Found this little article this morning on Drudge. Thought
you all might find it interesting also.
DER SPIEGEL 19/2007 - May 7, 2007
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/...481684,00.html
GLOBAL WARMING
Not the End of the World as We Know It
By Olaf Stampf
How bad is climate change really? Are catastrophic floods and terrible droughts headed our way? Despite widespread fears of a greenhouse , the latest computer simulations are delivering far less dramatic predictions about tomorrow's climate.
German sunworshippers enjoy a tail on a Baltic Sea beach in early May. Germany could experience a tourist boom as a result of climate change.
DPA
German sunworshippers enjoy a tail on a Baltic Sea beach in early May. Germany could experience a tourist boom as a result of climate change.
Svante Arrhenius, the father of the greenhouse effect, would be called a heretic today. Far from issuing the sort of dire predictions about climate change which are common nowadays, the Swedish physicist dared to predict a paradise on earth for humans when he announced, in April 1896, that temperatures were rising -- and that it would be a blessing for all.
Arrhenius, who later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, calculated that the release of carbon dioxide -- or carbonic acid as it was then known -- through burning coal, oil and natural gas would lead to a significant rise in temperatures worldwide. But, he argued, "by the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates," potentially making poor harvests and famine a thing of the past.
Arrhenius was merely expressing a view that was firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness of the day: warm times are good times; cold times are bad.
During the so-called Medieval Warm Period between about 900 and 1300 A.D., for example, the Vikings raised livestock on Greenland and sailed to North America. New cities were built all across Europe, and the continent's population grew from 30 million to 80 million.
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The consequences of the colder temperatures that plunged civilization into the so-called Little Ice Age for several centuries after 1300 were devastating. Summers were rainy, winters cold, and in many places temperatures were too low for grain crops to mature. Famines and epidemics raged, and average life expectancy dropped by 10 years. In Germany, thousands of villages were abandoned and entire stretches of land depopulated.
The shock produced by the cold was as deep-seated it was long-lasting. When temperatures plunged unexpectedly once again in the 1960s, many meteorologists were quick to warn people about the coming of a new ice age -- supposedly triggered by man-made air pollution. Hardly anyone at the time believed a warming trend could pose a threat.
It was not until the rise of the environmental movement in the 1980s that everything suddenly changed. From then on it was almost a foregone conclusion that global warming could only be perceived as a disaster for the earth's climate. Environmentalists, adopting a strategy typical of the Catholic Church, have been warning us about the horrors of greenhouse gas ever since -- painting it as a punishment for the sin of meddling with creation. What was conveniently ignored, however, is that humanity has been reshaping the planet for a very long time, first by clearing forests and plowing fields, and later by building roads, cities and factories.
In the age of climate change, it has become a popular social pastime to scour the weather forecast for omens of doom. Has it ever been as hot in April as it is this year? Is this lack of rain normal? Could all this mean that the end is nigh?
Graphic: Our Changing World
DER SPIEGEL
Graphic: Our Changing World
Nowadays hardly anyone dares to question the increasingly shrill warnings about our climate, as more and more people jump on the hand-wringing bandwagon. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, for example, recently said that climate change poses at least as big a danger to the world as war. German Chancellor Angela Merkel agrees, calling developments "more than alarming," and asking: "Are we willing to accept the fact that we now have completely unprecedented weather phenomena, such as tropical nights in the Harz (Mountains) region?" The fact that tropical nights, as every meteorologist knows, are nothing new in Germany -- every summer has always had a few -- seems to have escaped her attention.
The apocalyptic mood seems to grow each time the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases a new section of its climate change report. Climate hysteria appears to be more contagious than a flu epidemic. "We only have 13 years left to save the earth," screamed a recent front-page headline in the German tabloid Bild. "If mankind is unable to stop the greenhouse effect by the year 2020, it will bring about its own demise -- and a horribly tortured one at that."
Young girls sit on a pier at the beach of Lake Constance during sunset in late April in Langenargen, Germany. April was unusually warm in Germany, prompting speculation the hot weather was due to climate change.
Getty Images
Young girls sit on a pier at the beach of Lake Constance during sunset in late April in Langenargen, Germany. April was unusually warm in Germany, prompting speculation the hot weather was due to climate change.
But how bad is climate change really? Will global warming trigger plagues of Biblical proportions? Can we look forward to endless droughts and catastrophic floods?
Or will Arrhenius end up being right after all? Could rising temperatures lead to higher crop yields and more tourism in many places? In other words, is humanity actually creating new paradises?
The truth is probably somewhere between these two extremes. Climate change will undoubtedly have losers -- but it will also have winners. There will be a reshuffling of climate zones on earth. And there is something else that we can already say with certainty: The end of the world isn't coming any time soon.
Largely unnoticed by the public, climate researchers are currently embroiled in their own struggle over who owns the truth. While some have always seen themselves as environmental activists aiming to shake humanity out of its complacency, others argue for a calmer and more rational approach to the unavoidable.
One member of the levelheaded camp is Hans von Storch, 57, a prominent climate researcher who is director of the Ins ute for Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht in northern Germany. "We have to take away people's fear of climate change," Storch told DER SPIEGEL in a recent interview. "Unfortunately many scientists see themselves too much as priests whose job it is to preach moralistic sermons to people."
Keeping a cool head is a good idea because, for one thing, we can no longer completely prevent climate change. No matter how much governments try to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it will only be possible to limit the rise in global temperatures to about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. But even this moderate warming would likely have far fewer apocalyptic consequences than many a prophet of doom would have us believe.
For one thing, the more paleontologists and geologists study the history of the earth's climate, the more clearly do they recognize just how much temperatures have fluctuated in both directions in the past. Even major fluctuations appear to be completely natural phenomena.
Additionally, some environmentalists doubt that the large-scale extinction of animals and plants some have predicted will in fact come about. "A warmer climate helps promote species diversity," says Munich zoologist Josef Reichholf.
Also, more detailed simulations have allowed climate researchers to paint a considerably less dire picture than in the past -- gone is the talk of giant storms, the melting of the Antarctic ice shield and flooding of major cities.
Improved regionalized models also show that climate change can bring not only drawbacks, but also significant benefits, especially in northern regions of the world where it has been too cold and uncomfortable for human activity to flourish in the past. However it is still a taboo to express this idea in public.
For example, countries like Canada and Russia can look forward to better harvests and a blossoming tourism industry, and the only distress the Scandinavians will face is the guilty conscience that could come with benefiting from global warming.
There is no doubt that there will be droughts in other parts of the world, especially in subtropical regions. But the widespread assumption that it is developing countries -- that is, the world's poor -- who will, as always, be the ones to suffer is incorrect. According to current predictions, precipitation in large parts of Africa will hardly decrease at all, except in the southern part of the continent. In fact, these same forecasts show the Sahel, traditionally a region beset by drought and famine, actually becoming wetter.
By contrast, some wealthy industrialized nations -- in fact, those principally responsible for climate change -- will likely face growing problems related to drought. The world's new drought zones lie in the southern United States and Australia, but also in Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy and Greece.
Graphic: A Warm Future
DER SPIEGEL
Graphic: A Warm Future
All of this will lead to a major shift within Europe, potentially leading to tough times for southern Spain's mega-resorts and boom times for hotels along the North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts. While the bulk of summer vacationers will eventually lose interest in roasting on Spain's Costa del Sol, Mediterranean conditions could prevail between the German North Sea island of Sylt and Bavaria's Lake Starnberg. The last few weeks of spring in Germany offered a taste of what's to come, as sun-loving crowds packed Berlin's urban beach bars and Munich's beer gardens.
The predicted temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius would mean that summers in Hamburg, not far from the North Sea coast, would be as warm as they are today in the southwestern city of Freiburg, while conditions in Freiburg would be more like those in Marseille today. Germany will undoubtedly be one of the beneficiaries of climate change. Perhaps palm trees will be growing on the island of Helgoland in the North Sea soon, and German citizens will be saving billions in heating costs -- which in turn would lead to a reduction in CO2 emissions.
But climate change will also have its drawbacks. While German summers will be less rainy, fall and winter rainfall in the country's north will increase by up to 30 percent -- and snow will be a thing of the past. Heavy downpours will also become more common. To avoid flooding, steps will have to be taken to provide better drainage for fields and farmlands, as well as to restore natural flood plains.
Meanwhile, the Kiel Ins ute for World Economics warns that higher temperatures could mean thousands of heat-related deaths every year. But the extrapolations that lead to this dire prediction are based on the mortality rate in the unusually hot summer of 2003, for which Germans were wholly unprepared. But if hot summer days do become the norm, people will simply adjust by taking siestas and installing air-conditioning.
The medical benefits of higher average temperatures have also been ignored. According to Richard Tol, an environmental economist, "warming temperatures will mean that in 2050 there will be about 40,000 fewer deaths in Germany attributable to cold-related illnesses like the flu."
Another widespread fear about global warming -- that it will cause super-storms that could devastate towns and villages with unprecedented fury -- also appears to be unfounded. Current long-term simulations, at any rate, do not suggest that such a trend will in fact materialize.
"According to our computer model, neither the number nor intensity of storms is increasing," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Ins ute for Meteorology, one of the world's leading climate research centers. "Only the boundaries of low-pressure zones are changing slightly, meaning that weather is becoming more severe in Scandinavia and less so in the Mediterranean."
According to another persistent greenhouse legend, massive flooding will strike major coastal cities, raising horrific scenarios of New York, London and Shanghai sinking into the tide. However this horror story is a relic of the late 1980s, when climate simulations were far less precise than they are today. At the time, some experts believed that the Antarctic ice shield could melt, which would in fact lead to a dramatic 60-meter (197-foot) rise in sea levels. The nuclear industry quickly seized upon and publicized the scenario, which it recognized as an argument in favor of its emissions-free power plants.
But it quickly became apparent that the horrific tale of a melting South Pole was nothing but fiction. The average temperature in the Antarctic is -30 degrees Celsius. Humanity cannot possibly burn enough oil and coal to melt this giant block of ice. On the contrary, current climate models suggest that the Antarctic will even increase in mass: Global warming will cause more water to evaporate, and part of that moisture will fall as snow over Antarctica, causing the ice shield to grow. As a result, the total rise in sea levels would in fact be reduced by about 5 cm (2 inches).
It's a different story in the warmer regions surrounding the North Pole. According to an American study published last week, the Arctic could be melting even faster than previously assumed. But because the Arctic sea ice already floats in the water, its melting will have virtually no effect on sea levels.
Nevertheless, sea levels will rise worldwide as higher temperatures cause the water in the oceans to expand. In addition, more water will flow into the ocean with the gradual thawing of the Greenland ice sheet. All things considered, however, in the current IPCC report climatologists are predicting a rise in sea levels of only about 40 centimeters (16 inches) -- compared with the previous estimate of about one meter (more than three feet). A 40-centimeter rise in sea levels will hardly result in more catastrophic flooding. "We have more computer models and better ones today, and the prognoses have become more precise as a result," explains Peter Lemke of the Alfred Wegener Ins ute for Polar and Marine Research in the northern German port city of Bremerhaven.
Some researchers do, however, estimate that regional effects could produce an 80-centimeter (31-inch) rise in the sea level along Germany's North Sea coast. This will lead to higher storm surges -- a problem the local population, already accustomed to severe weather, could easily address by building taller dikes.
Another comforting factor -- especially for poorer countries like Bangladesh -- is that none of these changes will happen overnight, but gradually over several decades. "We still have enough time to react," says Storch.
In short, the longer researchers allow their supercomputers to crunch the numbers, the more does the expected deluge dissipate. A rise in sea levels of several meters could only occur if Greenland were largely ice-free, but this is something scientists don't expect to happen for at least a few more centuries or even millennia. This lengthy timeframe raises the question of whether the current prognoses are even reliable.
A healthy dose of skepticism is a good idea, especially when scientists become all too confident and make themselves out to be oracles. But there can be a wide gap between their predictions and the end result -- a fundamental weakness of all computer simulations that present only incomplete pictures of reality.
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In the early years, for example, computer modelers underestimated the influence of aerosols, especially the sulfur particles that are released into the atmosphere during the combustion of oil and coal or during volcanic eruptions. These pollution particles block sunlight and thus cause significant cooling. The failure to adequately take aerosols into account explains why earlier models predicted a more drastic rise in temperatures than those in use today. One major unknown in the predictions depends on how quickly countries like China will filter out the pollutants from their power plant emissions -- if the air becomes cleaner it will also heat up more rapidly.
Other factors that can either weaken or strengthen the greenhouse effect are still not fully understood today. For example, will the carbon dioxide trapped in the world's oceans be released as the water heats up, thereby accelerating global warming? And how much faster do land plants and sea algae grow in a milder climate? Plant proliferation could bind more carbon dioxide -- and serve to slow down the greenhouse effect.
But the main problem lies in correctly calculating the effects of clouds. The tops of clouds act as mirrors in the sky, reflecting sunlight back into space -- thus cooling the planet. But the bottom sides keep the heat radiated by the earth from escaping into the atmosphere -- causing temperatures to rise.
Which of the two effects predominates depends primarily on the al ude at which clouds form. Simply put, low clouds tend to promote cooling while high clouds increase warming. So far scientists agree on only one thing, namely that more clouds will form in a greenhouse climate. They just don't know at which al ude.
Even the most powerful computer models are still too imprecise to simulate the details. However, the clouds alone will determine whether temperatures will increase by one degree more or less than the average predicted by the models. This is a significant element of uncertainty. "Clouds are still our biggest headache," concedes Erich Roeckner of the Max Planck Ins ute for Meteorology.
Roeckner is a conscientious man and a veteran of climate research, so he, of all people, should know the limits of simulation programs. Roeckner, who constantly expects surprises, neatly sums up the problem when he says: "No model will ever be as complex as nature."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
© DER SPIEGEL 19/2007
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH
Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:
Biologist Josef Reichholf on Global Warming: 'We Are Children of the Tropics' (05/08/2007)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...481707,00.html
IPCC Climate Change Report: How The World Can Be Saved (05/04/2007)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...481085,00.html
Emotionalizing Climate Change: Is the IPCC Doing Harm to Science? (05/03/2007)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...480766,00.html
Merkel on UN Climate Study: "Report Confirms Climate Change Is a Fact" (04/06/2007)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...476074,00.html
Climate Change Predictions: A Tropical Germany by 2100? (02/02/2007)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...463378,00.html
SPIEGEL Interview with Climatologist Hans Von Storch: "We Have to Take Away People's Fear of Climate Change" (03/16/2007)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...472200,00.html
Calculating the Heating Bill: Climate Change to Cost Germany €800 Billion (03/14/2007)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...471762,00.html
SPIEGEL 360: Our Climate Change Coverage
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,k- 6975,00.html
Interesting, but I would still rather not poke the big bear with a stick if I can help it.
We don't really know how the earth's climate will react to us throwing megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere for hundreds of years, but it doesn't take much to cause some nasty things to happen.
Here is another interesting article I found this
morning. Wonder what ever happen to
rough-n-ready, if he got to San Antonio or
not.....oh, well.... read on.
May 12, 2007
ERAU professor seeks balance in global warming debate
By MARK HARPER
Education Writer
DAYTONA BEACH -- Nick Shipley, an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University freshman, had just spent a week of classes watching two films with polar-opposite conclusions about global warming.
"After watching 'An Inconvenient Truth,' I was relatively convinced," Shipley said one day last month in class. "(Al Gore) did a good job in presenting his points very methodically one after the other. They all build up to essentially prove his point.
"After watching 'The Great Global Warming Swindle,' my thinking completely changed," he said. "I kind of did a complete flip-flop."
College students aren't the only ones being confronted with climate change, its causes and what -- if anything -- can be done about it.
A Democratic Congress, an Academy Award for "An Inconvenient Truth" and continuing United Nations' proclamations have all contributed to the drumbeat for reducing carbon dioxide emissions as a strategy for fighting global warming. Some scientists are concerned the forces that are shaping debate and making policy decisions are not based on truths -- convenient or not.
James Wanliss, a space physicist who teaches at Embry-Riddle, showed students the two films in an honors course led "The Politics and Science of Fear" because he said more and more the public is being sold one side of an issue with many dimensions.
"I fear that attempts are being made to purposefully subvert the public understanding of the nature of science in order to achieve political goals," he wrote in an e-mail. "Science is not about consensus, and to invoke this raises the hackles of scientists such as myself. The lure of politics and publicity is no doubt seductive, but it nevertheless amazes me that so many scientists have jumped on the bandwagon of consensus science, apparently forgetting or ignoring the sad history of consensus science."
"An Inconvenient Truth," the do entary starring Gore and a lot of graphs, makes the case that humans have contributed mightily to a 1-degree rise in the Earth's temperature in the last 50 years. It uses images of melting ice caps and dying polar bears to nudge viewers toward action for reasons of morality.
"The Great Global Warming Swindle," an anti-Gore do entary, doesn't question the Earth's temperature increase but takes to task the questions of why and what's next. For example, it suggests solar activity may have more to do with the planet's warming than carbon dioxideemissions.
Wanliss said he doesn't necessarily subscribe to either film, but believes his students -- and the public -- should remain skeptical of theories such as Gore's explanation of global warming.
Other Embry-Riddle scientists are less outspoken than Wanliss, but one -- John Olivero, professor and chairman of the department of physical science -- allowed that skepticism is an essential tool of the scientific method.
"Science lives with internal conflict all the time," Olivero said. "Part of what we have to do is continually challenge each other."
That process, they say, leads scientists closer to truths that may be elusive for lifetimes.
The truths of global warming are, if not inconvenient, incomprehensible, Wanliss argues.
"The atmosphere is incredibly complicated, and we know very little about it," he said. "We are studying a system which is so big . . . we don't know what all the variables are."
Pointing to quotes in magazine articles, Wanliss says Gore and the producers of the "Swindle" film are purposefully overstating their science as a means to a political end.
His views are certainly controversial.
Penelope Canan, a professor of sociology at the University of Central Florida, leans toward Gore's way of thinking.
"There's really no doubt that human activities have altered the global carbon cycle and the natural balances that have thickened the blanket of greenhouse gases that have kept our planet like Baby Bear's soup for thousands of years," she said in an e-mail. "I am certain that the data presented by Al Gore was digested by hundreds of thousands of research hours and peer-reviewed data by the world's leading scientists."
Sam Rabin, a freshman activist at Stetson University who helped screen "An Inconvenient Truth" on his campus, said many policymakers avoid difficult decisions that may come from carbon dioxide emission limitations, while journalists ramp up the skeptics' arguments in the name of balance.
"This is horribly misguided and counterproductive," Rabin wrote in an e-mail. "There is virtually no scientific debate about global warming or its cause."
But Wanliss' students at Embry-Riddle leaned toward the skeptical. The professor said that is an important lesson about science.
"You want certainty, but it's hard to get that," he said. "Science isn't about certainty."
[email protected]
Okay folks, just one more piece of information that those who
love government should love. It is quite lengthly so I am providing
the link only. I know all you manmade global warmers wont like
it, so you more than likely wont read it. And Al Gore hates these
people. Al must really hate the fact he invented the internet
because it can be used to debunk his crap.
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c..._id=&Issue_id=
Of course, these folks have a whole different outlook on life.
The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!
'Five Years Left To Save The Planet'
Updated: 12:30, Tuesday May 15, 2007
Our planet is just five years away from climate change catastrophe - but can still be saved, according to a new report.
Planet is five years from disaster
Planet is five years from disaster
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warns governments have until 2012 to "plant the seeds of change" and make positive moves to limit carbon emissions.
If they fail to do so, the WWF's Vision For 2050 warns "generations to come will have to live with the compromises and hardships caused by their inability to act".
"We have a small window of time in which we can plant the seeds of change, and that is the next five years," James Leape, from the WWF, said.
"We cannot afford to waste them. This is not something that governments can put off until the future."
Between now and 2050, the world's energy needs are expected to double.
Woe is me, what are we to do.........
Bumping this for R-N-R.
Leonardo and Al are going to save the planet!
Well, here is another little article I hope you find informative.
I did.
I just wished Rough-n-Ready would comment on some of these
folks who write the article. Could it be he is closed mind about
such things or it just goes against his fondest dreams. He
claims to be a scientist but seems to have a hard time acting
like one.
The Faithful Heretic
A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions
Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough to love it, and then there’s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he’s still hard at it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.
Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Ins ute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Ins ute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.
Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general—and the general’s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the nation’s leading climatologists.
How Little We Know
Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.
“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.
In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.
“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”
“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”
Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.
We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff. “Don’t talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It’s all written down.”
Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.
Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”
We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.
“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”
What Leads, What Follows?
What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.
We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:
Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?
A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?
Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…
A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.
This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”
Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.
Renaissance Man, Marathon Man
When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate. We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist, about the significance of Bryson’s work in advancing the science he’s now practiced for six decades.
“His contributions are manifold,” Hopkins said. “He wrote Climates of Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.”
This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson’s high-school interest in archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology, and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. “He’s looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on human societies,” Hopkins says. “He’s one of those people I would say is a Renaissance person.”
The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson’s work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being outpaced by an octogenarian.
Without addressing—or being asked—that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as “the father of the science of modern climatology.”
“In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the present state of climatology,” Moran says, adding, “We’re going to see his legacy with us for many generations to come.”
Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, Moran became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “I came to Wisconsin because he was there,” Moran told us.
With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin’s Weather and Climate, a book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors “couldn’t fathom” certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that “Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.”
Clearly what those editors couldn’t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what might make them—and consequently us—behave differently. This was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing up for work at a job he’s no longer paid to do.
“It’s fun!” he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.
“I think that’s one of the reasons for his longevity,” Moran says. “He’s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes people don’t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but that’s how real science takes place.”—Dave Hoopman
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