The Simple Arithmetic of Global Warming Supports the Economics of a Climate Change Bill
"During the floor debate this morning over the historic American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) received a round of applause from GOP colleagues when he claimed that man-made global warming is a 'hoax' with 'no scientific consensus.'' ThinkProgress, June 26, 2009
One of the great ironies of our age is that skepticism of global warming is treated with greater respect than, say, Holocaust denial. Equally remarkable is how little people know about the basic numbers of climate change. If you understand how compound interest works, you can understand the urgency of facing the issue today.
CO2 Never Goes Away (At Least Not for 100 Years) - England no longer burns the soft sulfuric coal that poisoned the lungs of Londoners in the Great Smog of 1952, which killed 4,000 people in five days. Though the toxins may be gone, the carbon dioxide emitted in Britain and everywhere else in the 1950s remains in our atmosphere today.
Carbon dioxide, or CO2, accounts for 85 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. As you may remember from high school biology, CO2 is absorbed by plant life as an essential part of photosynthesis. Also, CO2 dissolves in water, which is why the ocean absorbs a lot of it, over time. But after plants and the ocean have absorbed all they can absorb, the remaining CO2 remains in the atmosphere, for about 100 years. We have been generating a CO2 surplus since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
This is why the average CO2 count rises every year. (Within a single year, the CO2 count rises and falls according to the weather or the seasons.) Even if we cut back on the essentials of modern society - thermal power plants and motorized transportation -the CO2 count will continue its compound growth.
CO2 Heats Up The Atmosphere - Everyone understands how CO2 reacts in the atmosphere. CO2 absorbs the sun's infrared waves. This infrared radiation makes the CO2 molecule unstable. The molecule can only return to its stable state by emitting the thermal radiation back into the atmosphere.
Bottom Line Syllogism on CO2 -Because more CO2 remains in the atmosphere, and because CO2 in the atmosphere generates atmospheric heat,more atmospheric heat is being generated.
This is why global warming is an absolute certainty.
There is some debate as to whether we have passed an irreversible threshold. James Hansen, NASA's climate expert profiled in The New Yorker, says that a massive climate disaster can only be averted if the CO2 count never reaches above 350 parts per million, a level we surpassed in 1987. Others say the threshold is 450 parts per million. We are currently at 385 parts per million.
The Compound Growth of CO2 Emissions - While the atmospheric growth of CO2 is inevitable, the modern world keeps increasing the level of CO2 emissions produced every year. The U.S. Energy Information Agency predicts that annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels will continue to grow significantly into the next decade.
As you would expect, most of the CO2 in the atmosphere represents the historical legacy of the developed world. Between 1980 and 2000, about half the CO2, from the consumption of hydrocarbons, came from the United States, Europe and Japan. China generated only 11 percent.
The Problem Requires the Leadership of the United States and China - China's economic growth has exacerbated the threat of climate change. About 59 percent of the growth in CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2006 came from China, which has overtaken the United States as the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions.
This makes things tricky. Since close to half of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the United States and China, both countries must take the lead in finding a solution to the problem. But China's increased fuel consumption has operated in tandem with its double-digit economic growth, which has been an engine for growth throughout the globe. And our financial recovery depends on China's willingness to continue buying Treasuries at fairly low yields.
The United States emits, on a per capita basis, greenhouse gases at about twice the rate of any other major economy. So, from the vantage point of the rest of the world, C02 cutbacks imposed on Americans might offer the biggest bang for the buck, with comparatively minor hardship. It's hard to see how we can ask for China's forbearance without demonstrating our willingness to make concessions at home.
Substituting Gas for Coal Shows the Quickest Results - There are many proposed solutions to the threat of climate change: nuclear power, geologic sequestration, smart grids, electric cars, and others. They entail massive investment in infrastructure over the span of many years. What can be done now?
In the United States, the quickest, and most effective way to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions is to use natural gas as a substitute for coal in electricity generation. Coal-fired plants emit about 2.4 times the CO2 as gas-fired plants (more specifically, coal emits 1.9 times the CO2 per energy unit, and gas-fired plants are about 1.3 times as fuel efficient as coal-fired plants).
Coal represents about 40% of our CO2 emissions. When people use the phrase "clean coal," they are generally referring to technologies that trap toxins like nitrous oxide, not CO2. The one technology for trapping CO2, geologic sequestration, would require a massive capital expenditures for an untested technology.
The global consumption of coal is concentrated in two countries: the United States and China. China's consumption of coal has doubled in the past five years. Again, if we want China to cut back on its use of coal, we need to take the lead.
The United States Has Abundant Gas and Gas-Fired Generating Capacity - Thanks to advances in technology, the U.S. supply of natural gas available for production has increased 58% in the past four years.
As it happens, we also have a lot of gas fired electrical power plants that operate only a small fraction of the time, whereas coal fired plants tend to operate at full capacity continuously. Almost half of our electricity comes from coal, while only 21 percent comes from natural gas, even though our gas-fired generating capacity exceeds our coal-fired capacity.
The buildup of gas-fired generating capacity began in the late 1990s, when the electric power industry deregulated in many states. Gas-fired capacity more than doubled between 1999 and 2005, while coal-fired capacity has been flat since the early 1990s. There are many economic reasons why developers preferred gas-fired plants over coal. Gas fired plants are much cheaper to build and easier to operate (think of modern desktop computers versus vintage mainframes).
The gas-fired building boom turned into a bust, because investors had relied on two incorrect assumptions. They assumed that coal-fired plants and nuclear plants would operate at their historic capacity levels. In fact, after utilities sold their coal and nuclear plants to private developers, as part of the deregulation process, coal and nuclear generation increased markedly. Between 1997 and 2002, nuclear generation increased by 24%. Between 1997 and 2004, coal generation increased by 7%.
Coal plants are dispatched to operate more frequently than gas plants because of their relative marginal operating costs, which is primarily the cost of fuel. Coal is much cheaper than gas. The cap-and-trade legislation before Congress was originally intended to provide Americans an economic incentive to use more gas and less coal.
According to James Hansen and others, the legislation is grossly inadequate. But the likelihood rejection of this minor level of adjustment shows the magnitude of our collective denial.
Addendum: Some of the comments below have questioned whether CO2 has been growing at a compound rate and whether clouds have a bigger impact than CO2 on the environment. From "Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing," by the IPCC are two graphic illustrations of the scientific consensus on those points.
2nd Addendum, July 1, 2009: Some of the comments below presented an eye-opening look into the relentlessness of global warming deniers. For a definitive refutation, see Scientific American's interview with NYU's Tyler Volk, who wrote CO2 Rising: The World's Greatest Environmental Challenge:
"[T]here are thousands of scientists involved in this IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] effort. So even though it is funded by the U.N., there are thousands of scientists involved and scientists are [a] pretty competitive, contentious bunch and there's a lot of young scientists that could make their names by proving the other findings for the last decades wrong; and so the fact that these predictions of warming and run by a dozen different models all over the world, any one of which would love to prove that the other models are wrong, you know, we have to see science as a kind of an evolutionary process in terms of variation and natural selection...So this self-correcting of a process, I mean, there is debates about the actual impacts of the CO2 on climate; but what I am trying to do in the book is to get people to understand the carbon cycle, ... even though the details of the warming are not known, the fact that it will warm and will make effects. It is enough and that really is an established scientific fact."
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The bit of carbon we are restoring to the atmosphere from previous extremely lush epochs is provably increasing agricultural yields in every corner of the planet cannot be ignored. Carbon fuels are "dirty" only in the same sense that rich soil is dirty.
On the other hand , classical physics definitively says CO2's couple of spectral lines have miniscule effect on our mean temperature. In fact, the lack of understanding of 19th century textbook physics of radiant heat transfer in this debate is appalling.
At my http://CoSy.com I've implemented the Stefan-Boltzmann/Kirchhoff relationship for radiantly heated balls like our planet . Bottom line, our mean temperature is constrained to be about 1/21st the temperature of the sun. The minor change in the already highly saturated CO2 spectral lines makes an equally minor change in our mean temperature. Any talk of "runaway" warming either reveals a total lack of understanding of the physics or an outright lie.
A prime example of this is the claim that Venus's extreme temperature is an example of such a "runaway". Venus is twice as hot as the sun could heat any object in its orbit so is radiating 16 time as much energy as it is receiving . Venus must have an internal source of heat . That this "runaway" idiocy is allowed to continue to be promulgated by the alarmists is inexcusable. The atmosphere of Mars is 95% CO2 but its temperature is right at the SB/K calculation within observational accuracy.
First of all the CO2 has a lifetime of 5 to 7 years not 100s of years. folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/vs/esef/ESEF3VO2.htm.
Your commenters quote the bogus GISS/NOAA claims about recent warmth. The global databases are contaminated by major rural station dropout around 1990, NO or bogus adjustment for urbanization, bad station siting for 90% of the US stations http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdff), etc . Over half a dozen peer review papers show these issues account for half of the warming in the last 100 years. It may be only one or two of the last dozen years are top ten warmest. See more http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAMAY.pdf.
Temperatures have declined for 8 years, oceans for 5 years. Sea levels have slowed or stopped rising. Arctic ice continues to recover and the arctic remain colder than normal and barely above the melting level http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Arctic062809.JPG while the antarctic extent is 1 million square Km above the normal. The climate models are failing miserably. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/may_co2_report.pdf
A Canadian scientist informs me a US democratic senator told an electric company executive he knows well a dozen years ago that the democrats would at first opportunity pass a carbon tax because Americans were too stupid to know what is happening to them. Fiderer is providing them cover. Wake up America you are about to be fleeced.
It is sad that under each article about climate change, the same disbelievers post the same mistruths. They argue it is all a conspiracy or misinformation about the data. They bring up problems with models when climate change is mostly an observational science based on what is happening at the poles and in the oceans. They argue temperature trends are cooling when the opposite is true. It is sad that with such an important topic, so many can not get beyong the same misinformation and half-truths. Then they expect to be convinced that it is all not conspiracy before we should take action. If they want to hide behind misinformation let them, but we should act as are other countries or risk losing our leadership position in the world. This demonization of science in this country and the equating of knowledge with elitism will doom us as a second-class nation. It is almost as if the right invites Taliban-like restrictions on thought, science, and popular culture.
It's sad that you don't adress the points made, rather you personalize it and make it about those who don't buy into the hoax. Demonizing of science? How bout your demonizing of dissenters. By discrediting your opponents on a personal level you are relieved from having to respond on the merits.
If you consider it a hoax, despite the widespread scientific consensus stated in the IPCC study, NOAA, NASA, and the recent study by the United States Global Change Research Program, a joint scientific venture of 13 federal agencies and the White House, to name a few, do you really think you are knowledgeable enough, sophisticated enough, and with enough respect for science to debate anything? If at this juncture, you call warming a hoax, why do you pretend you welcome a debate? What you welcome is remaining as closed-minded as possible. Scientific debates are carried on in scientific journals and this one has long been decided. The country can not let the far right by sticking its collective head in the ground set the terms of science and policy.
Jesus, I have glanced at your comments below and you are just about incorrect on each point. With so much misinformation, how would you even understand a debate. If I had so much misinformation on a subject, I would try some new sources. You guys never do. Stick to government agency websites or peer-reviewed scientific studies. Most of the science is observational and not so complex.
The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html
"Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans." Your statement is entirely wrong which is par for the course for science deniers. The decline of the Arctic ice, mountaintop glaciers, and rising oceans have all outpaced projections. Pine beetles, which were formerly killed in a harsher winter, are killing hundreds of thousands of acres of pine trees in Canada and Alaska. Your statement is either the prodcut of being extremely misinformed or an outright lie.
"The worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized," the scientists said in a statement. "There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.""
http://news.aol.com/article/climate-changes/376821
Iraq has WMD, Iraq has WMD, Iraq has WMD, Iraq has WMD, Iraq....
Not matter how many times you say "the temperature has flatlined", its still not true.
Do you have anything else to say?
Wow, the deniers are out in force, spieling the usual refuted nonsense. Their arguments, whether they know it or not, have been created by a bunch of pseudo-scientific jerks who are funded (usually indirectly) by fossil fuel companies.
No, our planet is not cooling, the temperature has not flat-lined, last year was the coolest year this decade, but dips in temperature around the trend line are normal. See the graph here. Read what climate scientists who work every day to understand climate say. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
The current relatively (compared to the trend line) cooler weather will soon be replaced by a hotter than ever year. I wonder what hokum the babblers will spin then.
The basic science of greenhouse gasses forcing global warming has NOT changed since I first heard it in a scientific convention 45 years ago. EXCEPT that additional mechanisms have been identified that make it worse. EXCEPT that the planet has a lot more people using more energy per capita, making it worse.
This climate bill is a start to promote renewable energy that doesn't fry the planet.. It will also improve our economy and reduce the money going abroad -- $700 billion trade deficit last year.
As a retired scientist, grandparent, and patriotic American, I hope it passes.
Your own graphs prove the skeptics. Notice how the graphs track temperature changes over the decades, and they do show a rise of several degrees. And then starting around the year 2000 they flatline, despite the obvious rise in Co2. So yes, the graphs show last decade is the warmest on record, but it ALSO shows the temps have flatlined, and even DIPPED in 2008. Your own graphs confirm what I said. TEMPS HAVE FLATLINED IN THE LAST 10 YEARS despite rising Co2 levels.
According to NASA, "The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008." The year 2007 was the hottest year on record and the year 2005 the next warmest, hardly showing a decline in temperatures. Jesusland must be a land of false narratives and misinformation.
I am sorry. "The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005" and not the other way around.
"Temperatures have been declining for the past 10 years." ?
Actually, that's the opposite of the truth. The fact is that the top 11 hottest years on record have all been in the last 13 years.
The fact that the top 11 hottest years on record have been in the last 13 years doesn't negate the fact that the temps have flatlined in the last 10 years, and that 2008 is the coolest in the last ten years (meaning temps are no longer rising). If you just can't wrap your mind around that, then simply look at the pictures (the graphs) Anticlast so kindly provided us.
Mr. Jesus, according to NASA, "the year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. 2007 tied 1998, which had leapt a remarkable 0.2°C above the prior record with the help of the "El Niño of the century". The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean is in the cool phase of its natural El Niño-La Niña cycle."
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/
The "simple arithmetic" of "global warming" shows that temperatures have flatlined in the last ten years. Which is probably why this guy won't show those graphs, just the Co2 ones. It's "inconvenient."
Jesus, there are graphs of temperature anomalies and other graphs of the rise in manmade co2 emissions. Some graphs combine the two and show the correlation. How come you guys are so sure of your opinions, yet get even the basic facts so wrong?
"says that a massive climate disaster can only be averted if the CO2 count never reaches above 350 parts per million, a level we surpassed in 1987."
So much for your whole premise and the validity of the science. I keep watching rush's countdown clock for Al Gores declaration of doomsday in ten years that he made in early 2006. The clock is at 6 years and 6 months left.
Glacial retreat and melting polar ice would seem to prove there's a warming trend. What it doesn't prove is that the warmth is manmade. Certainly the layer of filthy air visible everywhere around the globe is manmade, so that's a good reason to cut particulate emissions. But CO2 emissions as a cause of warming is still "up in the air."
Yes, to you "CO2 emissions as a cause of warming is still "up in the air,"" but to scientists it is not at all. The laws of physics make co2 a greenhouse gas and I do not know if the same folks who deny climate change are now denying physics, as well.
What a joke, there is no "Simple Arithmetic" to global warming, is 90% smoke and mirrors so that the gov can raise taxes and gain more power....
Wow, how long did it take you to arrive at the 90% figure? About two seconds? I can say with 100% certainty you know next to nothing about climate science and have no interest to learn. It is so much easier to make simple, trite, misleading statements.
Gotta' love the climate change skeptics.
http://www.grist.org/article/global-warming-is-a-hoax/
Its not funny if the USA had a climate denier as president the previous 8 years. He succeeded in holding back any progress for a full 8 years, and gave a moral boost to the cranks.
Water vapour! Why talk about that? The amount of water vapour is directly related to the temperature, so it will enhance the effect of CO2. But CO2 is the gas that doesnt rain out of the atmosphere.
But the climate deniers will just believe what they want to believe, irrespective of any facts and figures. The problem that the figures are complicated clearly doesn't make them all wrong, but the climate deniers will cling to any excuse to stick their head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich. (Real ostriches do not do that, by the way.)
CO2 is pulled out of the atmosphere and converted into solid matter by plants.
Yes, they ignore 99% of the data and evidence and concentrate on the 1% where they can build a case.
As a banker you should appreciate the stupidity of throwing good money down a hole for an imagined problem of "global warming" that so many scientists dispute. You should also appreciated this cap and trade bill will have zero effect on the environment. Further you should know that the increased taxes and energy costs caused by this bill will hurt the poor among us the worst.
Banker? Do you like people to lie to you?
90% of greenhouse gas is water vapor. Not CO2. His article goes down hill from there. Actually the NOAA has been discovered to adjuast temperature readins upward from actual readings. Cooking the books.
Bankers and accountants go to jail for that. Only 10% of CO2 is from human activity.
This isn't simple arithmetic, it's the arithmetic of the simple.
Sigh. The random and selective linkage of unrelated numbers - ssome readers at least know the basics of logic even if the author doesn't. I don't think there's anything in this piece that is correct measured by logic as applied to math and science, unless the author managed to spell his own name correctly.
The overwhelmingly dominant greenhouse gas is water vapor. Ninety odd percent. Most CO2, which is a best a trace element, is produced by natural processes, the proportion contributed by mankind being miniscule in the overall greenhouse effect. Good thing we have greenhouse gas - we're all frozen solid otherwise.
Oh, all CO2 molecules are not equally effective. In the absence of CO2, an addition of a few parts per million, say 50 or so, does actually generate a bit of warming (trace) but the effect diminishes exponentially as the amount increases (mostly produced naturally as I mentioned). By the time you get to three or four hundred parts per million where we are now for the umpteenth time in recent history, any addition is effectively ... well, ineffective.
Sigh.
Sigh! Mascamote, you do realise that the green words are links to the data that Mr Fiderer is basing his opinions on, don't you? Where are your green words?
The third and fourth paragraphs in my scribble contain some pretty specific statements. You can cut and paste 'em into Google or whatever and you'll get what amount to 101. You choose your own source. Be nice if it has any link to the physical sciences. I'm not going to be selective and generate self-serving links. There are lots of science and math and for that matter basic logic sites against which you can test what I said.
Tthe laws of physics and chemistry are pretty robust. Mis - or semi- represented as they frequently are by the AGW cult Swoonies, well, we can operate on a little higher level that that, don't you think?
Oh, the way you use Google to check simple facts if you don't have preselected self- serving, er, green links is...
While water vapor may be the most important greenhouse gas, co2 is the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas and it says so right in the IPCC document. But subtleties like that are easily lost on conservatives who do not do nuance very well.
"In the absence of CO2, an addition of a few parts per million, say 50 or so, does actually generate a bit of warming (trace) but the effect diminishes exponentially as the amount increases " No, not right!!. "The effect of co2 is logarithmic, which means that it takes a doubling of concentration to produce the same amount of warming that the previous doubling produced, Example: if you double concentration from 2 to 4, you have to double it again from 4 to 8 to get the same effect. This is why there can not be a "runaway" warming, but make no mistake, there is enough carbon dioxide and methane locked in permafrost and clathrate ice to double atmospheric CO2 all on its own."
And creating a new financial market based on the trading of the right to pollute is going to solve this problem how? Not to mention increasing utility and food costs acrossed the board. But the rich aren't worried about paying their bills.
Gardener - This flaming progressive agrees.
I'm nor convinced of global warming.
I have nothing against cleaning up the planet, but I'm oppossed to the transfer of wealth which will not solve the problem.
"man-made global warming is a 'hoax' with 'no scientific consensus........''
Smoking doesn' t cause cancer.
The earth is flat.
You americans are SO clever.
The author claims "...global warming is a certainty."
Yeah,just like back in the 1970s global cooling was a certainty.
As a blogger commented, " A recent Pew survey found that the public now ranks global warming dead last on a list of priority concerns.
Why? People have seen no warming in this century but a bit of cooling, contrary to what computer models keep predicting. Congress has nevertheless found a new source to tax, the air we breathe, and isn‘t about to back off.
Someday, folks will look back on this cap-and-trade folly and compare it with the failed efforts to outlaw booze.
Untrue about 'global cooling' in the 1970. Scientists didn't say that. Some newspapers went ape over the idea, because scientists were considering the effect of aerosols on global temperature.
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