Visualizations : Climbing CO2 preceeding warming spells

This is a plot of the more refined version of dataset posted earlier. Click on the data file to find out more about the difference. There have been some comments about the other dataset where it looked like the temp was climbing first. Overall while I believe that this view still makes it too hard to determine causation, the climbing trend of CO2 definitely precedes the warmest deviations. I’m uploading another dataset that normalizes both CO2 and temp deviations so that it is a little easier to line up.

The questions about causation still lingers however (i.e. in the past did more CO2= warmer or did warmer = more CO2). While some might use this question to dismiss global warming, I think it only raises far more pressing questions about these obviously correlated dynamics. If CO2 went up in the past and it wasn’t because of man, what was it? Furthermore now that we’ve made such an obvious shift in CO2 levels (look at that spike at the end of 420K years!) what natural CO2 releases have we yet to see? Massive releases from permafrost? Deforestation through drought?

This isn’t meant to be all gloom and doom, but instead I want to raise the profile of the discussion. We have to think bigger and we have to act quickly and correctly. Steering the earth is like steering an incredibly large cruise ship, if we’ve been piling on the coal going full steam ahead, making a course correction will only get harder.

Is action really necessary? Absolutely, imagine your washing machine, nicely balanced spinning your clothes dry. There are some vibrations, but it is spinning around a center (an equilibrium). That is what the past 420K years looks like. Now imagine that you drop in a big soggy carpet on one side of the washer. What happens?

The point about seriously questioning the policies for taking action are quite valid. Supposedly carbon neutral ethanol could have many unanticipated consequences, such as deforestation for growing corn, and further degradation of land. We will need some creative solutions! But these solutions don’t have to oppress economies or create huge burdens. Instead they should stimulate economies and create efficiency that makes our lives easier.

Here’s one. How about stimulating a big leap in telecommunications so that more and more people can work from home using high quality video conferencing and online meeting tools? By keeping people off the road we could save a ton in gas and people could be happier for not having to sit in traffic every day.

Anyway, I hope people will take this discussion beyond gloom and doom of having to choose between the “end of the world” or “complete destruction of our economy”.

I do not know first hand if there is Global warming or not. What your graph does show is we have become lazy since the advant of the Mass Production/Industy. We must prepare for all types of weather as well as its extreme effects. Here is an interesting link; make of it as you will.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/070916_ap_climate_record.html
Ancient Records Help Test Climate Change
By Bradley Klapper, Associated Press
posted: 16 September 2007 11:17 am ET

Thanks for the link. It makes a good point that extreme weather has always been prevalent and always will be. This point not only makes the “extreme weather” argument in regards to global warming not only weak, but dangerously misleading. My concern is that we have upset an equilibrium that will lead to new patterns that go beyond the 420K years we can see here. What those might look like is really spurious guesswork that I prefer to stay away from.

All I can really say is that it will definitely be different, and given that we only grow more established in our regions, the thought of having to move cities, find new areas to cultivate, or deal with other issues surrounding significant climate change, we can’t afford to not try and minimize the disruption we are clearly going to cause.

Another interesting view showing how clearly different the last 75K years have been from the norm.

Interesting graph, Bruce. I like your scientific caution about causation. What we don’t need now is a knee jerk, unscientific (political) reaction that will cost trillions to economies around the world. Please see:

Visualizations : Consensus? Scientists Endorse, Reject or Neutral on “man-made global warming” here on manyeyes:
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SIk76IsOtha6Zmm6Nf2jI2-

and…

New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears
August 20, 2007

New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears

Posted By Marc Morano – Marc_Morano@EPW.Senate.Gov – 4:44 PM ET

Washington DC – An abundance of new peer-reviewed studies, analysis, and data error discoveries in the last several months has prompted scientists to declare that fear of catastrophic man-made global warming “bites the dust” and the scientific underpinnings for alarm may be “falling apart.” The latest study to cast doubt on climate fears finds that even a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would not have the previously predicted dire impacts on global temperatures. This new study is not unique, as a host of recent peer-reviewed studies have cast a chill on global warming fears.

“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing the new study which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Another scientist said the peer-reviewed study overturned “in one fell swoop” the climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore. The study entitled “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz. (LINK)

“Effectively, this (new study) means that the global economy will spend trillions of dollars trying to avoid a warming of ~ 1.0 K by 2100 A.D.” Dr. Wilson wrote in a note to the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee on August 19, 2007. Wilson, a former operations astronomer at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore MD, was referring to the trillions of dollars that would be spent under such international global warming treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.

“Previously, I have indicated that the widely accepted values for temperature increase associated with a doubling of CO2 were far too high i.e. 2 – 4.5 Kelvin. This new peer-reviewed paper claims a value of 1.1 +/- 0.5 K increase for a doubling of CO2,” he added.

Climate fears reduced to ‘children’s games’

Other scientists are echoing Wilson’s analysis. Former Harvard physicist Dr. Lubos Motl said the new study has reduced proponents of man-made climate fears to “playing the children’s game to scare each other.”

“Recall that most of the 1.1 degree – about 0.7 degrees – has already occurred since the beginning of the industrial era. This fact itself is an indication that the climate sensitivity is unlikely to be much greater than 1 Celsius degree: the effect of most of the doubling has already been made and it led to 0.7 K of warming,” Motl wrote in an August 17, 2007 blog post. (LINK)

“By the end of the (CO2) doubling i.e. 560 ppm (parts per million) expected slightly before (the year) 2100 — assuming a business-as-usual continued growth of CO2 that has been linear for some time — Schwartz and others would expect 0.4 C of extra warming only – a typical fluctuation that occurs within four months and certainly nothing that the politicians should pay attention to,” Motl explained.

“As far as I can say, all the people who end up with 2 or even 3 Celsius degrees for the climate sensitivity are just playing the children’s game to scare each other, as [MIT climate scientist] Richard Lindzen says, by making artificial biased assumptions about positive feedbacks. There is no reasonable, balanced, and self-consistent work that would lead to such a relatively high sensitivity,” Motl concluded.

Overturning IPCC consensus ‘in one fell swoop’

The new study was also touted as “overturning the UN IPCC ‘consensus’ in one fell swoop” by the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Joel Schwartz in an August 17, 2007 blog post. (LINK)

“New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes,” wrote AEI’s Schwartz, who hold a master’s degree in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology.

The study’s “result is 63% lower than the IPCC’s estimate of 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2 (2.0–4.5 degrees C, 2SD range). Right now we’re about 41% above the estimated pre-industrial CO2 level of 270 ppm. At the current rate of increase of about 0.55% per year, CO2 will double around 2070. Based on Schwartz’s results, we should expect about a 0.6 degrees C additional increase in temperature between now and 2070 due to this additional CO2. That doesn’t seem particularly alarming,” AEI’s Schwartz explained.

“In other words, there’s hardly any additional warming ‘in the pipeline’ from previous greenhouse gas emissions. This is in contrast to the IPCC, which predicts that the Earth’s average temperature will rise an additional 0.6 degrees C during the 21st Century even if greenhouse gas concentrations stopped increasing,” he added.

“Along with dozens of other studies in the scientific literature, [this] new study belies Al Gore’s claim that there is no legitimate scholarly alternative to climate catastrophism. Indeed, if Schwartz’s results are correct, that alone would be enough to overturn in one fell swoop the IPCC’s scientific ‘consensus’, the environmentalists’ climate hysteria, and the political pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become so popular with the world’s environmental regulators, elected officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in the mainstream media notice?” AEI’s Schwartz concluded.

The article cited above is written by a former staff writer for CNSnews.com. I’m not entirely sure I would take him at face value. He is also the the Communications Director for Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.)

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/static.aspx?PageID=20