While playing golf this past weekend (pretty good day on the links – front nine 3 over, back nine 6 over) with the usual crew, the subject of Superstorm Sandy came up in the context of global warming.
My friends are, shall we say, VERY progressive and, to paraphrase the ol’ Bill Clinton campaign mantra, they basically turned the conversation into a rant with the theme “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”
Being the naive scientist that I am, I said something along the lines of, “Wait a minute guys, what evidence do you have that Sandy was a direct result of global warming?” (Setting aside the entire discussion about global warming as proven or not.)
The answers were revealing, “Normal hurricanes are maybe 300 miles wide, the size of this storm was beyond all norms. What do YOU think the explanation is?” To which I replied that, not being a climatologist, I couldn’t offer an opinion, since I didn’t have the training or the facts to have an informed opinion. Their response, “95% of the world’s leading scientists have concluded that global warming is man-made!!!” And my reaction was, “So what? Tell me how that proves ANYTHING about what made Sandy so large.”
After a lot of muttering and snarking, I threw up my hands and said, “Guys, read some geology to get a sense of scale.”
It was all really instructive, especially their willingness to make a cause and effect argument without a shred of evidence, and to be smugly passionate about it, to boot.
But, it made me see how hugely different my sense of scale and time is from theirs. For them, 100 years of observation provides all the data that’s needed to understand the geophysical and geochemical drivers of our planet’s behavior.
I think of Collins, Markello, et al.’s “Carbonate Analogs Through Time (CATT) Hypothesis.” The masterful compilation of sea level, temperature, magnetic polarity and other global variations over 540 million years makes me profoundly grateful for the sense of time and change geology has given me.
For example, there are highly episodic sea level fluctuations in the last 10 million years, increasingly frequent changes in magnetic polarity and a trend towards increasing CO2 that started… wait for it… in the Jurassic 190 million years ago. Then, there are the episodic (but increasing) levels of heavy oxygen (O 18), which started about 50 million years ago, but really started accelerating about 2 million years ago.
So, I see a dynamic world with hundreds of millions of years of data that clearly show that tens, or even hundreds of millions of years ago, the earth’s climate, sea level and even CO2 content reached levels we are currently attributing to man-made causes. As a result, it’s pretty hard for me to look at Hurricane Sandy and instantly think of it as human-caused.
What do you think? Should global warming advocates take a broader view of our current climate? Please, leave a comment below.
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Of course they should, but they won’t. They’ve already made up their minds and facts only confuse them. From my admittedly limited experience, these people have absolutely NO concept of scale or time, especially on a grand scale. T them, 100 years is sufficient to establish a trend, despite the fact that we’re barely out of the Little Ice Age, which somehow gets left out of all the man made global warming hysteria. If the facts don’t fit the hypothesis, discard the facts, not the hypothesis, right?
Interestingly, there hasn’t been net warming in 15 years. The main proponents of anthropogenic GW said 15 years ago that a 15 year period was the most one could expect with the models then. Now they say it is 20 years. There is melting on the Arctic and major ice additions in the Antarctic. Major net melting would mean major sea level rises which we aren’t seeing. We do know that there are 2000 year old villages 100-200 feet below the North Sea today. Perspective and an understanding of statistics are what is sorely lacking today. Who needs them when you have faith?
Now, @Allen, you know you can’t detect a trend from only 15 years of temperatures!
Check out this link. It references the Storegga submarine landslide of about 8000 yrs ago and implies that this one vent increased atmospheric methane ( from breached gas hydrates); ice cores from Greenland demonstrate and 80-100PPB increase in methane con-=incident with the timing of the submairne landslide event…so here’s an episodic, one-time geological event that is implied in changes of Holocene global temperatures…..
https://hol.sagepub.com/content/17/3/291.short
This link has some cool pics, maps, and seismic
https://www.google.com/search?q=storegga+submarine+landslide&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=l53&tbo=u&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=DOmjUODpEYHm2AWJt4HoAw&ved=0CEkQsAQ&biw=1920&bih=934
Typo in above …”that this one vent…” should read “…that this one event…”
and co=incident is actually coincident
And there’s plenty of tectonic muscle out there to trigger these gas hydrate rupturing submarine slides…go to this map of world seismic activity from the past 100 years…
https://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2012/07/100-years-of-earthquakes-on-one-gorgeous-map/
Re carbon increase, I believe we are appr. at an all time low?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png
We`re not out of the last ice age in millions and perhaps hundred of millions of years, so the planet will continue to heat up, releasing carbon from the oceans.
Re planets development, one solar system revolution around the galaxy takes som 225-250 million years. The sun is all over the place in that timeframe. Betcha the earth is also, ie regards earths relative position versus the sun and the mass gravity center of all the other planets.
Which would pull earth towards the sun if said mass center is on the other side of the sun and away from the sun if earth is between said mass center and the sun.
Same physics explains “it all” from development of landmasses, tectonic and volcanic activity, icehouse earth and heathouse earth.
I`d like to have some data on average distance earth-sun over 250-500 million years (1-2 revolutions) at 10.000 year intervals…
Oddgeir
Hugh, just using the climate guys statements WRT their models that they believe we should reorder the whole of humanity to deal with their predictions. Remember when you were a freshman geology student before all of this brouhaha and a warmer climate was coincident with more life and biodiversity? Now warmth is about destruction? Stasis is an unreasonable expectation. It is the logical equivalent of trying to fix the planet at 4:00 p.m. April 24th, 2012. No real difference.
CO2? Big deal. The #1 (by far) “greenhouse gas”, much more virulent than CO2 is good ol’ water vapor.
Ban clouds!
50% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapour, 25% due to clouds, 20% to CO2, with other gases accounting for the remainder.
Climate change or “episodic sea level fluctuations in the last 10 million years ” whatever is causing our record breaking weather changes we definitely are seeing more and more violent weather patterns .No one can deny this is not happening !
We had far more severe weather impacts when Krakatoa blew up ( last century ). That one event was orders of magnitude more severe than Sandy. And it was 100% mother nature’s fault (pardon the pun)
Krakatoa is a very good example. I’m not convinced at all that we are the problem. The population of the earth is larger, thus any storms or other natural disasters will accordingly have a larger impact on human activity. On top of that throw in our newly found capacity to communicate faster than ever before with live footage and social media and it makes it seem that much worse. If we were to imagine that same storm lets just say 300 years ago in the same exact area how many people would have found out about it and how many would have been severely affected . The fact is these types of events have been occurring since the beginning of time but there has not always been some one there to record it.
Geologists do indeed take the long view. It is built into our fiber. The only constant in the earth’s climate is change. We are quite fortunate as a species that we were ready for civilization at just the time the earth was warming from the last ice age, otherwise we’d still be living in caves. Notice the link below showing a graph of the temperature record over the last 450000 years. The earth has been mostly cooler over this time. Geologists correlate data, it’s what we do. Notice that the past four cycles correlate against each other quite well. 90000 years of cold and 5000 to 12000 years of warm. We are at the end of the modern warm period. For civilization, warm is good, cold is bad, so I always tell the global warming guys that I certainly hope we are warming the planet. Maybe we will stave off the inevitable ice age for a decade or two!
https://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/files/2010/07/vostok1.jpg
The problem is that the bulk of scientists that seem to be inclined to speak out against the idea of global warming (potentially for good reasons) tend to be somehow involved with O&G exploration. That doesn’t mean they’re not right, but the “marketing” of the argument is guaranteed to fall flat before it ever begins. And scientifically speaking, for good reason.
It’s like asking the manufactures of weapons to evaluate threats to the nation, or asking specifically on-topic, asking manufacturers of wind-farms to examine the global warming issue.
Even if people WERE honest in their analysis of data, we should never trust the people to analyze the data that benefit from it.
If you want to convey those arguments to the masses, find a way to convince the “progressives” to re-examine (or perhaps examine for the first time) the actual long-term data in this arena. Until then you’re just preaching to a choir that is in no position to stop this.
As I wrote to a friend this afternoon, I’m more than willing to go where the science takes me. The data from the Vostok core that Ken refers to is a powerful reminder that Earth’s climate is highly cyclical ,and shows that the Earth went through accelerating climate transformations well before the establishment of the industrial age. The trick is to see if anthropogenic contributions can be separated from the underlying long term model.
Does the oil and gas industry benefit from the production of oil and gas?Yes, if prices are reasonable.
Is the oil and gas industry populated with people who have been studying the history of the earth all their lives? In large part, yes.
Is their skepticism re: global warming drivers reasonable? Mostly.
As I said, I’ll follow the science.
But I would hope that every shred of evidence and argument–including those put forward by the oil and gas industry–is dispassionately considered.
Maybe the best thing would be for a group of Tibetan monks to start blogging about the Vostok core…no way they could ever be considered self-interested!
From the perspective of a former skeptic now turned evolved awakened consciousness, here is my take: As like any event that is occurring, the ultimate driving forces are not THIS or THAT…..it is this AND that. It is a natural geologic cycle; it is also being fueled along by man. There is sufficient proof that both sides are correct. I could create a list a mile long from respectable sources on both sides. My suggestion is to check out a documentary called “Cool It” created by Danish political scientist, Bjørn Lomborg. We are all intelligent people here, we are all well aware that statistics and maps can be manipulated to reflect either side of a situation. All experiences in life are neutral; we (man) assign positive or negative ideas to events. It is clear that global warming is happening – who cares why? It is a sign, read it how you want to. To me it is a sign that we (collective consciousness of mankind) need to shift our thinking patterns and usher in a new scientific paradigm. Extreme weather upheavals are a result of the collective consciousness reacting to negative belief systems and propaganda. We are clearing the negative out of our fields in order to experience it – so that we can choose more positive ways of thinking. It is time to integrate, not segregate. We should all work together, not against one another. Both sides agree that it is happening – that is a good start. Now we need to react on a gut level and stop measuring everything to death. The time for survival of the fittest is obsolete. The time for global awareness is at hand. If you don’t want to listen to me, then listen to one of the World’s greatest thinkers:
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty….The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking…We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
Two years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Arizona and was fortunate enough to visit with a geologist in the field. It gave me great perspective on the fact that our planet has endured great changes in climate so much to reasonably conclude that it climate change is normal.
As an attorney who has tried cases, the general publics view as stated by your golf buddies is one of the problems that occur in court rooms. That is how to deal with people who do not know how to recognize real evidence, give it meaning, and come to a conclusion that has a direct cause and effect relationship. Lazy thinking makes these people more susceptible to the inculcation of a political agenda that would make the Malthusians happy.
You don’t need to be a geologist to under stand the carbon or nitrogen cycles and come to a reasonable conclusion that the proponents of man made goble warming do not think past their emotional response.
Regarding the comment by Woldul Nivek: “Even if people WERE honest in their analysis of data, we should never trust the people to analyze the data that benefit from it.”
That logic would say that we should go to a butcher to ask about the blood in our stool or to a plumber about chest pains. Doctors have an economic interest in health outcomes, don’t they?
If I want information and analysis, I think the place to ask is where the expertise is. It it then up to me to decide if I trust the data.