Global Warming

As reported in Energy Bulletin, there are over 1000 Global Warming rallies taking place across the country this weekend. I'm pretty disappointed that this is the first I've heard of it, but not terribly surprised that nobody in the media has picked up the story. Let's thwack the world upside the head with a dying fish and force them to pay attention! If you want to look for an event in your area, check this site: Step It Up 2007.

The latest snowfall of any kind I remember growing up in Iowa was around April 15 -- but that was flurries. Today Iowa woke up in a blanket of mid-April snow in the same week that much of the nation faced numerous record lows and crop failure. Florida fared fine, and we even had a slight easing of our drought last night.

Many of you likely remember the movie "The Day After Tomorrow", which was in theaters just a couple years ago. While the hundred-foot tidal waves and stratosphere-sucking storms were pure fiction, there is some truth to the basic premise -- the collapse of the ocean conveyor belt in the Atlantic. RealClimate has an excellent explanation of the effect here.

As the RealClimate article mentions, there are indications that the thermohaline circulation has decreased by as much as 30% in recent times. So, I'm keeping a wary eye on the weather and its relation to the melting of Greenland, especially given that we're seeing record cold temperatures for the month (not just a particular day).

LiveScience reminds us in an article today that there is quite a number of gases in the atmosphere that contribute to global warming other than carbon dioxide. Some are greater than 10,000 times more effective at trapping solar energy than CO2, and their role in the atmosphere is not as fully understood. (We have past proxies such as ice cores that can explain the historical effects of CO2, but nothing for exotic species like chlorofluorocarbons -- we can only observe the current havoc they wreak.)

From the article:

Other greenhouse gases make up an even smaller portion of the total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but are more long-lived and less reactive than methane.

Chlorofluorocarbons, banned by an international agreement known as the Montreal Protocol because they eat up atmospheric ozone, are also greenhouse gases. While levels of this gas, formerly used in air conditioners and refrigerators, are no longer rising, the gas won’t completely leave the atmosphere for many decades.

“We just have to wait for the atmosphere to cleanse itself,” Shine said.

Other heavily fluorinated gases are very long-lived, almost permanent, in the atmosphere and are still being emitted. And their contributions to global warming still aren’t completely known.

RealClimate continues to impress me. In a recent post they pose the question of what would a CSI-style forensic analysis for the case of global warming look like? They point out how ridiculous a defense attorney (defending the humans accused of contributing to Global Warming) would appear while trying to argue such a case in court:

A rather more specious comment heard often (including at this hearing) is that 'if it was warmer before, then the current warming must be natural' or alternatively 'if you can't explain all of the past changes, how can you explain anything now?'. First of all, there are many periods in Earth history that are unequivocally accepted to be warmer than the present - the Pliocene (3 million years ago), the Eocene (50 million years ago) and the mid-Cretaceous (100 million years ago) for instance. Less clearly, the Eemian interglacial period or the Early Holocene may have been slightly warmer than today. Thus, if that logic were appropriate, no-one should bother worrying about climate change until sea levels start to approach mid-Cretaceous levels (about 100m above today's level!).

However, the logic is fatally flawed. It is akin to a defense lawyer arguing that their client can't possibly have committed a particular murder because other murders have happened in the past that were nothing to do with them. That would get short shrift in a courtroom, and the analgous point gets short shrift in the scientific community too. Of course, it is possible that our suspect was involved in previous murders too - but obviously the further back you go, the harder it is to pin it on them. And clearly, there will be past murders where they have a clear alibi.

We could be seeing a prelude to the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case on Global Warming.

Courtesy of the The Oil Drum, the Independent has a summary of the predicted effects of global warming at different temperature levels as found in the new United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

Considering that the IPCC is supposed to represent the views that the majority of scientists can agree upon as the minimum effects. Imagine if the high-end predictions are correct? Remember that the temperatures are in Celsius:

As the fervor over global warming continues to permeate the discussions of politicians and the media alike, I’ve noticed a stock set of anecdotal arguments from those who choose to remain unconvinced of anthropogenic global warming. A lot of their arguments remind me of the arguments of those who believe NASA faked the moon landings: “Well, in their pictures you don’t see the stars, so it must have been done in a studio.” Um, have you ever tried taking a picture of the night sky? How many stars do you see? But I digress...

While RealClimate has a solid collection of responses to common contrarian arguments, I have yet to see a concise, simple document targeted at the average reader for debunking the global warming denier crowd. NASA has hardly bothered to produce a response to moon landing deniers, finding it impossible to do so with a straight face at the preposterousness of the claims. Given the gravity of global warming, we similarly must respond seriously to the denialists even if it pains your face to keep from laughing in theirs.

This is my collection of rebuttals for the most prominent arguments put forth by the folks who deny anthropogenic climate change.

The Independent reports that global warming has claimed its first entire inhabited island. Those who lived there can never go home again. So begins the exodus to high ground. I wonder if this story would have received more press if there was oil involved?

From the article:

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

Continuing with the topic of soil management, this article on the importance of forest soil nutrition for carbon sequestration was intriguing. If you hope to help fight global warming by planting trees, make sure you pay attention to soil nutrition or you may end up doing very little to remove carbon dioxide. It’s also something to consider if you want a healthy source of timber after Peak Oil.

Continuing with the discussion of weather effects from a couple posts ago, there are many other requirements we can define.

Jeff pointed out that we need to more carefully examine how much rain falls during the growing season, rather than just the whole year’s average. I’m looking for the data on that for our selected Iowa location and I’ll get back to you.

In the following draft requirements, the term “withstand” may need some further definition. The understanding of what withstanding something may vary from person to person – some might consider it to mean every part of the structure and farm stays intact, and some might imagine it means only the core structure must survive. Any thoughts on a better way to define this term?

In the previous post we picked a specific location for our Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem, which enables us to do quite a bit. With these new assumptions we can better see our true requirements. With 34”/year of precipitation, we can modify our water requirements to take advantage of nature’s irrigation. With knowledge of our latitude, we can run calculations on solar incidence.

In the interest of furthering the design, let’s calculate what we need for growing food. Requirement 2.2.2 in the ORD is for 14,000 liters-per-day (lpd) of water. For four people on a vegetarian diet, we can liberally estimate that 1 acre of food would meet their nutritional needs (NOTE: This will be refined to a more exact number as the design progresses – remember Systems Engineering is an iterative process!).