Another Dose of Climate Change News

A new study from the University of Exeter, highlighted in a Science Daily article, finds concrete evidence that a warming climate releases greenhouse gases, leading to more warming, leading to more release of greenhouse gases, and so on in a positive feedback loop.

This is no surprise to anybody who has been paying attention. Go to YouTube and search for "methane fire ice". You'll get a number of short videos that illustrate the problem.  Here's just one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI. There is a lot of methane sequestered in permafrost and beneath the ice that covers frozen lakes. As climate warms, the only possible expectation is that this methane will be released into the atmosphere. As methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the result is more warming.

Some global warming deniers have tried to argue that, because paleoclimate indicators seem to show that increased carbon in the atmosphere happened before ancient warming episodes, that's proof that atmospheric carbon isn't what causes warming -- instead, they say, warming causes increased atmospheric carbon.

They're half right. Warming does cause carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to be released. But greenhouse gases also cause warming. The science is clear on that, completely apart from any question of whether the mechanism would apply to the atmosphere. Physics is physics. The two phenomena, warming and carbon release, go together in what could be a dizzying spiral of runaway greenhouse effect, were it not for other, less well understood mechanisms that eventually retard the effect.

The earth will recover from our current, human induced warming episode. But it may take millennia.

Christian Values

Reuters reports that 20 states have now enacted "religious freedom" laws, and I see from CNN that the Arkansas senate has just passed a similar law. Finally, I have put my finger on what bothers me about those laws.

It appears that these laws are at least partly being supported by conservative Christians who want to preserve the rights of business owners to deny service to people whose lifestyles disagree with their Christian faith. It's an effort to guarantee these business owners the right to uphold their Christian values.

So just exactly what "Christian values" might these be?

The one constant in these news stories seems to be that conservative Christians want to preserve their right to tell other people what they cannot do.

Jesus, by contrast, focused almost entirely on prescriptions for what I should do. He never once encouraged me to try to control the behavior of any other person.

Let's recall Micah 6:8 (NIV): "He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." Similarly, Matthew 7:1-2 says, "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

God does not require us to make a list of things that others are not permitted to do. Rather, he wants us to follow a fairly simple list of what we, ourselves, should do.

Those who focus on thou-shalt-not pronouncements about the behavior of others, ignoring the thou-shalts that Jesus actually spoke, are not trying to uphold Christian values.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Change

Today's news has two articles related to global warming:

• From Discovery News, "Snow Now Melts In Wyoming Two Weeks Early"
• From Reuters, "Study Shows Acceleration In Decline Of Antarctic Ice Shelves"

Of course, the first article is not necessarily related to global warming. Any one climatic observation or weather event may or may not be a part of the overall suite of climate mechanisms that we call "global climate change" or "global warming". But Wyoming is not the only place that's warming earlier in the spring or cooling later in the fall. Many years ago, when Kathleen and I went to our kids' Saturday morning YMCA soccer games, we usually had to wear a jacket. Nowadays, Saturday mornings in Houston during soccer season are rarely that cool.

The second article is most definitely related to climate change. The disappearance of floating ice sheets does not, in itself raise sea levels. But this disappearance has two consequences: First, as the article mentions, the missing sea ice provides less resistance to the advance of Antarctic glaciers, which can now move faster, dumping into the ocean vast quantities of ice that is not already floating. That will indeed raise sea levels. Additionally, the missing ice is replaced by open water, which is an amazingly good absorber of solar heat. That heat warms the water, reducing the opportunity to form new sea ice. It also raises the temperature of the air, delivering energy to melt Antarctic glaciers.

This is one of the situations that has climate scientists very apprehensive. It's exactly the sort of positive feedback mechanism that can, without warning, begin a runaway change that happens far too fast to react to in any useful way. If we cross one of these tipping points, the human race will have little ability to move the climate back toward what it had been, regardless of whether we actually try.

At present, many of our political leaders are actively avoiding any belief in the existence of climate change and resisting all efforts to spend any money to do anything about it.

Colder Europe Due to Global Warming?

ScienceDaily has an article about recent findings from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research, showing that the thermohaline circulation is slowing down, leading to an expectation of cooler weather for Europe -- likely resulting, at least in part, from global warming.

The article suggests that melting of Greenland's ice cap is a probable cause of the circulation slowdown. This idea is nothing new. Climate scientists have realized, for some time, that this is a possibility. Some believe that this has happened before, far distant geologic time.

It's called "thermohaline" because this circulation is driven by heat and by the salt content of the ocean. Salty water is denser than fresh water.  Greenland's ice melt, thus, floats on top of the saltier water coming northeast from the Gulf of Mexico. If enough fresh water invades the northern Atlantic, that northeastward flow is slowed or even halted. In what humans have come to think of as normal operation, this thermohaline circulation takes warm water far into the North Sea, warming Europe. Eventually, the increasingly salty water (because evaporation leaves the salt behind) is so dense that it has no choice but to sink to the depths of the sea and return southwestward. In the diagram above, we see that this circulation is worldwide. 

If the north Atlantic branch of the circulation shuts down, the result will be a colder Europe, thanks to global warming.

It's Official: New Record for Winter Sea Ice

I posted about this earlier, but it's now official. The wintertime maximum of north polar sea ice extent is the lowest on record, according to an article posted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at http://tinyurl.com/kcydsrh. This graph tells the tale:

The solid blue line is this year's day-by-day sea ice extent as measured by satellite observations. The grey swath shows the 95% prediction interval (under the assumption that the ice extent is normally distributed -- not a bad assumption, but it is an assumption). This year's trace drops almost to the level of being a full three standard deviations below the long-term mean. Even for a small sample, that's remarkable.

Ted Cruz: Candidate of the KnowNothing Party

They say that, if you keep your mouth shut, people might wonder whether you're an idiot, but, if you open you mouth, you dismiss all doubt. Apparently, Senator Ted Cruz proved the truth of this sentiment, earlier this week. The video clip from "Late Night with Seth Myers" is all over the web. One place you can see it is in a Mother Jones article at http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2015/03/ted-cruz-seth-myers-climate-change.

Cruz actually said this about global warming: "Debates on this should follow science and should follow data. And many of the alarmists on global warming, they've got a problem because the science doesn't back them up." 

In fact, it isn't only a lunatic fringe of "alarmists" who are distressed by the prospect of global warming. It's 97% of all practicing climate scientists, the people who make it their business to know about this. 97% of climate scientists know that the science does back them up. They know because they understand the science and the data. Ted Cruz does not.

The article quotes one of the more prominent of those scientists, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, as saying that everything Cruz believes about climate change is "a load of claptrap…absolute bunk". Trenberth is right: The "science" and "data" that Cruz refers to are very clear about this. Climate change is occurring, including warming of the globally averaged surface temperature, and it's caused by human activities that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I can't illustrate what's wrong with Cruz's thinking any better than Mother Jones does, so I won't try. Do please go read their article.

What I will do is wonder how Cruz thinks that his stance makes any kind of sense. Recent public opinion polls increasingly show that Americans are overwhelmingly on the side of science. A poll taken last December found that 83% of Americans believe that climate change is occurring. A poll taken in January showed that even 48% of Republicans would vote for candidates who want the government to do something to fight global warming.

It's pretty clear that Ted Cruz wants to be President. If polls are to be believed, a minority of Americans are going to score him positively on this particular issue. In what universe does Ted Cruz think that his position is making him look electable?

Oh. Right. In the universe known as "Texas".

As I happen to be a Texan, I can understand how somebody who spends all of his time here might well not realize that denial of global warming is a strategy for political failure. It plays well in some parts of this state. There are folks here who seem to have a major disconnect between the part of their brain that depends on the products of science and the part of their brain that controls what they say about climate change.  On the one hand, they want all those tech goodies that result from scientists using scientific method to learn how the universe actually works. But, whenever global warming is mentioned, they either take the position that science is irrelevant or, as Cruz does, they claim that scientists don't know what science has revealed.

Some days, I'm not all that proud to be a Texan.

Solar Plenty

An article in ScienceDaily reports on new research concluding that enough solar power generation could be installed in California to supply three to five times the state's energy needs.

This is not exactly a surprise.

I have followed the development of alternative energy sources for several years now.  Previous research has shown that wind power alone is enough to supply the energy needs of the entire United States.

Of course, the sun does not always shine and the winds do not always blow.  But that's only an engineering concern. We know how to make batteries. Ongoing research continues to make them cheaper and last longer.

So, if the United States truly wants energy independence from foreign oil, what's stopping us?

A wonderful management exercise is for a company's leaders to ask themselves the question, not of what business they are in, but what business it would be profitable for them to think that they are in. Eventually, oil companies will wise up and figure out that it would be best for them to think that they are in the energy business, rather than the oil business. I have heard that some of them are already moving in that direction.

Oil companies that insist on remaining oil companies will soon become dinosaurs. By contrast, those that invade the burgeoning alternative energy sector can be big winners.

That said, there is one teensy thing about solar and wind energy that has bothered me: To the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet done any research to pin down the consequences of using these energy sources.

Think about it: If you put up a wind generator on the plains of Texas, you extract energy from the wind flow. That means that, in one tiny location, the wind is flowing differently than it would flow if you had not taken some of the energy from it.  Now repeat that a million times, with wind generators spread across the continent. What is the consequence of the resulting change in the flow of air over the earth's surface?

If you put up solar generating facilities, whether home rooftop units or gigantic industrial facilities, you extract some energy that would otherwise contribute to warming the earth's surface at that location. You then transmit that energy over wires to other places where some of it will be used to power our devices and the rest will be released as heat. What is the consequence of changing the flow of heat on the earth's surface?

I hate to say it, but there is every possibility that this generation of alternative energy proponents, motivated by the need to combat global warming, may someday be succeeded by a new generation who blame us for the destruction of their environment because we failed to look at the consequences of the solutions that we implemented.

Somebody needs to look into this.

Second Warmest February

Tom Yulsman's blog at Discover tells us that NASA has released figures showing that this February and this past winter are the second warmest on record. He also has a great animated graphic of the disparity between a lot of people's perceptions and the reality of global warming in light of recent weather.

Yulsman combines NASA images of temperature anomaly -- departure of monthly average temperature from the long-term mean for the same month -- for the three months of the winter that many in the US just suffered through. His post also has a great explanation of just what the situation was that made the eastern part of the U.S. experience such cold and wintry weather.

Predictably, quite a few people who experienced that cold are yet again calling into question whether there can be any such thing as global warming. They feel cold. How can the earth be warming?

This is a lot like a person going into a coal mine on a bright and sunny day, turning off the lights, and then claiming that the sun has gone out.  "I can't see the sun, so I guess it stopped shining." Or, "I feel cold, so I guess global warming is a myth".

But the whole idea of global warming is that, though it may be unseasonably cold in some places, it's a lot warmer in other places, so that the average temperature of the earth is warmer compared to earlier periods in history.  Look carefully at the animation above. During the period when the eastern part of the U.S. was so much colder than normal, what was happening over all of Siberia and the northwestern half of North America? How much of the southern hemisphere had warmer temperatures than normal?

Fair to Partly Whalish

A Reuters news story ("World carbon emissions stall after almost 40 years of gains: IEA") reports that the International Energy Agency has finished their tabulating and concluded that the human race released 32.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2014, approximately the same amount as in 2013. In the same year, the global economy grew by three percent. So we know that we can have economic growth without worsening the emissions problem.

So everything's cool now, right?  We can stop worrying about global warming?

32.3 billion metric tons is 71.2 trillion pounds. That's about the same as 6 billion African elephants or 187 million blue whales. or 98 thousand copies of the Empire State Building. It's the same weight as 376 copies of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, fully loaded.

We do not notice the carbon dioxide that we add to the atmosphere, because it's invisible and odorless. But, if we could somehow put 187 million blue whales into the air each year and keep them aloft and visible, you'd pretty soon be able to see the problem. That's about four whales per square mile, distributed over the surface of the earth.

After a few years, the weather forecasters would be talking about "fair to partly whalish".

So no, we can't stop worrying about global warming. We need a lot fewer whale equivalents being injected into the atmosphere.

I'm Happy to Report that I'm Happy!

ScienceDaily has an article today on happiness and politics.

The article summarizes a research report (Wojcik, et al., 2015) that appeared in Science recently. A group of five psychologists have taken another look at the previously reported result that political conservatives are happier than liberals. That earlier research was based on what the research subjects reported. On average, conservatives reported being happier than liberals.

This new research ignores what people claim about their own happiness and instead focuses on observable behaviors that are linked to happiness. The abstract from the Science article has this quote: "Relative to conservatives, liberals more frequently used positive emotional language in their speech and smiled more intensely and genuinely in photographs."

So there you have it.  Conservatives claim to be happier. Liberals actually are happier.

This result actually tallies well with much of the essential message of Jesus. Happy ("blessed") are the meek who don't force their ways upon others, but instead appeal for agreement. Happy are those who give mercy instead of insisting on everybody (that is, everybody else) getting the punishments that they so richly deserve. Happy are those who try to achieve peace.

Happiness comes through following the two most important laws: Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Just in case you've heard and repeated that second one so many times that it has lost its meaning, go back and look at it afresh: In whatever way you would like to treat yourself, treat everybody else on the planet in the same way. Get rid of selfishness. Don't put yourself first. Put others ahead of you. Give liberally to others who need it.

Live that way and you'll be happier.




References:

University of California - Irvine. (2015, March 12). Political liberals display greater happiness, study shows. ScienceDaily. Retrieved from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150312142909.htm

Wojcik, S.P., Hovasapian, A., Graham, J., Moty, M., & Ditto, P.H. (2015). Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness. Science, 347(627) 143-1246, doi: 10.1126/science.1260817