An Inconvienent Truth

If anyone remembers the thread about the National Science Teachers Association turning down free copies of "An Inconvenient Truth", I just got this is my school e-mail:

"The producers of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth recently tried
passing out 50,000 free DVD copies to NSTA teachers but were turned
down. Intent on distributing free copies of this documentary to
teachers, they are now taking teachers requests for free DVD."

I guess I wasn't the only one that suggested they go directly to the teachers. I suggested going through the school libraries but this works too.

It needs a school tax ID so I'll be ordering it tomorrow.

 

I like and dislike the movie. Take out all the political jokes and "Gore political history" and it would be a great movie. Even his lifetime history added good stuff to the overall feeling the movie tried to invoke.

Walker, I highly recomend you check out RealClimate.org. Do some searches for this movie as well as "Global Dimming BBC". You must also read through the 100s of comments after each blog by Gavin and the gang over there. This will give you the most realistic view of AGW. There is no doubt in my mind that AGW is indeed occuring but there are sooo many other factors that we cannot add to climate models that make future projections tough. Don't get me wrong, I'm no skeptic but I do require sound science before I can be moved. In this situation I am doing all I can because ethically it's the right thing to do even if the science doesnt pan out exactly like projected.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Walker1 @ Jan 1 2007, 05:53 PM) [snapback]369338[/snapback]</div>

I bought the DVD last week (£14.45 or about $29) but haven't watched it yet. I'm reading a new book by George Monbiot HEAT: HOW TO STOP THE PLANET BURNING. He has gathered some interesting ideas but I remain pessimistic on the subject because as he points out the release of carbon increases according to the level of our incomes. In other words it's the wealthy who produce most carbon (the main culprit in global warming) and as the vast majority of people are doing their best to become more wealthy the outlook for carbon release is bleak.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Walker1 @ Jan 1 2007, 05:53 PM) [snapback]369338[/snapback]</div>

I haven't seen the movie, but what little I've read on the internets about CO2 levels and ice shelf break offs is very much a concern.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Beryl Octet @ Jan 2 2007, 08:26 AM) [snapback]369540[/snapback]</div>

If the reason it is 60 degrees in Connecticut yesterday is man-made global warming it is way too late to do anything anyway. Global Warming may be happening, but to attribute very warm days to global warming is ridiculous. Is there global warming in Connecticut and global cooling in Colorado causing the unusual amounts of snow?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Walker1 @ Jan 1 2007, 05:53 PM) [snapback]369338[/snapback]</div>

I thought the "seminar" parts of the movie were well done. Who knew that Gore could deliver a lecture so well. But I echo F8Ls sentiment, in that I could have done without the "Gore noire" scenes.

A mass-market movie has to engage in simplification to get the message across. I run across this in my own work -- try telling clients that your estimate (of anything) has an associated variance (standard error, imprecision in estimation), and their eyes just glaze over. Tell them that your esimated amount of imprecision itself has some imprecision in it (ie, you're only roughly sure how imprecise your estimate is), and you've just lost a client. You haven't said anything wrong, but you haven't effectively communcated anything either.

This website has, I think, a fuller discussion of many of the issues, in the form of answering skeptics about global warming. Yet, I come away from that website with the impression that Gore's move had it just about right.

http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics

So, in some places, Gore presents what I would characterize as the mean value, or most probable scenario, without the associated standard error. For a mass-market movie, as long as the mean is well within the range of projections, I think that's not merely fair game, it is literally the only way the movie can be scripted and still be reasonably effective for the target (lay) audience.

So, is there more uncertainty about these issues than the movie would suggest? Yeah, but in most cases not hugely more -- see the other thread today about the "middle ground" scenario in the NY Times, to the extent that you are willing to trust the Times on this issue. My take is that Gore pretty much hit the ball down the middle of the fairway. As I understand it, in areas where the "output" quantities vary continuously, pretty nearly all the professionals here are agreed on the basics, and the arguments are about the exact magnitues and the details. Important arguments, to be sure, but with agreement on the basics. Then, there is far more argument about the many places where a smooth transition may not be possible, or where there may be additional quick, snap, discontinous, or otherwise rapid changes. I think that's a consequence of how nearly all mathematical modeling works -- predicting whether or when a discontinuous event will occur is far harder than predicting the level of some continuous variable. As a consequence, those types of changes tend to be ignored in mathematical modeling.

What makes this hard is that the skeptics will focus on any one small piece of this to show contrary evidence. So, you have to get the big-picture overview to understand that (e.g.) it's not that the glaciers Gore showed have always been stable before, it's that (nearly) every glacier in the world is melting right now. And so on. The website above does an excellent job of pulling the facts together that way.

The Greenland ice sheet discussion was, I thought, a bit on the edge of what was acceptable. I'm guessing it was there precisely to scare the US East Coast audience. But, given the recent surprise breakup of a floating Antarctic sheet, and, as the movie pointed out, some signs of instability in that land-based Greenland ice sheet, I wouldn't even call that one unfair. Just a little too speculative. I'm also fairly sure that if it broke up (as opposed to wasting purely by melting down), it couldn't occur all-at-once like the floating Antarctic sheet. I think. We'd have years and years to watch it go.

What I find most troubling about the projections is not that there is one possible discontinuous change like this, but that there are many that we know about, and most of them point to trouble and toward positive feedback to greater rates of warming. There appear to be lots of potential trigger points. Even if the a priori likelihood of any one of them is small, cumulatively I get the feeling that at least one of them is going to be triggered. Don't buy the Greenland ice sheet scenario? How about the release of the methane currently frozen in the Arctic permafrost? Ditto for methane hydrates in the sea bed. And so on.

So, in the jargon of economics, the risk function is strongly asymmetric (if we get rapid global warming, we'll have disproportionately large problems, if we get little global warming, we'll have few problems) and the variance of the projection is large (we might get moderate global warming, but we might instead, with positive probability, reasonably project one of the real disaster scenarios, and with positive probability project a "small change" scenario). Obviously its hard to put any remotely plausible dollar figures on these items, but my judgement is that the sensible course is to act now. If the earth were a home, and I was the insurer, I'd make the homeowner have a carbon-abatement policy in place. Just based on the dollars-and-cents calculation, not based on the more imperative moral issues. We could dicker over the details. But not to have some plan, at all, about this, strikes me as imprudent.

For my own part, I think I've more-or-less exhausted the lifestyle changes that I can make painlessly and at little cost, to reduce my carbon footprint. And my family of four still produces, in total, an estimated 22 tons of CO2 annually from household consumption of fuel and food. (No idea what our pro-rata share of the rest of the US economy's CO2 would be). Roughly one-third of that total is attributable to electricity use. I am getting ready to bite the bullet on photovoltaics, though I am far from happy about it.

Fully realizing, of course, that none of this matters unless we get some leadership out of the US government, to incent/jawbone/cajole/regulate a reduction in GHG emissions from the American people. Absent a local catastrophe, that seems unlikely to happen soon. So I make my own changes purely to reduce my guilt, not with any expectation that it will have any measurable impact, and hope for a change at the national level.

My take on it is that any probable rise in fossil fuel prices due to scarcity alone will not be anywhere near enough to check the growth in CO2 emissions in the US. So here's an economist saying that, in my opinion, markets alone will be insufficient to reduce CO2 growth here. That's because there's no connection between value in use, cost of production, and the value of the harmful externality (the CO2 release) from the consumption of fossil fuel. There's no reason to expect markets to correct this issue in isolation -- there's no market for air. Or, if they do, it'll be purely by chance. There's no necessary connection between fossil fuel scarcity and environmental impact. In effect, we're just too wealthy for our own good. We'll run out of planet before we run out of gas money.

When I try to be optimistic, I view collective action on this as a function of the learning curve. Some people figure things out fast, some people take some time, some will never have a clue. What you can do depends in part on where the population is on the learning curve. Twenty-five years ago, 35% of US adults smoked cigarettes. Now its down to 21%. That 21% is concentrated among the uneducated - virtually nobody with a college degree smokes. Then look at Prius buyers -- ovewhelmingly, they are smart people. Innovation starts with the savvy person. And, among people who are willing to change their minds about an issue, there can quite reasonably be different thresholds of proof required before people will accept a new idea. So, assuming that the evidence of human-caused global warming continues to accumulate, I would like to think that more people will change their minds on this issue, as they reach the threshold at which the evidence is sufficient to convince them that action is needed. Not all. One-out-of-five Americans still smokes. But enough to get something done at the national level.

On the issue of East Coast weather, yes, this is by a longshot the weirdest winter I've ever lived through, in terms of weather, in Northern Virginia. I've lived here off and on since 1964. Check out my posts on tulips and on yesterday's Washington Post article on the trees and shrubs that have started to bloom here in (what used to be) the dead of winter. This AM, my wife reports that the forsythia in our neighborhood are blooming. That is our classic first-spring-bloom plant. So, the plants are telling us that spring is here, a bit less than three months early. Unless something drastic happens in January, I think this is going to go down as the year without a winter around here. It's not that it's been really warm -- it has been pleasant most days -- it's that it never gets very cold, and won't stay cold long enough to keep the plants dormant. We've rarely had a night below freezing so far this year. So, yes, it's pleasant to barbeque the week before Christmas, but it's also deeply unsettling.

 

Just a quick recommendation. If you enjoyed "An inconvenient truth" you might like "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery. Both text and audio versions are excellent. There is more information and in-depth coverage of the primary literature.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(malorn @ Jan 2 2007, 11:02 AM) [snapback]369550[/snapback]</div>

Maybe. That is why the correct term is climate change. Some places will be hotter, others colder, or both...

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(malorn @ Jan 2 2007, 10:02 AM) [snapback]369550[/snapback]</div>

While I agree with the sentiment that you can't infer global climate changes from a single observation of local weather, and with Alric's comment that the change will not be uniform across the globe, I still think that local weather records can be interesting markers to show that we are experiencing new weather extremes. Some of the evidence of global climate change has come from longer-term, systematic data on plant and animal behavior, showing, for example, a long-term trend toward earlier spring emergence of some species.

The way the plants are behaving in Northern Virigina is unlike anything I've ever seen before. And it's not that the mean temperature is so high, it's that we are rarely experiencing freezing nighttime lows and have not had any extended period of consecutive cold days. Looking out my window now, one of my rasberry canes still has a few bright green leaves on it -- so we haven't had a hard enough freeze yet even to kill off all of last year's leaves. I have, in effect, an evergreen raspberry plant. Those are hardy plants, but they're not supposed to be evergreens.

The next firm marker I'm looking for is when the National Park Service declares the date of peak bloom for the National Cherry Trees. Previous record was March 15. It varies wildly from year to year. It will be interesting to see if we beat that this year.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(chogan @ Jan 2 2007, 08:20 AM) [snapback]369554[/snapback]</div>

Chogan,

Have you looked into solar water heating? It's far cheaper than PV. If you're house has electric water heating you'll offset a lot of energy consumption. You don't have to live in the SW either. There are folks here on PC who use it in Seattle. With the 30% tax credit the ROI is a few years, generally. The way energy prices are going solar thermal seems more and more to be classified as LHF (low hanging fruit ).

 

Longwinded much???
Just kiddin' , Though I did take a nap in the middle *YAWN*
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(chogan @ Jan 2 2007, 10:20 AM) [snapback]369554[/snapback]</div>

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(malorn @ Jan 2 2007, 07:02 AM) [snapback]369550[/snapback]</div>

Like Alric stated, GW will show up differently in different areas. Some areas will become much wetter and others much drier. The temperature variance will also change depending on latitude with higher temps being observed in the very high latitude areas. Now if disruptions in the standard heat transfer mechanism for that area occur then even greater changes in climate can occur.

Here in California the general idea is that the summers will be hotter and drier and the winters will be warmer and wetter with less snow pack resulting in less water available throughout our dry "mediteranian" months.

 

Chogan, I always enjoy your posts, fyi. To comment on your despair about the minimal affect individuals will have notwithstanding government intervention, this is just wrong. Individuals are the level at which change may be brought about. If every single person implemented all of the changes you have, our carbon footprint would have already been drastically reduced. You have made a difference.

On another note, are we not experiencing exceptionally warm temps in part of the U.S. because of El Nino? I believe this to be the case based on the southern winds. I tried to look up historical data on what are the typical affects on our temps and was not able to locate anything in the limited time frame that I had yesterday. Since I don't recall ever experiencing such a warm winter, I'm guessing that what we're experiencing now is not typical. Does anyone have any information pertaining to any of this?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(tripp @ Jan 2 2007, 12:03 PM) [snapback]369592[/snapback]</div>

Looked at it before, will look again. We have gas heat, I'm pretty sure this would pay off poorly for me. In part because natural gas is cheap, but also because I'm such a cheapskate. The water heater is pretty new, it was the best standard pilotless heater I could get, I keep the temp just above the point that provokes complaints (ie, shower in straight hot water, no admixture of cold), have water-saver shower heads, don't do the laundry in hot, and so on. In the summer months my gas bill is about $15, of which I think only maybe half is for the gas, the rest is the line charge. So I put this way down on my list. My guess is I'm spending maybe $80 a year for hot water. A commercially-produced solar hot water system would have a long payback period. I've toyed with the idea of making a cheap system from foam building sheet, 1/8 plexiglas, flexible PVC, and a surplus HDPE water barrel for a pre-heat system, but ... realistically, I'm never going to get the time to see that through. I'm still hoping for cheap solar cells from Nanosolar. They picked a site in San Jose for their big factory, in December. Not exactly charging ahead, imho. So I guess it'll be a while before anything is available. But if they succeed, there's going to be a substantial drop in solar cell prices. At which point I will be happy to shingle my roof with them. Just a question of a) whether the Nanosolar thing is really going to happen, B) how soon that'll trickle down to the retail consumer market, and c) whether I want to wait that long. If we're talking a decade, screw it, I could be dead before then. My money won't do me much good, might as well blow it now on what's currently available. If we're talking 3 years, for half-price solar cells, well, that's a pretty good rate of return for having a little patience. Toyed with the idea of putting in a small (1KW) sytem now, built for eventual expansion when (if) solar cell prices drop, but that seemed to be the worst of both worlds - high upfront expense, little operational payback, two contracting hassles. So, I'm still on the fence.

Well, this has motivated me. The only thing that makes narrow economic sense, for me, right now, would be a cheap one-off water heating system. High-tech redneck. Maybe I'll give that another try.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Walker1 @ Jan 2 2007, 12:09 PM) [snapback]369687[/snapback]</div>

I think one must be careful how they view this. There is a big difference between an ice shelf in the ocean and an ice sheet that is supported by land. I don't see any projections showing sea level rises of that magnatude over short periods of time but I only took basic oceanography last semester not anything in depth. lol

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Walker1 @ Jan 2 2007, 03:09 PM) [snapback]369687[/snapback]</div>

That is a concern, although I had read about more gradual increases, and it seems like we are heading into more and more weather instability.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2116873.ece

World faces hottest year ever, as El Niño combines with global warming

A combination of global warming and the El Niño weather system is set to make 2007 the warmest year on record with far-reaching consequences for the planet, one of Britain's leading climate experts has warned.

As the new year was ushered in with stormy conditions across the UK, the forecast for the next 12 months is of extreme global weather patterns which could bring drought to Indonesia and leave California under a deluge.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Walker1 @ Jan 2 2007, 03:09 PM) [snapback]369687[/snapback]</div>

I don't recall that exactly from the movie, but I think the accurate statement is that if the Greenland ice sheet melted entirely, that, by itself, would raise see level about 20 feet. Yes, that's what the US Geological Survey says, below (given in meters, not feet). They also say 240 feet (80 meters) if all the ice everywhere melted. The USGS also says that a 30 foot sea-level rise would flood one-quarter of the US population.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

But the timescale there is centuries, or at least many decades.

Per F8Ls comment, the melt of floating ice has a negligible immediate impact on sea level. It's only the land-based ice that matters. As reflected in the USGS table.

A random internet find here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4720536.stm

This says scientists used to figure on 1000 years to melt the ice off Greenland, but recent measurements have cut that back to just a few centuries. That's not a good trend, but they still talk in centuries to melt the whole thing. I mean, it's like a mile thick at the center. Still, if you get the drift, a single set of five-year measurements reduced the projected melting timescale by about a factor of three. The question is, what will the next set of measurements show. Is the estimate stable now, or has the acceleration just started?

What Gore raised, I think, is the possibility for a more catastrophic breakup/melting scenario, where the ice starts to shift and break apart, and the melt might occur in a much shorter time period. He was referring to the potential for meltwater to lubricate the ice-earth interface, and noted the increase in earthquake-like events that indicated increased instability in the ice mass.

But it still wouldn't be a kerplunk - tidal wave kind of thing. Even then you'd be talking decades. And even at that, such a short time period is clearly not the mainstream thinking on this issue. Yet.

I really think he put that in there just to get the attention of the Eastern US audience, because the focus at that point was what I naively call the Gulf Stream. (It has a scientific name but it escapes me just now.) He was talking about the potential for a rapid melt to shut down the Gulf Stream, and what havoc that would cause in Europe and the US Eastern Seaboard.

Wickipedia has a nice article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet

BTW, if you ever drive Route 95 in Virginia, you're about where the shorline will be if everything melts. The "fall line" in Virginia (where Piedmont meets Tidwater) is the ancient shorline, and 95 runs just on the high side of the fall line in Virginia.

 

Thinking optimistically, the Earth will probably heal from Global Warming. That is, after is "corrects" our population numbers with mass deaths from famine, drought, flooding, wind, etc. We're already witnessing significant numbers of deaths from catastrophic natural disasters. So, just maybe, the earth will start anew, as was the case after the last great extinction.

We're searching for life forms on other planets and have yet to recognize a hospitable environment capable of harboring life. Quite a number of conditions have to be in balance to support life and we are drastically affecting this balance. Since atmosphere is integral, and we continue to tamper with it, we'll surely seal our fate. If the government(s) (and individuals) can't see their way to action, it seems the Earth will make the corrections for us.

 

Until the climate actually kills off the human race, I'm not sure if global warming is true or not, so I'm going to assume it's not...

Sheer madness, especially when the the primary arguments *against* global warming are economic in nature.

P.S., President Bush, I went shopping this Holiday Season, just like you suggested.