And that scientist, Charles David Keeling, was a registered Republican.
Below are some choice cuts from the article.
From page 1:
As the political debate drags on, the mute gray boxes atop Mauna Loa keep spitting out their numbers, providing a reality check: not only is the carbon dioxide level rising relentlessly, but the pace of that rise is accelerating over time.
“Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, said at a recent seminar. “Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.”
From page 2:
By the late 1960s, a decade after Dr. Keeling began his measurements, the trend of rising carbon dioxide was undeniable, and scientists began to warn of the potential for a big increase in the temperature of the earth.
From page 3:
In an interview in La Jolla, Dr. Keeling’s widow, Louise, said that if her husband had lived to see the hardening of the political battle lines over climate change, he would have been dismayed.
“He was a registered Republican,” she said. “He just didn’t think of it as a political issue at all.”
The basic physics of the atmosphere, worked out more than a century ago, show that carbon dioxide plays a powerful role in maintaining the earth’s climate. Even though the amount in the air is tiny, the gas is so potent at trapping the sun’s heat that it effectively works as a one-way blanket, letting visible light in but stopping much of the resulting heat from escaping back to space.
From page 4:
The Internet has given rise to a vocal cadre of challengers who question every aspect of the science — even the physics, worked out in the 19th century, that shows that carbon dioxide traps heat. That is a point so elementary and well-established that demonstrations of it are routinely carried out by high school students.
However, the contrarians who have most influenced Congress are a handful of men trained in atmospheric physics. They generally accept the rising carbon dioxide numbers, they recognize that the increase is caused by human activity, and they acknowledge that the earth is warming in response.
But they doubt that it will warm nearly as much as mainstream scientists say, arguing that the increase is likely to be less than two degrees Fahrenheit, a change they characterize as manageable.
From page 5:
At midnight Mauna Loa time, the carbon dioxide level hit 390 — and rising.
From Darryl Cunningham Investigates:
For a comic presentation about climate change, click HERE to read a conversation between a guy and a penguin, a very smart penguin.
From page 2:
By the late 1960s, a decade after Dr. Keeling began his measurements, the trend of rising carbon dioxide was undeniable, and scientists began to warn of the potential for a big increase in the temperature of the earth.
From page 3:
In an interview in La Jolla, Dr. Keeling’s widow, Louise, said that if her husband had lived to see the hardening of the political battle lines over climate change, he would have been dismayed.
“He was a registered Republican,” she said. “He just didn’t think of it as a political issue at all.”
The basic physics of the atmosphere, worked out more than a century ago, show that carbon dioxide plays a powerful role in maintaining the earth’s climate. Even though the amount in the air is tiny, the gas is so potent at trapping the sun’s heat that it effectively works as a one-way blanket, letting visible light in but stopping much of the resulting heat from escaping back to space.
From page 4:
The Internet has given rise to a vocal cadre of challengers who question every aspect of the science — even the physics, worked out in the 19th century, that shows that carbon dioxide traps heat. That is a point so elementary and well-established that demonstrations of it are routinely carried out by high school students.
However, the contrarians who have most influenced Congress are a handful of men trained in atmospheric physics. They generally accept the rising carbon dioxide numbers, they recognize that the increase is caused by human activity, and they acknowledge that the earth is warming in response.
But they doubt that it will warm nearly as much as mainstream scientists say, arguing that the increase is likely to be less than two degrees Fahrenheit, a change they characterize as manageable.
From page 5:
At midnight Mauna Loa time, the carbon dioxide level hit 390 — and rising.
From Darryl Cunningham Investigates:
For a comic presentation about climate change, click HERE to read a conversation between a guy and a penguin, a very smart penguin.
6 comments:
The 'problem' with global warming is that the well has been poisoned rhetorically to such an extent that I don't think you could blame me for not believing what many scientists say.
The constantly changing explanations and predictions (that don't come true), the intentionally falsified data, and the fact that every proposed solution involves the US being crippled economically all are rather counter-productive if you truly believe there is a crisis that can be prevented.
I accept that the climate is changing, but I'm not sure how much of it is due to human activity. I believe that the Earth is much more resilient than "they" give it credit for and I also believe that the changing Sun has much, much more effect on our climate than what humans can do.
I also question their motivations since it seems they just want to seize political control over my life.
As Glenn Reynolds (instapundit.com) says quite often: "I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who tell me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis."
In other words, you're saying it's the end of the world as we know it, and you feel fine. No solutions or alternatives for you, by God.
I'll side with the scientists/scholars who publish in peer-reviewed journals and the overwhelming scientific consensus who has related for decades that global warming is indeed real, happening, and will have effects that need to reckoned with environmentally, politically, socially, and economically. Since I'm a betting man on occasion, I'll wager on the side of the strong majority (we're talking probably the high 90th percentile here) of the real experts in the scientific community about global warming. To me, acting like there's a chance this isn't all real and scientists are fooling us is acting like JIm Carrey's character in Dumb and Dumber: "So you're telling me there's a chance. Yeah!!!"
A post from '08 might be helpful in connecting to what the penguin is talking about: http://plannedob.blogspot.com/2008/06/not-surpise.html
And I noted the permafrost issue this summer: http://plannedob.blogspot.com/2010/06/smoke-signals-by-alisa-opar.html
I find your notion that human activity isn't fundamentally changing the temperature of the planet, well, just flat wrong, Same on the sun stuff too.
New Scientist on the Solar Forcing/Sunspot Myth: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11650-climate-myths-global-warming-is-down-to-the-sun-not-humans.html
And the "Climategate" deal was "good media," light on detailed information, and lacking in journalistic follow-up: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/debunking-misinformation-stolen-emails-climategate.html
And it's rich that someone like Bjorn Lomborg claims that scientists are creating a hoax: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/ucs-examines-the-skeptical.html
In other words, you're saying it's the end of the world as we know it, and you feel fine. No solutions or alternatives for you, by God.
Do you discuss strawman arguments in your classes much? That is not what I said at all.
When I was growing up, it was global cooling. Now it is global warming. They said 10 years ago that British children wouldn't know what snow would look like because of climate change, and now there is a blizzard.
They want us to accept drastic changes to our lifestyle, and only ours, not China or India, for something that might help.
They flat out lied about the "hockey stick" graph. And deleted emails and data to hide the decline.
All of this happens while global warming experts say it is critical to reduce carbon emissions while flying across the planet to a tropical location to discuss it at a conference.
I believe that climate change is happening. I don't believe that we fully understand the causes and consequences of that fact. And real science is never settled.
I fully support conservation efforts and we should continue to do as much as we can to reduce pollution, but I am not convinced we should spend trillions of dollars and cripple ourselves to fight climate change.
I am reminded of the king who ordered the tide to recede. I don't believe we have the knowledge or ability to deliberately change the climate on a global scale.
The R.E.M. lyrics sum up some people's attitudes about the issue though, travolta. Or various people in Congress. I didn't mean to make your post into a strawperson. Sarcasm seldom works well in an online environment about a heated [pinky to the mouth] issue.
Scientific discourse doesn't work that way though ~ your need for things to be "settled" about the effects although the numbers of true experts supporting the reality of global warming is settled in the scientific community. The unsettled part is because they're working with future consequences while they're already seeing consequences. Scientists are likely to give nuanced predictions on what will happen or offer a variety of outcomes because, unlike politicians, they understand that there are a multitude of outcomes to a problem. In other words, they're not likely to proclaim that the economy is getting stronger or weaker based on one number that came out in the press the day before.
I never heard much or anything about global cooling, but McKibben's End of Nature came out in '88 or 89, which was one of the first mass-market books that brought attention to climate change.
Important people have to fly to places to discuss important topics whether it's Japan or a tropical location or Knob Noster, MO. The fact they're meeting in a certain location doesn't discount the solid work that's been done about climate change.
In regard to the hockey stick graph, the National Research Council noted some statistical failings with the graph but concluded those problems didn't change the conclusion of the report: the temperature is rising and has risen astronomically since the Industrial Revolution. Numerous scientific reports have looked at the data after the Mann et al. paper and have come to the same basic conclusions about rising global temperature.
One of the easiest ways to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions are efficiency measures. Doing so isn't sexy or flashy, but they would make a decent impact.
As James Fallows reports in the recent issue of the The Atlantic, the world will not meet its energy demands without using coal as I believe you've directly stated on intimated before on this blog. One of the many interesting points in his article is that he strongly argues that China is already taking the lead in "clean coal" initiatives like carbon storage. And you'll love this. He says this is so because there's less regulation in China to try new energy projects (coal or others), and companies don't have to deal with Congressional foolishness.
And as I've whined about before, American companies are far behind in market share in producing alternative energy systems related to solar and wind. I think biomass holds promise, so maybe some American companies will get those initiatives moving in the right direction.
The main cause of my anger about inaction on this issue is our so-called leaders, who have had true experts trotted before them for decades, such as NASA's James Hansen among others, but they do next to nothing because as P.J. O'Rourke called it, Congress is a confederacy of whores (Democrat and Republican).
But I guess I shouldn't be surprised about the lack of action on this problem since it took them decades to pass higher mpg averages for American cars.
If the results of climate change come out as solid peer-reviewed science backs, all of us could be changing our lifestyles whether we want to or not.
And by the way, travolta, happy holidays.
Merry Christmas QBN!
When I referenced science being "settled", I meant to refer to the Global Warming activists who say that talking about the problem is pointless because "Science Has Spoken". That attitude is what I was attempting to belittle.
The world has spent quite a lot of money building up these here inter-tubes. If carbon emissions is such an evil, then why couldn't all these important environmental conferences be done via VTC, or teleconference, or tele-presence, or webinar, or......
As far as energy generation goes, nuclear is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels at this point. We should absolutely be pushing down all available research paths, including wind and solar, but we should be building dozens of nuke plants right now. The fact that we aren't is just screwing ourselves over in a decade or so, but what else is new.
And "clean coal" isn't clean. I'll agree that it is cleaner, but it is just another PR move by savvy marketeers to push fossil fuel use.
I also concur that efficiency measures are the boring, effective way to get immediate improvements. At least until we get the solar power satellites beaming microwaves back to the ground electric generation stations that I read about in science fiction. Where is my damn flying car, while we are at it?!?
Once again, I am struck by how little we disagree once we dig past the rhetoric. Other than the use of nuclear power, we (mostly) only differ on the degree of what we should be doing. We also disagree on how to get there, but I think our ideas of what the future should look like are remarkable similar.
Yeh, I agree that "clean coal" is a marketing scheme for the most part (like corn-based ethanol, for examle), but I see it hard to convert to other resources (short-term) without using the stuff with energy demand increasing.
China's building all kinds of coal-fired plants anyway, and there's not a damn thing we can do about at present.
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