Is Man-Made Climate Change a Hoax?

The answer is no. 

Consider for a moment what it would take for Climate Change to be a hoax.  Not only would the temperature data for the last 120 years from all over the planet need to be faked, but so would ice core data, ocean sediment core data and studies across a whole range of disciplines, from climatology, geology, geophysics, meteorology, and oceanography, among others.  NOAA, NASA, the National Academy of Sciences and a slew of public and private academic institutions in this country alone would also have to be in on it. 

I would sooner believe that the U.S. Government was capable of covering up the existence of the 1947 Roswell UFO at Area 51.

Don’t take my word for it.  Every major scientific organization on the planet has looked at the evidence for Climate Change and come to the same conclusion. 

So, you don’t accept the view of these organizations?

Try this – last year, a well-known climate skeptic, physicist Richard Muller, in a study partially funded by the Koch Brothers (well-known both for their philanthropy and advocacy that Climate Change is a hoax), reviewed the data used by major climatic research institutions and came to the same conclusion – the data are sound and the changes are real. He found no evidence that any of the data were fraudulent.

Or this - the Department of Defense, in its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review stated (in part):

“. . . climate-related changes are already being observed in every region of the world, including the United States and its coastal waters. Assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration. While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.”

Why would the Defense Department be planning for future conflicts and natural disasters due to climate change if it is all a hoax?

Next question – is Climate Change caused by us?

Again - Every major scientific organization on the planet has looked at the evidence and come to the same conclusion. 

I could give you all sorts of charts and graphs to back this up but I have found that it’s not worth the trouble to do that.

Think about this – it took 15,000 years for CO2 levels to go from about 180 parts per million (ppm) at the depths of the last ice age to pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm (That’s the difference between a mile of ice where you sit now and today’s climate). It took 200 years to go from 280 ppm to the current level of 394 ppm, 72 times faster than the natural increase that accompanied the end of the ice age.

Keep in mind that modern civilization developed during the last 4000 years that climate has been fairly stable.

Where did this recent spike in CO2 come from? 

Short answer – us.  Not volcanoes – us.

That’s power plants, cars and trucks, home heating, industrial usage the total of which far exceed anything that volcanic eruptions have put into the atmosphere during the last 200 years.

Does CO2 contribute to Climate Change?

Yup.

It’s called the Greenhouse Effect. CO2 absorbs infrared radiation, the kind of radiation emitted by the surface of the Earth when it is warmed by the light from the sun.  If the heat cannot escape to space, the temperature goes up. Even though CO2 makes up about 0.0003 percent of the atmosphere, it has a profound effect on the Earth’s temperature.  A Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius figured this out using nothing but pen and paper back in 1896.

You may then ask how such a small amount of anything could have such a strong affect.  Well, consider that when you take a few hundred milligrams of aspirin, Advil or Tylenol for a fever or muscle aches, that few hundred milligrams represents something like one ten-thousandth of your body weight –but this amount of medicine is enough to do the job.  Lots of natural phenomena, large and small, are triggered in an analogous manner.

The next question that might come to mind is that if at the depths of the last ice age, global temperatures were on average, 8 degree C cooler than now, why isn’t global temperature 8 degree C warmer than it was just two centuries ago?

Again, an analogy helps explain this.  If you have to push something heavy – let’s say your car, you push on it and the car does not move immediately – you have to overcome the car’s inertia, or tendency to stay still before it starts to roll.

We have pushed on the Earth’s climatic system but it is a complex system which gets pushed by many factors including the earth’s orbit and inclination, the sun’s energy output, volcanic sulfate aerosols, ocean circulation, the position of the continents, ability of the oceans to absorb heat and gases, the amount of forested land, the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases like CO2 and, to a lesser extent, methane. The climate “car” has only just started to move.

Average global temperature is up just about 1 degree C.  The oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic as they absorb CO2.  Sea level is rising as glaciers melt and warmer waters expand. The Arctic ice pack is decreasing in extent and volume.  Severe weather phenomena, such as extended regional droughts which are well out of the norm – have been occurring (Texas 2011 and Russia 2010 for example).  All of these changes have been predicted.  The “acid test” of a scientific theory is its ability to make accurate predictions.

Granted the Earth has had many natural climate changes in the past and will again in the future.  The geologic record shows that the Earth has been much warmer in the past and was so for tens of millions of years after the extinction of the dinosaurs – but that was long enough for life to evolve and adapt to that climate.

The geologic record also shows what happens to the climate when greenhouse gases such as CO2 increase at the sorts of rates we are seeing now.  The pace of species extinction increases enough to be noticeable in comparison with background levels. That’s paleontologist speak for “extinction event.”  A spike in CO2 concentrations to about 1000 ppm above background levels 56 million years ago made way for critters that evolved into us.

I would personally be really bummed if we slipped back into an ice age, to put it mildly. What we are doing right now makes that less likely. What sort of climate we are heading into is far less clear but the research done to date indicates that it will be far less stable than what the planet has had since the end of the last ice age.

So, the question then becomes – what can we do about it? 

Short answer – nothing, at least in the near term. 

I wrote an op-ed in the Westborough News a couple of years back that said we need to do something about it now. However, I have changed my mind, but not because I think Climate Change isn’t a problem.  It is just that now think it is too late to stop major changes that are going to happen in the next couple of centuries.

Given how many gigatons of CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere and the fact it stays in the atmosphere for centuries, a certain amount of climate change is going to occur regardless of what we do now.  So even if we stopped fossil fuel burning tomorrow, nothing we can do will stop temperature increases and subsequent changes in climate that will accompany what we have already put in to the climate system.   Essentially – a lot of climate change is already “baked in”.

It would be great if we could get on a sustained program to get off of fossil fuels, but it is also obvious that our government is not going to do anything to cut greenhouse gas emissions substantially. Certainly not when one of the major political parties in this country denies that we are doing anything to the climate. Both Senator James Inhofe and former Senator Rick Santorum have stated in no uncertain terms that Climate Change is a hoax (Santorum also thinks evolution is a hoax, but that’s another story).  Both the Democrats and the GOP get a lot of financial support from Big Energy – a further impediment to action.

Other major countries – such as China or India – are not going to do much either – especially as long as the US doesn’t take the lead.  Their populations are striving to have the same lifestyle we have – which requires a lot of energy per capita to sustain. With the Earth’s population growing at an ever increasing rate, greenhouse gas emissions will continue upwards even if per capita energy use decreases.

Another factor is the inability of most of us to think in terms of impacts that are decades or centuries into the future.  Right now, the country cannot figure out how to get its fiscal act together in the next decade, let alone deal with a problem whose greatest effects will be felt many decades from now.

I am convinced by the data that we are in the process of pushing the Earth’s climate out of the relatively stable configuration we have lived in for the last several thousand years.  The car is about to start rolling.  I think our grandchildren will live in interesting times.

Bottom line - What we can do is start to figure out how to adapt to predicted changes. The Department of Defense is doing this already.  The rest of us will need to follow suit, whether we like it or not.