Say Goodbye to the Earth as We know It (edited 11/19/08)

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Nothing like a word of optimism, eh?

I am so hopping mad!!! I just read AP's version of pres-elect Obama's video message to the Los Angeles meeting on climate change today.

He plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Let me just toss in here that today at the library I grabbed "Censoring Science" by Mark Bowen, released in January 2008. I started plodding through it, and primarily it centers around data that led Jim Hansen, regarded as the preeminent climate scientist of our time to state, in 1988 after testifying to a Senate Committee, "It's time to stop waffling...and say that the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate now."

Folks, that statement was made in 1988. If we continue to allow greenhouse gas emissions to exceed 1990 levels for 12 years-where will the global climate be?

And cap and trade by auctioning carbon credits? I still argue that the rising price of oil crashed the global economy-so how is raising the price of energy via cap and trade going to help the economy?

I leafed through to the end of the book, and found Jim's web site that I was going to check out, when I came across the AP article on Obama'a climate change policies. So I haven't checked the website out yet and have other things going on at the moment, but here is the web page if anyone wants to check it out before me.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1

EDIT:
I have corrected the link-I misread the last character as an l instead of a 1. Should work now, but you need Adobe to read the PDF docs, if interested.

I will also add that Obama at least seems to be following James Hansen's recommendations in the latest PDF. Those are to reduce/eliminate burning of coal. Hansen projects that if the use of coal, the number one CO2 contributor, is curtailed, given the projection of the remaining oil reserves, by 2020 CO2 emissions will gradually start to return to approximate 1990 levels.

In other words, the declining availibility of oil will reduce consumption and the production of CO2 as contributed from oil.

Given those projections, Hansen estimates that there will still be climate change, but not in the extreme that would make life uncomfortable here on Earth.

Those were my impressions from the most recent PDF document.

From my personal climate observations here in my little corner of the Earth, I would venture to say that climate science is a very complicated thing.

For example, the last two summers have seen the greatest loss of Artic sea ice in recorded history. Last fall we had an extremely warm season here, followed by near record snowfall for the winter. This fall, we have been well below normal for average temperatures. Our highs this week, according to local meteorologists, are more in line with average temperatures for December. So, this fall we are below normal for temperature. We have also had a very wet autumn-so perhaps the extensive cloud cover has contributed to those lower temperatures.

Obviously there are many variables that create climatic conditions. If the loss of sea ice was a primary factor in our climate here, I would assume that the last two years would be similar, but they are not. I am curious as to what our snowfall amounts will look like for this winter compared to last year.