been warming up since then, most of those glaciers and ice sheets are considerably reduced...but we also know that these warmings are part and parcel of some natural cycle we don't fully understand,

The earth spins on its axis much like a top, and thus it also exhibits changes in the eccentricity, tilt and wobble in the earth's orbit, with recognized orbital variations of 22,000, 41,000 and, what do you know, 100,000 years. Coincidental?

Who knows, because from what we are able to determine today, the 100,000 year temperature changes producing the ice ages seem to be those smallest in seasonal solar energy distribution yet they still seem to line up with the ice ages according to the ocean-core records. Doesn't make good sense, does it.

And here's another factor to consider, as Hughes adds:

"Over at least the last the last 160,000 years, for example, including two ice ages and interglacials, global temperatures have oscillated in lock step with carbon dioxide levels."

Of course...carbon dioxide. But, just as we've resolved that problem, he then continues:

"Recent research, however, indicates carbon dioxide levels may actually have PEAKED" (emphasis mine) "near the time of the ice-age era of 430 million years ago.

"Clearly, the causes of both glacial epochs and individual ice ages are complex and, at best, only partially understood. Plate tectonics, large carbon dioxide changes, and even the Earth's orbital variations, for example, are relatively ponderous, long-term processes. They don't explain the abrupt surges in the ocean-sediment record that often mark the beginnings of interglacials, nor the stunningly sudden changes in both interglacial and ice-age climates recently revealed in Greenland ice cores."

You should look at the graph of the four major ice EPOCHS...man, those changes are abrupt! Within the shorter fluctuations they had to be even more abrupt.

The next time some "scientist" spouts off and assures you "what scientists KNOW for a fact" about global warming now you know how to evaluate what they have to say.

In fact, what Hughes points out about the recognized cyclical nature of ice ages seems to indicate that Newsweek may have been right back in 1975 when they printed a graph from the National Center For Atmospheric Research showing temperatures had been falling precipitously since about 1946.

But, as Hughes adds:

"We humans, however, have added a new twist to nature's script that could delay the inevitable."

We're burning fossil fuels and adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Assuming that we’re having any effect at all, on the whole global warming is a preferable alternative to freezing your ass off!

There, now, don't you feel better about it all?

Oh, yes...just to keep things in perspective, back to the conclusion of the Newsweek article, April 28, 1975:

"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 or diverting arctic rivers might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality." (EA)

Rather than the product of an overheated imagination?

First we cover the arctic ice cap with black soot to warm things up, then Algore discovers he can make a buck out of promoting global warming so he sends your money north (and south, presumably) to bag up the soot and put it...well, sorry, kids, times up, but haven't we had fun watching my movie about inconvenient truths? M-I-C... K-E-Y... EMMMMMM-O...

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