The climate challenge just became a lot more challenging. We know that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are accelerating global warming. But intrepid research has revealed an additional sinister threat: methane. As Sarah Simpson reports, the warming of the Arctic is releasing vast quantities of methane that has been locked away for centuries in formerly frozen soil. Once released, methane traps 25 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide does. So it is more imperative than ever to slash greenhouse gases quickly, to slow the venting of methane.
The single boldest stroke must come from Congress. The House and Senate are debating legislation that would impose either a cap-and-trade system or a tax on carbon emissions (for updates see www.ScientificAmerican.com/Earth3). Certain politicians and CEOs are trying to talk Congress out of it. Our representatives should dismiss the detractors and pass legislation, before November. That deadline is crucial: nations will meet in December in Copenhagen to hammer out new international agreements to limit emissions. The U.S., shamefully, has never signed such a protocol, and leaders worldwide have said, plainly, that the Copenhagen talks will fail if the U.S. does not enact legislation to clean up its own backyard.
Another bold stroke would be to confront the 800-pound gorilla in the room: population. Cutting our wanton consumption will reduce emissions in the short term, but sustaining our planet long-term will depend on how fast population grows. It’s a touchy subject, but we have to face it. Robert Engleman lays out the issues in his article on population and sustainability.
Hope lies in action. Let’s embrace what forward-thinking economists are saying, that putting a cap or tax on carbon will stimulate massive innovation in the next great global industry: clean energy technology. Even a slowly growing population will create big demand for clean energy, and the U.S. can build a new economy by dominating this market—but only if it acts boldly, before other nations do.
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Needed: Bold Strokes. Now."
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25 Comments
Add CommentOne should never use the words "bold" and "congress" in the same sentence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYawn.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA carbon tax as a solution to the catastrophe just ahead? This is a joke right? Like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe only thing that will save us is a massive nuclear attack on global warming - a World War 2 type effort mass producing thousands of publicly owned mostly factory built Generation 3.5 reactors all at once at a billion a pop. No private company could finance it. Within ten years we can be off fossil fuels and reversing global warming. To do anything else, like this carton tax nonsense is to risk a climate catastrophe that might actually end life on this planet.
Political action from congress and the president is required or an army of attorneys and massive insurance costs based on Big Coal/Oil financed fear campaigns would kill us.
Big Auto needs to retool into mass producing parts for the thousands of standardized generation 3.5 nuclear reactors.
Work on generation 4 reactors is looking towards the same low mass production cost as generation 3.5's. Generation 4 reactors use spent fuel from previous generation reactors or abundant thorium and leave much less hazardous waste in a tiny fraction of the volume than do current coal or nuclear plants.
Westinghouse has begun construction in China of four 1 gigawatt plants it sold for 5.5 billion producing power at a small fraction of Big Private Power companies are charging us for coal. Hyperion can't keep up with the orders for the 70 megawatt refrigerator size nukes it is selling for $25 million.
The risk of using very much unsafe NOT!!! options like wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, is enormous. These energies have zero possibility in stopping a Global climate collapse because of their low densities, inability to store power, and immense cost. It would take wind farms taking up 300 squa300 square miles of land, or 60 square miles of photovoltaic cells to replace a one acre 1 Gigawatt nuclear plant. Wind Power requires 30 times the steel and green house producing concrete of a nuke. There is no power when the sun is behind clouds or at night. It can be shown that wind power actually produces more CO2 than gas power plants alone because of the fast spooling low efficiency gas plants required to load balance the things.
Nuclear power plants just keep on ticking rain or shine sleet or hail matters not. They are there when you need it at a lower cost both financially and environmentally than any other technology. It can get us off oil in ten years if we wish and it can not only end the global warming march but reverse it.
Its hard to say much in 2500 characters except to admire the futility of such nonsense. That is because, you see, that carbon dioxide is not the cause of global warming, for the simple reason that there is no such warming. The idea that CO2 causes air to get warm was introduced by Hansen in his testimony to Congress in 1988. He observed that air temperatures had started to rise about 1977. He also observed that carbon dioxide in the air was steadily increasing. The two had to be related, so he produced a GISS computer program that showed how increasing carbon dioxide would make the temperature increase too. He ran his curve out to 2020 and scared Congress and the media with it. This eventually led to the establishment of the IPCC. But there is one problem with that idea: carbon dioxide had been increasing linearly since 1958, as it still is. But his warming had a definite beginning, for the global temperature up to that point had been pretty and flat for more than a good ten years. Since there is nothing in particular about the carbon dioxide curve at that point to explain why it suddenly should start to warming the air his assumption that it did so is unjustified. And to cap it off: satellite measurements show that there actually was no warming either and his temperature curve was simply wrong. While carbon dioxide warming is non-existent, there actually has been warming but it started with the super El Nino of 1998. It was followed by the twenty-first century high from 2001 to 2007. But all this ended with a La Nina cooling in 2007 which bottomed out in 2008. A giant and increasing gap now separates real temperatures from Hansen's predictions. Carbon dioxide warming is dead and our climate from now on will be controlled by ENSO oscillations as it was before 1998. And yet Hansen gets a present of four hundred millin dollars to study climate in fiscal 2009!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt’s hard to say much in 2500 characters except to admire the futility of such nonsense. That is because, you see, that carbon dioxide is not the cause of global warming, for the simple reason that there is no such warming. The idea that CO2 causes air to get warm was introduced by Hansen in his testimony to Congress in 1988. He observed that air temperatures had started to rise about 1977. He also observed that carbon dioxide in the air was steadily increasing. The two had to be related, so he produced a GISS computer program that showed how increasing carbon dioxide would make the temperature increase too. He ran his curve out to 2020 and scared Congress and the media with it. This eventually led to the establishment of the IPCC. But there is one problem with that idea: carbon dioxide had been increasing linearly since 1958, as it still is. But his warming had a definite beginning, for the global temperature up to that point had been pretty and flat for more than a good ten years. Since there is nothing in particular about the carbon dioxide curve at that point to explain why it suddenly should start to warming the air his assumption that it did so is unjustified. And to cap it off: satellite measurements show that there actually was no warming either and his temperature curve was simply wrong. While carbon dioxide warming is non-existent, there actually has been warming but it started with the super El Nino of 1998. It was followed by the twenty-first century high from 2001 to 2007. But all this ended with a La Nina cooling in 2007 which bottomed out in 2008. A giant and increasing gap now separates real temperatures from Hansen's predictions. Carbon dioxide warming is dead and our climate from now on will be controlled by ENSO oscillations as it was before 1998. And yet Hansen gets a present of four hundred millin dollars to study climate in fiscal 2009!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIts hard to say much in 2500 characters except to admire the futility of such nonsense. That is because, you see, that carbon dioxide is not the cause of global warming, for the simple reason that there is no such warming. The idea that CO2 causes air to get warm was introduced by Hansen in his testimony to Congress in 1988.
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The stupidity above can be refuted with just six words: Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius.
I agree with Arno Arrak and Caerbannog. The catastrophe that the global warming crowd claims will happen is based on faulty science, or "consensus" science. They cannot verify that global warming is actually occurring; yet they want billions of dollars to rectify a problem they cannot verify. And even if they could prove "scientifically" that global warming is occurring, they couldn't correct the problem with their off the wall schemes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGiven the massive amount of misinformation pouring from denialists, most people will throw up their hands at understanding the actual science, and will instead opt for the simple 'answers' proffered by those corporations which seek to avoid regulation. Politicians will find it difficult to be objective, as those same corporations fund campaigns.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo action is likely to be very slow.
But our population growth continues. Food reserves are at a low and will likely continue to fall. So it now seems likely that most people will achieve an intuitive understanding of 'population overshoot' ONLY when we have a very bad drought year some 10 or 20 years down the road.
caerbonnag and Carey Allen: I recommend that both of you find out what the scientifioc method is all about and how to apply it to the global warming problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiscaerbannog: citing Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall, and Svante Arrhenius as authorities proves nothing about what is going on today. In case you don't know, what I have done is called science, something you should learn some day. It is based on observed facts. You cannot change facts by citing authorities out of context.
Carey Allen: you simply don't like what science has to say when it does not say what you want it to say. The Pope did not like Galileo for the same reason. You say politicians find it difficult to be objective, and so do I. But not because of the corporations but because of the huge environmentalist lobby that has influenced the Obama administration to introduce legislation that is totally against our national interest. This lobby is also harping that "ExxonMobile" is supporting "denialists" and is paying for their contrary views. If so, I wish they would pay me - I did all this work on my retirement income. I have demonstrated by methods of science the complete falsity of the carbon dioxide warming scare and recommend that all efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions, from Kyoto Protocol to cap-and-trade laws, be abandoned forthwith.
Arno,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a reasonably rigorous university education in astrophysics (undergrad) and math, and philosophy of science is an interest, so I think I have some basic familiarity with the scientific method.
My suggestion to you is that since you have "demonstrated by methods of science the complete falsity" of AGW, you really should publish your work.
I look forward to reading your paper.
To Carey Allen: Please apply your training to climate studies. Read my work with comprehension and think it through. Even though I detect sarcasm, your point about publishing my work is well taken, for that was my first thought. Unfortunately the science publishing field is completely controlled by warmists. I submitted it to Science, Nature, and PNAS - no takers. We have arrived at a truly Lysenkoist society: any denialist paper is routinely returned without even permitting peer review, just in case some maverick reviewer has the gall to approve of the wrong kind of science. PNAS in particular annoys me because they have published piles of trash from Hansen's group. Just to submit a paper you have to fill nine pages of computer forms with many restrictions and on top of it they want exorbitant page charges, which I for one was not going to pay. But that's life. I don't have a share of that billion dollars of climate research money that the U.S. government spends each year. And now I find that my latest revision did not go up on ICECAP because it was too long. Next step is to break it in two and rewrite it - you will have to wait for that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCarey Allen - I thought I put in a comment in before but there is no sign of it. I think you could and should apply your education to get to the facts on warming. I had to split my paper in two parts because the latest version was too big to put up on ICECAP but it should be available any time now. It will bring you up to the cutting edge. Your point about publishing it is well taken even if you choose an irritating way to express it. That was my first thought too. I offered it to Science, Nature, and PNAS - no takers. Science publishing is in the hands of the warmists and any paper from a "denier" is rejected without even giving it a peer review - just in case some maverick reviewer decides to approve of an undesirable paper. PNAS particularly annoys me because they have published a ton of trash from Hansen's group. Just to submit a paper you have to fill nine pages of computer forms with many restrictions, and on top of it all they want exorbitant page charges. I was not about to give that, for I don't have a share of that billion dollars the U.S. government spends each year on climate research, and told them I wanted them to pay me for the paper. That global warming delusion has a hold on our science establishment as strong as Lysenko's was under Stalin to keep real science results from the public.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAh, the old "global warming conspiracy controls the journals" excuse.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I can't get my paper published in a peer-reviewed journal because the global warming conspiracy is against me."
Well, either that or it just can't pass peer review. It's probably one of those two things.
The notion that "consensus science" is "bad science" reveals serious ignorance of the scientific method (MS in medicinal chemistry here, before you ask). "Consensus" is formed in science by reproducibility: multiple scientists attacking the same problem and getting similar results. If you get the same answer by asking the question in multiple different ways then that is good investigative methodology, not bad.
And the idea that the greenhouse effect was invented in 1988 is simply, factually wrong. The idea was developed and demonstrated experimentally in the 1800s, by the aforementioned Fourier, Tyndall, and Arrhenius.
Which shows again (Note: reproducibility!) that you should ALWAYS check the "facts" put forward by climate denialists.
Here's a question...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhere are the papers that demonstrated the flaws in AGW theory from BEFORE the conspiracy took over the journals? Did the conspiracy go back and edit them out of all the library hard copies?
Psuliin: you are just an opinionated ignoramus who understands nothing of what I have said, so let's go over the basics again. In the sixties and seventies, that is for two decades, there was no global warming of any kind and the world even cooled a bit. That means two decades of no warming. But your favorite gas, carbon dioxide, was already in the air and was slowly increasing as we know from very good records kept since 1958. Its increase was linear with time - that means a constant amount each year - and it has been ever since. But then something happened in the late seventies to cause the world temperature to start creeping up at the rate of one tenth of a degree Celsius per decade. We don't know what caused it to start warming then but James Hansen of NASA said he did: it must be that carbon dioxide in the air that is causing it - Svante Arrhenius told us it would do that! It was not a slow start, this warming, but quite sudden, within a few years. This point is important, for nothing whatsoever happened to carbon dioxide - it just kept on increasing slowly as it had in the sixties and seventies, and as it would keep doing for the rest of the century. Now answer this question: how can a gas that has been in the air for decades without causing any trouble suddenly change its behavior and start warming the world? You can't answer that and nobody can. The first thing a scientist who is faced with this problem will have to is to check his data again: has the rate of carbon dioxide accumulation changed? Or did we measure the temperatures correctly? The answer to the first question is a definite no. As to temperature, people have criticised methods of measurement and guessed that the urban heat island effect might distort it but no definitive answers have come out. The problem remained unsolved until satellites were used to measure world temperature, and guess what they found? There was no such warming, period. Hence, carbon dioxide did not do it, and is an innocent bystander. But where did those temperature values come from then? There is obviously a serious systematic error of unknown origin, possibly the urban heat island effect, in these data. Which reminds me of another temperature flap - that "hockey stick" that attempted to wipe out history by denying the existence of the Medieval Warm period and the Little Ice Age, all to prove that the "late twentieth century warming" was man-made. And perhaps it was, but not in the way they meant it. Here is room for someone (not me) to start a conspiracy theory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, at least now you're admitting that the greenhouse role of CO2 wasn't invented in 1988. I suppose we have to content ourselves with baby steps.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for the idea that the world just "suddenly" began warming the late 70s, that's demonstrable nonsense.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/global-jan-dec-error-bar-pg.gif
The records of the National Climate Data Center show very clearly that the 60s and 70s were a brief plateau in a steady temperature rise going back at least to 1910. This means that every word you wrote after "It was not a slow start..." was simply false. Your questions are based on bogus premises - which assures you that no one will ever answer them, any more than they could tell you why the sky is magenta.
So, my earlier question still stands: where are the refutations of AGW theory that were published before the conspiracy that keeps your truth from being heard? Still waiting.
Psuliin: I never credited Hansen with inventing the idea of greenhouse warming - he is no smart enough for that. He just used it. But to point to climate changes in the distant past as proof of something happening today is simply stupid. You have to explain why carbon dioxide warming was non-existent in the sixties and seventies, and you cannot do that by changing the subject and talking about what happened at some other time. Unfortunately warmist bullshit is all like that and what is worse, the so-called “peer review” process lets them get away with that. We all know that a huge warming took place when the ice age ended and continental glaciers disappeared but this has absolutely nothing to do with what happened in 1977. Carbon dioxide did not do it then, could not do it in the sixties and seventies, did not do it in the eighties and nineties, isn't doing it now, and as matter of fact has not done it for the last 500 million years. If the latter is news to you I suggest you look up the article entitled “Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years” by Daniel Rothman. It appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 but it is of such importance that it was still among the most-read articles on the Academy web site in May 2009. I quote from it: “The resulting CO2 signal exhibits no systematic correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at tectonic time scales.” QED
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E09-01_NuclPwrClimFixFolly1i09.pdf
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"This semi-technical article, summarizing a detailed and documented technical paper(1), compares the cost, climate protection potential, reliability, financial risk, market success, deployment speed, and energy contribution of new nuclear power with those of its low- or no-carbon competitors. It explains why soaring taxpayer subsidies haven’t attracted investors. Capitalists instead favor climate-protecting competitors with lower cost, construction time, and financial risk. The nuclear industry claims it has no serious rivals, let alone those competitors—which, however, already outproduce nuclear power worldwide and are growing enormously faster."
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome information about how to become a more scientific skeptic of AGM.
I might be a little pessimistic, but I think nothing is going to happen... Politicians (and managers in a more general sense) are scientifically handicapped and scientists are politically handicapped.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe demographic 'gorilla' is in fact toothless : To obtain a 1-pound steak requires 50 pounds of cereals and soybeans on top of that. So eat meat only twice a week and the whole world can easily be fed. Feed the poor and they have less children, (proven in all developped countries). So eat less meat and the gorilla is tamed and pressure on ressources diminishes. No laws are needed : Just a voluntary choice made by each citizen.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe stupidity of leaning on these six words can be refuted with just two words: Ferenc Miskolczi. Using NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 Miskolczi showed that the infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere has been unchanged for 61 years, with a value of 1.87. This means that constant addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for all these years has not changed its transparency to heat radiation from below one whit or the optical thickness would have increased, and this did not happen. To put it in other words: the greenhouse absorption signature of carbon dioxide is simply missing. This is an empirical finding, not deduced from any theory, and it overrides any calculations from theory that do not agree with it. Which means that any theories emanating from your six word dictionary that do not agree with it need to be either revised or discarded.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou say you look forward to reading my paper. I have an even better suggestion for you: read my book. It is called "What Warming?" and is available on Amazon.com. Spring for it and learn some real climate science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCarey Allen: I am glad you mention publication because that is exactly what I did. You can find my scientific work in "What Warming?" that is available on Amazon.com. It may interest you as an astrophysics grad that Ferenc Miskolczi, a physicist, determined using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948 that the global average annual infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere has been unchanged for 61 years,with a value of 1.87. This value is very close to the theoretical value as he points out in his most recent work reported at the EGU meeting this month in Vienna. This means that the transparency of the atmosphere in the infrared where carbon absorbs did not change for all these years while the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by 21.6 percent. You can also put it this way: the greenhouse absorption signature of this added carbon dioxide is simply not there. It may trouble you to know that this is totally against what IPCC has been telling us all these years. Just no absorption, no greenhouse effect, case closed. This is an empirical observation, not derived from theory, and overrides any calculations that do not agree with it. Specifically, it overrides the six words caerrabannog has chosen to bring out as justifying his ignorant comment. Observations of nature agree with Miskolczi because this so-called "greenhouse warming" simply cannot be observed as satellite temperature measurements prove. To learn more, spring for my book or get the Kindle version and find out what real climate science is all about.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCarey, I do not question your educational credentials, I just want you to apply critical thinking to the global warming problem. First thing you must do is get over name calling like talk of "massive amount of misinformation pouring from denialists" and exert yourself to be specific. Just what is it that you want to call misinformation that those dastardly denialists are spreading? They don't agree with you? Is that a crime now? Do you have any idea of the temperature history of the last few centuries? I doubt it so lets walk it through. Starting with the twentieth century, there was cooling for the first ten years. Then, suddenly, the early century warming started in 1910. It stopped equally suddenly in 1940. There was no parallel increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide and this, by the laws of radiation physics, rules out the greenhouse effect as a cause of warming. Bjørn Lomborg thinks it has solar origins and I agree with him. In the fifties, sixties, and seventies there was no warming while carbon dioxide steadily increased. People were worried about a coming ice age and newspapers and magazines had articles about it. There has never been a satisfactory explanation of why this rising carbon dioxide failed to create warming for thirty years, just contorted hypotheses trying to explain it away. One of them was smoke and aerosols from war production blocking out the sun. There was no warming in the eighties and nineties, just ENSO oscillations, while carbon dioxide kept increasing. Don't forget that Hansen swore in front of the senate in 1988 that warming had started. He still remembers that "very warm summer" which was nothing more than an El Nino phase of ENSO. There were five of these in the eighties and nineties, each followed by a cool La Nina period. And then came the super El Nino of 1998 that brought us real warming, twenty years after Hansen spoke. In four years global temperature rose by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. There has not been any warming since that time. This leaves just Arctic warming to be accounted for. Unfortunately for you, this one is not greenhouse warming either but is caused by Atlantic Ocean currents carrying warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic Ocean. It started suddenly at the turn of the twentieth century before which there was nothing but two thousand years of slow cooling. And there you have it: there has been no greenhouse warming at all for the last 100 years. I don't ask you to take my word for it, just check everything I said. You will find that what I said is true.
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