Atomic Nerds

I’ve been avoiding the subject for some time, partly because the sheer amount of piled bullshit and pointless rancor gives me a headache, and partly because other folks handle the issue much better than I ever could. I don’t have the expertise to analyze it as well, or the interest in the subject to keep as close track as I should.

But, all the other substantial posts I currently have in my mental queue are in some way unfinished, and a few people have asked me about it, so… here is my best effort at a quick primer for the sense and nonsense in the climate debate. As with energy, the biggest problem is that there is no broad consensus among the public debaters (as opposed to the scientists) about what the argument is actually about. “Is global warming real?” is FAR too broad a question; there are actually a great many questions involved in the serious debate.

1. Is the climate changing?

This is, perhaps, the only gimme in the lot. Yes, we may be certain that the climate is changing, because that is what the climate does. Expecting it to stay static because that would be convenient for us is idiocy of the first order. Climate has changed enormously over the course of history in general, and even within human history, in smaller cycles within overall “ice age” and “warm” periods. One of the problems of the debate in general is that humans have only been able to accurately measure certain variables precisely within the last few decades; our knowledge of what “normal” is only covers the last thirty years or so with any precision. Outside of that, we’re stuck with inaccurate “thermometers” that can be powerfully influenced by other variables- like tree rings- or best guesses based on our knowledge of history, such as the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age- which are controversial precisely because our “records” are so spotty and unreliable.

2. Is humanity influencing climate?

Probably. Humans have caused massive ecological changes before, usually without meaning to, even when it should have been obvious. The megafauna extinctions of North America spring to mind, as does the deforestation of the Middle East and North Africa. Today, North America is far more heavily forested than it ever was- because we killed off the massive herds of grazing animals that create those wide-open plains, and then we became so efficient at agriculture that we no longer needed huge amounts of farm and range land to have a food surplus. Human activities DO release an abnormal amount of the carbon dioxide that normally stays locked up in earth and rock, and we DO know that CO2 plays a role in climate. The question here is not “can we influence climate” but “how sensitive is climate to our influence”.

3. Does CO2 cause warming?

Almost certainly. A tremendous amount of time and energy is expended by skeptics on attacking this link, but it’s wasted effort; this part of the debate really is “settled science”. The problem is that because they think global warming is bullshit, they don’t do any followup research- such as the important questions “how much warming does CO2 cause on its own”, and “is CO2 a primary driver of climate or a secondary amplifier”. These are not even the most important questions, because even the IPCC* (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which produces the big, thick reports on various aspects of climate change that seem to set the standard for the debate) agrees that CO2 has a diminishing-returns relationship with warming- CO2 absorbs solar radiation, but that relationship isn’t linear. By their own calculations, carbon dioxide by itself can only cause about 1-1.2 degrees Celsius of warming, about half of which we (may) have already experienced. This is an effect, but it’s not a catastrophe- the catastrophic scenarios are based on feedback effects, which are posited to be heavily dominated by positive feedbacks.

4. “Wait, positive feedbacks? What feedbacks?”

…Annnnd here is the part of the debate that is rarely mentioned in media reporting at all (probably more because most reporters are scientifically illiterate rather than any attempt at spin), and is usually only even alluded to by skeptics who observe that the earth’s climate has undergone large recognized historical shifts, but has remained in stable oscillation around a median rather than freezing to a snowball or heating up into a slightly cooler Venus. All of the climate models used by the IPCC assume the feedbacks are mostly positive- that, when the earth warms, various natural systems (like ice albedo and cloud formation) will drive more warming. How much solar radiation is reflected back out by ice and other reflective surfaces; how much is absorbed by water vapor; how much cloud cover might reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface; how much in additional greenhouse gases will be released by melting ice, and how much will be absorbed by plants and other biological processes**. Whenever you hear of a climate “tipping point”, the person is talking about 100% positive feedback- that the earth could go unstoppably climate-critical, like a nuclear reactor. The IPCC models do not assume 100% feedback- over time, it’s gone from 45% positive assumption to 68%. (At the same time, their estimates for how much warming is due to carbon dioxide alone have gone down.) If you like numbers and want more detail, a pretty good analysis of the IPCC’s feedback assumptions and how they’ve changed over time lives here.

What we DO know is that the climate models have consistently made much higher predictions for warming than actually occurred as time has marched on since this field of study began in earnest. Something is wrong with the models- which is, in itself, not surprising, since climate is a massively complex system and we still don’t understand a great many variables. As Roy Spencer*** recently testified before Congress, this assumption is being re-examined.

5. “Wait, are the climate scientists and modelers morons or what? Why would they assume strong positive feedbacks?

While I cheerfully agree with the assessment that the UN is led by morons and the policy recommendations based on the IPCC’s science were crafted by morons, there was a good reason for this assumption. If you’ll recall that CO2 by itself doesn’t actually have that strong an effect on climate and that it operates in a diminishing-returns relationship with warming, the .7 degrees Celsius of warming we experienced in the twentieth century was a good bit more than could be explained by CO2 alone. Positive feedback relationships were posited to fill in the gaps of what was understood about warming and CO2, in order to explain why, again, reality didn’t match the model. When that happens, the model needs changing- regardless of which direction the error is in.

6. “So what did cause the warming?”

It’s a bit of an open question, one related to another one that isn’t asked often enough that I mentioned earlier- Is CO2 a primary driver of climate? There’s a growing body of research into the idea that the primary driver of the warming we experienced recently may actually be solar radiation. This is a fairly new idea, only really starting to get off the ground since 2005, and NASA is on it. The debate is now about how much these other sources of warming contribute and have contributed in the past (obviously, we have little to no data on historical solar fluctuations and corresponding Earth temperature changes, not even anything as shaky as tree rings), how much of the assumptions of positive feedbacks are changed by this new information- some are claiming that evidence of sensitivity to solar radiation actually proves that climate is dominated by negative feedbacks- and how this would interact with what is already known about greenhouse gases. So, the short answer to the question is: we don’t know. This is science working normally, no matter what Al Gore or Michael Crichton say.

And that’s the thing of it: we really don’t know. It’s a young science for a field that’s necessarily going to be of breathtaking complexity, simply because it’s about how physics, chemistry, and biology interact to create long-term patterns over every aspect of the entire planet. Based on what I do understand, I personally think that climate change is real but that it’s unlikely to be the catastrophe we’re told it will be, simply because it makes no sense for climate to be dominated so heavily by positive feedbacks that it would be that sensitive- as many have observed, Earth has undergone truly massive perturbations in its climate’s history and yet still returned to oscillating around a median. I can’t think what would be so different about human-generated CO2 that could suddenly change all those rules.

However, just because I can’t think it doesn’t mean it’s not true. I quite rightly bash on others for rejecting huge chunks of science just because it offends their uneducated intuition, and I’m about as educated on climate science as Roy Spencer is educated on biology. The catastrophists could be right, and the logic of preparing for the worst-case scenario rather than blithely hoping for the best dictates that I must think about what will happen if they are. Lots of people point to the shrill hysteria among the catastrophists, and their cultlike insitence that humanity must pay for its carbon “sins”- but just because some nut tells you you’ll burn in Hell for your sins in order to bully you to behaving as he would prefer, it does not follow that Hell does not actually exist. As this kind of Christian wingnut usually smugly asserts, after you’re dead and standing before judgment is a lousy time to find out that they were actually right about what kind of tolerance God has for earthly funny business.

That leads to the last question, which skeptics and alarmists alike need to address honestly:

7. “If global warming is real, what should we do about it?”

This is a very serious question. The cost of serious CO2 abatement in the absence of some seriously heavy-duty deus ex machina results of alternative-energy research amounts to a serious chunk out of the global economy- in one of Al Gore’s proposals (which would reduce warming down to a couple of degrees, by the catastrophist models), nearly half the entire current global economy. Again, this is more than just belt-tightening, reducing, and reusing: this is with 20$-a-gallon as a plausible FLOOR on gas prices, and food prices just as bad, since food requires a substantial energy investment to grow, store, and ship. Almost no one is currently meeting Kyoto Protocol targets, and those targets are incredibly wimpy compared to what will be required for serious carbon abatement- one of the arguments against the United States becoming a signatory nation is that even the catastrophists admit that even if everyone DID comply, it would be an insignificant drop in the bucket so far as warming were concerned. The other reason? The nations didn’t want to take the economic hit, as their leaders know damn well and good that their populations would revolt. Whether a nation chose not to sign or chose not to make real efforts to meet its goals has mostly been a matter of how seriously they take treaties and what kind of black eye they want to take.

It’s incredibly ironic that the IPCC and Al Gore shared a Nobel Peace Prize for their work in spreading awareness about catastrophic global warming, because if they’re absolutely right and the skeptics are absolutely wrong, the conflicts over resources, energy, and the consequences of warming would be the single biggest cause of death, poverty, and warfare among increasingly-desperate nations in history, making squabbles about land, religion, and economic theories look like playground scuffles. People who think we’re all going to link hands and sacrifice nearly everything in some sort of global harmony in face of the threat are either on mind-altering chemicals, or appallingly ignorant of history. The UN is typically concerned about the impact of climate change on women and minorities, but doesn’t seem to consider that the economic impact of serious carbon abatement will almost certainly be much, much worse.

And in that disconnect, it’s pretty easy to see why a lot of skeptics have called global warming a “scam”- because in it, the same people who have always been dreaming of re-engineering the world to their vision see an excuse far better than the old ones of “economic justice” or religion- a threat that could conceivably affect EVERYONE to the point where they might acquiesce to the social engineers’ control. And that prospect has attracted them to global warming catastrophism like flies to honey, which is why so many of the “solutions” look like repackaged socialism: they are. Only this time, instead of killing off huge numbers of people implementing a ham-handed collectivist approach to industrialization, it will kill off large numbers of people in a ham-handed collectivist approach to taking humanity back to a completely imaginary time when we supposedly lived in environmental harmony with the planet. (Most true historical cases of human populations living with a very light environmental impact have been due to a very high mortality rate, especially of children.)

At the end of the day, one thing that both skeptics and catastrophists should be able to agree on is that our only plausible way out of the trap- whether you consider the trap dependence on fossil fuels, global warming, or dependence on an energy source that is largely controlled by psychopaths- is through alternative energy. Alternative energy is not there yet. Nowhere near. Getting there will require lots and lots of money… which will be in very short supply if we react to a climate change whose magnitude and scope we still have only a very fuzzy idea of.

Real solutions to problems involve a lot of serious cost-benefit analysis, careful and detailed research, and an ethical approach grounded in reality rather than ideology. I suspect the sign we’ll have that alarmists have truly begun to take the problem seriously- and that skeptics have truly begun to take energy problems seriously- is when this actually starts to dominate the discourse. For one, those nuclear plants suddenly look like a really attractive proposition in terms of energy produced versus carbon emissions.

I apologize for how abruptly this ends, but trying to wrap all these issues up into a neat and symmetrical package is like trying to stuff forty snakes into a hamster ball. This issue is a hydra: for each head you lop off, more grow.

*Plain language to this effect can be found in the IPCC third assessment, but not the fourth, which is the most recent. While they made a number of updates to the physical science they address directly- not always in favor of the catastrophist scenario- an explicit demarcation of the boundary between “CO2 period” and “CO2 plus feedbacks” seems to have vanished.

**For a quick guide to feedbacks according to the IPCC, go here.

***Those who are also interested in my primary science-and-culture issue, evolution, may know that Spencer is also a doubter of evolutionary theory. I don’t find this to be hugely problematic; Fred Hoyle’s denial of evolution didn’t make him a bad astronomer, just a man who had overestimated his own reasoning skills and didn’t understand someone else’s field.

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