59abd191_Quark_Soup_by_David_Appell__ode_Highlights_HIDE_HIGHLIGHTS
[Time] 5:25
Russ: So, when you suggest that it might actually be good for humanity or the world to have more CO2, that must drive some people very crazy. And we will talk about the kind of reactions you've been getting over the last few years to your writing and positions. But, why do you think--to focus on the key part, I think of the lukewarming, the lukewarmer position--that there's little or no risk of dangerous climate change? So there might be--we've had, I think 8/10ths of a degree Centigrade of warming over the last, I forget, how long. The worry is we might go to 4. Or 6. Why aren't you worried about that? True, it might be, the dose makes the poison. Maybe a little bit more CO2 is better for the environment--for human life and the planet. But we get into the range of the higher increases that some people are worried about, those would seem to be pretty dangerous. Guest: Yes. Well, two reasons. One is because the rate of warming has been much slower than predicted. So, if you go back and look at what the IPCC's (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) climate models have predicted, we have seen much less warming over the last 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, than those models have predicted. We've seen a little more than 0.1 degree per decade. The IPCC, remember in 2013, came out and said that it is very confident that more than half of the warming since 1950 is man-made. Now, we've have 0.8 of a degree since 1880. About 0.5 of a degree since 1950. More than half of that is 0.25 of a degree. So they are saying that something like a third of a degree of warming is man-made over 50 years. Now that's extremely hard to measure. And we've got no really good evidence that we are measuring it accurately. In fact, the surface temperatures tend to find a slightly faster rate than the satellites. Which implies that we are contaminating the record with urban heat island effects and things like that. Local warming, in other words, not global warming. So that's the first reason--is that we've got nothing in the data that we've seen so far to suggest that increasing carbon dioxide from 0.03 to 0.04%, which is what we've done, has produced anything like the speed of warming that we would expect if the models were right. The second reason is that the models are assuming something which we now know pretty well not to be true. And that is that the carbon dioxide warming will be hugely amplified by a water vapor warming. It's a very little-known fact, which is often kind of kept of the conversation, to my frustration, that it's widely agreed by the IPCC and everybody else, that if you double carbon dioxide, you only get 1 degree of warming: 1.2, 1.1, that sort of zone of warming. Russ: If you double the stock-- Guest: If you double the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Don't double emissions, but double the level in the atmosphere. From 300 parts per million to 600 parts per million, or 400 to 800. It doesn't matter where you double from because the graph is curved. You double from 800 to 1600, you still expect to get 1 degree of warming. That's the way the arithmetic works. So, why do they say that their estimate of climate sensitivity, which is the amount of warming from a doubling, is 3 degrees? Not 1 degree? And the answer is because the models have an amplifying factor in there. They are saying that that small amount of warming will trigger a further warming, through the effect mainly of water vapor and clouds. In other words, if you warm up the earth by 1 degree, you will get more water vapor in the atmosphere, and that water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas and will cause you to treble the amount of warming you are getting. Now, that's the bit that lukewarmers like me challenge. Because we say, 'Look, the evidence would not seem the same, the increases in water vapor in the right parts of the atmosphere--you have to know which parts of the atmosphere you are looking at--to justify that. And nor are you seeing the changes in cloud cover that justify these positive-feedback assumptions. Some clouds amplify warming; some clouds do the opposite--they would actually dampen warming. And most of the evidence would seem to suggest, to date, that clouds are actually having a dampening effect on warming. So, you know, we are getting a little bit of warming as a result of carbon dioxide. The clouds are making sure that warming isn't very fast. And they're certainly not exaggerating or amplifying it. So there's very, very weak science to support that assumption of a trebling. Now the really interesting thing is that when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with this latest report on this--the main report was in 2013, the follow-up report was last year in 2014--they had before them 14 different peer-reviewed papers of this climate sensitivity issue, all of which pointed to a much lower climate sensitivity than they had been assuming in the past. And these are the ones based on observational data. And rather than adjust their--so, what they did, they adjusted the range of climate sensitivity they think is likely, downwards slightly, from the previous year, from the previous report in 2007. But they did not give a best estimate of climate sensitivity, which had been 3 degrees in 2007. They simply didn't give one. They simply said, 'We don't know what the best estimate is.' Now, that's been completely ignored in all the impact models that countries are using around the world to estimate how much warming they are going to get and what the effect will be on people's livelihoods and sea level and so on. They've gone on assuming that the best estimate is 3 degrees. Whereas, pretty well every scientist who is working on this is now accepting that climate sensitivity is in the 1-2 degree range. So--and that, by the way, explains, in an instant, the rate of warming we've had over the last 50 years. If it's only in the 1-2 degree range, climate sensitivity, then that would explain why we've only had a third to a half degree of warming in 50 years, when we should have had much more than that. So, if you see what I mean, both the theory and the data support lukewarming and not alarming warming. Why is everyone going on about the future being alarming? Because there's a huge vested interest in that now.
Quark Soup by David Appell
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