Enough With the Global Warming Graphics, Get to the Choices
Those who want the U.S. to act decisively on climate change seem to be losing the battle of public opinion lately. Only 30 percent of Americans say global warming should be a top priority for Congress and the President, behind the economy, terrorism, Social Security, health care, immigration and even that most tedious of all issues, trade policy. More than half, 55 percent have heard nothing at all about the cap and trade legislation in Congress (and that doesn't even count the otherwise honest people who don't want to admit to a telephone survey taker that they don't pay attention to the news).
We're even losing ground on the home front, according to a recent survey. Just one year ago, consumers said that more energy efficient windows and furnaces would top their list if they got a $10,000 renovation windfall. This year, most have their eyes on a new bathroom or kitchen and new flooring. The survey actually has even more alarming news for anyone who has pinned his or her hopes on individual Americans taking the lead in the energy efficiency department. Most consumers said that their energy bills would need to rise 70 percent before they would "feel forced" to make energy efficient improvements to their homes.
That last bit has to be especially galling for environmentalists. People seem to go crazy at the mere mention of a few extra dollars on their electricity bills to support renewables, yet they won't put in a new furnace until their bills go up 70 percent!
This really is not good, because improving efficiency is supposed to be the easy part of the energy debate. After all, there are juicy tax incentives for many of these improvements. Most save money on utility bills and pay for themselves in just a few years. Of course, people do have to front the money themselves, which may be tough in this economy. Then there's the whole chore of actually doing it. Either they have to roll up their own sleeves or find someone else to do it and go through the mess, noise, and the "But you said you would come yesterday" song and dance that often involves. It's right up there in root canal territory for a lot of us. We really have to find some better ways to make these kinds of "easy" changes happen.
But back to the bigger picture on energy and global warming. One major problem with continually ringing the global warming bell (other than it doesn't actually seem to be working) is that a lot of the Americans who agree it's a problem don't really understand what the country needs to do about. That makes it a lot scarier and more confusing than it needs to be. And rather then actually explain the problem, more than a few advocates are clinging to the hope that they can buy public cooperation with a few tax credits and slip cap and trade through without anybody much noticing.
It may work for the near term, but sometime soon, we need to tell the American people what the whole thing really means: the United States has to start reducing its reliance on fossil fuels like coal and oil. That means rethinking how we generate electricity and how we move ourselves and our products around. This is not something you do with one piece of legislation, and it's certainly not something you can do without telling anybody. Right now, four in ten Americans can't even name a fossil fuel and more than half think reducing smog means you're making good progress on reducing global warming. Most of what legislators, environmentalists and energy mavens are talking about is just sailing right over the public's head.
There are some hints that the public is not entirely unreachable. In a Public Agenda survey, 73 percent of Americans disagreed with the statement that "if we get gas prices to drop and stay low, we don't need to be worried about finding alternative sources of energy," and more than half "strongly disagreed."
Moreover, despite partisan debate, Americans find common ground on many measures to address the nation's energy problems. At least ten major energy proposals that would support alternative energy, encourage efficiency and reduce gasoline usage have widespread support, including one requiring developers to build more energy efficient homes, even if it makes them more expensive. At least three-quarters of Americans think that's worth pursuing.
The people who have worked so hard to make climate change an issue in the United States deserve enormous credit. This is a crucial issue that humanity can't afford to ignore any longer. But another clever graphic showing how carbon emissions get trapped in the atmosphere probably isn't going to make much difference to most people.
We have to get down to the business of helping Americans understand the choices for getting electricity and driving their cars. Americans need to understand their options, and they deserve to know what their leaders are really talking about.
Ritt Bjerregaard: The Hopenhagen Ambassador: It Could Be You
It's not just world leaders who carry an enormous responsibility to improve the globe's climate in the future; the responsibility also weighs on individual cities and individual people.
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"Only 30 percent of Americans say global warming should be a top priority for Congress and the President." Well, I believe that result is only because unemployment is above ten percent. Americans know that warming is a serious problem. We are not that unsophisticated, despite the tea-bagging crowd. If someone reads newspapers, he can see the affects of warming in countries around the world where once in 50 year storms are happening every few years.
For anyone interested in outgoing long wave radiation (Realpolitic?), here is some data:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/timeseries/
To look at the global picture use Interpolated OLR, Latitude -60 to +60, Longitude -180 to 180. It should give you something like:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries.pl?ntype=3&lat1=60&lat2=-60&lon1=-180&lon2=180&iseas=0&mon1=0&mon2=0&iarea=0&typeout=2&Submit=Create+Timeseries
As I understand it, CO2 should be causing it go down... I have it increasing at 0.07 W/m^2/yr
Does this article help? Perhaps radiative imbalance is slightly different from greenhouse effect?
"We define the longwave “radiative forcing” of the climate system as the difference between the top of atmosphere longwave flux with and without the greenhouse absorbers. This forcing is not the same as the “greenhouse effect,” which is related to the effect absorbers have on the earth’s surface temperature."
http://coelho.mota.googlepages.com/RadiationBudget.pdf
Fumes for Hopenhagen Ambassador.
I have seen this before - have it bookmarked!
It has a lot of good info in it. I think your quote on the difference between the green house effect and forcing is right on. My understanding is that the greenhouse is like the total effect - obviously a good thing in that it keeps us from freezing! I think the radiative forcing is the radiative inbalance given a CHANGE in GHG concentration. I think it excludes the 'baseline' greenhouse effect.
Here is a new one:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
There is some push back on it you can see at RealClimate - apparently the authors used v2 vice v3 of the satellite data. The v3 corrects for a software error and reduces the magnitude of the result, but it does not invalidate (or 'debunk') the results.
The thing to look at is fig 1A (ERBE-Red, long wave) and 1B (ERBE-Blue, short wave). You can see the long wave going up and the reflected short wave going down. This seems more consistent with decrease in albedo rather than CO2 as the cause of warming. If it were CO2 I would expect the longwave to go down.
Another thing to check would be to see if the albedo is lower over the Northern hemisphere (where a majority of the warming seems to be occuring)...
You are confusing the total longwave radiation emitted by the earth (TLR) with outgoing longwave radiation (OLR).
When you warm the earth -via for example atmospheric CO2 - its TLR will increase, which is of course what we are seeing. About 90% of that TLR gets re-radiated back to earth via atmospheric greenhouse gases and thus warms the earth considerably more than it would be without said greenhouse gases - this is the "Greenhouse Effect."
Only about 10% of the TLR gets past the atmospheric greenhouse gases and escapes into space - that is what is known as the *outgoing* longwave radiation (OLR). Which is say: the OLR is *not* the total longwave radiation that it is emitted by the earth (the TLR) - it is only a tenth of the TLR.
Which is why when you warm the earth the OLR increases as well as the TLR - it's a small *proportion* of the TLR. Remember that the TLR too is increasing - and in absolute numbers (as opposed to proportionally) the TLR is increasing *an order of magnitude faster* than the OLR.
The problem is the facts are against those wanting to regulate CO2 in the United States. China emits more CO2 than the United States, and is building more coal fired electrical power plants. This means China is expanding CO2 output faster than the United States plans to cut CO2 emissions. So assuming CO2 is the problem causing global temps to rise ( science doesn't support that either ), unless you get China to change its CO2 output, all the money spent on CO2 reduction in the United States will be wasted.
were the moon made from a darker cheese..
the water recently found there would evaporate off into space.
were the moon with sufficient gravitational force..
those water vapor molecules would instead stick around..
and make an atmosphere.. and warm the moon even more!
How come the astronauts did not dine on the moon cheese? No crackers?
When in doubt about global warming, just follow the money:
- Al Gore, a hundred millionaire from his carbon offset business
- Since 1990, over $20 billion in US grants for studies associated with global warming
- Copenhaven treaty including over $100 Billion/year to third world nations ($50B/yr from US)
- Cap & Trade bills with billions in grants promoting green industries
And the coal companies are doing well? What about Exxon- best profits of any industry ever?
Most climate change deniers do not want to be educated, but just to cast doubt on the science, as a decade ago cigarette manufacturers cast doubt on whether smoking caused cancer. They arrive at silly conclusion like cap and trade legislation will bring about one world government and then work backwards to say the science is unsupported, although they know next to nothing about science. They call themselves "skeptical," but just deny any science related to climate change and accept any information from some right-wing blog that casts doubt on the science. It is not skepticism, but extreme ideology that drives them. They ask questions, but have no interest or use for answers as they believe the science interfers with their personal freedom. They are useful dupes for the coal and oil industries, but do not look at things deeply enough to understand they are being manipulated.
The previous post is an excellent example of the sort of elitist "I know what's best for you" drivel that explains why Americans are turning off to Global Warming. Although it is obvious that the science is not settled, and even more obvious that global temps are not increasing as the models predicted, hair-on-fire enviro-bots lecture the great unwashed on their lack of sophisication in understanding the immediate need to address a non-problem.
Common sense trumps pseudo-intellectualism with most Americans, thank goodness.
Karl Rove would be proud of you. You threw all the enemies of the far right in there, but the liberal press. You define science as psuedo-intellectualism. Read the science without distorting it. I have not seen one denier here who has the courage to actually read some of the science without distorting it and creating silly straw man arguments. You are just as misinformed as the other deniers with your temperatures are not increasing nonsense. Where does one go to join this merry band of practiced ignorance? It is conformity run amok!.
la2010verdad: "it is obvious that the science is not settled"
Science is never "settled."
la2010verdad: "and even more obvious that global temps are not increasing as the models predicted,"
And that's false.
If you disagree, cite your (global warning denier) source(s).
The solution to climate change is elegant in its simplicity, has been tested over millennia, and works without fail. It is also the same solution for every other social and environmental problem facing us.
The good news is that we don't have to do anything to implement it. Our ignorance and arrogance has pretty much insured its implementation, which may be underway at this very moment.
The bad news is that the solution will require a somewhat painful transition with an unknown outcome. It will be under the direction of nature, and could be described as a "population recession" aka: massive untreatable illnesses (high death rate) coupled with a failure to reproduce (low birth rate). One estimate for a sustainable worldwide population is a reduction from 6.8 billion to say 2 billion humans.
Once the smoke clears, those humans still standing (if any) will be in the enviable position to start over to treat nature with the respect she deserves. Other societies that have failed to do so are extinct (see "Collapse" by Jared Diamond). You see, our planet is not in trouble, we are. It is quite arrogant to think our planet needs our help to “save it”, or that its very existence is somehow under our control. In our absence, nature has millions of years to cleanse herself of our legacy, regenerate, create many of new species, and perhaps evolve an improved human model.
Roy Mankovitz, Director
http://www.MontecitoWellness.com
Another Malthus apologist - wrong for a century and a half and still counting.
lff
While the Malthusian hypothesis was primarily based on food shortage, the hypothesis of the present era is that there will be plenty of food available, perhaps enough to feed ten billion. I agree.
I (and others) also believe that the environmental cost of producing such Frankenfoods (CAFOs, GMOs, annual monocrops) and of disposing of the toxins generated by our current population, will so poison our environment (air, water, soil, food, climate) that a forced population reduction is inevitable. We can dicker over the timetable, but here are some predictions from those in the trenches.
Regarding the potential for a decrease in birth rate, see:
The Disappearing Male - a CBC documentary about one of the most important, and least publicized, issues facing the human species: the toxic threat to the male reproductive system.
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=7530701744597358451&ei=ndU-Sc-KFZ-QiQL369XeBQ&q=the+disappearing+male#
Regarding the effect of GM foods on reproduction, see:
http://www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/Home/index.cfm
Regarding the potential for an increase in death rate, read "Rising Plague - The Global Threat from Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal to Fight Them" by Brad Spellberg, MD. Also see "Bad Bugs, No Drugs" by The Infectious Disease Society of America:
http://www.idsociety.org/badbugsnodrugs.html
I believe Malthus was right, but for the wrong reasons. The fact that his prediction has yet to materialize does not mean it will not. The clock is definitely running, but we are no longer the timekeeper.
"The people who have worked to make climate change an issue in the US deserve enormous credit." Actually, they have done a great disservice. By focusing most of the attention on the climate change issue, they have created a major controversy between the climate alarmists and AGW deniers. They have detracted focus from the important issues. Instead of the controversial "global warming", if the key arguments had been the need to clean the environment, lower costs thru increased energy efficiency, reduce massive trade deficits, increase our energy independence and improve the quality of life, there would be a greater acceptance of the need to change our dirty energy habits. Instead, we just create more distracting arguments about "global warming". By the way, any idea what improvement to global warming will result from the current proposed cap & trade bills. How about a temperature decrease of only 0.2 degrees C over 100 years. See, another detraction from the need to clean up our act caused by the disruptive global warming argument.
"See, another detraction from the need to clean up our act caused by the disruptive global warming argument."
There is no global warming argument. There are those who are fact immune, and there is rational America. You may fall in the former category with your canard about .2C - assumes only America changes its carbon output. Ignores the truism - when you find yourself in deep - first step is STOP DIGGING. We must stop carbon - with the nows.
You make some good points - but the screamers and birthers and deniers are becoming a real problem in our society. Facts have to be the basis for analysis - or we deserve the fate we are speeding towards.
Here is a simple fix, and it works well with the "let the market take care of it," and "the earth isn't warming," crowd.
Pass a law removing the limited liability for stockholders ONLY for damages caused by global climate change. This means that any state, nation, or person who can show harm from climate change can sue any polluter for damages. If there is no global climate change, this law means nothing...
Of course, if there is global climate change, you won't be able to give away Chevron or Exxon shares...
Oh Boy! Let's enrich the lawyers. That always works!
lff
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