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Rinty

Nightmare vision of a world 200 years on

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=132492006

The trouble with these "nightmare" visons are that they are pure speculation. We know that the earh is getting warmer, we know that we have probably contributed to it a bit. What we dont know is the results of this.

Speculating how many people will be alive or be killed by global warming is nonsense. It is as easy to argue that areas will become more habitable as it is to argue areas will become unihabitable. It also assumes that we have no developments in technology to assist us and that the current trends will remain.
Neil

In the late Roman period they grew grapes in York. World temperatures have been higher than they are now & lower. With the Hockeystick theory proven fraudulent (ie the evidence that about 1995 temperature growth had started rising faster then ever before - the guy had fiddled his figures) we don't even know whether the underlying trend now is up or down.

I see today the radio led off another story with "scientists say global warming may be worse than previously expected....". Such things sell papers, help give jobs to regulators & are consistently later (without media fanfare) proven to be rubbish.
Morph

One of the main problems with this seems to be dissagreement between scientists on what is going on.
Rinty

h

Or the agenda of some paid scientists and their paymasters and the interpretations of the media.

I have no doubt that we are contributing to the warming of the world and that it is happening but everything else is nothing but specualtion.

Botanists point out often that Global warming will lead to more rain and may make previously infertile places fertile.

As Neil pointed out we have heated up and cooled down many times in the past. The gulf stream has dissappeared and came back before too.

After last years Tsunami the whole media circus centred on Global warming when the Tsunami was started by an earthquake beneath the sea that had nothing to do with global warming. I saw on the news today that this was our dryest January since 1973, but that means it was drier in 1973!
SLG

As far as I can see, the consensus is that the world is heating up, that this is partly due to natural variation and that we are producing chemicals that in theory add to the effect. It is still debatable the level of effect that these human actions are having. Personally, I would err on the side of caution and assume that they are having a significant effect. To assume the best seems a pretty irresponsible attitude to me.
Morph

That is true,
Neil

As well as the global warming probable effect in increasing rainfall & plant growth is the certainty that increased CO2 allows plants to grow better, which encourages all bio diversity. This has been definitely seen in the patterns of tree ring growth over the last century. More questionably it may be responsible for the fact that satelite photos show a slight but definite retreat of the Sahara.
SLG

I can't quite remember where, but I'm sure I've seen predictions for where this increasing rainfall will land are very concentrated. So while parts of Africa will benefit, on balance much more of the world will become uninhabitable.
Rinty

j

I think any predictions about where the rain will fall and how the world will be affected by changing climate are at best guesswork and at worst propaganda from both sides.

Frpom what I can see no-one knows yet "scientists", especially those in the pay of the wind and nuclear industries (or in the case of AMEC both) seem to be sure that certain places will fall into the sea, other places will be desert and others frozen tundra.
SLG

Well we have to base what we're doing on the best information possible. We can make good predictions based on established techniques, so I think we would be wise to use that information. I'm not talking about press releases from either environmentalist organisation or industry, but peer reviewed academic research.
Rinty

h

Of course you're right SLG. The problem is that if you look at research in the past and compare it against their predictions, it is very rare that we get climate predictions right. It is also difficult to be specific as a set reaction to global warming can trigger all sorts of unpredictable chain reactions. I saw a report recently that claimed that in parts of Greenland the ice caps were getting thicker. The reason for this was global warming increasing snow so more was falling on the ground than melted from below it.

I go along with your view that we should err on the side of caution, I just think that the debate and any conclusions are tainted by the doomsday scenario merchants, and the global warming deniers.
SLG

There is also the serious problem of how the thoughts of the scientific community get translated into the popular press. There is a real lack of critical thought amongst the scientific correspondents in the press. So much of it is based on press releases by the two extreme lobby groups rather than what is going on in peer reviewed academic circles.
Neil

The problem is that the media like scare stories. "NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT TODAY" isn't going to sell a lot of papers. This means they will push any Greenpeace scare about "ghost fleets", Greenland melting, or cancers caused by pollution reducing life US life expectancy to 40 by 2000.

Add to that that any scientist who reports GW to be non-existent knows the press won't report him & that he won't get a grant to study it - scientists are after all as human as the rest of us. It is noticeable that many of the academic leaders of the anti-GW field are emeritus (retired) professors.

It is not just a matter of following the best, or at least loudest, advice - any action we take has a cost (Kyoto regulations cost about $400 million a day)http://www.junkscience.com/ anything has some effect & should not be undertaken lightly. For example as a counter to GW we could reduce global temperatures significantly by flying a hundred jumbo jetfulls of fine dust into the stratosphere ( as nature did at Krakatoa) but it would be very harmful to do so unless we were sure that catastrophic global warming was actually taking place.
SLG

I would like to believe that provided nothing catastrophic does happen, and I don't expect it to, then I would like to think we should be able to reach the stage where we can control to an extent global temperatures even through means as crude as depositig dust into the atmosphere.
azzuri

taking GW out of the equation and talking about health, wouldn't it be beneficial for us if we stopped pumping these gases from burning fossil fuels into the air? It surely can't be good for our health. Asthma development and other respiratory diseases have risen dramatically amongst children in the last 20 years. This can only be attributed to the quality of the air we breathe, and these extra carbons aren't doing us any good. You only need to see the problems with kids in densely populated areas such as Los Angeles to see this is a time bomb waiting to happen.
Rinty

g

Quote:
Asthma development and other respiratory diseases have risen dramatically amongst children in the last 20 years. This can only be attributed to the quality of the air we breathe, and these extra carbons aren't doing us any good. You only need to see the problems with kids in densely populated areas such as Los Angeles to see this is a time bomb waiting to happen.


This was a view widely held for a while. Asthma increased at roughly the same rate as car use since the 50's so therefore it was reasonable to assume a correlation. Since then, however there has been research that asthma was rising faster in rural and less poluuted areas. Many now attribute the rise in asthma to double glazing, fitted carpets and sealed housing filled with soft furnishings.

LA isnt as densely populated as a lot of places, it is quite spread out. High buildings are not popular because of earthquakes. LA's smog problem is famous and caused by pollution and also geography.

LA have also had some of the strictest rules to combat pollution among cities and have had for a while. I haven't been there for a while but I always remember the amount of catalyctic converters shops spining up as prevalent as tyre fitting places and car washes. At that time failure to renew the filters on your car every three months resulted in fines and penalty points.
SLG

Interesting wee piece in Nature this month regarding the basis for a lot of these catastrophy theories, that being the shutting down of the Atlantic conveyor.

Quote:
Carl Wunsch
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

An oceanographer charts the ebb and flow of opinion on ocean currents.

Many scientists believe that high-latitude cooling drives the ocean's currents as cold, dense water sinks then flows towards the Equator, creating a convective heat engine.

Since I was a student in the 1960s, when a colleague at MIT, Thomas Rossby, had seemingly shown that such a flow could be set up in the lab, this view has been entrenched.

But a flaw in the heat-engine model was pointed out as early as 1908 by the Swedish meteorologist Johan Sandström.

Heating a saucepan from below causes an instability: lower, warmer fluid rises and displaces the fluid above, leading to a vigorous convection current. In the ocean, heating and cooling both occur at the same level — the surface. Sandström argued that this situation should be stable.

In my student days, Sandström's argument was simply dismissed because he had considered an ideal, non-turbulent fluid.

Recently, however, some of us became interested again — in part because of public concern that the ocean circulation is 'shutting down', and more sensibly because of the need to understand the oceanic energy budget.

In one example, two experimentalists revisit the problem (W. Wang & R.- X. Huang J. Fluid Mech. 540, 49–73; 2005) and find that cooling salty water at or below the level of heating always produces some motion. So Sandström wasn't strictly correct. But the observed flow is so weak that the efficiency with which the ocean converts heat to motion must be vanishingly small.

The circulation in the ocean — and in retrospect, in Rossby's original experiment — depends on details of how cold and warm waters mix. That means the winds and tides are the real drivers of the ocean currents. How long will it be until the literature catches up?

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