Climate experts' "rapidly rising levels of anxiety "

[david dissadent]

One simply cannot measure the biomass is the topsoil. Not directly. One could do sums, but they'd need to be backed by a mass of world-wide empirical measurements.

He's hinting that's the kind -- just one kind -- of the information you need if you want to start actively to manage the interactions between your five short-term reservoirs of CO2.

Anecdotal evidence that I read overwhelmingly indicates that top soil errosion is underway but also read this

Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a “postage stamp” remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers' accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.

When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can eat. Much of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted, a trail of dollars billowing from the burglar's satchel.

In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it's about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915

 

[free spirit]

One simply cannot measure the biomass is the topsoil. Not directly. One could do sums, but they'd need to be backed by a mass of world-wide empirical measurements.

He's hinting that's the kind -- just one kind -- of the information you need if you want to start actively to manage the interactions between your five short-term reservoirs of CO2.

if that's what he's hinting at then he's correct to a point, in that there's already a lot of work been done on this, it's not like all climate science is based on modelling, and nobodies been doing work in the field as well.

Where he's wrong is in trying to make out that this is a simple problem to solve, and we don't need to worry about adding massive amounts of carbon to the atmosphere from the fossil fuel reservoirs because with some minor changes to land use practices the land can just absorb this extra carbon. It can't... well actually it probably can and will, just not in the sort of timescale that would be any use to us in avoiding Climate Change being a major problem.

Essentially the thing we know for a stone cold certainty is that the reason the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is increasing is down to us burning fossil fuels to increase 'new' carbon* into the atmosphere at a much faster rate than the biosphere and Oceans can absorb it.

There's also increasing evidence that the rate at which the Oceans are absorbing CO2 is dropping, which if true would mean his 1/100th inch figure would be even further out if the soil also had to pick up the slack from the Oceans.

Essentially some eminent physicist coming along with some notion that we can keep burning fossil fuels as much as we like so long as we adjust our land use practices just really isn't very helpful IMO, as well as being totally inaccurate.

 

[Jonti]

Actually, no, he didn't make out this is a simple problem to solve. He said it was a theoretical possibility that what he called "intelligent land management" has a role to play in controlling CO2 levels, and an idea worth looking into. From what you've said above, you agree with him!

Of course if we had a way to control the rate of removal of CO2 from the atmosphere we would be better able to manage the consequences of burning carbon rich fuels. You may not like that, but it's true all the same.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

He strongly implies we should be in a position accurately to measure and if necessary manage this short-term reservoir of CO2; and by implication each of the five (they are the atmosphere, the land plants, the topsoil in which land plants grow, the surface layer of the ocean in which ocean plants grow, and our proved reserves of fossil fuels).

Do you think this is such a bad idea?

Why would I think it a bad idea? Well, I certainly don't think it's a bad idea to increase rather than decrease (as is presently happening) the overall amount of topsoil. Not least because it's quite important for growing food.

A better understanding of the science involved? Sure by all means. I'm entirely in favour of that. Except when it turns into 'no need to take the politically difficult steps to reduce fossil energy use because the problem needs more study.'

My problem here is with the way his ideas interact with politics and economics.

Don't forget, this talk of topsoil is only the latest version. Dyson is the guy who (as far as I'm aware) first came up with the idea of carbon offset plantations back in the mid-70's. Neat scientific insight, well ahead of its time, but the result has been a rush by various industries to create a market for tradable offsets of extremely dubious ecological value. This has seen old-growth forests cut down and replaced by fast-growing monocultures. In impoverished countries land which could be supporting the local humans is instead being turned over to provide industries in rich countries with an excuse for not getting their act together and in the process causing ecological damage and economic hardship.

That makes me want to take a really close look at what he means by 'manage' here. Are we talking about supporting ecological resilience and sustainable agriculture in impoverished countries or are we talking about the World Bank and Monsanto 'managing' this resource?

I suspect Dyson hasn't really thought that bit through, but someone probably should ...

 

[david dissadent]

Actually, no, he didn't make out this is a simple problem to solve. He said it was a theoretical possibility that what he called "intelligent land management" has a role to play in controlling CO2 levels, and an idea worth looking into. From what you've said above, you agree with him!

Of course if we had a way to control the rate of removal of CO2 from the atmosphere we would be better able to manage the consequences of burning carbon rich fuels. You may not like that, but it's true all the same.

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Mr Dyson would be a bit more credible if he did not start his essay contradiciting himself. First he catagoricaly states that global warming is not a big problem then he states that the models are all inaccurate and we cannot make accurate predictions about the future of the climate. So if we cannot make accurate predictions why start the essay with a declarative statement about the impact of adding CO2 and methane to the atmosphere?

He then goes on to add a rather delicious irony of a lab scientist complaining about other lab scientists not having a true practicle understanding of the issues in the field. Its actualy very funny. Funnier still, he goes on to try to lecture us about what actualy happens in the field and seems to ignore the huge body of scientists who do do field work in ecosystems, soil management, galciology, marine stewardship and so on who are very very deeply concerned about the speed of the changes they are seeing.

Dysons first point totaly ignores the fact that it works both ways. Not only do we not fully understand negative feed backs like to what degree high altitude clouds will reflect incoming radiation, we do not fully understand positive feedbacks that can accelerate heat accumulation in the atmosphere.
Link
Here is one of them. The melting arcitic. Why is there such a fuss over this? Its all about radiation absorbtion and not polar bears. Sea water absorbes about 70%-90% of the energy that hits it while the figure for ice is about 15%. This means that open sea water absorbs huge amounts of additional energy compared to ice. This simplified feedback mechanism has already been observed and its cause not predicted by models.

Winter in the Arctic has long been determined by what researchers refer to as a "tri-polar" pattern. The interaction among the Icelandic Low, the Azores High and the subtropical high in the Pacific led to primarily east-west winds, a pattern which effectively blocked warmer air from moving northward into the Arctic region.

But since the beginning of the decade, the patterns have changed. Now, a "dipolar" (bipolar) pattern has developed in which a high pressure system over Canada and a low pressure system over Siberia have the say. The result has been that Artic winds now blow north-south, meaning that warmer air from the south has no problem making its way into the Arctic region. "It's like a short-circuit," says Rüdiger Gerdes, a scientist at the Alfred Webener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and one of the five authors of the study.

The influx of warm air from the south was especially intense during the winter of 2005-2006, the study says. During that period, 90 terawatts of energy flowed into the Artic Ocean from the North Pacific -- an amount that far exceeds the needs of the entire industrial world. Gerdes has no doubt that the ice will "quickly disappear if the new pressure patterns stay the way they are." He says that the Arctic Ocean would still freeze during the winter, but the ice pack would be too small to survive the warmer summer months.

A weather pattern that does not seem to have been predicted by the median forecasts has developed over the arctic that transports heat from the lower lattitudes into the higer lattitudes that increases the amount of energy absorbed by the earth. This energy is partialy released in the autumn as the ice takes longer to freeze leaving open water to heat up the air. Mr Dyson cannot have his cake and eat it. If the climate models are not reliable then they are not reliable in both directions.
(from Dyson)

So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions

.
Funnily enough, every time I see climate modelers present there findings they usually surround them with a huge body of caveats, its politicians and journalists that tend to make declaritive statements deviod of the caveats.

As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability.

He skips close to chaos theory then fails then fails to explain the potential for relatively small changes to generate dramaticaly disproportionate responses.
From Dyson

They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.

No shit Sherlock, so stop telling everyone that you have some great insight into the problem that field scientists lack.

I do not want to confuse you with a lot of numbers,

Actualy I prefer lots of numbers, numbers I can check...... its how science works

Every year, it absorbs and converts into biomass a certain fraction of the carbon dioxide that we emit into the atmosphere. Biomass means living creatures, plants and microbes and animals, and the organic materials that are left behind when the creatures die and decay.

And the rate of that absorbtion is limited by what again... ah yes Liebegs law. If the amount of CO2 is not the constraining nutriet, we aint gonna be absorbing more.

To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year.

PROVIDED the current CO2 and CH4 is not enough to continue the heating past the point where feedback mechanisms overtake the CO2 to take the world into a dramaticaly changed climate.....

Actualy rereading this paragraph its is so speculative. Its a thought experement from a lab rat with no practicle experiance in the field he is writing about. His whole argument is built around wish fulfillment.

Many of the basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood.

Hmm what more needs to be said.

Everyone agrees that the increasing abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has two important consequences, first a change in the physics of radiation transport in the atmosphere, and second a change in the biology of plants on the ground and in the ocean.

Third decreasing the Ph of the worlds oceans.

Hot desert air may feel dry but often contains a lot of water vapor.

So why do they get so cold at night? Its the lack of something in the air......

The warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics,

Nope wrong again the warming in the arctic is due to changes in air and sea currents. Much of it predicted but the rate and scale of the increase has not been. If it was all due to CO2 increases then why is the much dryer and much colder Antarctic not showing this change on its main ice sheet? Although to be fair that fastest warming place in the world is supposidly the Antarctic Peninsula, home of the WAIS, west antarctic ice sheet.

There are five reservoirs of carbon that are biologically accessible on a short time-scale,

Does he mean both as sinks and sources of CO2 CH4?

At present we do not know whether the topsoil of the United States is increasing or decreasing.

Find me just one single peer reviewed source saying it is increasing.

 

[david dissadent]

Another possible cause is the large-scale melting of glaciers, which also began long before human influences on climate became significant. Once again, we have an environmental danger whose magnitude cannot be predicted until we know more about its causes,

A but we have historic president to examine.....
Behold the Younger Dryas and the 8.2 kiloyear event (catchy name eh). These two events are hypothisised to have been caused by the large scale release of cool fresh meltwater into the North Atlantic, we cannot prove that it was but it is the leading theory. So basicaly this unpredictability that he is hyping is actualy there, but its not there in a good way. We could experiance rapid swings between much warmer then somewhat cooler climates. Farming is massively dependent on stability. He has come as the harbinger of the really bad news. We are not facing global warming but climate change.

However, recent measurements of the ice-cap show that it is not losing volume fast enough to make a significant contribution to the presently observed sea-level rise

Thats real nice. So right now at present its not adding water fast enough, what about when the ice shelfs go the same way as Larsen B and the Wilkins looks like its headed..... hmmmm.....

We know that there is a natural cycle that has been operating for the last eight hundred thousand years. The length of the cycle is a hundred thousand years. In each hundred-thousand year period, there is an ice-age that lasts about ninety thousand years and a warm interglacial period that lasts about ten thousand years. We are at present in a warm period that began twelve thousand years ago, so the onset of the next ice-age is overdue.

Oh for fucks sakes this takes the biscuit. Nope the natural variation has not been hapening for 800 000 years but about three million. And as it happens they indicate we should be in a stadial or very cold phase of the interglacial right now. Perhaps even tipping over back into glaciation. But we are not we are warming very significantly it is several 10 000s of years before we again return to a potential glaciation. (see posts above for the data). If someone wants to lecture us on climate science they had best at least get the very basics right.

First, if the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to continue, shall we arrive at a climate similar to the climate of six thousand years ago when the Sahara was wet?

Ummm that is not the destination, but a station we will whizz past on our bullet train of climate change.

The biosphere is the most complicated of all the things we humans have to deal with. The science of planetary ecology is still young and undeveloped.

And once again, the esteemed scientist admits that his declaritive statement about the effects of additional CO2 are based on a very limited understanding. Whats more, unlike the huge bodies of sciences that now study them and warn us, his statement is based on not even understanding high school level climate science.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I did a bit of digging (hohoho) and there are already plans in place to base a new system of carbon credits on soil biomass production. See e.g. Amazing Carbon (brought to you by Rio Tinto Coal)

The implied production system of choice seems to be specially managed grazing of deep-rooted perennial groundcover (some sort of grass, probably GM grass if Monsanto gets in on the act). Probably not a bad idea in the right place. Not exactly an efficient method of food production though and potentially a complete disaster if it's taken up the way monoculture tree planting was by the carbon credit industry and inflicted on the indigenous inhabitants of places where land is cheapest.

 

[free spirit]

Actually, no, he didn't make out this is a simple problem to solve. He said it was a theoretical possibility that what he called "intelligent land management" has a role to play in controlling CO2 levels, and an idea worth looking into. From what you've said above, you agree with him!

Of course if we had a way to control the rate of removal of CO2 from the atmosphere we would be better able to manage the consequences of burning carbon rich fuels. You may not like that, but it's true all the same.

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I will discuss the global warming problem in detail because it is interesting, even though its importance is exaggerated.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The number that I ask you to remember is one hundredth of an inch per year.[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology.[/FONT]

that's a pretty oblique way of saying Climate Change is not a simple problem to solve, and that intelligent land management has a role to play in controlling CO2.

I'm pretty sure most people would read that article and think as I did that he was making out that the problem of Climate Change had been blown out of all proportion, and that a simple change of land management practices could easily absorb all the carbon from fossil fuels, so what's the fuss all about. but then maybe I need to learn to read better or something.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Dyson is a bit of a puzzle to me. He signed the latest version of the Oregon Petition, which suggests, to put it charitably, extreme naivity about the politics of science on his part. He comes out with this stuff about land use, and has maybe read something about it, but it's pretty badly thought out, especially in the political and economic dimensions but also in terms of the science. Most of the experts in the field are shitting themselves about soil erosion and the best-case figure I have for topsoil renewal under agriculture is about x5 less than what he's advocating as a global target (source Pimentel: 'Food, Energy and Society') Of course if you can get people in the poor South to stop eating so that you can harvest soil carbon credits for polluters and dickheads like Bono, then maybe you can indeed do somewhat better than that, but this is all rather academic while we're actually losing topsoil at about 30 tons per hectare per year ...

Now, I absolutely agree that it would be a very good thing to achieve the sort of rate of renewal of topsoil that he's talking about. Fantastic idea. Soil erosion is an extremely serious problem, arguably more serious than climate change (except that the two are inter-linked in numerous ways) In terms of actual feasibility though, it appears to me to be as hard or harder to achieve in economic and political terms than reducing emissions and even when the political and economic will is there, it's extremely difficult to achieve technically in areas where serious degradation is occurring. See e.g. http://www.fao.org/docrep/t1765e/t1765e00.htm

 

[free spirit]

Dyson is a bit of a puzzle to me. He signed the latest version of the Oregon Petition, which suggests, to put it charitably, extreme naivity about the politics of science on his part. He comes out with this stuff about land use, and has maybe read something about it, but it's pretty badly thought out, especially in the political and economic dimensions but also in terms of the science. Most of the experts in the field are shitting themselves about soil erosion and the best-case figure I have for topsoil renewal under agriculture is about x5 less than what he's advocating as a global target (source Pimentel: 'Food, Energy and Society') Of course if you can get people in the poor South to stop eating so that you can harvest carbon credits for polluters and dickheads like Bono, then maybe you can indeed do somewhat better than that, but this is all rather academic while we're actually losing topsoil at about 30 tons per hectare per year ...

I'm really struggling to see what Soil Erosion has to do with the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil...

well ok, if the soil's eroded so badly that it's down to the bare rock and no plants can grow in it then that'd obviously impact on it, but it's not a direct corelation - soil that's eroded mainly ends up in the sea eventually, where the carbon stored in the soil is still locked away.

so 2 different issues aren't they?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I'm really struggling to see what Soil Erosion has to do with the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil...

well ok, if the soil's eroded so badly that it's down to the bare rock and no plants can grow in it then that'd obviously impact on it, but it's not a direct corelation - soil that's eroded mainly ends up in the sea eventually, where the carbon stored in the soil is still locked away.

so 2 different issues aren't they?

You could say so, but they're linked in a number of ways.

A certain amount of erosion can be tolerated without reducing the production of biomass (either above or below the ground) but the topsoil doesn't have to be entirely gone before biomass production is reduced.

In addition (and I was being a bit sloppy here) you've got significant degradation directly impacting fertility. For example salination, use of pesticides and herbicides etc. Plus economic factors like forest clearance removing sources of fuelwood causing farmers to use crop residues as fuel rather than mulch, which contributes both to loss of fertility and erosion.

 

[Jonti]

Hot desert air may feel dry but often contains a lot of water vapor.

So why do they get so cold at night? Its the lack of something in the air......

The warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics,

Nope wrong again the warming in the arctic is due to changes in air and sea currents.

Yours is the kind of militant ignorance that destroys my faith in greens, and makes me extremely suspicious of their political motivations.

Hot desert air does often contain a lot of water vapor. The reason for this is that warm air can hold a lot more moisture (water vapor) than colder air. When night falls, one can actually collect water out of the cooling Saharan air, for example, with a polythene sheet and a few rocks.

The dramatic falls of temperature are due to the lack of cloud cover. A cloudless night is a cold night.

Dyson is also right when he points out that water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than is CO2. That's just physics (!), and it also explains why the warming we have experienced over the last few decades is most pronounced at the poles.

The cold air at the poles is very dry, so the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere warms the poles, whereas in more humid climes the effect tends to swamped by the more potent water vapour.

Again, this isn't controversial, it isn't just pedantry, and it should be a fact known to anyone who's taken an interest in the topic. I fail to see how ignorance and name calling (Dyson is a "lab rat" is he?) is helpful.

 

[david dissadent]

Yours is the kind of militant ignorance that destroys my faith in greens, and makes me extremely suspicious of their political motivations.

Hot desert air does often contain a lot of water vapor. The reason for this is that warm air can hold a lot more moisture (water vapor) than colder air. When night falls, one can actually collect water out of the cooling Saharan air, for example, with a polythene sheet and a few rocks.

The dramatic falls of temperature are due to the lack of cloud cover. A cloudless night is a cold night.

Dyson is also right when he points out that water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than is CO2. That's just physics (!), and it also explains why the warming we have experienced over the last few decades is most pronounced at the poles.

The cold air at the poles is very dry, so the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere warms the poles, whereas in more humid climes the effect tends to swamped by the more potent water vapour.

Again, this isn't controversial, it isn't just pedantry, and it should be a fact known to anyone who's taken an interest in the topic. I fail to see how ignorance and name calling (Dyson is a "lab rat" is he?) is helpful.

Just to remind people who dont follow the arctic melting thread of why I am so alarmed here is an older post by me back in February.

A very frightening video.


here


It is a WMV file of the ice over the winter melt season. Earlier I had said that the thick multi year ice had been flushing out of the Fram straight into the Atlantic and melting.


Watch this. I hate being so doom and gloom about things but FFS, its winter and the ice is thining (even if the area coverd grows the thick multi years stuff dissapears)

What you are seeing is changes in the circulation of the arctic. The circulation is now flushing thick old growth ice out of th Fram Straght, the only really deep channel into the arctic ocean. Climate change is not a linear process defined solely by the additional energy trapped in the earths troposphere by the forcing of anthropogenicaly sourced greenhouse gasses. . This video shows how the ice is thinning out even in winter. Less ice to melt more additional heating in summer.

The above is taken form IPCC4 and has the 07 meltseason added onto it. We are way out of the IPCC4 projected range already. The year after it was released.

Now back to the causes. Well digging around I did a bit of learning. The low temperature of the arctic and its ability to hold water DOES have an impact on the rate of temperature change experianced in the arctic. But not as the goodley professor would have us believe. As the arctic cold air holds less water vapour than more tropical climes, the air is easier saturated and the additional energy is no longer absorbed by the process of evaporation and instead goes directly to heating the atmosphere.

See page 26 of the executive summary here for a source. http://amap.no/acia/

The other major reasons given for the disproportionate changes are the ice albedo effect (mentioned twice once for land snow and ice once for sea ice), a shallower atmoshperic layer to heat and alterations in atmoshperic patterns. I have provided a good link in my post above to cover some of these changes in the atmospheric circulation. I also have posted a video to = show how changes in the currents massively impact on the volume of old multiyear ice over the winter of 07/08 (the source for this is the Cryosphere Today website). This much thinner ice meant that the 08 melt season was a near equal to the increadible 07 melt season inspite of the climatic conditions being much less condusive to a record breaking melt. I.e. although the weather was not as extreme, it had less work to do melting the ice cover. To repeat what has been said several times before, this additional melting exposed sea water that absorbes far more energy than ice, the additional open water had to cool down before it could freeze, this cooling took place partialy by passing heat back to the atmosphere: hence the increadible high temperatures in the arctic over autumn. This huge anolomy helps contribute to the much quicker warming found in the region compaired with temperate lattitudes.

@Jonti. Ok mate, Ill let you do the maths. You are backing Dysons hypothosis that the increase of temperature observed in the arctic is driven primarily by local CO2 as a forcing mechanism. CO2 is usualy given as being in the order of 1.4w\m^2 radiative forcing. The ice extent for 2007 was ~2 million km^2 at the furtherst extent of the melt season. Take an average ice thickness of 4m and then do the maths. Explain how CO2 over that area produced the temperature changes and had enough spare heat to melt the ice (phase change from ice to liquid).
Secondly I take exception to your strawman that I dimiss water as a greenhouse gas. I am very well aware that up to 90% of the greenhouse effect is from atmoshperic water. However it is not a forcing mechanism, mankind is not emitting sufficient extra water vapour to have a noticible effect on the climate, what it is though is a feedback mechanism to enhance other anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. Additional water is able to be held in the atmosphere as a result of increased temperature from anthromorpogenic greenhouse gasses. This amplifies there impact. But if you have any decent links are professor dyson failed to provide any to show that at low lattitudes atmopheric water content masks the forcing signal of CO2 then please post em up.
Finaly I would like to reiterate that Dyson dismisses the entire body of field work in the earth sciences that supports AGW on the basis that models are imperfect. The article is inherently flawed from the outset. It is also all but totaly devoid of sources for many of its claims. It comes across as glib proselytizing, not geniune revolutionary science.

 

[david dissadent]

It seems to me that the debate is almost over.

Here. Id think more than 95% of the contributers to the Guardian coment is free section seem to be increadibly hostile to the idea of climate change. This chimes closely with the kind of posts I see on the Times and Telegraph, while at work almost no one believe global warming has a man made origin. So many obsolete arguments. The battle seems to be close to over, enough doubt is spread with enough vigour that science has lost out.

God help darwinian evolution in a downturn in the economy.

 

[goebfwai]

Ancient skills ‘could reverse global warming’

Trials begin of a technique used by Amazon Indians that takes CO2 and locks it safely into soil

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 7 December 2008

http://www.independent.co.uk/enviro...lls-could-reverse-global-warming-1055700.html

 

[Jonti]

Excellent stuff.

This initiative would never have happened if the scientifically illiterate greens had succeeded in silencing voices like Dyson's.

 

[Jonti]

Now back to the causes. Well digging around I did a bit of learning. The low temperature of the arctic and its ability to hold water DOES have an impact on the rate of temperature change experianced in the arctic. But not as the goodley professor would have us believe. As the arctic cold air holds less water vapour than more tropical climes, the air is easier saturated and the additional energy is no longer absorbed by the process of evaporation and instead goes directly to heating the atmosphere.

You can't spell or use a spell checker, you don't understand basic science, and you've alienated the folks whose support you need. By your own admission, the "green party" has lost the debate. That's a remarkable achievement given that few serious people doubt that human activities are affecting the planetary climate.

There can be no doubt that the ignorance and hostility of "greens" towards science and scientists have contributed to the defeat of the green agenda.

I think that's a great shame myself. But with a bit of luck, now we'll have some rational debate rather than repeated attempts to blind folks with cargo-cult pseudo-science.

 

[Jonti]

Back to the (apparently unpalatable) idea that intelligent land management can improve the topsoil and reduce the level of CO2 in the air, here's a couple of pieces of interest.

Scientific wisdom has it that soils are created only over geological time periods. But farmers with degraded soils in Guatemala and Honduras who can't wait that long, have discovered that the mucuna or velvetbean, Mucuna pruriens, used as a green manure, can help rebuild soils quickly.

more ...

Yet more on the mucana bean from the BBC, here.

ps my thanks to gorski for the tip about the mucana bean

 

[Bernie Gunther]

It's not so much that the idea is unpalatable. Indeed, halting erosion and then restoring soil fertility on a global scale and in a sustainable way is essential for reasons that have nothing much to do with climate change.

The problem I'm having is with Dyson and various carbon credit marketeers boosting it as some sort of panacea.

Right now that's a bit like someone on the balcony of a collapsing burning building saying 'don't worry about finding something soft to land on, all we really need to do is find a way to put the fire out long enough to build a proper fire escape that we can use instead of jumping.'

The problem of restoring soil fertility, while still doing enough agriculture is a hard one. It's certainly worth solving and any efforts to solve it in a way that doesn't cause lots of people to starve to death or be thrown off their lands to make shitheads like Bono very slightly richer are laudable, but it's probably at least as hard a problem to solve as getting rich countries to stop emitting greenhouse gasses at a rate that's unsustainable.

The reasons why both are happening is essentially an economic one and while there are certainly many techniques for restoring soil biomass and fertility generally, having an impact on a global situation where the direction of change is overwhelming towards the loss of fertility and indeed the loss of the soil itself isn't a matter of a clever technique here or there. It's a matter of changing the economic imperatives that not only encourage ruthless corporations to create ecological disasters to make money, but also make desperate people use unsustainable farming methods even when they know perfectly well that those methods are unsustainable.

edited to add: classic example of the latter is one I mentioned earlier. A government somewhere in the Poor South colludes with local elites to cut forests down, perhaps even for a 'carbon credit' plantation to make rich westerners feel better about their emissions, in any case to make money by cutting down old growth forest. The precise business plan doesn't matter.

Result is locals can no longer get their fuelwood there as they have for generations, so they start burning dung and crop residues that they know perfectly well they should be using as mulch. For lack of that mulch, soil erosion occurs and biomass production, of precisely the kind required to sequester carbon, is reduced. The reasons are economic.

 

[david dissadent]

Now back to the causes. Well digging around I did a bit of learning. The low temperature of the arctic and its ability to hold water DOES have an impact on the rate of temperature change experianced in the arctic. But not as the goodley professor would have us believe. As the arctic cold air holds less water vapour than more tropical climes, the air is easier saturated and the additional energy is no longer absorbed by the process of evaporation and instead goes directly to heating the atmosphere

.

You can't spell or use a spell checker, you don't understand basic science, and you've alienated the folks whose support you need. By your own admission, the "green party" has lost the debate. That's a remarkable achievement given that few serious people doubt that human activities are affecting the planetary climate.

There can be no doubt that the ignorance and hostility of "greens" towards science and scientists have contributed to the defeat of the green agenda.

I think that's a great shame myself. But with a bit of luck, now we'll have some rational debate rather than repeated attempts to blind folks with cargo-cult pseudo-science.

I had to read this a couple of times to try to work out which angle you were coming from, then it dawned on me that you had mistaken my post for one agreeing with Dysons view on why the arctic would warm first.

My post was finding out that less of the energy was being absorbed by the process of phase change, that is the energy required to be absorbed by matter to change from one state to another (or the energy released). Due to the low temprerature of the arctic it can carry little water vapour so energy that would go to evaporation instead goes to thermal heating of the water. This energy is either absorbed into the sea or released at some point back into the air. Dyson however wrote this....

In humid air, the effect of carbon dioxide on radiation transport is unimportant because the transport of thermal radiation is already blocked by the much larger greenhouse effect of water vapor. The effect of carbon dioxide is important where the air is dry, and air is usually dry only where it is cold. Hot desert air may feel dry but often contains a lot of water vapor.

This is clearly something different. You seem not to understand this. What he is referring too is this....

1

The absorbtion bands of the atmosphere. The theory that there is an overlap of the absorbtion of the bands CO2 absorbes in the region of 20µm. Where there is no water there should be a greater impact from CO2. While the argument has merit in that CO2 will absorb some more energy where there is an absence of water, but it is not enough to make a significant difference and especialy not account for the the lack of water vapour to act as a positve feedback to the CO2 warming. In the lower lattitudes this positive feedback accentuating the CO2 heating by quite a large amount (sometimes given as doubling it.3 4) In the arctic where the air is not warm enough to hold water vapour the additional energy absorbed by CO2 in its absence is insufficient to make up for the missing energy that it would absorb. Big warning: this is a very simplified answer to the problems of calculation the impact of absorbtion overlap (and I am not expert enough to give you a better answer).


So far as I understand, over the past couple of years the overwhelimingly strong warming 'signal' in the arctic has come from the change in albedo. I have covered the physics of this in other posts but this picture should help illustrate the point.

2

This is an image of the heat anolomy of the last 9 years. While much of the earth shows heating anolomies in the region of 0.1 - 0.4 of a degree centigrade (and a few regions with cooling anolomies) the anolomies in the arctic really really stand out. But they are almost completely confined to the areas covered by the ice cap. The average temperature for Reykjavík from December to February is just about 0. Yet Reykjavík is not showing the huge increase in temperture anolomy that the area of the arctic covered by the ice cap is. Why is the anolomy at Reykjavík not significantly different from London when the amount of water vapour in the air over Iceland in deep winter will be so much lower?

I am open to suggestions.

Yours is the kind of militant ignorance that destroys my faith in greens, and makes me extremely suspicious of their political motivations.

Hot desert air does often contain a lot of water vapor. The reason for this is that warm air can hold a lot more moisture (water vapor) than colder air. When night falls, one can actually collect water out of the cooling Saharan air, for example, with a polythene sheet and a few rocks.

The dramatic falls of temperature are due to the lack of cloud cover. A cloudless night is a cold night.

Water acts to trap infrared radiation from both the sun and the ground, and dry desert air is incapable of blocking sunlight during the day or trapping heat during the night. Thus, during daylight most of the sun's heat reaches the ground, and as soon as the sun sets the desert cools quickly by radiating its heat into space. Urban areas in deserts lack large (more than 14 °C/25 °F) daily temperature variations, partially due to the urban heat island effect.

link
Deserts can carry a great deal of moisture in the air, but are normaly quite dry. The reason it gets so cold is the lack of moisture. If it were merely the lack of clouds, then cities like Brisbane and Durban would fall to not far above freezing on every clear cloudless night.

(Edited to add: to be fair Berlin and Johannesburg would have been better examples. Less costal)

 

[free spirit]

Back to the (apparently unpalatable) idea that intelligent land management can improve the topsoil and reduce the level of CO2 in the air, here's a couple of pieces of interest.
Yet more on the mucana bean from the BBC, here.

ps my thanks to gorski for the tip about the mucana bean

no, sorry, you can't twist this argument around like that.

Neither I, nor anyone else on this thread questioned the fact that better land management had a role, even a potentially significant role to play in levelling off atmospheric carbon levels.

What I and others were, and still are arguing is that Dyson's article makes it seem like land management can relatively easily offset all the carbon we're emmitting, which is utterly wrong, and very unhelpful to the debate.

I note you've not commented on my hatchet job on his 1/10th of an inch figures in post 33 either, a post that should illustrate clearly why I say he's utterly wrong.

 

[laptop]

I presume Professor Dyson is a better physicist than he is ecologist or environmental scientist... maybe he should stick to his subject area and stop putting out stupid stuff like this that can only turn him into a laughing stock, at the same time as adding to the public perception of scientific confusion over such an important issue.

Dyson has always struck me as an interesting example of Nobel Psychosis without the Nobel Prize.

They get their Prize for their work on psychosomatic metallurgy. They get invited onto the Today programme to talk about the latest finding in cosmological dramaturgy, then CNN calls them for their opinion on the NFL/AFL method in psephology... within days they think they're qualified as an omniopinionator

Dyson seems, more than 30 years ago, to have reached the omniopinionation stage without passing through the Prize stage

Recall that his mindset is defined by the notions behind the Dyson Sphere and that he won the Templeton Prize, given for "for outstanding originality in advancing the world's understanding of God or spirituality".

NOTA fucking BENE: these observations do not constitute an "ad hominem" attack because they do not claim to rebut or refute his recent claim: they merely provide context for it. The refutation has been done nicely in post #33.

 

[free spirit]

David... sorry mate, but you probably should have known better than to challenge a professor of physics on the more physics side of things...

The warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics,

true

Global Total Column Water Vapor

[source]

 

[kyser_soze]

So on this thread everyone is disagreeing about how bad things are?

Ummm...

 

[xes]

yeah,don't worry,everything will be ok

 

[Signal 11]

true

Global Total Column Water Vapor

Water vapour is lower there but that isn't the cause of polar amplification.

While ice-albedo feedback is likely to account for much of the polar amplification, the strength of the feedback depends on numerous physical processes and parametrizations which differ considerably among the models. Nonetheless, the mean sea-ice state in the control (or present) climate is found to influence both the magnitude and spatial distribution of the high-latitude warming in the models. In particular, the latitude of the maximum warming is correlated inversely and significantly with sea-ice extent in the control climate. Additionally, models with relatively thin Arctic ice cover in the control climate tend to have higher polar amplification. An intercomparison of model results also shows that increases in poleward ocean heat transport at high latitudes and increases in polar cloud cover are significantly correlated to amplified Arctic warming. This suggests that these changes in the climate state may modify polar amplification. No significant correlation is found between polar amplification and the control climate continental ice and snow cover.

Holland & Bitz 2003 (PDF!)

 

[Jonti]

So on this thread everyone is disagreeing about how bad things are?

Ummm...

It's worse than that

Freeman Dyson says that the human species has done better when the planet has been a tad warmer than it is at the moment; and that a chartist approach would indicate we could be on the threshold of another ice age, which he considers to be worth avoiding. You might say it is an inconvenient truth if he is right on those points.

He also says, that we simply do not know whether the impact of human activities is likely to trigger the next ice age, or avert it

A tad counter-intuitive perhaps, but the scenario is that the warmer arctic conditions caused by CO2 are likely to be accompanied by increased precipitation into the arctic ocean, diluting its salinity.

That's a problem because the Gulf Stream is counterbalanced by a deep flow of cold water from the Arctic; and the diluted water would not sink as it does at the moment. That could stifle the flow of the Gulf Stream, triggering the advance of the ice sheets.

 

[Jonti]

yeah,don't worry,everything will be ok

Yeah, the guy is very old, so he's lived through more apocalyptic scares than most. I'm kind of losing count myself, and I'm nowhere as ancient as he

I think we'll see an increasing amount of "direct action" by individuals, private firms, and government agencies to attempt to manipulate the planetary climate the way they'd like ...

If biotechnology takes over the planet in the next fifty years, as computer technology has taken it over in the last fifty years, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed.

Laptop, whatever you say, your comments on Dyson are ad hominem. His attitude to "spirituality" has as much to do with his understanding of Gaian homeostasis as would his attitude to slavery or wife-beating.

 

[kyser_soze]

Damn that natural environment and it's refusal to respect easy, commons sense patterns!!

But he's right, another ice age would probably be best avoided...having said that, I have a completely unsupported pet theory that the reason behind the explosion in civilsations after the last ice age was due to population movement south creating a 'tipping point' combining population density, cultural sharing, resource discovery and conflict/cooperation...

 

[Signal 11]

Freeman Dyson points out that the human species has done better when the planet has been a tad warmer than it is at the moment;

Please specify when that was and in what sense the human species "did better".

the Gulf Stream is counterbalanced by a deep flow of cold water from the Arctic; and the diluted water would not sink as it does at the moment. That could stifle the flow of the Gulf Stream, triggering the advance of the ice sheets.

Please provide any evidence you have that a weakening of the Gulf Stream would "trigger the advance of the ice sheets", which is totally contrary to the views of mainstream climate scientists.