http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704541004574599981936018834-lMyQjAxMDA5MDEwNjExNDYyWj.html
As Santa gets his sleigh ready for his worldwide efforts this week, we want to wish our regular readers the happiest of holiday seasons! For those who celebrate as we do: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Looking down at Earth from Santa's galactic perspective, Howard Bloom helps with a little Earth history in order to bring us some current perspective on what is and is not relevant about the two week meeting that just took place in Copenhagen. Of course, the short answer is that there is "nothing" relevant that took place in Copenhagen but we know those involved were sincere people so we'll be sincere too.
And, we'll set aside what we thought we heard was $100 billion offered by a representative of the U.S. (could that have been Hillary Clinton - perhaps she was confused about the asking price of her next book deal, but I digress) as good faith money for developed countries to offer developing countries to help move their climate efforts forward. It would appear that throwing money at the problem is seen as a way of showing sincerity.
Bloom's perspective is that we've been the beneficiaries of a stroke of luck: "In the over two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis ... we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years."
All this took place without Al Gore.
Bloom defines our "stroke of luck" as the sheets of ice we lived with "peeling back some 12,000 years ago" leaving today's planet. But, this "weather standstill", as Bloom refers to it, has held on for an "abnormally long amount of time."
So, as our planet "wobbles" thru its solar system orbit, it produces weather alterations we cycle thru every 22,000, 41,000, and 100,000 years. This is called the Millankovich cycle, named for the Serbian engineer and geophysicist who discovered it.
In addition, the sun is going thru a cycle: as a result of maturing, the sun is 43% warmer today than it was when the Earth was first formed 4.5 billion years ago.
Bottom line: "Weather changes and the occasional meteor have tossed this planet through roughly 142 mass extinctions since life began 3.85 billion years ago. That's an average of one mass extinction every 26.5 million years. Where did these die-offs come from? Nature. There were no human capitalists, industrialists or cultures of consumerism to blame."
As Bloom says, we don't want to be the victims of one of these "extinctions", but we do need to prepare for more than just the changes "we" think we make. Bloom calls it preparing for "fire and ice." The big stuff is not caused by your neighbor's SUV.
The next time our global temperatures go up 18 degrees in 20 years, it won't be because we didn't convert to electric cars fast enough ...
Happy Holidays!
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It truly is a marvel that we are so ready to embrace the science that supports our view, and reject the science that does not.
ReplyDeleteExample: This graph from the NOAA. Note the dates.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/paleolast.html
"The similarity of characteristics among the different paleoclimatic reconstructions provides confidence in the following important conclusions:
Dramatic warming has occurred since the 19th century.
The recent record warm temperatures in the last 15 years are indeed the warmest temperatures the Earth has seen in at least the last 1000 years, and possibly in the last 2000 years."
Ultimately, as I have repeatedly stated, global warming is pretty much fact, regardless of your political views.
Whether you choose to believe man has anything to do with it or not is another matter entirely.
Regardless, I'll quote Bloom's last paragraph:
"We have to realize that nature tosses us tests, and that we grow by outwitting her. We have to prepare for fire and ice. And we have to realize that Mother Nature is not nice."
This is a challenge. The science behind the idea of greenhouse gases has been proven in small scale experiments. I'd say anything that exacerbates an existing and proven problem, particularly one that could cause our extinction, bears a long, hard look, not joviality.
I have little doubt, were we to detonate thousands of nuclear warheads at once in a single spot on our planet that we would cause a catastrophic change to our planet. I find it incomprehensible how people cannot see that centuries of burning trillions of tons of coal could possibly have a similar impact.
Utterly incomprehensible.
Happy Holidays to you, too! :)
Climate engineering will eventually come around, but we first have to get very reliable international cooperation for that to work. Why climate engineering? Because Earth's atmosphere does fluctuate all the time over thousands of years. So how much is CO2 contributing right now? Answer: nobody knows. Hence, there is a defensible position on both sides of global warming debate. What do we do in practice? We fight about it and find whatever way possible to support our position because we are right and they are wrong.
ReplyDeleteWhat will end the debate? People must come together to audit our previous research and identify the right ways to understand our planet. This might be inconclusive still.
The only way to truly know what is going on is to blanket the Earth at all of its levels in millions of sensors. Then, consolidate that data for analysis. In reality, this is impractical. In reality, we will never quite know what is going on. Again, the search for truth is limited to mere speculation.
Far too often, I see the researchers and politicians ignoring the complexity of our climate. The devil is in the details. The devil's greatest trick is convincing everyone he does not exist.
This is why the human race progresses technologically yet lags tremendously socially. We want to find the truth so much, that we end up filling gaps with the best explanation possible we can give. Unfortunately, our best explanation for event do not always match with reality. However, since it is the best explanation, we treat it as truth. This fallacy of humanity never ceases, and we make the same mistakes eternally.
My bad. The latter is one of the reasons why humans progress technologically yet lags socially. I was not thinking clearly.
ReplyDeletePlease, forgive my incessant butchering of the English language.
Craig: As always, you are on the mark! And, I think we are all agreed that nuclear is safer now and needs to be encouraged. And, the same for wind.
ReplyDeleteJosh: Don't worry about "butchering" the English language - what's important is that you are looking to deal with the problems we face and expressing yourself about them.
For both of you and others who visit, the Happiest of Holiday Seasons!