November 2, 2011 12:12 am
Debate on Climate Change, Environmental Effects
By Ariel Webster, Contributing Writer
As part of the Natural Science and Mathematics (NS&M) Colloquium series this semester, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Professor at Penn State University in the Department of Meteorology and Geoscience, Michael E. Mann came to St. Mary’s to discuss the reality and politics of climate change in Schaefer Hall on Oct. 26.
Mann began his talk by reviewing the evidence there is for the fact that humans have had and will have a significant affect on the earth’s climate. The earth warmed one degree Celsius over past century, and both sea levels and temperatures have risen while snow coverage around the world has lessened. According to Mann, the earth warms and cools naturally, however, based on solely natural models the earth should have cooled slightly in the last 100 years instead of warmed.
Critics might argue that all of these results are based on models and that it is impossible to accurately model something as complex as climate. Mann countered this argument by pointing to models such as Hansen’s Three Predicted Global Warming Scenarios, which have predicted very accurately the amount of global warming we have experienced in the last 50 years.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a panel of thousands of scientists working under the United Nations, has concluded that global climate change is “very likely” due to greenhouse gases. Mann pointed out that, “scientists don’t use the term ‘very likely’ lightly” and what it means is that they are about 90 percent sure of their results. Almost identical conclusions have come out of the scientific academies in almost all of the industrialized nations in the world.
At this point in time, it is possible to see the effects of climate change on the weather. On any given day in the United States there are record high temperatures and record low temperatures; a few decades ago the ratio of record hot to record cold days was one to one. Today it is two to one, in favor of the hot days. Any particular hot day is not evidence of climate change but the trend is significant. Rainfall also can demonstrate this trend: warmer sea temperatures lead to evaporation and more rainfall. “I liked the stats that he used to prove it was actually happening,” said senior Colleen Brummitt.
Since it is possible to already see such profound effects, it is reasonable to ask why no action has been taken. This is because the subject is highly politically charged. The first example Mann used to show this political masking was a memo written in 2002 by Frank Luntz, owner of the political consulting firm Luntz Global, which coached politicians in how to argue against climate change. Mann’s next example was of an event called “Climategate,” when private emails of scientists researching climate change were stolen and released to the public. Oddly enough, the following political attention was not focused on the theft but on the supposed fraud that the scientists discussed in the emails. Sarah Palin, former Governor of Alaska, wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post declaring that the scientists were deliberately hiding a decline in global temperature. This was not true, according to Mann. What the scientists had been discussing was how to shift people’s attention away from tree ring data that was wrong after 1960 so that it did not confuse people.
Mann found himself in the center of the climate change debate because of his work on the “hockey stick graph,” which has become an icon for climate change. Because of this work he was targeted by political opponents of climate change such as Texas Representative Joe Barton (R), who subpoenaed all of his research and data.
Barton’s subpoena was attacked by almost every news source in the United States and nearly every scientific journal. Mann stressed at this point that there were politicians on both sides of the aisle that have defended climate change and scientists. Mann praised former New York Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R) specifically as a national hero for calling out his fellow republicans for driving the Republican Party towards becoming a party of anti-science.
Barton was not the last to subpoena Mann. When Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli subpoenaed him, The Washington Post published no less than five editorials and two cartoons bashing Cuccinelli for the dangerous precedent he was setting under which any scientist could be stopped from doing their work if the Attorney General did not like their subject or findings.
The political debate and battle for acceptance of the reality of climate change is ongoing. This is a shame, according to Mann, because the scientific community accepted the reality of climate change two decades ago. The debate now should be how to fix the problem. If we stay on this track, says Mann, “[the] coral reefs will be gone within 40 to 50 years” and crops in the tropics will suffer significantly. If we want to avoid this, we have to bring our CO2 emissions to a peak within the next decade and below the levels of those in the 1990s by the mid-2000s. This cannot be accomplished by individuals reducing their carbon footprint; we need to put a cost on emissions.
“I don’t want a world where my daughter can only show her children polar bears in zoos and that is what we are heading towards,” Mann says. So, there is still hope; we can still do it, but it has to happen soon.
[...] predicted very accurately the amount of global warming we have experienced in the last 50 years.http://thepointnews.com/2011/11/nsm-climate-change-articleGISS has tracked below Hansen’s scenario C (zero CO2 emissions since the year 2000) . Either [...]
“while snow coverage around the world has lessened”
Wrong:
http://www.real-science.com/record-snow-continues-straight-year
lol, are you kidding me? Barton subpoenaed Mann because Mann wouldn’t release his numbers or methodology. Our congress is asked to pass laws regarding climate change and you think it is alright to hide data and methodology from the very people making laws regarding climate change? What sort of idiotic reasoning is that? As far as Cuccinelli goes, it would do you well to recall that this is the public’s information. It isn’t Mann’s. His work product belongs to the public. If he has been an honest broker, then there shouldn’t being anything that would prevent him from continuing his efforts.
How is it that a group of people have concluded that we should alter the entire socioeconomic structure of the globe but we shouldn’t investigate the people or information presented by such advocates? I thought operating on blind faith was something science abhors.
Mann and every other scientist openly publish their research, data, and rationale/conclusions. Their work is clearly available for peer review. It is open to the media and anyone else who wish to review it. The subpoena strategy is to access correspondence; letters, emails and phone conversations which occur during the course of designing and completing the research. The science should stand or fall on its own. The witch hunts and conspiracy theories belong in the dark ages. Scientists have now, for the first time, started to contribute to a personal defense fund. They don’t want to be personally demonized for their conversations. They wish to be, and expect to be judged on their scientific results. And rightly so.
The “science” doesn’t stand on its own . On the most fundamental level the understanding of the basic physics displayed by both sides of the debate is mathematically amateurish and retarded compared to any other branch of applied physics . I defy Mann to show me the handful of equations demonstrating he even knows how to calculate the temperature of a radiantly heated varicolored ball like our earth .
Forest, I don’t know where you got that impression, but clearly, you’ve missed out on some recent history. Mann’s openness and availability of data and methodology, (or lack thereof,) has been chronicled and well documented since his original study. You can start at ClimateAudit. It took an act of congress for him to release parts of his original work.
They want the correspondence because it is clearly evident that he colluded with other scientists to skew perception of his work. If he hasn’t done anything wrong, then he should happily comply with the law enforcement branch of the Virginia. Again, it isn’t his property. It is the public’s.
You remaining climate change crisis believers can childishly fear monger billions of children all you like but it won’t change the fact that CO2 climate change belief is absolutely pointless, meaningless and irrelevant without addressing Human CO2 with CO2 mitigation. Taxing activities and lifestyles and goods and services and the air is not going to happen, not on this planet. Bank funded and “corporate-run” Carbon Trading Markets ruled by politicians are called; CLIMATE MITIGATION so consider climate change dead folks. And as far as the science world goes, the world of science denied their deadly pesticides as being dangerous for decades so exaggerating the effects of Human CO2 is plainly clear. Now to the good news, the planet is not dying from unstoppable warming and a future dealt with using courage and love for the environment is more responsible than holding the spear of death by CO2 stuck into the backs of billions of children. Obama didn’t even mention the climate crisis in his state of the union address and the only way the former believer majority will get back in line is if we see the millions of scientists who are warning us of crisis, actually making themselves visible and believable. Exaggerating isn’t a crime, anymore. REAL planet lovers don’t WANT this misery to be true. Just who WAS the real fear mongering neocon in all of this then? Save the planet or die. Nice job girls. History won’t be kind to this insanity of climate blame.
I don’t know about other places but here in Southern Oregon we have seen 3 consecutive years of longer, cooler, wetter Springs followed by cooler Summers (This year we had a record NO triple digit days) and colder Winters. Veggie gardeners are despairing of ever being able to grow a decent garden again. I’d really love to see some of this purported warming around here!
Mann’s version of events, as shown above, is a lot of half-truths.
True, Sarah Palin misunderstood what that discussion in ClimateGate was about.
However, the truth is just as bad.
The “Hockey Stick” graph of temperatures in the past that Mann mentions above was originally created from analyses of tree-rings, on the theory that tree-rings, if analyzed properly, could accurately indicate temperatures in the past.
The people in the ClimateGate discussions had found other sets of trees that, when analyzed, showed similar results to Mann’s Hockey Stick.
Unfortunately they ALSO had found a set of trees that could be directly compared against thermometer readings in modern times, and while temperatures were going up, the tree-ring analysis of those trees said that temperatures should have been going down. That did not look good for their technique.
They named this problem “divergence”, and they tried to find a reason for this divergence, but they couldn’t.
What they were left with was data that showed that their tree-ring analysis technique was NOT RELIABLE. They could not say why, how, where, and when a set of trees in the past or present might not also fail to correctly indicate the actual temperatures when analyzed using their technique.
This would mean that Mann’s great life’s work, the Hockey Stick, was unreliable.
So here’s what Mann says they were doing: “…discussing was how to shift people’s attention away from tree ring data that was wrong after 1960 so that it did not confuse people.”
And here’s what they were actually doing: discussing how to hide real, valid tree-ring data that suggested that their technique was unreliable.
The phrase “data that was wrong” is actually kind of hilarious. The data could be “wrong” if it was mismeasured, but he’s never claimed that. Given that it was measured correctly, it’s as if he is accusing this set of trees of being bad schoolchildren who didn’t follow the physical rules of nature that all other trees have obeyed throughout history. Bad, bad trees.
But trees do what they do; the only thing that can be “wrong” is our theories of how they work.
Take anything that Mann says as a starting point for your own investigation, and you may find other…uh…”divergences”.
http://news.yahoo.com/biggest-jump-ever-seen-global-warming-gases-183955211.html
Hi, Danny. I think you missed the point of my note…it wasn’t about whether C02 is going up or not. C02 is definitely going up. If there’s anything in the debate that isn’t under question by ANYbody , it’s whether C02 levels have been rising.
It’s great that you’re doing your own research, though. Try checking out the ClimateGate letters, which you can find googling online. Nothing in these letters prove or disprove AGW; but they should make it clear that it’s important to doublecheck what the scientists say, because the letters show that scientists are human, political, egotistical, and self-serving creatures just like the rest of us.
Interesting….a department of Energy calculation….notice the article did not say it was a measurement, only a calculation…so, how do you do that? How do you “calculate” the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmophpere? What assumptions do you make? How to you account for trees and vegetation and the balance of o2 and CO2 between plants and animals? How do you account for the lightning that creates ozone and ozone’s reaction to hydrocarbons? The reality is no one knows how much “green house” gases were created last year…and to believe that someone can sit down and calculate the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in a year to any degree of accuracy???? I’ve got a few bridges to sell, cheap.
ALGORE is my shepherd; I shall not think.
He maketh me lie down in Greenzi pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still-freezing waters.
He selleth my soul for CO2:
He leadeth me in the paths of self-righteousness for his own sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of reason,
I will fear no logic: for thou art with me and thinking for me;
Thy Gore’s family oil fortune and thy 10,000 square Gorey foot mansion, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a movie in the presence of contradictory evidence:
Thou anointest mine head with nonsense; my fear runneth over.
Surely blind faith and hysteria shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of ALGORE forever.
Contemplating how to restrict comments to college IP addresses only…
Contemplating how to restrict college students from seeing debate in a free press, and to further indoctrinate them politically, eh?
Yes. Please troll elsewhere.
I’m just curious, given that there are a ton of older folks with lots of insight into things that might have happened when college students were too young to be interested in politics, why would you want to shut out that info?
what about alumni, faculty and staff? Surprised to hear a managing editor want to restrict free speech.
Surprising indeed. It should prompt you to ask exactly what would someone have to post to make me, a person who has twice been threatened with legal action while defending the right of people to comment on this website, to contemplate how to block access. You can rest assured I won’t but another ode to Al Gore, such an inane and trivial waste of time and I will switch to Facebook Comments only so you have to put your name and face on each comment.
or just remove comments altogether. Sorry you have received harassment but everyone knows that fools are going to post regardless.
Nah, we wont do that. I want to promote open discussion but it tests my patience from time to time.
Let me get this straight, the Global alarmists want us to believe that we somehow have reliable temperature data that goes back to the civil war time frame (and earlier) that is accurate to within tenths of a degree…we’ve done this in a statistical manner to represent the entire earth, compensated to atmospheric altitude and depth i.e., the earth’s not flat…we did this by compiling data from multiple sources such that the error between using tree rings and snow packs stayed less than about 0.1 degree C….we also measured the statical average height of the ocean for the last hundred years…. Seems to me that the plots are within the statistical error of the data. If the plots were drawn with the margin of error envelopes, then there would be no graphs. I don’t believe the data is real. I think the model predicts the historical data as well as the future predictions so we are comparing predictions to predictions. I do not think that there is a way to take a snapshot of the entire earth’s temperature in such a way the earths temperature can be measured. Call me silly, but I don’t think we can measure it today, most less 100 years ago.
And your degree in atmospheric sciences comes from which university now?
@That Guy….are you going to refute any of my comments? If you know of a way to measure the temperature of the earth today, most less 100 years ago, please enlighten us all.
I thought the comments I got were shitty, but oh lordy, at least most townies haven’t found my site