Resetting Earth's Thermostat

Tuesday June 24, 2008, 4:59 am
I hope we don't have to do this. Even if we are forced to it, we have to solve the problem of ocean acidification

Tuesday June 24, 2008, 10:42 pm
I certainly hope that someone fully identifies these unintended consequences of geo-engineering before Samuel Thernstrom (this article's writer) completes his study of its policy implications - it might prove 'surprisingly simple' to tinker in this way, but it also sounds unsurprisingly dangerous to do so without a clear understanding of the big picture.

Tuesday June 24, 2008, 11:26 pm
Come on Pekka...not the ocean acidfication ruse again.
How many times does one have to show that it is poppycock. Ocean organisms from corals to cocolithophores mop it up in no time making calcium carbonate. The PH of the ocean varies with the season, the time of day and how close to shore the sample was taken.
http://www.physorg.com/news128613620.html

As to geoengineering...on whose authority?

I love the crystal ball the writer is using. How else could he know that the warming will continue well into the next century and CO2 levels will continue to rise.?

Meanwhile no sunspots and continued cooling since 2001.

Wednesday June 25, 2008, 1:21 am
I'll leave Pekka to maybe come back to you on the oceanic acidity, and move onto the reprise of the now very familiar 'the world has actually been cooling since 2001'... Or to use the words of David Whitehouse, from his New Statesman article, Has global warming stopped?:

"The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming - the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly."

Mark Lynas penned a response to that in the same magazine the following week, Has global warming really stopped?, which included:

"I'll be blunt. Whitehouse got it wrong – completely wrong. The article is based on a very elementary error: a confusion between year-on-year variability and the long-term average. Although CO2 levels in the atmosphere are increasing each year, no-one ever argued that temperatures would do likewise. Why? Because the planet's atmosphere is a chaotic system, which expresses a great deal of interannual variability due to the interplay of many complex and interconnected variables. Some years are warmer and cooler than others. 1998, for example, was a very warm year because an El Nino event in the Pacific released a lot of heat from the ocean. 2001, by contrast, was somewhat cooler, though still a long way above the long-term average. 1992 was particularly cool, because of the eruption of a large volcano in the Philippines called Mount Pinatubo.
'Climate' is defined by averaging out all this variability over a longer term period. So you won't, by definition, see climate change from one year to the next - or even necessarily from one decade to the next. But look at the change in the average over the long term, and the trend is undeniable: the planet is getting hotter.
...
Every qualified scientific body in the world, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to the Royal Society, agrees unequivocally that global warming is both a reality, and caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
...
Yes, scientific uncertainties remain in every area of the debate. But consider how high the stakes are here. If the 99% of experts who support the mainstream position are right, then we have to take urgent action to reduce emissions or face some pretty catastrophic consequences. If the 99% are wrong, and the 1% right, we will be making some unnecessary efforts to shift away from fossil fuels, which in any case have lots of other drawbacks and will soon run out. I'd hate to offend anyone here, but that's what I'd call a no-brainer."

Seems compelling enough to me, Judy, so perhaps you'd be so good as to change the denialist repartee a little bit next time? After all, don't want the conversation getting stale.

Wednesday June 25, 2008, 4:33 pm
Ah, like it or not we are ALREADY geo-enginering!!!! We are currently dumping 2 BILLION tons of CO2 into the air each year and increasing all the time (not to mention the other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrisoxide). We are already affecting the consentration of these gases in the atmosphere. We are already affecting the climate. We are also measurably changing the acidity of the seas. We are ALREADY affecting the earth on a global scale.

Friday June 27, 2008, 11:19 pm
"Meanwhile no sunspots and continued cooling since 2001."

Either that's a typo (you meant 2007) or you are lying outright, Judy. Sigh!