It's alive!

July 1, 10:30 AMOrlando Science Policy ExaminerSteven Andrew

I’m always happy to address a few questions and comments, keep ‘em coming. Here’s a few, paraphrasing mine, found here and elsewhere that have come up a lot recently, just in time for the new and improved Senate debate -- now with Al Franken -- over a historic climate and energy bill. Some of these are affectionately referred to as Zombie Lies because no matter how many times they’re debunked, they keep coming back to life and they're after your braaains!

Several people asked about my qualifications. My wife would tell you I'm a guy with internet access and too much time on my hands. But I'd call myself a resonably well informed layman with terrific sources. For example, the NASA references in this piece were vetted by two senior climate researchers both of whom are intimately familiar with the data. Outside of that I have no problem if you want to think I'm a failed lion tamer or if you really are. I'll judge you by the words you write and the track record you build up.

Climate change is a naturally occurring phenomenon.

So are Cat 5 hurricanes, plagues, and rabid grizzly bears. That doesn’t make them safe or desirable. Paleo-climate changes may be naturally occurring in the sense that they weren’t manmade, but anthropogenic climate change is a whole ‘nother ballgame.

The earth has experienced severe climate swings in the past and will survive just fine if they continue in the future.

The ‘planet earth’ would survive just fine if the crust were heated beyond the melting point of glass. The planet earth sailed right through the Permian-Triassic extinction with nary a ripple in her orbit, but about 9 in 10 species disappeared. It’s not the earth we’re worried about so much as the rate of the change on the surface and the near term effect it will have on human civilization.

The sun is causing the warming.

Generously stipulating that that was true, adding to the effect here on earth by needlessly emitting more greenhouse gases that trap the hypothetical increased solar output would literally be the last thing on earth we’d want to do. It would be akin to driving down the road, seeing an eighteen wheeler coming head on in your lane, and concluding a reasonable course of action would be to point straight at the grill and step on the gas. In reality the sun is the most studied object in the universe outside of earth itself. If it were to start mysteriously heating up like that, the screaming apocalyptic headlines would bury today’s celebrity deaths and political scandals so deep you'd need a bulldozer to find them.

NASA 'silently' revised its findings and now admits 1934 is the warmest year on record.

Not even close. The NASA GISS Global Temperature Index (GISTEMP) shows that 1934 (Jan – Dec interval) was 0.04 C warmer than the baseline average from 1880 to 2008. This pales in comparison to 2005 (+0.75), any other year after 1976, and whole slew of years before. But 1934 was one of the warmest years -- on land in the lower 48 states of North America. The term 'silently' is a bit perjorative since NASA posted all this on the same site with the GISTEMP. If we can cherry pick any place and time and pass it off as a global average, we can mislead the willfully ignorant into believing the planet’s temperature is doing pretty much whatever we choose.

NASA admits that the last few years were cold and this signals the planet is actually cooling.

The NASA GISTEMP record shows that 2008 was 0.55 C warmer than the base line. That places it in the top ten warmest of the last 128 years, most of which occurred in the last decade. If we’re going to point to every tiny side ways or slightly down tick on the heels of record hot periods, and ignore the spikes and surging trend, it would be a piece of cake to say the planet is cooling with every new record high. Or, if the GISTEMP trend were reversed, we could say the planet is heating up with every record low.

Mars is warming up just like the earth so that proves it’s the sun.

This is probably worth a post of its own. But for now, suffice it say not only do we not know that, barring some Area 51 type alien data dump, it's hard to imagine how we could possibly know that for reasons that should be painfully obvious: up until the 1960s temperature estimates even confined to a single time and place on Mars we could directly observe under ideal conditions varied by something like twenty degrees or more, and uncertainties in the range of several degrees still remain. On earth we have the benefit of millions of direct land and sea thermometer readings from every corner of the global for over a century, dozens of weather and climate satellites snapping real time images using optical and infrared wavelengths over several decades accurate to a thousandth of a degree, and innumerable climate proxies like ice cores, pockets of trapped gas, and geo-chemical samples allowing us to develop a precise global temperature record. Compared to that vast, detailed database, we know next to nothing about trends in global Martian temperature.

What if you’re wrong?

Then we end up with new sustainable and cleaner technologies, new industries, and new jobs, we reduce demand on fossil fuels thus lowering the price, or slowing its rise, for when we do have to use them, we also deprive unsavory governments of leverage over us and hurt terrorist networks who depend on those petro-dollars, and we reduce pollution. Plus, we gather a heck of a lot of critical science about our precious home. Not exactly a bad set of items to be stuck with. Now, what if you’re wrong?