An Inconvienent Truth

[Walker1]

Hi, I recently got the Al Gore documentary about global warming and after viewing it was somewhat shaken. I knew we as a species are polluting & ruining the earth and I already knew the planet is getting warmer. What I didn't know was about the 32 earthquakes Greenland had in 2006, and what drastic effect a large piece of ice would have on us if it broke off of greenland or Antarctica.

Is there anybody here who has seen the movie and disbelieves? I would welcome any feedback regarding global warming and what we can do to possibly stop the "train wreck" we're headed for. I just talked to a friend in CT and he says it's 60 degrees and they have had NO snow through yesterday. I'm from there and it never was that warm in Jan. with no snow storms. I find all of this to be most distressing.

[Godiva]

If anyone remembers the thread about the National Science Teachers Association turning down free copies of "An Inconvenient Truth", I just got this is my school e-mail:

"The producers of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth recently tried
passing out 50,000 free DVD copies to NSTA teachers but were turned
down. Intent on distributing free copies of this documentary to
teachers, they are now taking teachers requests for free DVD."

I guess I wasn't the only one that suggested they go directly to the teachers. I suggested going through the school libraries but this works too.

It needs a school tax ID so I'll be ordering it tomorrow.

[F8L]

I like and dislike the movie. Take out all the political jokes and "Gore political history" and it would be a great movie. Even his lifetime history added good stuff to the overall feeling the movie tried to invoke.

Walker, I highly recomend you check out RealClimate.org. Do some searches for this movie as well as "Global Dimming BBC". You must also read through the 100s of comments after each blog by Gavin and the gang over there. This will give you the most realistic view of AGW. There is no doubt in my mind that AGW is indeed occuring but there are sooo many other factors that we cannot add to climate models that make future projections tough. Don't get me wrong, I'm no skeptic but I do require sound science before I can be moved. In this situation I am doing all I can because ethically it's the right thing to do even if the science doesnt pan out exactly like projected.

[Oxo]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Walker1 @ Jan 1 2007, 05:53 PM) [snapback]369338[/snapback]</div>

Hi, I recently got the Al Gore documentary about global warming and after viewing it was somewhat shaken. I knew we as a species are polluting & ruining the earth and I already knew the planet is getting warmer. What I didn't know was about the 32 earthquakes Greenland had in 2006, and what drastic effect a large piece of ice would have on us if it broke off of greenland or Antarctica.

Is there anybody here who has seen the movie and disbelieves? I would welcome any feedback regarding global warming and what we can do to possibly stop the "train wreck" we're headed for. I just talked to a friend in CT and he says it's 60 degrees and they have had NO snow through yesterday. I'm from there and it never was that warm in Jan. with no snow storms. I find all of this to be most distressing.
[/b]

I bought the DVD last week (£14.45 or about $29) but haven't watched it yet. I'm reading a new book by George Monbiot HEAT: HOW TO STOP THE PLANET BURNING. He has gathered some interesting ideas but I remain pessimistic on the subject because as he points out the release of carbon increases according to the level of our incomes. In other words it's the wealthy who produce most carbon (the main culprit in global warming) and as the vast majority of people are doing their best to become more wealthy the outlook for carbon release is bleak.

[Beryl Octet]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Walker1 @ Jan 1 2007, 05:53 PM) [snapback]369338[/snapback]</div>

Hi, I recently got the Al Gore documentary about global warming and after viewing it was somewhat shaken. I knew we as a species are polluting & ruining the earth and I already knew the planet is getting warmer. What I didn't know was about the 32 earthquakes Greenland had in 2006, and what drastic effect a large piece of ice would have on us if it broke off of greenland or Antarctica.

Is there anybody here who has seen the movie and disbelieves? I would welcome any feedback regarding global warming and what we can do to possibly stop the "train wreck" we're headed for. I just talked to a friend in CT and he says it's 60 degrees and they have had NO snow through yesterday. I'm from there and it never was that warm in Jan. with no snow storms. I find all of this to be most distressing.
[/b]

I haven't seen the movie, but what little I've read on the internets about CO2 levels and ice shelf break offs is very much a concern.

[malorn]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Beryl Octet @ Jan 2 2007, 08:26 AM) [snapback]369540[/snapback]</div>

I haven't seen the movie, but what little I've read on the internets about CO2 levels and ice shelf break offs is very much a concern.


[/b]

If the reason it is 60 degrees in Connecticut yesterday is man-made global warming it is way too late to do anything anyway. Global Warming may be happening, but to attribute very warm days to global warming is ridiculous. Is there global warming in Connecticut and global cooling in Colorado causing the unusual amounts of snow?

[chogan]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Walker1 @ Jan 1 2007, 05:53 PM) [snapback]369338[/snapback]</div>

Hi, I recently got the Al Gore documentary about global warming and after viewing it was somewhat shaken. I knew we as a species are polluting & ruining the earth and I already knew the planet is getting warmer. What I didn't know was about the 32 earthquakes Greenland had in 2006, and what drastic effect a large piece of ice would have on us if it broke off of greenland or Antarctica.

Is there anybody here who has seen the movie and disbelieves? I would welcome any feedback regarding global warming and what we can do to possibly stop the "train wreck" we're headed for. I just talked to a friend in CT and he says it's 60 degrees and they have had NO snow through yesterday. I'm from there and it never was that warm in Jan. with no snow storms. I find all of this to be most distressing.
[/b]

I thought the "seminar" parts of the movie were well done. Who knew that Gore could deliver a lecture so well. But I echo F8Ls sentiment, in that I could have done without the "Gore noire" scenes.

A mass-market movie has to engage in simplification to get the message across. I run across this in my own work -- try telling clients that your estimate (of anything) has an associated variance (standard error, imprecision in estimation), and their eyes just glaze over. Tell them that your esimated amount of imprecision itself has some imprecision in it (ie, you're only roughly sure how imprecise your estimate is), and you've just lost a client. You haven't said anything wrong, but you haven't effectively communcated anything either.

This website has, I think, a fuller discussion of many of the issues, in the form of answering skeptics about global warming. Yet, I come away from that website with the impression that Gore's move had it just about right.

http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics

So, in some places, Gore presents what I would characterize as the mean value, or most probable scenario, without the associated standard error. For a mass-market movie, as long as the mean is well within the range of projections, I think that's not merely fair game, it is literally the only way the movie can be scripted and still be reasonably effective for the target (lay) audience.

So, is there more uncertainty about these issues than the movie would suggest? Yeah, but in most cases not hugely more -- see the other thread today about the "middle ground" scenario in the NY Times, to the extent that you are willing to trust the Times on this issue. My take is that Gore pretty much hit the ball down the middle of the fairway. As I understand it, in areas where the "output" quantities vary continuously, pretty nearly all the professionals here are agreed on the basics, and the arguments are about the exact magnitues and the details. Important arguments, to be sure, but with agreement on the basics. Then, there is far more argument about the many places where a smooth transition may not be possible, or where there may be additional quick, snap, discontinous, or otherwise rapid changes. I think that's a consequence of how nearly all mathematical modeling works -- predicting whether or when a discontinuous event will occur is far harder than predicting the level of some continuous variable. As a consequence, those types of changes tend to be ignored in mathematical modeling.

What makes this hard is that the skeptics will focus on any one small piece of this to show contrary evidence. So, you have to get the big-picture overview to understand that (e.g.) it's not that the glaciers Gore showed have always been stable before, it's that (nearly) every glacier in the world is melting right now. And so on. The website above does an excellent job of pulling the facts together that way.

The Greenland ice sheet discussion was, I thought, a bit on the edge of what was acceptable. I'm guessing it was there precisely to scare the US East Coast audience. But, given the recent surprise breakup of a floating Antarctic sheet, and, as the movie pointed out, some signs of instability in that land-based Greenland ice sheet, I wouldn't even call that one unfair. Just a little too speculative. I'm also fairly sure that if it broke up (as opposed to wasting purely by melting down), it couldn't occur all-at-once like the floating Antarctic sheet. I think. We'd have years and years to watch it go.

What I find most troubling about the projections is not that there is one possible discontinuous change like this, but that there are many that we know about, and most of them point to trouble and toward positive feedback to greater rates of warming. There appear to be lots of potential trigger points. Even if the a priori likelihood of any one of them is small, cumulatively I get the feeling that at least one of them is going to be triggered. Don't buy the Greenland ice sheet scenario? How about the release of the methane currently frozen in the Arctic permafrost? Ditto for methane hydrates in the sea bed. And so on.

So, in the jargon of economics, the risk function is strongly asymmetric (if we get rapid global warming, we'll have disproportionately large problems, if we get little global warming, we'll have few problems) and the variance of the projection is large (we might get moderate global warming, but we might instead, with positive probability, reasonably project one of the real disaster scenarios, and with positive probability project a "small change" scenario). Obviously its hard to put any remotely plausible dollar figures on these items, but my judgement is that the sensible course is to act now. If the earth were a home, and I was the insurer, I'd make the homeowner have a carbon-abatement policy in place. Just based on the dollars-and-cents calculation, not based on the more imperative moral issues. We could dicker over the details. But not to have some plan, at all, about this, strikes me as imprudent.

For my own part, I think I've more-or-less exhausted the lifestyle changes that I can make painlessly and at little cost, to reduce my carbon footprint. And my family of four still produces, in total, an estimated 22 tons of CO2 annually from household consumption of fuel and food. (No idea what our pro-rata share of the rest of the US economy's CO2 would be). Roughly one-third of that total is attributable to electricity use. I am getting ready to bite the bullet on photovoltaics, though I am far from happy about it.

Fully realizing, of course, that none of this matters unless we get some leadership out of the US government, to incent/jawbone/cajole/regulate a reduction in GHG emissions from the American people. Absent a local catastrophe, that seems unlikely to happen soon. So I make my own changes purely to reduce my guilt, not with any expectation that it will have any measurable impact, and hope for a change at the national level.

My take on it is that any probable rise in fossil fuel prices due to scarcity alone will not be anywhere near enough to check the growth in CO2 emissions in the US. So here's an economist saying that, in my opinion, markets alone will be insufficient to reduce CO2 growth here. That's because there's no connection between value in use, cost of production, and the value of the harmful externality (the CO2 release) from the consumption of fossil fuel. There's no reason to expect markets to correct this issue in isolation -- there's no market for air. Or, if they do, it'll be purely by chance. There's no necessary connection between fossil fuel scarcity and environmental impact. In effect, we're just too wealthy for our own good. We'll run out of planet before we run out of gas money.

When I try to be optimistic, I view collective action on this as a function of the learning curve. Some people figure things out fast, some people take some time, some will never have a clue. What you can do depends in part on where the population is on the learning curve. Twenty-five years ago, 35% of US adults smoked cigarettes. Now its down to 21%. That 21% is concentrated among the uneducated - virtually nobody with a college degree smokes. Then look at Prius buyers -- ovewhelmingly, they are smart people. Innovation starts with the savvy person. And, among people who are willing to change their minds about an issue, there can quite reasonably be different thresholds of proof required before people will accept a new idea. So, assuming that the evidence of human-caused global warming continues to accumulate, I would like to think that more people will change their minds on this issue, as they reach the threshold at which the evidence is sufficient to convince them that action is needed. Not all. One-out-of-five Americans still smokes. But enough to get something done at the national level.

On the issue of East Coast weather, yes, this is by a longshot the weirdest winter I've ever lived through, in terms of weather, in Northern Virginia. I've lived here off and on since 1964. Check out my posts on tulips and on yesterday's Washington Post article on the trees and shrubs that have started to bloom here in (what used to be) the dead of winter. This AM, my wife reports that the forsythia in our neighborhood are blooming. That is our classic first-spring-bloom plant. So, the plants are telling us that spring is here, a bit less than three months early. Unless something drastic happens in January, I think this is going to go down as the year without a winter around here. It's not that it's been really warm -- it has been pleasant most days -- it's that it never gets very cold, and won't stay cold long enough to keep the plants dormant. We've rarely had a night below freezing so far this year. So, yes, it's pleasant to barbeque the week before Christmas, but it's also deeply unsettling.

[Alric]

Just a quick recommendation. If you enjoyed "An inconvenient truth" you might like "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery. Both text and audio versions are excellent. There is more information and in-depth coverage of the primary literature.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(malorn @ Jan 2 2007, 11:02 AM) [snapback]369550[/snapback]</div>

Is there global warming in Connecticut and global cooling in Colorado causing the unusual amounts of snow?
[/b]

Maybe. That is why the correct term is climate change. Some places will be hotter, others colder, or both...

[chogan]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(malorn @ Jan 2 2007, 10:02 AM) [snapback]369550[/snapback]</div>

If the reason it is 60 degrees in Connecticut yesterday is man-made global warming it is way too late to do anything anyway. Global Warming may be happening, but to attribute very warm days to global warming is ridiculous. Is there global warming in Connecticut and global cooling in Colorado causing the unusual amounts of snow?
[/b]

While I agree with the sentiment that you can't infer global climate changes from a single observation of local weather, and with Alric's comment that the change will not be uniform across the globe, I still think that local weather records can be interesting markers to show that we are experiencing new weather extremes. Some of the evidence of global climate change has come from longer-term, systematic data on plant and animal behavior, showing, for example, a long-term trend toward earlier spring emergence of some species.

The way the plants are behaving in Northern Virigina is unlike anything I've ever seen before. And it's not that the mean temperature is so high, it's that we are rarely experiencing freezing nighttime lows and have not had any extended period of consecutive cold days. Looking out my window now, one of my rasberry canes still has a few bright green leaves on it -- so we haven't had a hard enough freeze yet even to kill off all of last year's leaves. I have, in effect, an evergreen raspberry plant. Those are hardy plants, but they're not supposed to be evergreens.

The next firm marker I'm looking for is when the National Park Service declares the date of peak bloom for the National Cherry Trees. Previous record was March 15. It varies wildly from year to year. It will be interesting to see if we beat that this year.

[tripp]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(chogan @ Jan 2 2007, 08:20 AM) [snapback]369554[/snapback]</div>

For my own part, I think I've more-or-less exhausted the lifestyle changes that I can make painlessly and at little cost, to reduce my carbon footprint. And my family of four still produces, in total, an estimated 22 tons of CO2 annually from household consumption of fuel and food. (No idea what our pro-rata share of the rest of the US economy's CO2 would be). Roughly one-third of that total is attributable to electricity use. I am getting ready to bite the bullet on photovoltaics, though I am far from happy about it.
[/b]

Chogan,

Have you looked into solar water heating? It's far cheaper than PV. If you're house has electric water heating you'll offset a lot of energy consumption. You don't have to live in the SW either. There are folks here on PC who use it in Seattle. With the 30% tax credit the ROI is a few years, generally. The way energy prices are going solar thermal seems more and more to be classified as LHF (low hanging fruit ).