It has recently come to my attention that there's some difference of opinion on exactly what climate skeptics mean when they say that global warming is "part of a natural cycle," or more simply, "natural," as opposed to anthropogenic.
My assumption has always been as follows: The amount of CO2 produced by human activity is trivial as a climate forcing. It's not causing the rise in global average temperature. The rise in global average temperature is simply part of a swinging between hot and cold that happens over centuries, and will happen no matter what we do. (Alternatively, recent warming is caused by an increase in solar radiation.)
The main practical outcome of the view that global warming is "natural" is that we can't do anything about it (except adapt). I think that's the whole point. But apparently not everyone agrees.
Does that jibe with what y'all think? Or are there other interpretations?
Comments
View as Flat
sunflower Posted 9:13 am
07 Jul 2006
The current warming is very rapid in geologic time. This leads to the debate that it is too late, like when a ship sinks faster when past the point of no return. I am not a climate scientist so I must defer to their statements that we have 10 years to turn this thing around.
Some of your detractors seem to have had exposure to climate science in high school (multiple ice ages etc.) but are not now up to date on the science. Past warming may have been caused by sunlight intensity (not much evidence), 23000 year Earth tilt wobble, volcanoes, asteroids, dinosaur farts, and so on. All theory because we were not there then. Now we can see the causes and effects.
Amateur armchair arguments that global warming is natural is like a smoker saying the diagnosis of lung cancer does relate to smoking. Cancer is natural.
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ffletcher Posted 10:24 am
07 Jul 2006
Like Sunflower example, the smoker, it may very well mean the poor soul will require the cancer be removed, but in any case stop smoking. But it is not that simple.
I suspect that we can not go "cold turkey" on CO2 fast enough to save the polar caps. So what are we going to do, not adapt, and let the waters rise. Of course we will have to adapt.
We may have kicked into gear a string of natural events that are now not related to our production of CO2 and those events may not be undone for a very long time. And as we continue to produce CO2 we may make those natural events, and potentially other yet unknown natural events, even worse. We do not know if reductions will undo these events and reduce the global warming. Once the polar caps are gone it will be difficult for us to bring them back.
You have caused me to question reductions because I think you may be right in your conclusion "if we can not do anything about it" we should simply get on with adaptation. Because human based or not we may not be able to do anything but adapt in a timely manner.
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sunflower Posted 11:14 am
07 Jul 2006
Adapting to the failure of global warming mitigation is not possible. All global ports and low farm land will be flooded, creating billions of refugees. Drought and floods will destroy agriculture. Methane release could make 95% of large animals extinct. Forest fire. Disease. Heat stroke.
There is no escape from this sinking ship. We have been told by the experts that we can and must turn around in ten years, 3650 days. Every day is precious.
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foodnotoil Posted 1:57 pm
07 Jul 2006
...There exist many different natural storehouses of greenhouse gases all over the planet; from the fossil fuels we dig up, to the plants & trees that absorb CO2, to the oceans and permafrosts that retain methane & other elements.
Humans, in particular, have hijacked some of those natural greenhouse gases (fossil fuels) and continuously vapourised them into the atmosphere. As we have been doing this, global average temperatures have been rising faster, lock-step in-line with our global CO2 emissions.
As temperatures rise, we risk setting off "tipping points" of other natural greenhouse gases &/or catastrophy-fueled events. These tipping points include, but are not limited to:
ice sheets melting resulting in less white ice bouncing sunlight back into space, fueling more warming as more blue waters soak up more sunlight & heat.
Warmer waters fuel hurricanes to grow bigger.
melted ice means higher sea level(s), flooding, killing & displacing people in areas home to thousands/millions of people.
oceans also absorb CO2, and that's starting to cause the oceans to acidify. Too much acidification destroys phytoplankton. When you destroy phytoplankton, pretty much the entire foodchain of the oceans risk a terrifying collapse since phytoplankton is the bedrock of the ocean food chain.
hotter & hotter temperatures will eventually lead to the amazon catching fire in the not too distant future, releasing vast amounts of more greenhouse gases.
amazon rainforest is a big part of air conditioning of the world. That much less plants & trees soaking up CO2 will mean much more CO2 stays in the atmosphere for even longer, driving temperatures further still.
Drive the temperatures far enough, and ~10,000,000,000,000 tons of methane hydrates, a greenhouse gas 21 times stronger than CO2, start to melt more rapidly from the bottom of the oceans & within permafrosts, causing the oceans to boil in a firy-display, savvy enough to use the word "armageddon..."
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caniscandida Posted 4:48 pm
07 Jul 2006
<<
I suspect that we can not go "cold turkey" on CO2 fast enough to save the polar caps. So what are we going to do, not adapt, and let the waters rise. Of course we will have to adapt.
We may have kicked into gear a string of natural events that are now not related to our production of CO2 and those events may not be undone for a very long time.
>>
But your earlier point is also important, that even if we are already beyond a "tipping point," the managing of GHG emissions is obviously a prudent course, and so turns out to be a form of adaptation.
Foodnotoil, I have read most of the items in your scenario elsewhere, but not the bit about the Amazon rainforest burning. I suppose it makes sense: if the Amazon basin becomes hotter and more arid, then it will no longer be able to support a rainforest, so that many trees will die, and survivors will for the first time be subject to forest fires. Is that really very likely? -- scary if so. Could Backcut shed some light on this?
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LegumeSam Posted 10:57 pm
07 Jul 2006
It's true of the western United States...
http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/
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caniscandida Posted 8:03 pm
08 Jul 2006
There was already a consensus building, though, that the pattern of more forest fires, and more extensive and destructive ones, in the Rocky Mountain states (not just the northern ones but down to New Mexico), Arizona and California, and I think even Oregon east of the mountains, is related to global warming. Complicating the picture, without mitigating the culpability of rising temperatures, are issues involving the effects of earlier logging practices and fire-management practices. But the scientist who was interviewed interestingly made a point of saying that practices related to development are not to blame; I am not quite sure what the point of that was.
Now, these Western forests are mostly sub-alpine, in more or less arid regions. Forest fires are natural occurrences, regular if rare, and the local biota seem to have adapted well enough on the species-level.
But I am asking about those forests technically called "rainforests." Do wildfires ever break out naturally in them? How about the forests of the Olympic Peninsula, and of Vancouver Island, and of the mainland coast of British Columbia, which are often referred to as "temperate rainforests": Are there ever wildfires there? My guess is No; frequent precipitation and constant high atmospheric humidity make them pretty impossible. But I do not know, and hope to be corrected if I am wrong.
And I am thinking the same goes for the Amazon rainforest. Before it becomes subject to forest fires, my guess is, the atmospheric conditions will have to dry out significantly. And that would kill a lot of the flora and fauna, before the fires kick in.
It is entirely credible that global warming can accomplish such a monstrously destructive change in regional atmospheric conditions. But I am indeed curious about Foodnotoil's suggestion, about an apocalyptic conflagration in the Amazon, which I had not read of before.
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foodnotoil Posted 11:47 pm
08 Jul 2006
Yeah, your probably right about that. Ecosystems are pretty complex systems; its hard to know exactly how things are going to turn out. In some places, you can remove wolves and whole forests start to die. In other places, some forests can't survive without catching fire every now & then. Attenborough documented stuff like that in his films; namely The Private Life of Plants & State of The Planet.
As for the amazon catching fire, I'm not sure who else is saying it, but I've seen numerous climate change documentaries, and Peter Cox often pops in saying that the amazon could catch fire in the distant future. He bases it on the projections produced by the supercomputer at the Hadley Center, which he works at.
The first time I saw him say it, was in a documentary called Global Dimming. This' his quote:
"2040 it could be four degrees warmer, the climate change could have led to big drying particularly in the Amazon Basin, that would make the forest unsustainable, we'd expect the forest to catch fire probably, turn into savannah and maybe ultimately even desert if it gets really really dry as our model suggests." Peter Cox
But he also says it in the new Attenborough documentary about climate change. The link I gave in my last post is a video-clip of Peter Cox from this documentary.
I don't know where exactly to find actual research on the basis of this claim, but according to this article, it says that the report, Climate and the Amazon: Consequences for our Planet based its conclusions:
"largely on the work of Dr Peter Cox and Dr Richard Betts from the UK Meteorological Office at the Hadley Centre and Professor Roni Avissar from Duke University in the United States. They reported their findings to a conference on 'World Climate in Danger: the Amazon Connection' held in London in October, 2002."
It also says that if you want a copy of the report, "Climate and the Amazon: Consequences for our Planet," you can contact (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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mihan Posted 4:42 am
10 Jul 2006
I think most of the "natural" camp argues that we are contributing a very small (or negligible) amount of forcing to the system or that climate changes aren't anthropogenic in nature (the opposite of "natural", even though one might argue that we are a part of nature).
In the end, calling it "natural" allows them to (1) say "it's too late!" or (2) we shouldn't mess with it. (1) may be true, but there are plenty of "natural" processes that we mess with: we build dams, we seed clouds, we dump warm water and waste into cool bodies of water. This particular one just happens to be, um, inconvenient.
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