Article by on climate change by James Lovelock

[BigShot]

Greg - it'd take some doing.
I see a climate that has been changing for millennia, which reached a minimum just before the industrial revolution and is not unusual in its current trend of warming.

If there's a solid argument that shows the current trend is NOT natural, and further is preventable, I shall be over to the other side of the debate in a flash.

However I've read more about this issue than I care to admit to and while there have been some very technical arguments, some very emotive arguments and some with at least some degree of logic, I've yet to be convinced that it is anything other than mainly natural (if not entirely) and so obviously I'm unconvinced that it's preventable.

I'd also like to see a good solid argument that warming would inherently be bad, and while rising sea level may cause some issues, I don't believe it to the the nightmare-scenario many suggest, or, for that matter, an unusual one.


Husky - I became a skeptic (strangely) after taking an interest in open source software and found that most climate models used in the debate are closed source and can't be properly investigated for valid coding, sensitivity levels and so on, and that in some cases the very data used was in question (data shaping I believed it was called - i don't recall too clearly now)

That got me looking a bit further and through that I turned skeptic.

It was only a long while after that when I heard the argument about financial conflicts of interest, something that I'd (somehow) not encountered in the previous reading I'd done to move me to concerned and eventually to skeptic.

 

[gregorach]

Greg - it'd take some doing.
I see a climate that has been changing for millennia, which reached a minimum just before the industrial revolution and is not unusual in its current trend of warming.

If there's a solid argument that shows the current trend is NOT natural, and further is preventable, I shall be over to the other side of the debate in a flash.

Right then, the specific sub-field of climatology you need to be looking at is known as attribution, and is probably the most complex and technical aspect of climate science. This RealClimate post might be a good place to start.

I'd also like to see a good solid argument that warming would inherently be bad, and while rising sea level may cause some issues, I don't believe it to the the nightmare-scenario many suggest, or, for that matter, an unusual one.

Well, it's not so much the amount of warming that's the problem, it's the rate. Ecosystems can only change so fast, and if the climate is changing too rapidly for them to keep up (especially considering that most of the adapation mechanisms have been severely impaired by habitat destruction and islandisation), then you face some potentially severe problems. In much of the world, agriculture is on an climactic knife-edge as it is. I'd also like to see you tell the people of Victoria that rising temperatures aren't necessarily anything to worry about...

I will certainly agree that there is a large amount of uncertainty about what the impacts will be - but that is a completely separate matter from the questions of whether climate change is happening or how much of it is anthropogenic. And of course, the consequences of being wrong are highly asymmetric - if we go all-out to decarbonise our economy and it turns out not to be necessary, then we've done something which is worthwhile for other reasons (those fossil fuels won't be around for ever) a little sooner than we needed to, possibly sacrificing some economic growth in the process. However, if we choose to do nothing, and it turns out that it is a severe problem, then millions (or even billions) of people starve to death. If I must err, I prefer to err on the side of caution.

 

[gregorach]

also i was just winding gregorach up who is a close friend, so thats okay. i think.

I'll deal with you later, bawheid.

 

[Oblio13]

... i was just winding gregorach up ...

I'll deal with you later, bawheid.

SCORE!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[BigShot]

Greg - certainly attribution is a complex issue.
If we work with the supposition that carbon drives temperature in a major way, I'm willing to accept that man is having some impact for the sake of argument.
That being the case I still don't see it as being a major issue as without man's help we exited a number of periods of glaciation including "the ice age".


I disagree, however, that the consequences of either side being wrong are necessarily asymetric.

If we do nothing and are wrong...
(for argument's sake, this is working under the assumption that warming=bad)
The predicted deaths would be a huge problem.

However, there are huge consequences to the opposite (we do something and were wrong)
Possibility A> We do something ("go all-out to decarbonise our economy") and it turns out the warming was natural and unstoppable.
We've spent massive resources on decarbonising, slowed the development of the third world (the current state of which leads to scary numbers of premature deaths as a direct result of living primatively), probably taxed the population more heavily leaving people poorer and wasted money on a dead end that could otherwise have been invested in tangible things like sewage treatment, clean drinking water, medicine, vaccinations and much more.
Further we are unprepared for farming in the new climate as we've been so comitted to stopping it, again the money invested in the dead end would be better placed in learning to deal with a hotter world, not trying to prevent it.

Possibility B> We do something and it turns out the warming wasn't happening to start with.
Again we've wasted a ton of money, taxed unnecessarily, restricted development and so on.
That money could have made a positive impact and instead was wasted.


While I agree totally that we will eventually need to move away from fossil fuels, as I said earlier it is important not to confuse the argument about AGW with discussions about peak oil, clean living, waterway and localised airbourne pollution.
They are very much separate issues.

I'm very much an environmentalist.
I love the work groups like SAS do in forcing the hand of water companies to install year-round tertiary sewage treatment which in turn works wonders for the ocean ecosystems and leisure users too.
I love the work conservation groups do to save whales, megafauna, red squirrels and much more besides (including attempts to undo the damage man has done in terms of eliminating apex predators and introducing invasive species).
I follow with interest the development of new-renewables (such as the cheap, flexible solar panels under development now - a huge improvement on the limitations and cost of silicone photovoltaics)

I'm all for the furthering of those causes, but they should go ahead naturally and not be forced under the umbrella of climate change, something I believe to be an entirely misleading and disingenuous approach.

The costs of developing those technologies are huge and to force a transition to them will serve only to make travel (for one example) more expensive in the short term. The move away from fossil fuel is absolutely inevitable, we need not legislate for it now, as sooner or later we will have no choice, and market forces will eventually determine the time to be right and the switch will happen.


I turn lights off as I pass through the house - yet I hate energy savers both for quality of light and environmental concerns.

 

[gregorach]

Wait - there is absolutely no possible question that the warming is happening. That's indisputable unless you start doing things like looking at completely the wrong data set, or picking the record-breaking El Nino year of 1998 as your starting point.

There certaily are valid arguments about the opportunity costs of various mitigation strategies. However, I have much more confidence in climate models than I do in economic models - I simply don't accept the argument that mitigation will necessarily be cripplingly expensive. I've seen no compelling evidence for that idea. Most of the people who argue that seem to assume that money spent on mitigation simply disappears from the economy entirely, never to be seen again. That's obviously nonsense - it gets spent on employing people. As for the third world, it's almost certainly more efficient for them to leap-frog over the centralised, high carbon energy model and go straight for renewable micro-generation. Indeed, this is exactly what's already happening in much of Africa. People who would never be connected to the grid and who can't afford the diesel to run generators can be very well served by small-scale renewables.

As for whether prevention or adaptation is preferable... We're able to do both, and presenting it as a straight either / or choice seems very questionable. Adaptation is much easier if you can minimise the extent of the dislocation you're trying to adapt to.

Finally, I absolutely do not accept your rigid demarcation of climate change, peak oil, airborne pollution and so forth. These subjects are all interconnected, and some strategies can be effective in dealing with more than one of them at a time.

 

[locum76]

Possibility A>
Further we are unprepared for farming in the new climate as we've been so comitted to stopping it, again the money invested in the dead end would be better placed in learning to deal with a hotter world, not trying to prevent it.

i think you'll find that almost all of the organisations aiming for a reduction in fossil fuel consumption and a reduction in carbon output have food security as their number one priority. from a local level all the way up to global. I've already posted a list of events on this thread from one of those organisations which aims to bring the issue into the public domain.

slowed the development of the third world

in what way? by reducing the use of fossil fuels? surely it would be irresponsible to encourage development using fossil fuels when we all know they are becoming rarified and expensive. If we encourage and support development without fossil fuels surely the future for the third world be much rosier? also you say they suffer because of primitive living, I would counter that by saying that they suffer because thier countries are being pilfered for resources that we in the developed world either need or covet.

the 'primitive' lifestyles of the third world may contribute many useful skills and techniques to our own culture in the future. isn't that a bit of what bushcraft is about for some of us? learning the skills of our ancestors and different cultures to prepare for potentialy more difficult times ahead...

 

[gzornenplat]

I have much more confidence in climate models than I do in economic models

Good grief! Why?

 

[gregorach]

Climate models are based on physics. Physics works. Economics isn't even a proper science.

 

[BigShot]

I said I wasn't getting into a debate. I'm stopping after this post as it's turned into one. Sorry.

Greg - I'm not questioning whether it is, just presenting it as one of the skeptic arguments...
Personally I do believe it is happening, but also that we have little or no input on it.

I don't pick El Nino as my starting point, typically I look much further back and point to things like the various "ice ages" and maximums. One minimum of which was not long pre industrial revolution and it's that increase which we started measuring - and some maximums of which are hotter than now and saw an abundence of food.


Waiting for renewables to be capable of running not just homes, but industry is, by definition, slowing development in the third world.
If we helped them use their own resources (for example, coal) they could run heavy industry now and so make self determined steps to an easier way of life and increased longevity as a result.

Unless you're aware of a renewable that gives a constant and reliable supply now - not H2, not Solar, not Wind, not tidal (as many don't have that option) not hydro (for the same reason) It's not so bad generating locally and running a house that way, but industry like manufacture and so on? I can't see it.


I'm not saying that the third world suffer for any single reason, the suffer through national debts, terrible leadership, western manipulation, and also the green-movement discouraging them from using their own natural (fossil) resources which necessarily limits their options for developing a manufacturing industry. (and remember - it was a manufacturing and export industry that gave us the wealth and comfort we have in the "west")

We should encourage third world development full stop. Let (and indeed help) the third world develop NOW with their own abundent resources of fossil fuel, and then let them join in the development of renewables, let them get a free ride on it if you want.
But no, getting them to wait to develop fully under renewables is not rosy, but prolonging their current poverty by waiting for a technology that is currently incapable of running the kind of industry needed to support a developed nation.


greg - peak oil, pollution and so on are connected in that some have common solutions and as such can be addressed together, but they are not necessarily interconnected.
I object to people lumping them in with climate change for a very simple reason.
It is not established that climate change is anthropogenic. It is established that airbourne pollution, damage to food chains, the marine environment and so on are anthropogenic.
It is also established that at some point we'll need to move away from fossil fuels.

I'm fine with the established issues being addressed as a whole, in fact it is probably far more efficient and productive to do such.
Throwing carbon into the mix does not help matters though.

 

[BigShot]

Oh - and those cliamte models.

CLOSED source software.
How can you be sure they are correctly written? They put numbers into a magic box and results come out. We make world changing decisions based on that.

But until those models are open source (or at very least properly assessed yet proprietary) they suffer immensely from the problem illustrated in the "you need to be more specific in step 2" cartoon.

There are many arguments that those models are far too sensitive to carbon.

Until we can figure out the attribution, those models are completely and utterly meaningless in the real world.
They serve only to reinforce arguments that are based on no more than some level of internal consistency on their interpretation of questionable numbers.

Those models are one of the things I put the least faith in. By their very nature they are incredibly easy to manipulate and impossible to check.

 

[VirusKiller]

I think that Lovelock has one thing right; there are too many of us on the planet. I remember the human population being four billion when I was at school in the early 80s. We're seven billion now? Working in the anti-virus software industry, I have first-hand experience of exponential growth.

If the Earth is moving towards being inhabitable for humans (which I won't deny is possible), we are certainly not going to solve the problem until we solve the population problem. Which, unfortunately, is to say that we won't solve it peaceably: You only have to look at Western attitudes towards the Chinese "one child" policy, the mammalian pre-disposition for shagging, and the fact that kids are the brightest lights in many people's lives, to realize that voluntary population control simply isn't going to happen. The whole debate then starts heading towards the nasty and taboo subjects of compulsory sterilization and, of course, eugenics. Edit: Economic incentives might be possible, but I'm doubtful that implementing one or zero child policies worldwide is.

Another thing which strikes me as ironically amusing is the human inability to conceive a world without humans.

 

[locum76]

hi viruskiller.

i agree with most of that, our impending problems are a result of overpopulation. I don't think the human race will be wiped out though, i believe we'll just have a big population crash at somepoint in the next 200 years. that'll be messy.

 

[durulz]

...and you get a cup of tea and a biscuit...

Hope that's a tea and biscuit with a low carbon foot print.

 

[gregorach]

BigShot - for a man who's not getting into a debate, you're doing a lot of debating...

If we helped them use their own resources (for example, coal) they could run heavy industry now and so make self determined steps to an easier way of life and increased longevity as a result.

Except that it's far more economically efficient for them to sell their resources to the likes of us - Nigeria isn't a major oil exporter for the fun of it. Oh, and the vast majority of the world's coal reserves are not in the third world. The largest coal reserves in the world are in the USA, followed by Russia, China, India and Australia.

As for your objections to climate models on the basis that they're not open sourced... Jesus, I thought I'd seen everything. Who the frak is even capable of writing a climate model? Only climate scientists - not some bunch of JavaScript weenies on SourceForge. And no, they're not proprietery in any sane sense of the world. They're highly specialised pieces of scientific software, developed by scientists , working as part of the scientific community. They're constantly compared to each other and to real data. There are many ways to validate a climate model, and they're all used all the time. You might be interested in the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project.

They do not "put numbers into a magic box". And even if you could see inside the box, what good would it do you? What are you going to do with a million-plus lines of FORTRAN? I'm a professional programmer by trade, have been for over a decade, and I couldn't even begin to assess a GCM by looking at the code. However, I don't believe that the entire climate science community is engaged in some kind of massive conspiracy (why would they bother?), so I trust 'em to get the models right.

"There are many arguments that those models are far too sensitive to carbon."

Such as... ?

 

[gzornenplat]

Climate models aren't based on physics, they are based on things like temperature readings calculated on the size of rings in fossilised tree remains. They then apply a little physics and a lot of 'rules', these 'rules' being along the lines of 'let's see what happens if...'

At least economic models have pretty much complete and incontrovertible data. Not that I'd trust economic models, either, because economic models don't take into account that the financial system is now based on (for one model) the unknowns of all the other models.

Economic models can be applied to many different real life systems in order to see if they hold up, and the speed at which you can test if the model can predict the future is not in the range of millions of years. Modellers of economic systems keep their jobs if they produce results. Modellers of climate keep their jobs if they produce models which back up the beliefs of the people who pay them. On both sides - a lot of big businesses want models which 'prove' that climate change is not due to their activities. Governments tax things as they always have, but climate change doom (true or not) has now persuaded the public that these taxes are a good thing. Obviously they want this to continue, and if it is ever proved that it was all a mistake and that the government funded and promoted the misconception, there will be riots.

Although by definition no-one knows what unknowns there are out there, common sense would say that it is easier to work out what factors would affect an economic system and easier to miss factors in the ecosystem of a whole planet.

I've spent 25 years in computing, most of them modelling real-world systems in one way or another. Give me any amount (a month, a year, ten years, longer) of horse-racing data, and I will guarantee that I can come up with a system which would have made you money over that period and, when projected into the future, will allow you to retire within 3 years.

I don't trust computer models in areas like this. Neither economic nor climate models are actually *based* on science in the way, for example, modelling stress on an aircraft part is. Both rely heavily on 'what if x = 12%' and 'what happens if we change y to ...'.

I can't even find a straight answer to why CO2 changes lag temperature changes and yet still manage to retrospectively cause them. Or a site that says those data are wrong.

Ian

 

[British Red]

hi viruskiller.

i agree with most of that, our impending problems are a result of overpopulation. I don't think the human race will be wiped out though, i believe we'll just have a big population crash at somepoint in the next 200 years. that'll be messy.

Shazzam

We have a winner.

Any efforts to reduce per capita carbon footprint without a definitive plan to control and reduce population are logically inconsistent and doomed to failure. Indeed given the option of tackling per capita carbon footprint or population growth it is common sense to tackle population. By reducing population, even if per capita carbon footprint is static, net carbon emissions fall. The converse is simply not true and indeed trends exponentially.

It is sheer folly that the UK has a policy for one and studiously ignores the other.

Red

 

[durulz]

I'm new to this thread.
I love it when these good debates get going - although I always feel it's only a matter of time until some zealous mod stops it. Still.
Well. I consider myself both a 'lay' person - meaning I don't have specific knowledge on this subject, but also an 'expert' - meaning I work in academia as a university lecturer (completely different subject area mind you - the arts) who knows too full well how important it is to keep a 'profile' and know how academic staff like to play around and 're-evaluate' information.
Maybe my view is tinted by my discipline - the arts, after all, is based on the quality of one's argument - 'truth' is a highly subjective notion. I could be wrong in suggesting the sciences are similar. Though I doubt it - at the higher levels subject divisions become irrelevant: Galileo's view that the Sun is at the centre of the universe is as much philosophical as it is scientific.
I just don't believe there is hard and fast evidence that global warming is taking place. But neither do I believe the opposite. That's the difficulty. And I have real problems listening to anyone who claims there is proof (either way).
Who was it who said, 'the act of looking decides what is found'?
There are umpteen examples of how the climate works in cycles. There are just as many who can provide jolly good evidence to show how humanity has affected it all. Well. Did anyone see the programme on evolution/Darwin the other night with David Attenborough (normally when I see that name I run a million miles)? His conclusion made some considerable sense: when we see that we are (genetically) related to the rest of the planet we become aware of our relation and dependence on the biosphere, and recognise its dependence on us. That's as far as I can go, I'm afraid.
But I suspect it's enough.

 

[gzornenplat]

As for your objections to climate models on the basis that they're not open sourced... Jesus, I thought I'd seen everything. Who the frak is even capable of writing a climate model? Only climate scientists - not some bunch of JavaScript weenies on SourceForge.

So climate scientist are also writing million of lines of Fortran? Surely they should specialise.

Climate scientists, more likely, write the spec and then programmers write the code.

If the specs and the code were in the public domain, other climate scientists could discuss the science and assumptions made, and other programmers could check that the code does what is intended.

The fact that BigShot may not be able to do this himself is irrelevant: if the methods, parameters and data are open for scrutiny, then it will increase confidence in the results. If the data, the methods and parameters are hidden and access is refused, then people will obviously wonder why the climate scientists refuse to show how they come to their conclusions.

If you don't show how you come to a conclusion and with what, then it is no more useful than (and indeed might be) an opinion with nothing to back it up at all.

Ian

 

[gregorach]

Climate models aren't based on physics, they are based on things like temperature readings calculated on the size of rings in fossilised tree remains. They then apply a little physics and a lot of 'rules', these 'rules' being along the lines of 'let's see what happens if...'

Utterly false. You're confusing general circulation models with palaeoclimate reconstructions - they're completely different. GCMs start with the basic principles of physics and work up from there.

I can't even find a straight answer to why CO2 changes lag temperature changes and yet still manage to retrospectively cause them. Or a site that says those data are wrong.

And I can't find an explanation of how chickens hatch from eggs, yet still manage to lay them. The data are right, it's your interpretation that's wrong.

CO2 changes lag temperature in the palaeoclimate record because there were no first-order source of CO2 forcings prior to the industrial revolution (as the dinosaurs weren't burning fossil fuels). However, those CO2 changes then act as a positive feedback mechanism, leading to greater temperature changes than can be explained by the first-order forcings alone.

There are many forcings in the climate system. CO2 is currently the dominant one. At other times in history (in fact, all of history prior to the industrial revolution) the dominant forcings were orbital, with CO2 as a second-order positive feedback.

A more thorough treatment than I can be bothered to present can be found here. Indeed, this particular argument has been so thoroughly dealt with that I have a hard time believing that you've managed to avoid encountering the correct answer, unless you're deliberately trying to.