Bloody Inconvenient Truth, Bloody Al Gore

[Maxus]

The other day, An Inconvenient Truth came on, and I listened with half an ear.

Until the part where Al Gore shows a graph where the Antarctic ice composition is used to analyze the last 650,000 years of the earth's climate, and tries to cite evidence against climate change being cyclical

I didn't go through an Earth History class without learning anything, and I recognized some flaws in that part of his presentation. To whit:

• --the last 650,000 years is not representative of the earth's total climate history. Not by a long shot. We've been in an ice age for the past million or two million years--just fucking started, in geological time and compared to the length of past ice ages. Of course, he was using a flawed method for checking the temperature of the earth, but I'll talk about that later
  
  --he didn't recognize that an ice age actually contains periods of glacial advance and retreat. No, the way he told it, the last ice age was, what, ten thousand years ago? And then he makes reference to the "past seven ice ages in the past 650,000 years", where there's been about five true ice ages in the history of the planet.
  
  --Checking the composition of Antarctic ice is a nice dating measure and all, but there's a better way with a much longer record, and that is tiny marine fossils. Basically, the ocean contains lighter and heavier kinds of water of water, the mass being determined by the oxygen isotope. For as long as there have been tiny little sea creatures, some have used the oxygen in the water around them to build their silica shells--and some of those make their shells to contain the same proportion of oxygen isotopes as the water around them does. This becomes important when you realize that lighter water is the first to evaporate and the first to end up in the ice at the poles--meaning that the amount of ice on the planet can be derived from examining the ratios of oxygen isotops in the shells of little silica-shell-making critters. This fossil record goes back a hell of a lot longer than a piddling 650,000 years.

There's probably some other stuff, but it was about this time that I realized I was shouting at the TV and decided I'd better go watch something else.

I may buy the movie and persuade some of the geology faculty and students to watch it with me, while we take notes (there's only four professors, and they like me).

[Crissa]

Except humans, as we know them, haven't been on the planet 650,000 years. Other years are therefore irrelevent.

The last ice age was ten thousand years ago. Continental glaciers came and went. If you believe that the earth has always been in an ice age as long as humans have been around, then you aren't participating in the conversation.

(Fossil records aren't as exact and are missing small chunks of time. While we can give and exact year for tree rings and ice layers, we're down to hundreds of years for most fossils. Good when measuring millions of years, but bad when measuring single years.)

I don't know what you're smoking, but it has nothing to do with the actual point of the dissertation: That at no time while humans walked the earth has atmospheric carbon dioxide been higher; this leads to higher temperatures; higher temperatures lead to climate change; we're highly dependent on the climate as it was a hundred years ago.

So yeah, what does your complaint have to do with the actual topic?

-Crissa

[ubernoob]

Crissa seems more informed than me...

[Maxus]

So yeah, what does your complaint have to do with the actual topic?

-Crissa

It comes down to spectacular claims requiring spectacular evidence and doubts of the accuracy of An Inconvenient Truth's methods/evidence.


Anyway, I told the hydrology/environmental professor about the idea of subjecting An Inconvenient Truth to some analysis, and he thought it'd be fun. So I may be putting up the results here.

[Maj]

The thing that really got me about that chart is that carbon dioxide levels follow temperature by about 800 years. They don't precede it.

[Username17]

Maj, I seriously don't know where you got that information, but it is wrong.



Now there are a lot of factors that go into climate other than Carbon Dioxide levels. Volcanoes, for example, can put quite a formidable cold snap on the world without taking any CO2 out of the air. Indeed, a subsequent plant die off would put CO2 into the air, which would then raise temperatures even as the dust settled and temperatures prepared to rise anyway.

Nevertheless, methane and CO2 levels have been shown quite persuasively to correlate very well with global temperatures.

-Username17

[Crissa]

The thing that really got me about that chart is that carbon dioxide levels follow temperature by about 800 years. They don't precede it.

That's because the general way things work in the Earth's biosphere is that rising temperatures release more CO2 into the atmosphere.

This is not inconsistent with CO2 being a greenhouse gas because that is known independently.

-Crissa

[Tydanosaurus]

--he didn't recognize that an ice age actually contains periods of glacial advance and retreat. No, the way he told it, the last ice age was, what, ten thousand years ago? And then he makes reference to the "past seven ice ages in the past 650,000 years", where there's been about five true ice ages in the history of the planet.

Chill.

There are different ways to refer to an ice age, one of which refers to those periods of glacial advance within longer general cooling periods. Just as Gore uses the phrase. When most people talk about an ice age, that's what they're talking about.

As for the rest, read the IPCC and you'll have more respect for An Inconvenient Truth.

[Maj]

Sorry, Frank. I didn't see anything at your link that said anything in opposition to my statement. And to be honest, I've never seen anyone dispute the fact that CO2 levels lag behind temperature.

I also don't dispute that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. But I can tell you that water vapor is more of a greenhouse gas than CO2 ever will be.

[josephbt]

Can't really comment on the documentary, haven't seen it.

What i can comment is bloody Al Gore. Why(HOW??) the fvck did he get the Nobel prize?

[Username17]

Sorry, Frank. I didn't see anything at your link that said anything in opposition to my statement. And to be honest, I've never seen anyone dispute the fact that CO2 levels lag behind temperature.

Here's something which directly addresses your point. The 800 year lag that republicans ant about a lot is not found continuously throughout the record, only at a couple of data points that presumably represent other events.

The ice ages show that temperature can determine CO2 as well as CO2 driving temperature. Some sceptics – not scientists – have seized upon this idea and are claiming that the relation is one way, that temperature determines CO2 levels but CO2 levels do not affect temperature.

To repeat, the evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas depends mainly on physics, not on the correlation with past temperature, which tells us nothing about cause and effect. And while the rises in CO2 a few hundred years after the start of interglacials can only be explained by rising temperatures, the full extent of the temperature increases over the following 4000 years can only be explained by the rise in CO2 levels.

-Username17

[Tydanosaurus]

But I can tell you that water vapor is more of a greenhouse gas than CO2 ever will be.

That's another red herring. Lots of things are better greenhouse gasses than CO2. Methane, for instance. (As an aside, it's not CO2 that matters, but carbon, in whatever form). The issue isn't whether a chemical well cause the earth to retain heat, but whether the atmosphere contains more or less of that chemical over time.

We can track carbon loads over time and match them to temperature increases and decreases through a variety of ingenious measures, including animal and plant life, coral growth, soil and mineral deposits, and a bunch of other things.

If you aren't convinced by Gore, read the IPCC.

[Crissa]

Gore got the prize because he was instrumental in creating the Kyoto accords, as well as giving this seminar we're talking about.

It only took about twenty years of work, with more and more of his time and money focused on the issue - to the point that it's been his full-time job (more hours than W's spent in the white house) since he won the 2000 presidential election.

So yeah, he deserves the damn nobel prize for using his ability to speak and work with politicians around the world. Otherwise, this would still just be an issue that science geeks the world around knew but no one else cared about. Instead, it's an issue that only one nation on this planet has not accepted as priority to human survival.

-Crissa

[Username17]

Instead, it's an issue that only one nation on this planet has not accepted as priority to human survival.

Not quite true. Here in Czech Republic for example, the president has seriously said that higher temperatures and water levels are something that the world can an should adapt to, and that those who can't or won't "just deal with it" are the enemies of freedom.

I think it helps that the current model is that we will probably lose Frankfurt and that the Czech Republic will just freeze over less during the Winter. There are other countries in a similar boat: Bolivia could probably give a fuck if sea levels rise, and Mongolia is making a fortune (for Mongolia) on newly excavated glacier mammoths. So it's not that there is only one country that has accepted that global warming is a priority for human survival - it's that there's only one country that still claims to be agnostic about whether it is happening at all.

-Username17

[Crissa]

Well, put it this way: It didn't stop them from agreeing to treaties limiting carbon emissions. Or agreeing to agree.

-Crissa

[josephbt]

Yeees, it is such a crysis. No other problem on Earth is even close to global warming. Famine and wars and dictatorships and slave labour don't even come close.

It's a fvckin overblown media hype. Yes, there is GW. Yes, the greenhouse gases make temperatures rise. So? That's such a big deal, it's happening so fast? Since the '70, we've been seeing how we will drown in the oceans. Every year they keep pushing the year when this will happen. I'm simply too sceptic after all this time of panic to belive that it is such an alarming matter. And it certainly ins't something that warrants a Nobel prise.

On the other hand, Kissinger also won it, so thats saying a lot about non-bias of the prise.

[Username17]

Yeees, it is such a crysis. No other problem on Earth is even close to global warming. Famine and wars and dictatorships and slave labour don't even come close.

Actually, it is famine. In lots of countries. Different weather patterns mean that the crop production cycles that people have created over generations don't quite work right, leading to food shortfalls all over the world.

There is a reason that rice exportation was banned in China and India this last year, and ultimately it is climatological in origin. It is not overblown media hype, it's a serious fucking problem that took a hundred years to start breaking shit and could easily continue breaking our shit for a hundred more.

People and food plants don't just spontaneously evolve. The natural solution requires a mutant or subset of the existing population to happen to have a genetic answer to a shift in environment, and then every single fucking last one of the remaining population has to die. Evolution is horrible, and it's often not very fast, efficient, or reliable.

-Username17

[josephbt]

And then again, in a lot of countries, different weather patterns will mean more crops.

[Username17]

And then again, in a lot of countries, different weather patterns will mean more crops.

No. They won't. That's not how it works, at all.

In the long run, we eventually will be able to grow stuff in every region according to the climate that it happens to have. You know, assuming that the climate actually stops changing long enough for us to find plants and growing cycles that work with the new hand that we are given.

But in the immediate, and without the advent of biological science "immediate" has historically been a term that is tens of thousands of years long, the stuff that we did grow in area X using technique Y won't do that anymore. The fact that we may eventually find technique Z to grow crop Q in the new climate doesn't help today's food stores at all.

Rice requires water at certain times of its life cycle, barley likes frost, and so on and so forth. When the rains come at different times, when the frosts don't come at all, then the plants that we've spent the last 30,000 years breeding don't grow. We have genetics and biology and super science, so we can replicate that trick much faster today, but from the standpoint of the seeds we are growing we are being forced to start pretty much from scratch. Food is not a generic quantity, it is the product of long and carefully cultivated ecosystems which will in fact tumble like a house of cards if the climate changes drastically in short periods of time.

Seriously, in the here and now we are running out of rice. We're dumping thousands of tonnes of fertilizers and tapping deeply into non-replenishable aquifers just to keep rice production from falling. And the climate shifts are accelerating year to year. The heroic efforts we are doing need to be more heroic next year and we're already falling short and we're already drawing on reserves we don't really have.

Creating a sustainable agricultural system requires a self sustaining ecology for that agricultural system, and that's impossible if the climate itself does not stay even relatively stable. As long as that ain't happening, we're just playing catch-up - and we are losing people to starvation every moment we fail to maintain parity.

-Username17

[Crissa]

This year we do not have enough soybean seeds to replace all the corn that was destroyed in the midwest floods. (There isn't enough time to grow corn when it's destroyed in June, so you have to switch to a shorter crop)

Not because midwest floods are uncommon or unpredictable or haven't happened before.

In the US, flour prices have doubled this year alone.

Farmers have to predict the climate months in advance to grow things. When they can't do that, you end up with... Well, dead crops.

-Crissa