Day 24: How I spent Valentine’s weekend, or my response to Tom Yulsman’s climate change blog
USGS scientists have predicted that, if atmospheric CO2 levels aren't controlled, glaciers at Glacier National Park could be gone by 2030. Photo by Anne Minard.
It’s a bit of an understatement to say journalists have been coming under scrutiny lately for coverage of climate change. On the extreme end of the criticism is the allegation that “the media” (can you tell I hate that, “the media?”) is deliberately hoodwinking the general public to believe in global warming. I’m not really sure I understand why “the media,” of which I am a living, breathing member, would be accused of a crafted conspiracy to promulgate a myth of global warming. That’s odd. Who would be the target of such a conspiracy, and who would benefit?
A more mainstream observation, which is coming from even within the ranks of journalists, is that we’ve gotten some of our reporting wrong, that we haven’t done due diligence in vetting the facts.
Two examples:
Vicky Pope, head of climate change for government at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom, wrote a guest column for the UK’s The Guardian in which she blasts both global warming activists and global warming skeptics for exploiting short-term temperature changes to advance their respective arguments. Those misuses of data are irresponsible, she says, and distract from what should be a unified effort to reduce the pollutants we put into the atmosphere. James Hrynyshyn reported Vicky Pope’s statement late last week in his blog, and got a handful of useful comments underneath.
New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin cautioned his fellow journalists in a recent panel to not be seduced by the “story of the moment.” For example, he said, the question is not, “Will President Barack Obama be able to pass a climate bill?” but rather, “Is the atmosphere going to notice?” That dialogue took place at the American Museum of Natural History last week, and was reported in the blog of the Columbia Journalism Review.
And so the implication seems to be that media members are at risk of being “seduced” by quick-turnaround stories and alarmist perspectives. All of this criticism bothers me, because I’m a journalist who has written some stories on human-caused climate change — and who has accepted it as fact. It’s fair to say I’m afraid something I think I know could turn out to be wrong. As such, my heart leaps into my throat when I see attacks on prevailing beliefs about global warming, like I did late last week underneath a blog post by Tom Yulsman at CEJournal.
That’s my bias; I’ll state it clearly: I’ve believed for some time that global warming is real and actionable, and I have a visceral reaction when people say it’s phony. And so, fully aware of this bias — and trying to put it aside — I’ve delved into some fresh research on the subject.
Opposition to global warming includes two main components. 1. People think the planet really isn’t warming, and they accuse scientists of lying and the media of complying. 2. People think even if the planet is warming, it is a result of natural climate variability (= not humans’ fault), and will return to normal in due time.
Is global warming happening?
Yulsman’s blog referenced the global temperature anomaly work of NASA’s James Hansen, and Morano countered with the work of Roy Spencer, formerly of NASA. My impressions of that showdown are developing, and will appear in a future post.
Fewer reflective surfaces, like snow and ice, on Earth mean that less sunlight will be reflected -- and more will be absorbed. Photo by Anne Minard.
Some of the confusion about global warming comes from Antarctica, where incomplete records have stymied a full climate picture. For example, in 2002, Peter Doran, an earth and environmental scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published results showing most of Antarctica was cooling. Doran wrote a 2007 op-ed in the New York Times lamenting that his earlier study had been cited by global warming skeptics, including the late Michael Crichton in his 2004 novel State of Fear.
But last month, Eric Steig of the University of Washington and his colleagues came out with a Nature paper showing that overall, Antarctica actually has been heating up. The team combined satellite and ground-based weather station data to revise the picture of warming over Antarctica, the one continent out of seven where an overall warming trend had not been documented before. (Doran had used only weather station data for his 2002 analysis, and welcomed the bigger picture.) The new paper reports that the temperature over western Antarctica is rising 0.31 degree Fahrenheit (0.17 degree Celsius) per decade, with a whole-continent increase of 0.18 degree Fahrenheit (0.1 degree Celsius). Worldwide, the temperature has climbed an average of 1.08 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degree Celsius) over the past 50 years, said study co-author Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science.
With the warmer temperatures has come the loss of sea ice. Yulsman included excellent data showing the dramatic loss of sea ice over the Arctic (he found it here and here). It’s also been demonstrated at the South Pole. A NASA study published in the February 2008 issue of the journal Nature reported that the net loss of ice mass from Antarctica increased from 112 (plus or minus 91) gigatons a year in 1996 to 196 (plus or minus 92) gigatons a year in 2006. That corresponds with a rate of global sea level rise that went from 0.3 millimeters (.01 inches) a year in 1996, to 0.5 millimeters (.02 inches) a year in 2006. I wrote to the study’s lead author, Eric Rignot, who splits his time between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, and the University of California at Irvine. He said his results have not been challenged by his peers in the intervening year, but have actually been confirmed by independent measurements from GRACE. The GRACE mission includes a pair of NASA satellites that launched in 2002 to study the Earth’s gravity field, as a way to assess the planet’s coverage of water and ice.
This post doesn't even touch the oceans, where increased CO2 concentrations are set to cause acidification that would have dire effects on marine life. Are ocean temps rising? Has acidification already begun? More questions for further inquiry ... Olympic National Park; photo by Anne Minard.
But is it our fault?
The “not our fault” arguments suggest three main drivers of warming that don’t have to do with gas-guzzling SUVs and coal-fired power plants. They are: the Sun, natural atmospheric climate cycles, and natural sources of greenhouse gas emissions, like volcanoes. I didn’t know where to start investigating until I found this interesting comment underneath a recent story in science progress, which I’m pretty sure takes an editorial position that global warming is real. Ironically, this is where I was led to the most schooling in the “Global Cooling” point of view. The commenter’s name is listed only as Neil. He wrote:
The recent cooling is from a weak La Nina in phase with a tanking PDO [my addition: Pacific Decadal Oscillation], and solar cycle minimum (that is 12 months (and counting) longer than expected). It has as little to do with GHG[greenhouse gas]-induced warming as does the 1998 El Nino-linked heat wave. Obviously, when ENSO [El Nino], PDO, and the solar cycle are in positive phase, there will be constructive interference above and beyond the level AGW [anthropocentric global warming] is responsible for, and yes, it will get really hot.
Aha! Something to go on. From this, I cozied up to Vicky Pope’s admonishment that acute global warming fears have been stoked over the past decade or so by a combination of natural and human-caused influences. But so has the “Global Cooling” counter-movement been falsely puffed up in the past couple of years by a short-term cooling trend that had to do with natural factors. I think that’s where we find most of the influence from natural atmospheric climate cycles (La Nina, El Nino and the PDO): they operate on short time scales that put kinks in the longer-term trends.
The Sun warms thousand-year-old ruins at Hovenweep National Monument, just north of Utah's border with Arizona. Photo by Anne Minard.
What about the Sun?
I Googled a random string of Neil’s words, and it led me to one of the only sites that Marc Morano mentioned under Yulsman’s blog that didn’t link right back to the bizarro propaganda on Senator Inhofe’s website. It led instead to a blog called wattsupwiththat, where there appears a seemingly intelligent discussion about solar cycles that have the power to influence climate change more significantly than carbon emissions. The commenters are speculating that we could return to conditions that occurred during the so-called “Little Ice Age.” I mentioned this freak climate era in my book (Pluto and Beyond), so I’m quoting myself here:
The Sun normally shows signs of variability, including its twenty-two-year magnetic cycle and its eleven-year sunspot cycle. It ranges from minimum to maximum activity, represented by a peak in sunspots and flares. The Little Ice Age was a period of cooling that likely started around the 14th Century and lasted several hundred years. During this time, according to NASA publications, access to Greenland was largely cut off by ice, and canals in Holland routinely froze solid. Glaciers advanced in the Alps and sea ice increased so much that no open water flowed around Iceland in the year 1695. Those effects peaked during one of the cold periods, called the Maunder Minimum, lasting from 1645 to 1715. Scientists believe it coincided with a decrease in the total energy output of the Sun. For evidence, they point to Galileo Galilei and the world’s first telescope. The telescope was invented in 1610. By 1611, Galileo was making drawings of lower sunspot activity leading up to the Minimum. He—and the astronomers who later confirmed his findings—saw only about fifty sunspots over a thirty-year period. Normally, they would have seen closer to 50,000.
Some global warming skeptics say recent warming trends have been caused by an increase in the Sun’s activity. The skeptics on whatsupwiththatsay the Sun is actually showing signs of less activity, and they predict that thinning out Earth’s CO2 blanket through emissions reductions — just as another Little Ice Age approaches — could result in disastrous cooling. Wes Lockwood, a solar expert at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, believes strongly in the Sun’s ability to influence Earth’s climate. So far, Lockwood told me, the researchers who have the most credibility (and are the most politically neutral) say the Sun will contribute twenty-five percent of the Earth’s climatic variability on a one hundred year timescale. So how do we tease out the relative contributions of the Sun and carbon emissions, and use that in our climate predictions? NewScientist took up the challenge in 2006, with data and comments from an impressive cadre of sun experts. The piece concluded that if the Sun’s activity does crash, it could give Earth a respite from climate change. But if industrial polluters and reluctant nations in turn rest on their laurels, said one of their experts (Leif Svalgaard, from Stanford University), ”when the sun’s magnetic activity returns, global warming will return with a vengeance.”
And volcanoes? Scientific American took this on just last week:
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world’s volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide. Despite the arguments to the contrary, the facts speak for themselves: Greenhouse gas emissions from volcanoes comprise less than one percent of those generated by today’s human endeavors.
So … in tentative conclusion: Temperatures are rising over all seven continents, despite recent irregularities in the trend caused by short-term atmospheric patterns. Polar ice is melting in response, along with mid-latitude glaciers. The Sun is not likely to be a primary driver of warming or cooling in the near future, and volcanoes certainly aren’t. (I’m sure of more! I’m so happy!)
But wait (cue up ominous music that lets you know a sequel is in the works): Do the rising temperatures correlate with parts per million of atmospheric carbon, and do rises in those atmospheric carbon levels correspond in lockstep to human emissions? I have assumed so, but I haven’t dug up the science — yet. It’s a hole. Stay tuned …
