Why increasing CO2 is a significant problem — in six easy steps

NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt continues to do terrific blogging at RealClimate explaining climate science and the immateriality of the illegally hacked e-mails to our broad understanding of human-caused global warming.  That, of course, is why the anti-scientific ideologues are going after him so hard (see “Competitive Enterprise Institute to sue RealClimate blogger over moderation policy“).

He was asked recently on RC, “what percentage of global warming is due to human causes vs. natural causes?”  I’m posting his reply here because it’s a good answer and frankly much clearer than the one science advisor John Holdren gave at today’s House hearing to an almost identical question — though I thought Holdren and Lubchenco were both terrific, especially in their opening statements, and I hope to get those videos up as soon as they are available.  Schmidt explained:

Over the last 40 or so years, natural drivers would have caused cooling, and so the warming there has been … is caused by a combination of human drivers and some degree of internal variability. I would judge the maximum amplitude of the internal variability to be roughly 0.1 deg C over that time period, and so given the warming of ~0.5 deg C, I’d say somewhere between 80 to 120% of the warming. Slightly larger range if you want a large range for the internal stuff.

Schmidt has a new post today on the emails, in which he urges people to read a 2007 post that provides  “an easy-to-understand explanation for why increasing CO₂ is a significant problem without relying on climate models,” which I am reposting below: Read more

E-mails “highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers.”

Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ‘smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real “” or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

First, Earth’s cryosphere is changing as one would expect in a warming climate. These changes include glacier retreat, thinning and areal reduction of Arctic sea ice, reductions in permafrost and accelerated loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Second, the global sea level is rising. The rise is caused in part by water pouring in from melting glaciers and ice sheets, but also by thermal expansion as the oceans warm. Third, decades of biological data on blooming dates and the like suggest that spring is arriving earlier each year.

Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world’s voracious appetite for carbon is essential (see pages 568 and 570).

So begins, “Climatologists under pressure,” an important and lengthy editorial in tomorrow’s Nature (subs. req’d, reprinted below), the highly respected British scientific journal, which is among the few journals “that still publish original research articles across a wide range of scientific fields,” including climate science.  [I am leaving the links in the editorial, but they require a subscription.]

For all the disinformation that the deniers are pushing because of these emails — lapped up mostly by people who never understood or believed the science to begin with, I actually think this affair is an opportunity for the too-reticent, too-insular scientific community to explain climate science to the broader public, which Phil Jones and UEA chose not to do, but which many others have started doing (see Climate science statement from the Met Office, NERC and the Royal Society: It’s the hottest decade on record and “even since the 2007 IPCC Assessment the evidence for dangerous, long-term and potentially irreversible climate change has strengthened”).

Indeed, besides RealClimate and CP’s posts (at the end), I’d recommend: Read more

Have Flip camcorder, will travel!

So I just got a new Flip UltraHD camcorder in preparation for my trip to Copenhagen.  Indeed, the entire Center for American Progress team will be outfitted with Flips to bring you as many video interviews as possible with the 20,000 attendees from around the world.

I brought it with me to a clean energy workshop yesterday, and who was sitting next to me but the director of the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Dan Arvizu.  Since I knew him from my DOE days when he was at Sandia National lab, and since he is a leading expert on solar energy, especially CSP, I thought it would be a great opportunity to make him the guinea pig for the launch of my video career.  Part 1 (above) is a short overview about NREL, deploying renewables at scale, and Arvizu’s philosophy.

I didn’t realize that YouTube had a 10-minute limit, so you’ll have to watch Part 2 (below), to hear Arvizu’s answer to my questions about concentrated solar power (CSP), PV, and algae biofuels: Read more

The emails may give the anti-scientific ideologues in Congress something new to talk about, but fundamentally it’s their anti-scientific ideology that long ago determined their position on the gravest threat to the health and well-being of future generations:

• Inhofe on why global warming isn’t real: “God’s still up there.”
• Lobbyist Dick Armey’s Gospel of Pollution (GOP): ‘As an article of Faith,’ it is ‘pretentious’ to believe in global warming
• Rep. Shimkus: “Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood.” Rep. Barton: “I wish I had another dozen John Shimkuses on the committee.”
• Rep. Barton: Climate change is ‘natural,’ humans should just ‘get shade’
• House GOP leader Boehner on ABC: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical.”

As an aside, to the extent that the hacked emails induce conservatives to focus their attacks on the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill on global warming science, I rather think that is a net positive for the overall debate because it just leads them to make nutty statements, like Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), who is a leading Member of the disinformed, as this Think Progress repost makes clear:

Read more

“Dan Templeton stands on the nacelle of a 2-megawatt DeWind turbine in Sweetwater, Texas. Four of the world’s five biggest wind projects are in Sweetwater’s Nolan County.” The photo is from a long article in Popular Mechanics:

Why Texans See Green Gold in Renewable Resources

Driving along Broadway in Sweetwater, Texas, one could justifiably assume the city is on its way down, not its way up. Cobwebs crowd the windows of abandoned storefronts, and peeling signs hang from cracked facades. It is only after I pull up to the mayor’s office, pausing to study the street more carefully, that I notice a real clue to the city’s changing fortunes: The blond stone building is neatly sandwiched between Craig A. Johnson, Independent Petroleum Landman, and Evans Enterprises, “Your source for wind turbine maintenance solutions.”

Greg Wortham, the mayor of Sweetwater, is a compact man who, contrary to his West Texas roots, speaks quickly and easily, offering more information than is asked. As we leave downtown in his silver Ford Escape Hybrid, he points to one low-slung building after another. “That’s a British company, Altezza. They work on the outside of the blades and towers, like spacewalkers. That building had been vacant for a dozen years, easily. This is General Electric””there’s 150 workers there. It used to be a Coca-Cola storage facility. At one point, a quarter of all GE turbines in the world were built here. Northwind moved into that one; it held a company that made deer blinds.”

Along the narrow state road, warehouses evolve into wide-open plains where Black Angus cattle meander among the bases of sleek white turbines. I have to crane my neck in order to take them in. When the blades revolve to 12 o’clock, the turbines stretch to a height twice that of the Statue of Liberty and sport a wingspan greater than a 747′s. As I peer out the window, Wortham identifies turbine models the way a bird-watcher ticks off species: The nacelles of Mitsubishis appear to have two eyes and a mouth on the back, he tells me. Siemenses have a tail fin and are long and sleek like a bullet; General Electrics are shaped like a breadbox and Vestas turbines are cut across the bias with a clean diagonal line.

The irony of this scenario in a state better known for its drilling rigs is not lost on Wortham. “If you picked 50 states, plus D.C., and asked anybody in the U.S. to rank all 51 [for wind power], Texas would be somewhere around Mississippi,” he says, “at the bottom.”

Here’s more on Texas and how it might become the leader in solar, too:

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Birther Lou Dobbs and climate denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) are concerned that President Barack Obama is trying to make America into a monarchy. Appearing on Dobbs’ radio show on Tuesday, Inhofe argued President Obama doesn’t have the authority to make any commitments on behalf of the United States during the international climate treaty negotiations next week in Copenhgen, Denmark. Obama will “make the statement that he will commit ourselves to the emission standards that were in the Markey bill,” Inhofe argued, but “he can’t do that,” because only Congressional action can create a legally binding international commitment. Dobbs then exploded, swearing, “Who the hell does this president think he is?”

DOBBS: Who the hell does this president think he is?

INHOFE: I don’t know, because you can’t do that. And I think it’s certainly disingenuous to mislead countries into thinking that a president … You know, this is not a kingdom. He’s not able to do that.

DOBBS: Not yet!

Listen:

Despite the anti-monarchist fears of Dobbs and Inhofe, the White House made clear that any commitment President Obama makes to address the climate threat at Copenhagen is a “provisional target” that is “in line with current legislation in both chambers of Congress” and that the “President is working closely with Congress to pass energy and climate legislation as soon as possible.”

Dobbs and Inhofe are two of America’s most prominent conspiracy theorists, as Dobbs doubts whether Obama is a natural-born American citizen, and Inhofe believes the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming is a hoax. It’s not much of a surprise that they hatched a new conspiracy theory when they got together.

Transcript: Read more

Our top climate scientist was interviewed by Newsweek‘s Science Editor last week.  Sharon Begley talked to Hansen “on the eve of the publication of his first book, Storms of My Grandchildren, which he finished while recovering from treatment for prostate cancer and which will be published in December.”

SB:  Last week, someone leaked e-mails obtained by hacking into the server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Activists who have long denied the reality of climate change  say they show that climatologists have engaged in a grand conspiracy to manufacture a case that global warming is occurring due to human activities. Do the hacked e-mails undermine the case for anthropogenic climate change?

JH:  No, they have no effect on the science.  The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.

SB:  Do the e-mails indicate any unethical efforts to hide data that do not support the idea of anthropogenic global warming or to keep contrary ideas out of the scientific literature and IPCC reports?

JH:  They indicate poor judgment in specific cases. First, the data behind any analysis should be made publicly available.  Second, rather than trying so hard to prohibit publication of shoddy science, which is impossible, it is better that reviews, such as by IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences, summarize the full range of opinions and explain clearly the basis of the scientific assessment. The “contrarians” or “deniers” do not have a scientific leg to stand on.  Their aim is to win a public relations battle, or at least get a draw, which may be enough to stymie the actions that are needed to stabilize climate.

And here’s more from Hansen on the science: Read more

The challenges facing President Obama and the U.S. Congress have not gone away. Paul Krugman worries that “unemployment is likely to stay near its current level for a year or more,” because “much of the political establishment now sees stimulus as having been discredited by events, so that it’s very hard to come back and scale the policy up to where it should have been in the first place.” But there remains a pathway out of Krugman’s dire vision of “a process of defining prosperity down” “” if enough politicians embrace the alternative vision of a green economy, promoted by political leaders as far apart on the ideological spectrum as Van Jones and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The basic concept is simple, as [the above] video from Repower America shows “” heat up the economy by cooling down the planet.

Read more