Break out the sunscreen:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The last few decades were the warmest on Earth in the past 400 years, and may well have been warmer than any comparable period since the Middle Ages, U.S. scientists reported on Thursday.
In a separate study, climate experts blamed global warming for much of the hurricane-fueling rise in temperatures in the North Atlantic last year, when there were a number of devastating hurricanes, including Katrina.
In a new report by the National Research Council, researchers said they were highly confident the mean global surface temperature was higher in the past 25 years than any comparable period during the previous four centuries.
And:
It has been 2,000 years and possibly much longer since the Earth has run such a fever. The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the “recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.”
A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is heating up and that “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.” Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.
I post this information for entertainment value only, because as long as somebody somewhere doubts that human pollution cases climate warming the present government will do exactly nothing.
On this issue the real action will happen at the local level. Take a neighbor to Al Gore’s movie (it is excellent), get your local fishing and hunting clubs worked up about the Republican war on the environment. Leave the NRA and join the non GOP-toadying alternative, the American Hunters and Shooters Association. We the people need to light a burner under Congress’ asses before they lift a fat finger over this issue. Even then any useful progress probably depends on turning over Congress in November – an American writer once said, don’t bother convincing a man of something whose salary depends on him denying it. Set aside some scratch to donate to an appealing local candidate, and even phone them up to volunteer if you have a weekend to spare.
Maybe, just possibly, scientific consensus has reached the point and public awareness is trending in the direction that we might accomplish something useful before a decreasingly-habitable Earth solves the problem for us.
Punchy
As long as you have oil industry-paid “scientists”, you’ll have that “somebody somewhere”. It’s just like the evolution debate–they feel they can ignore 99.99% of all research papers and just keep pulling out the one or two quacks that say otherwise.
Why is this global warming debate even polarized between conservs and libs? Is it in the Bible that the Earth never warms up? Or do conservatives just reflexively deny anything liberals say about anything, no matter what the subject?
srv
Look, most of hottest states are Red States to begin with.
Who cares if the south becomes even more unbearable to live in? Think of it as evolution in action.
Eural
Actually, yes that appears to be the case amongst my cirlce of conservative friends – although in their defence my liberal buddies pretty much react the same way to conservative ideas. In general, both sides seem pretty happy with themselves, don’t actually talk to each other and do nothing to improve the catastrophic state our democracy is currently in. Both sides seem to have forgotten that crazy idea of the “common good”.
Richard 23
Fortunately we have global dimming. C’mon polluters! Keep those particulates coming!
srv, I’ll bet ppGaz appreciates that….
bud
“I post this information for entertainment value only, because as long as somebody somewhere doubts that human pollution cases climate warming the present government will do exactly nothing.”
Good, because that means that they’ll finally be doing what I want.
I don’t get no respect.
QuickRob
Global warming…sooooo….uh, BORING
Paul L.
Wow, Gungrabbers recommend a group that is better than the NRA.
Another Gun Owner Wants National Gun Control
Yeah Tim, I’ll join the DNC/Brady center-toadying astroturf alternative.
Tweaking Science for Consensus
Zifnab
The “hockey stick” graph is less reliable the farther back it goes. This is true. Of course, CEI scientists will tell you that ‘less reliable’ means ‘wrong’. What’s more, they’ll tell you that if the hockey stick graph is wrong, it debunks all of global warming science to the present day.
Once more, we’re kicked back to the days of the cigerette companies tells us that smoking just doesn’t cause cancer. They all had their institutes and their scientists and a hundred million dollars of funded research that clearly stated cigerettes do not cause cancer.
One wonders where we’ll be fifty years from now. How many lawsuits will be flying against Exxon and GM and Reliant Energy for lying to us because they didn’t want to kill company profits by releasing a hybrid car or a fuel cell before 2001? It’s almost a joke, except that the oil and motor execs realize they won’t be around in 50 years, so they’ll never have to pay the piper. And in the meantime, certain Exxon ex-Presidents have $140 million in retirement benefits to console themselves.
Mark
It has been 2,000 years and possibly much longer since the Earth has run such a fever
How did it get so hot 2000 years ago? And why did it cool down? Did the Roman Senate adapt the Kyoto protocol?
Just playing devil’s advocate, that’s all. And being a smart-ass to boot.
Shawn
Hello from really freaking hot New Mexico! We were blue til this last election, Bush barely won here. I voted Dem and I’m roasting my a$$ here! We’ve only gotten 6/10 inch of rain in the past 6 months. This isn’t a red state/blue state thing. This is a OMG, we are all screwed thing.
However, we are doing what we can to reduce our energy consumption. I never drive unless I absolutely have to. We’re putting in solar tube skylights in our windowless/dim rooms, researching solar power, etc.
There is hope. My husband is a Republican who reads NewsMax and Drudge. Argh. He’s even starting to believe.
P.S. to all the gun peeps above, I don’t get the gun control thing. Most Dems I know, including me, own guns and are pro 2nd amendment. I think us pro gun people should take over the Democratic Party. I think the Republican Party is beyond hope at this point.
Zifnab
Haha. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
Gun control was mostly a nanny-state thing from the 80s and 90s which, to be fair, wasn’t such a bad idea in theory. There’s this idea that if you have a five day waiting period and a background check, its less likely that a career felon will be able to buy the tools of his trade. But the truth is that there were entirely too many loopholes – gun shows, private sales, clean guys buying guns for crocked guys, etc – that it lost alot of teeth. And the NRA kicking and screaming along the entire trip just made the process too politically painful to continue.
Which is a shame, because we really do need to disarm some of the inner cities. I’ve got no trouble with some guy in Wisconsin hunting deer for sport. I just don’t see why Joe Blow from inner city Detroit thinks he’ll be safer with a small arsenal concealed under his trenchcoat.
pdquig
So, now all that’s left to do is to actually find an explanation for the mechanism that is causing the warming upon which we can all agree. Since the computer models cannot even predict the recent past based on the actual data available, and since CO2 alone cannot explain the phenomenon, we climatologists are left with a bit of a problem: we have observations for which we have no hypothesis that can hold water (vapor or otherwise). Details, details.
How about this: let’s ban greenhouse gas emmisions just like we banned DDT. Then, we can look back in 35 years and lament all those poor, brown people (say, 25 million) that died as a result of our high-minded — yet unsubstantiated — zeal. Better safe than sorry, since it’s unlikely that many rich, white people will be the victims.
Tim F.
The gun control debate is a completely irrelevant distraction from the point of this thread. The main problem with the NRA isn’t the gun control issue, it’s that the NRA reflexively and dogmatically supports a party that directly contravenes the interests of outdoor sportsmen. The time when the Democratic party seriously posed any danger of “grabbig your guns” passed a long time ago so there is no imaginable reason anymore why NRA should essentially equal GOP. Democrats are hands-down better for protecting the outdoors for hunting and fishing and it seems long past time that a sportsmen’s organization reflected that.
From personal experience I will say that the Blue Ribbon Coalition is on the table as well. However, from personal experience I will also say that the Sierra Club set will gladly cut off their nose to spite their face when it comes to engaging with them.
Tim F.
“We” climatologists? You sound like a sub-par TCSDaily reader. Let’s not get into a pointless laying-out of anonymous credentials, but make an effort to show that you know about the diversity of models on offer and the relative ability of each to reverse-predict past climate.
Taking your logic, I could observe that some rightwingers think that we should have nuked Fallujah and conclude that rightwingers are emotional children who would not know the real world if it bit them in the ass. Spot my fallacy?
Andrew
No.
The Other Steve
As for the NRA freakjobs…
They’ve been running around lately claiming The UN is going to confiscate all their guns on July 4th
And they accuse the Democrats of being shrill, or it being ridiculous to remind people when Bush uses political tactics used by Hitler. I mean sheesh!
CaseyL
I thought the “mechanism” of GCC was, if not simple, pretty straightforward.
There are certain gases, called “greenhouse” gases, because they thicken the atmosphere, thus trapping heat. Greenhouse gases are found in nature, and there are natural processes that break them down so their component parts can be re-absorbed and re-used. But burning fossil fuels creates, as a waste product, far more greenhouse gas far more quickly than natural processes do; and also creates them in unnatural configurations (extra molecules, unstable isotopes, etc.); and the natural processes that normally break down greenhouse gas can’t keep up.
Any system that can’t break down and get rid of a waste product fast enough becomes poisoned by it.
What happens to a human with kidney failure? Cirrhosis of the liver? Colo-rectal cancer? The bloodstream becomes saturated with waste that those organs would normally process and expel from the body, and the body sickens and eventually fails.
That’s what’s happening to the planet. It doesn’t happen quickly, because the world is large and its “metabolism” is slow. Like the difference between, say, a cat with kidney failure and a human: the cat gets sick and dies quicker than the human does, because a cat is smaller and has a more rapid metabolism.
Ross
Just saw “An Inconvenient Truth” tonight. It was very good. I was particularly convinced by the data from the arctic ice core samples, which measured CO2 levels in the atmosphere over the last 650,000 years. There you can clearly see the natural cycles of global warming and cooling. BUT … today’s CO2 levels are over twice the highest level that they ever reached in any of the warm periods of the past. I also thought that the parallels he made between tobbaco and global warming today were pretty good – real-world consequences of our actions, misinformation campaigns from big business, and moral imperatives.
There were other parts that I thought needed more work. Mostly his rebuttal to the “myth” that environmentalism opposes the economy. It was fairly weak, because I think his stance was too extreme to be really supported. Also, I would have liked to have seen more time given to what we can do about it. Towards the end of the movie he just rattled off a bunch of bullet points … suggesting we do improve things like “other end-use efficiency.” Huh?
Overall, a $9 well-spent.
Paul L.
BS Have you forgot the push they did to renew the assault weapon ban that they passed last time the Democrats controlled congress. John Kerry who missed alot of votes when running for President somehow managed to vote Yes for the renewal of the AWB.
The reason the Democratic party has not seriously posed any danger of “grabbing your guns” is that they have not been in power for 12 years.
BTW, the second amendment of the Constitution does not mention hunting.
C-141 Crew Dog
Global Warming is the ultimate, you-can’t-lose scam. To-wit:
(1) If we adopt the most severe measures (such as “carbon taxes”), and the earth is significantly warmer a century from now anyway, it will be because, “the problem was much worse than we predicted; even the painful, society-altering measures we took weren’t enough.”
(2) If we just make a few relatively mild changes, like making cars more fuel efficient with lower emissions, using alternative fuels, etc., and the climate stays stable or even cools a bit, then it will be because, “See? We were right! Had we not forced the auto industry to change, we would be living on Venus righ now!”
Wasn’t there a “little ice age” during the medieval period? Is that why data becomes “unreliable” prior to 1600? What about volcanic activity; wouldn’t a major eruption such as Krakatoa effect weather and climate significantly? And more recently, Mt St Helens, Pinatubo, and Saddam’s burning of Kuwait’s oil fields?
How does Al Gore propose to make countires like China or India adopt more climate-friendly practices?
Lee
I had a long debate in a thread on a local board just the last 2 days about GCC.
For several they trotted out the same old stuff (e.g., global warming on mars, too short of a time period, etc). I links to How to Talk to a Global Warming Sceptic and all but one seem to at least understand it.
The last one (I’m sorry to say) called himself a libertarian and kept up mantra ‘But there is no PROOF!’. I tried to explain the fundementals of science, he never seemed to understand it.
TTT
How about this: let’s ban greenhouse gas emmisions just like we banned DDT. Then, we can look back in 35 years and lament all those poor, brown people (say, 25 million) that died as a result of our high-minded—yet unsubstantiated—zeal
How about this: let’s eat pop rocks and drink soda so our stomachs will blow up!
The two suggestions are equally true, since there was no DDT ban. The tropical countries worst effected by malaria continued using DDT–despite its substantiated and proven ill effects on wildlife–for decades after America stopped.
Kirk Spencer
TTT, sorta right.
There was no global DDT ban. But because the big spender nations DID have a ban, the scales of efficiency worked against cheap production. So tropical nations still bought and used it, but they bought less with each dollar spent – and they had fewer dollars to spend in the first place.
Kirk
Ross
That pretty much sums up the right wing’s arguments about the “war on terror.” Another you-can’t-lose scam. Keep the public paralyzed in fear and you’ll keep winning elections!
chopper
i liked the movie. pretty straightforward in most ways if you ask me.
i mean, the comparison of past temperatures and CO2 concentrations shows the correlation betweenthe two that scientists have assumed for decades. and the high concentration of CO2 now was well demonstrated.
what i didn’t like too much was the talk about hurricanes. not because warmer oceans don’t cause more hurricanes to form, they do. and make hurricanes more intense. however, hurricanes are complicated systems and most climatologists i’ve seen are not willing to come out and say that GW means more hurricanes.
i mean, what if one of the side effects of GW is more high-level wind shear over the tropics? then fewer hurricanes will form. or maybe GW causes the sahara and western deserts in africa to get even drier and dustier, causing more and more intense dust storms to throw dust over the cape verde area, stifling tropical wave growth in that area? we’re not sure. so using katrina was a bit of a political point more than a scientific one.
but other than that, i thought the movie was good. i woulda preferred more talk within the movie as to what people can do to reduce CO2 emissions instead of in the credits. but whatevah.
Derek
Ok there are too workible large scale solutions to CO2 output. Nuclear power on a masive scale in conjuection with electric cars. Or destroying the worlds ecomnomic output so that almost no one uses machines. That’s it. The only real solutions to the problem (Please don’t go on about renewible fuels, we all know it’s too little, too late). Too bad enverimentalist helped kill the Nuclear power off. Destroying the worlds Ecomny would kill far more people than global warming will.
fwiffo
And that has what to do with the price of tea in China?
Because there is less data, and the tools for measuring it are less precise. It’s like the difference between measuring an object sitting on the table in front of you and measuring something from across the room. The latter is more difficult to do with a high degree of precision.
Gee, I guess climate scientists never thought of that. Bully on you for your scientific breakthrough![/snark]
Volcanos dump all sorts of particulates and espescially sulfur compounds into the atmosphere, and large eruptions do have a noticeable cooling effect on the climate. The year after Krakatoa, summer failed to arrive in some parts of the world. However, the sulfur and dust expelled by volcanos that causes the cooling is washed out of the atmosphere much more quickly than CO2 and the cooling effect only lasts a couple years.
Ryan S.
SO WHAT!?
First off there are about lets say 300 mill people in the US. And about 7Bill people in the world. That means 300,000,000/7,000,000,000 which is 4.5%. And the US produces about 25% of all the CO2 emissions in the WORLD.
And volcanoes…. Please
Pb
You mean the toothless ban that was law for ten years? Yeah, I remember… Did you have a point there?
Bob In Pacifica
There was an interesting story, I believe I saw it at the BBC website months ago, which posited that the decline in Europe’s population after the Black Plague may have caused what was known as The Little Ice Age. Because so many died from the Plague much farmland in Europe became overgrown and reforested. Because forests convert more CO2 into O2 than cropland, the theory suggests that this may have played a part in cooling the globe.
So the increase in North Atlantic ice which isolated settlers in Iceland and pretty much killed off the Norse Greenland settlements also stopped any further Viking expansion south into present-day Canada and the U.S. It delayed the European push into the New World by several hundred years.
It could be argued that Native Americans, in conflict with a European enemy (the Vikings) not so technologically superior, may have been better prepared to fight off any colonization, or would have been close enough to equal militarily to have absorbed the Viking bands. Trade of cattle, sheep and crops to Native Americans along with Viking knowledge of metalurgy would have provided Native Americans with a firm basis for a society that could have withstood later invasions.
Or not.
It’s been really hot out here on the West Coast the last few days.
Zifnab
Perhaps he’ll encourage them to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Oh wait. India already did.
That said, Al Gore is not in charge of China or India. The best he can do is propose solutions for the US end of the problem. Hopefully, China, India, and the Soviet Union will find equally intelligent and inspiration people within their own countries rather than becoming another stone in the White Man’s Burden. Because, you know, those stupid foreigners just don’t know how to take care of themselves.
Mashall Applewhite
We need sound science, this is not sound science. We have known that temperatures have gone up and down over time naturally. This is simply liberal, elite, secular humanist, haughty, know-it-all scientists telling us what they think. I get the truth from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. They rely on sound science. Considering that the Institute does not have any employed scientists, that gives them even more credibility! And because the Institute gets plenty of money from the Auto and Oil industries, they love America and are doing what is best for us. America is not part of the world. We do not need to have advice from the UN or Kyoto to better ourselves. We are the best, and we got this way by doing things the American way. So who cares if the earth is getting warmer, which it is not, because it was done by us, and what we do is the best and for our collective benefit.
Zifnab
In the same way that the black plague decimated between 25% and 90% of regions in Europe, small-pox had a similar impact on the Native Americans. While European technology and horses played a major roll in conquering America, the massive death toll from plague played an arguably even greater roll, as there were vast regions of frontier that Europeans claimed without any resistance due to depopulation.
Steve
I’m not sure if I agree 100% with this. I saw Al Gore’s movie, thought it was great, and there were two main lessons I took away from it:
(1) the scope of this problem is so massive that the solution simply has to be a political one, rather than a matter of nagging your neighbors to conserve; and
(2) China and India are so densely populated, and industrializing at such a rapid pace, that any real solution has to include them as an important component, and of course, the greater developing world is important too.
Whoever said above that the US comprises a very large percentage of the world’s CO2 emissions was correct, of course. But that’s largely because China and India, and their 2.5 billion people, are only starting to realize their vast potential. If China were as broadly industrialized as the US, if the average Chinese person had the same car ownership and energy usage statistics as the average American, the pollution issue would be staggering. Thank God they’re Communist, I guess, which keeps their economy from growing as fast as it could.
Gore’s point, though, is that the tradeoff between fuel efficiency and economic growth is a false one. He thinks we need to spur the growth of an alternative energy industry, and that if we do, there’s a massive market for American companies to invent efficient, environmentally friendly energy sources and then sell them to the developing Chinese and Indian markets. It’s not a matter of holding their feet to the fire. They already want it.
Mike in SLO
Everyone denying the science of global warming here please post your credentials and links to the real scientific studies that support your position and not to partisan think tanks like the CEI. Point to a peer-reviewed study that supports your position, You won’t be able to, because there is no argument on the issue with real scientists. Deny evolution, deny global warming, deny that the earth moves around the sun. Reignite the Luddite movement!
Ross
And deny that tobacco is harmful to your health.
Gus
“BTW, the second amendment of the Constitution does not mention hunting.”
But it does mention a well regulated militia. Are gun owners required to participate in a militia? Because I’m a gun owner, and I’m not sure where to report.
Barry
pdquig Says:
“How about this: let’s ban greenhouse gas emmisions just like we banned DDT. Then, we can look back in 35 years and lament all those poor, brown people (say, 25 million) that died as a result of our high-minded—yet unsubstantiated—zeal. Better safe than sorry, since it’s unlikely that many rich, white people will be the victims.”
Deltoid, at Science Blogs, look for DDT. Note both the absence of a ban on residential use, and, more importantly, **why**.
tzs
Actually, the major problem with China is their heavy reliance on coal for electricity. Coal is about the worst for producing CO2.
Which is why getting CO2 sequestration technology really up and running is the only stop-gap we have right now. The amount of CO2 produced by a standard 500 MW coal-fired power plant yearly is gobsmackingly large.
Also getting more nuclear power plants working. Some of the new designs (pebble-bed reactors, etc.) look to be pretty robust.
Major problem is electricity production does not equal liquid fuel production. We’re probably going to have to go to a combination of hybrid/better efficiency/better battery technology. Ethanol can only provide a minor percentage of what is needed.
ppGaz
Two centuries of slavery, segregation and heat have taken their toll on the Red States.
Good for cotton, bad for politics. There should be some kind of catchy slogan there, but I haven’t found it.
I haven’t spent a summer in Mississippi, but I can tell you that out here in the desert, when you are driving with oven mitts and spraying your kids with a squirt bottle to keep them from dying of heat prostration, trying to focus on the realities required to keep a liberal thought in your head can be a strain. It’s easier to just say “fuck it” and be a Republican. Being a liberal is work, rquires diligence. Being a Republican just requires the ability to make farts with your hand in your armpit. Hot weather does this to people.
LoafingOaf
So does this mean the lefties will finally support nuclear power? Aren’t they ashamed they haven’t for all these years?
dorianmc
Suggest some of you watch the following set of videos produced by scientists and not a raging lunatic (read some of Gores comments about global warming). The second link discusses an issue brought up in the video about the hockey stick graph.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?ide=3
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=13830&ch=biztech
Dorian
tzs
Nuclear power seems to have gotten more robust. The earlier stuff did have certain problems with it. And low-level waste actually turns out to be much more of a hassle than high-level waste, because there’s so much more of the bloody stuff.
A lot of electric companies are now starting to go through the process to get new plans/places/etc. for nuclear plants certified, although no one has put in an actual order for one yet. Sort of like a whole bunch of kids on the edge of a pool, poking each other nervously, watching to see who’s going to jump in first.
Frankly, I think they’re worried more now about the NIMBY problem than the technology. I still think that the top management of any nuclear power plant should be required to live right next to it. Japan’s main trouble with nuclear power plants so far have had to do with idiotic stuff when cost-cutting measures were implemented.
John
I thought one of the most interesting points in An Inconvenient Truth was the info regarding Chinese fuel economy standards i.e. that Chinese fuel economy standards are more stringent than US standards and how the whole argument that raise the CAFE requirements in the US would hurt US automakers when in fact, not raising those standards has hurt our automakers in two ways.
1. Their products are not competitive in China because they will not meet fuel efficiency standards their.
2. With Americans looking more and more to fuel efficient cars in light of high oil prices, they will be more likely to buy the products of foreign competitors which are more fuel efficient.
links below….
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2004/10/china_new_fuel_.html
http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2004-10-08-china-fuel-efficiency_x.htm
http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=9128
Paul L.
Yep, the UN has no interest in Gun Control.
Notice the comma, Gus?
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.“