Global Warming Less Extreme Than Feared?
Here’s a hopeful piece on climate change, suggesting that warming may be capped at less than 2 degrees C, even though our emission of greenhouse gases continues to grow. Though obviously I’d like to accept any good news, I have to say that I don’t understand this. If X causes Y, and we’re producing more X, aren’t we going to get more Y?
I’m not convinced that it is possible to know accurately how much global warming will occur, or exactly what it’s effects will be. However, it is possible that global warming could be greatly different, in either directions, from the predictions.
The risks are too great to be acceptable. We must takes steps to reduce CO2 emissions greatly to minimize global warming.
Yesterday PBS showed a night picture of the U.S. taken from outer space. All the major cities showed up because of the light they emitted. Surprisingly, a sparsely populated area in North Dakota also emitted a large amount of light. The source? Flaring natural gas from oil extraction operations. Natural gas is now so cheap that they cannot justify extending gas pipelines to use it instead of flaring it. So, the flaring is adding to CO2 emissions as well as wasting gas which may be in short supply at some future date.
In answer to your question, “If X causes Y, and we’re producing more X, aren’t we going to get more Y?” it’s because of nonlinearity. If you push a swing twice as hard, will it be farther away after 10 seconds? Impossible to say.
Regarding the study, I think all they seemed to show was that thier model contains a ton of uncertainty. with 250 years of data through 2000, they were predicting a 3 C temperature rise. Add ten years (2001-10) and now they are predicting a 1.9 degree rise. That’s a big change for only 4% more data.
Ha! I knew when I wrote this that the logic had a slight flaw in it, and I figured that you’d be along momentarily to point that out. 🙂
Seriously, you make a good point.
It’s not that the logic is flawed, more that the evidence does not support the degree of certainty which the journalist is attempting to convey. This is a common problem with science journalism. And it goes both ways… sometime the journalism does not support the degree of certainty which is actually shown by the science- while we’re uncertain how much average temperature will go up, we’re very confident that it will, and that humans are causing it. Such qualitative results are much easier to sustain than precise quantitative ones, mainly because climate/weather is a chaotic system.
See my article on chaos theory and global warming: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomkonrad/2011/08/30/chaos-theory-financial-markets-and-global-weirding/
I see. Here’s a quick post of the subject: http://2greenenergy.com/chaos-theory/34054/.