Global warming denialism
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Revision as of 02:05, 27 October 2007
Global warming is the atmospheric consequence of the greenhouse effect. This atmospheric warming is vital to all life earth as without it the planet would be as cold as the moon.
The greenhouse effect interacts with other planet-wide influences such as the Milankovitch cycles in order to produce long term climate movements. Many gases contribute to the greenhouse effect, some of the most important being water vapour, methane and carbon dioxide.
Anthropogenic Climate Change
The phrase “Global Warming” is also used to refer to the rapid rise in temperatures the planet has experienced since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Basic physics can be used to demonstrate that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. As the increase in the level of carbon dioxide which began at the start of the industrial revolution correlates with the rise in global temperatures, it is generally accepted by climate scientists that the recent radical additional rise in worldwide temperatures has occurred as a result of human activity. The scientific consensus is that if we wish to reduce man made global warming we should reduce the quantity of carbon dioxide we emit into the atmosphere.
Because there are many entrenched interests - including oil companies and oil producing nations - which would stand to lose a lot of money if action were taken to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, a lot of effort and money has been put into attempts to discredit the science behind man-made global warming. The disinformation campaign is similar to that embarked on by the tobacco companies who wished to persuade people that cigarettes were healthy, and that carried out by the oil companies when they wished to continue adding lead to petrol.
Hierarchy of Global Warming Denier Rationalizations.
Global warming deniers have found it necessary to defend and abandon the following series of ideas as scientific information has become more compelling. Depending on their depth of understanding of the subject deniers may be at any of the following stages:
1. Global warming isn’t happening - so we don’t have to do anything.
2. Global warming is happening, but it’s not caused by humanity - so we don’t have to do anything.
3. Global warming is happening, it is caused by humanity, but it may be a good thing - so we don’t have to do anything.
4. Global warming is happening, it is caused by humanity, it is a bad thing, but China isn’t doing anything - so we don’t have to do anything.
5. Global warming is happening, it is caused by humanity, it is a bad thing, but even if China does something it’s too late for us to do anything and it would cost us money - so we don’t have to do anything.
6. (There is an hypothesized sixth step, "Global warming was happening, it was caused by humanity, it is a very bad thing and previous governments should have done something.")
When debating global warming skeptics, it is wise to establish beforehand where they are on the above rationalizing scale - otherwise you can waste a lot of time proving the wrong point. It may be similar to arguing with someone you think is a YEC, only to find out that he holds some other idea such as OEC.
The Global warming skeptics have however raised a number of more scientific arguments which are mentioned below.
Claims by global warming denialists
NASA and the Y2K bug
Steve McIntyre deduced, and NASA recently admitted, that NASA programmers had a Y2K bug in their source code that processes temperature data. This bug introduced a 0.02 percent change in the temperature data that has been corrected. Before this correction 1998 was the listed as the hottest year recorded but this difference was statistically non-significant with the second place year 1934. With the correction 1934 becomes the hottest year but it is still statistically non-significant. 1934 was a period of intense drought in the United States, as it was during the Dust Bowl years in the Great Depression. The change does not effect the global temperature only the United States.
The old temperature series data for the U.S. was as follows:

With the correction it changes to:

Denialists jumped on the bandwagon in regards to this shift making many grandiose claims that it invalidates all of the data that proves this has been the hottest decade in recorded history. This is not the case, it makes a minor change that does not change the decade averages or the global averages. It takes one year during an intense drought in the United States and moves it up non-significantly.
Glacier retreat calculations
Scientists have found DNA from ancient animals in an ice layer of Greenland, 1.2 miles beneath the surface.[1] Since this study indicates that the ice layer survived the last interglacial, it has led to speculation that the ice caps may be able to also withstand global warming. [2] However, the main author of the study dismissed suggestions that his team's data indicated that sea levels would not rise to predicated levels, saying that "during the last interglacial, sea levels rose by 5-6m, but this must have come from other sources additional to the Greenland ice cap, such as Antarctic ice. I would anticipate that as the Earth warms from man-made climate change, these sources would still contribute to a rise in sea levels."[3] Another scientist pointed out that it may not reasonable to extrapolate the study's results to our current situation, because the temperature changes in previous interglacials occured at a much slower pace.[2] Coincidentally, this article provides evidence that the world is at least 120,000 years old, which flies in the face of creationists who claim the earth is 6000 years old.
Nature generates more CO2 than man
It is true that natural sources of CO2 release represent a much higher percentage of CO2 output, natural carbon "sinks" that take up that CO2 balance it out. The amount of CO2in the atmosphere has been relatively constant for hundreds of thousands of years due to output and input being equal. What man is doing is burning and releasing sources of CO2 without adding additional carbon sinks. We are actually removing carbon sinks. This means the net amount of CO2 is increasing over time due to our involvement even though our total output is less than natural sources.
One of the interesting things is that the natural outputs of CO2 and the man made outputs are chemically different. Fossil fuel burning outputs CO2 that has more C14 and C13 than does natural sources. Using tree ring dating it can be shown that C14 containing CO2 has been responsible for most of the CO2 increase up until the 1940s when the atomic bomb negated our ability to use that test. But C13 testing confirmed the C14 testing and showed that fossil fuel burning is the number one contributor to the increase in the CO2 amount in the atmosphere.
Clearly it is human caused burning of fossil fuels responsible.
CO2 levels lag behind temperature increases
There have been several major changes in the earth's climate over its 4.5 billion year history. These have includes spectacular effects such as the snowball earth and have also included periods of intense global warming. These periods of warming and cooling all have a range of causes mostly involving positive feed back loops, such as ice reflecting the sun back to space causing more ice, reflecting more sun. The warming had similar positive feed back loops, initially it could be caused by one of many factors but eventually the warming increased the levels of CO2 which then caused even more warming. The fact that CO2 level increases have not been responsible for the start of a 100 percent of all global warming events on the planet does not negate the fact that CO2 in the atmosphere does cause warming.
It has been hotter in the past so it is just cyclical
While it is true that there have been cyclical patterns of temperature changes through out our planet's history that does not mean that causes are unknown, unknowable or all the same. Science and the application of the scientific method is a great method for working out cause/effect relationships. We have managed to link several warming and cooling cycles in the geologic history to specific causes. We have also shown that the modern warming is due to an increase in the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This CO2 increase is due to the added output of humans burning fossil fuels and destroying carbon sinks.
Also the reality of previous "warming" cycles does not mean that its not a big deal. These previous cycles destroyed a great deal of life on the planet and if similar effects occured today they would probably destroy all of human civilization (it would be under water) and probably all of humanity as well. It does mean that the earth itself will survive, but no denialist would be around to gloat.
Global warming has more to do with the sun than the earth
Changes in the sun have not been shown to provide a significant change to the earths climate. When it goes red giant certainly but there has not been any significant change in the total energy output of the sun since we have started measuring it and no changes in the sun or sun phenomenon correlates with increased temperatures. One thing that can change is small perturbations in the orbit of the earth that draw the planet closer or further from the sun. These perturbations might be linked to the start of several of the major climate changes in the geologic history of the earth. However, the actual change in temperature due to these orbital changes is small and the large scale changes are due to feed back loops localized to earth pushing things in one direction or another.
There is no evidence that such an orbital shift is happening now, but even if it has it can only explain a very small percentage of the increase in global temperature. The main cause is an increase in atmospheric CO2 levels, which are increasing due to humans burning fossil fuel and destroying carbon sinks.
Mars and Pluto are warming too
Many of the planets in our solar system and some moons are big enough and active enough geologically to have an atmosphere and a climate. In any given system there will be some planets increasing in temperature and some decreasing in temperature. This is due to changes in the localized climate, just as it is with earth. The causes are different for each planet and have little to no baring on each other. The localized cause of climate warming on the planet earth is the increase levels of CO2 in the atmosphere being caused by humans burning fossil fuels and destroying carbon sinks.
Using anecdotal evidence
Like using "Wow, it's really fucking cold today! Global warming, my ass!" to argue that "global warming" is not an issue. That's because the real problem is not defined as "global warming," per se, but "climate change," which involves the climate, you know, changing. That means more hot, but also, sometimes, more cold and wet. Get used to it.
Conservapedia
Conservapedia |
Reality |
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Richard Lindzen wrote in 1992,
Indeed, a recent Gallup poll of climate scientists in the American Meteorological Society and in the American Geophysical Union shows that a vast majority doubts that there has been any identifiable man-caused warming to date (49 percent asserted no, 33 percent did not know, 18 percent thought some has occurred; however, among those actively involved in research and publishing frequently in peer-reviewed research journals, none believes that any man-caused global warming has been identified so far). [4] Oddly enough, even though 82% of US climate scientists refused to support the global warming theory then, liberal activists were already claiming a scientific consensus for Anthropogenic global warming. (It's hard to understand how 18 percent credence in any global warming translates into "consensus" support for human-caused global warming.)
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Note that a full citation for the poll isn't given by Lindzen; perhaps this is because he intentionally lied about its results..? Despite the identical claims of Rush Limbaugh and George Will, the Gallup poll in question found that a majority (66%) of the 400 scientists questioned believed in human-caused global warming, while 23% were undecided and only 10% disagreed. [5] The San Francisco Chronicle published a correction from Gallup regarding this: "Most scientists involved in research in this area do believe human-induced global warming is occurring now."[6] The fairly significant minority in this poll who did doubt human-induced global warming were likely borne of the relative scarcity of convincing evidence for it in 1991.[7] |
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Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame." [8] |
In typical fashion, Conservapedia omits the wide body of evidence that glaciers are retreating worldwide in favour of mentioning an expanding anomaly. Fowlera and Archer (2006) is the study Conservapedia's source is referring to. It says,
"Temperature data for seven instrumental records in the Karakoram and Hindu Kush Mountains of the Upper Indus Basin (UIB) have been analyzed for seasonal and annual trends over the period 1961–2000 and compared with neighboring mountain regions and the Indian subcontinent. Strong contrasts are found between the behavior of winter and summer temperatures and between maximum and minimum temperatures. Winter mean and maximum temperature show significant increases while mean and minimum summer temperatures show consistent decline. ... This divergence commenced around the middle of the twentieth century and is thought to result from changes in large-scale circulation patterns and feedback processes associated with the Indian monsoon. The observed downward trend in summer temperature and runoff is consistent with the observed thickening and expansion of Karakoram glaciers, in contrast to widespread decay and retreat in the eastern Himalayas. This suggests that the western Himalayas are showing a different response to global warming than other parts of the globe." This study clearly does not contradict Gore's assertion; in fact the authors reaffirm it in the abstract! (Other studies ignored by Conservapedia have likewise confirmed Gore's claim.[9][10]) |
External links
References
- ↑ "Ancient Biomolecules from Deep Ice Cores Reveal a Forested Southern Greenland"
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Greenland ice yields hope on climate
- ↑ Greenland's ancient forests shed light on stability of ice sheet
- ↑ http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n2/reg15n2g.html
- ↑ In Denial on Climate Change
- ↑ Myth: Humans are not causing global warming.
- ↑ The Debate on Radio 4
- ↑ Alarmist global warming claims melt under scientific scrutiny (The author of this article is a member of The Heartland Institute)
- ↑ An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China
- ↑ Geomorphological evidences of retreat of the Gangotri glacier and its characteristics