One Degree Makes Huge Difference
When Global Warming comes up, I often hear, “So what? The temperature’s only gone up like, what? One degree? Ha! Big fat deal!”
The “one-degree” temperature data came independently from land stations and ships, which greatly correspond since thermometers came into widespread vogue around 1850.
From this data, the combined best estimate of global surface temperature change is a 0.6 degree C increase. For the Celsius illiterate, that’s 1.8 degrees Farenheit, which is closer to TWO degrees than one. Still, you say, what’s the big deal?
Global Warming In Progress
Below are two photographs of Muir Glacier in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park.
The top photo was taken on August 13, 1941. The bottom photo was taken on August 31, 2004. Seven miles of ice replaced by a valley full of ocean water. Foilage where it was once too cold to grow.
That’s the difference.
Read More: global warming, climate change, Muir Glacier, Glacier Bay, Alaska
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Great blog, Joe.
Would you mind if I posted this, in its entirety, on my blog?
Indigus: I’d be glad for you to post it. Spread the word, and thanks for dropping by! :-)
P.S. Adding you to my link list…love your blog title: God Is NOT an Asshole.
Thanks, Joe.
I’ve been on the Athabasca glacier, in a SnowCat. The photos of that place, then and now, hit me in the gut.
I don’t deny the world is going through climate change. I just don’t think humans are affecting it one way or the other. A volcano puts out more pollution that a coal plant’s smokestack.
It’s more complicated than that, Holywriter. The Industrial Age has had an undeniable impact on climate, all facts considered.
The chlorine molecules in the upper atmosphere that destroys the ozone is not only from spray deodorant, etc…every Space Shuttle launch unleashes a gargantuan quantity of ozone destroying chemicals. Jet planes are impacting our atmosphere horrendously. Skin cancer rates are skyrocketing Downunder. Australia and New Zealand are becoming as dangerous as Antarctica, in terms of places to live, and may soon be nearly uninhabitable.
Our atmosphere shrank in thickness by over a mile between the mid 80s and the mid 90s.
Volcanos do their part, but humans have done theirs, as well. Look it up.
I edited that and botched the grammar.
Sorry to be so preachy but volcanic activity has always been around, and the argument that it gets humans off the hook for the recent climate lurch is a lame, irresponsible, and unenlightened one.
Let me preface this by saying I’m definitely not an expert on the environment. But, just from a pure logic standpoint, it seems the C02 levels in ice-core data and the climb in temperature over the last century and a half have a proportional ratio.
Now, that could be because the global warming caused CO2 levels to rise, or the CO2 levels caused the global warming, or, less likely, something entirely different. However, humans are responsible for belching out tons of CO2 (in proportions that rival volcanic output…). And I don’t know of anybody running a gigantic air conditioning machine in the open, so, for me, that makes me lean toward the human-added CO2 at least in part causing the global warming. I’m probably still missing a lot of facts, though, because I’m not well read up on it. Yet.
What I am a little surprised to hear from so many people is that there’s no way us little ol’ humans could cause a big enough change in the atmosphere to cause global warming. This coming from the same generation who will swear straight up that the hairspray their mom used to keep her beehive hairdo aloft single-handedly ripped a giant hole in the ozone over the north pole.
Seems if refrigerators and aerosol cans can put a hole in the sky, we should have no problem believing those millions of cars and coal plants can cause the temps to rise.
But again, this is not science–this is my speculation without all the facts. Contradicting information is welcome, and please jump in here and correct and educate. It’s like Dragnet….I want facts, damnit! Facts!!!! :-) We can handle the truth! Bring it on! :-)
One thing the ice-cores show is that never have CO2 levels been this high without an ice-age soon following. And the transition to full-blown ice-age condition is swift. As quickly as a decade or two.
I don’t pretend to be an expert, but I first began studying this in 1990 when I received a packet of info which included a study on ice-core data, as well as the Gulf Stream as climate engine. The salinity of the North Atlantic is what drives the Gulf Stream. With the melting of the ice cap, salinity levels have dropped precipitously and slowed the Stream to a near stop. There are only a couple of “chimneys”, i.e. water columns of falling high-salinity water, left functioning.
Look for wicked winters in the UK and N Europe. It could get ugly real fast.
Don’t let the warming throw you, as counter-intuitive as it seems.
The Holywriter: In fact, each year volcanoes release on average somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 times less CO2 than is released by humans through the burning of fossil fuels.
Major volcanic eruptions do release lots of particulate matter into the atmosphere. However, on the whole, these tend to have a temporary cooling effect that lasts on the order of months to a few years. The cooling effect due to the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991 can be seen in the climate record…and, in fact, has been used by scientists to test the global climate models that they use to study the effect of CO2 on climate.
Joel: (If you’re still reading this far back…) I just watched an Inconvenient Truth, and was really impressed by some of the facts presented. For instance, that none of the past ice ages/warm periods had anywhere close the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as today.
Before I saw the movie, I imagined it was going to present some arguable theories, but instead it laid out pretty inarguable hard facts.
I’m just curious, has any scientist (besides the lying shills at Exxon, etc.) shot holes in those facts yet? Just wondering before I pass my DVD around and brag on it too much…
Joe:
I think the facts hold up pretty well. Here is a piece from a climate scientist working in the field: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/al-gores-movie/ (In general, Real Climate is a very good source of information on climate science.)
The one thing that I would say regarding the ice age / interglacial cycles and CO2 levels that Gore glossed over is that the link between CO2 and warming in these past cycles is more complicated than simply CO2 causing the warming. In fact, it is generally understood that the warming was initiated by orbital (”Milankovitch”) oscillations and that this warming itself caused a release of CO2 (by some mechanism that scientists have various hypotheses for but no definitive conclusion) and that this released the CO2 caused further warming. The best estimate is that about 1/2 of the warming going from the glacial to interglacial is caused by the CO2.
So, what you actually had in the past is a complicated process whereby warming caused CO2 to rise which then caused warming. Our current case is a little bit different than these historical analogs in that we know that the current rise in CO2 is a result of us and not of any natural process. Nonetheless, the basic idea that this CO2 that we are releasing is causing and will continue to cause warming is well-understood. And, the fact that warmings in the past also tended to cause increases in CO2 also suggests the possibility of a feedback cycle whereby the warming we produce through the increased CO2 levels causes natural sources to release more CO2 into the atmosphere thus accelerating the warming further.
[...] There’s no longer any debate that the average global temperature climbed a degree over the past century. [...]
The Muir Glacier photos are terribly convincing to me. The Earth is our space ship and we are tinkering with our life support systems.
BirdAdvocate: Your comment reminded me of this photo, taken 4 billion miles from here in 1990: Pale Blue Dot
We’re all Horton’s Whos, riding on a speck of cosmic dust. You’re so right—no time to be tinkering with the life support systems!
[...] This photograph was taken 4 billion miles away in 1990. We’re all Horton’s Whos, riding on a speck of cosmic dust. As BirdAdvocate so wisely pointed out, “It’s no time to be tinkering with the life support systems!” [...]
[...] We’ve seen the huge difference a one degree change makes, and now, the U.S. National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, reports that in January, the world’s land areas were a whopping 3.4°F warmer than normal. This breaks the old 2002 record by 0.81°F. It also stands as the biggest temperature jump the world has seen in 10 years. [...]
Science, not anecdotes. Global warming is an excuse for population reduction and control (energy reduction). Global temperatures correlate with sun spot activity. Right now there is global warming on Mars too!
Mathematical evidence depends on the period selected just like the stock market. It can be up or down. When I was a kid the push from “teachers” was the the earth was freezing and we were all going to freeze to death.
We might want to look into HAARP and consider its effects, not only on the weather but on living organisms.
Super site, lots of great reads, thanks!
There are a lot of this supposed consensus that both sides of this issue have to take on faith. Greenland used to export wheat. Today it exports a few fish and some amazing fog banks. There is a place that has had a notable pollution phenomenon named for it. The brown cloud os Asia is not nearly enough to get the two largest polluters in the in the world to sign on to Kyoto but countries much cleaner and countries investing so much more are hated for what many call denying genocide. Apparently we care more about the temperature of the garbage we spew not the fact that it is a deadly toxin. I don’t have to take this on faith and neither does anyone else. You can just read the blogs.
China and India are putting a new “unregulated” coal fired power plant on line EVERY 5 DAYS, that should concern even those most skeptical of global warming. Their populations are less than 1/3 of the worlds population.
How many new cars, trucks are on the road since 1941? (I have 3). How many more jet aircraft? (don’t think there were any passenger jets in 1941).
Heard a great, but possibly insulting to some, comment the other day:
“to those who are having a hard time with the “Global” warming concept, start trying to understand it in the “Flat Earth” warming context.”
Sorry, but some of our good friends just need a shove sometimes, don’t they?
[...] The chart above compares temperature, atmospheric Co2 levels (in parts per million), and carbon emissions (in gigatons). Sure, the temperature change is only about one degree, but we know that one degree makes a huge difference. [...]
Every time I see this stuff, it makes me want to puke. Goddamn socialist propaganda. Their is no evidence to suggest a connection between pollution and global warming nor is there even the slightest shred of data to suggest such a thing.
To begin with, 2 degrees is NOT a lot. People need to stop thinking that annual average changes are to be treated on different scales than the normal daily temperature.
To reinforce that point, this post was made just six months ago. At the time of the post, as stated above, the global average temperature had risen 1.8 degrees. In the time elapsed since, in fact, it has dropped by 3.5 degrees.
My second point: During the industrial revolution, during the 1800’s, pollution levels were several *hundred* times what they are today. In big cities such as London and New York, the centers of such pollution, people thought they were falling into a new Ice Age, not burning up. Which makes perfect sense, considering my final point:
THE GREENHOUSE AFFECT MAKES NO SENSE! How is it that greenhouse gasses let sunlight in, and yet block it when it tries to come back out? It’s just an absolutely ridiculous concept to begin with.
Alex: I refer you to the U.S. Government EPA FAQ: State of Knowledge.
As for 2 degrees not making a big difference…the average global temperature during the last ice age was only a few degrees cooler…and it DID make a big difference.
As for the 3.5 degrees drop…show me a link to some data.
As for “THE GREENHOUSE AFFECT MAKES NO SENSE! How is it that greenhouse gasses let sunlight in, and yet block it when it tries to come back out?”
Well, you know…have you ever been in a GREENHOUSE? It works like that.
Yeah, “It works like that” Alex…and, in the meantime, the permafrost is melting, with a colossal store of methane and CO2 set to rock this ignorant fucking world.
When you proponents of anthropogenic global warming start giving up your gasoline-powered automobiles and taking your houses off the coal power grid in favor of solar and wind power… when I see you ride your bicycles to work and eating food you grow yourself, then I’ll start taking you seriously.
When you really believe in something, you change your lifestyle accordingly.
If you’re not doing those things, then you must not really believe that any one of us can make a difference.
The link between increased atmospheric CO2 levels and rising global temperatures is tenuous. It is circumstantial. I for one lean towards solar activity as the root cause of global warming. What are we going to do about that? I know! Let’s build a really big umbrella.
RichardB: Lots of people know smoking causes cancer, and they continue to smoke. Lots of people know that being fat will kill them, and they continue to eat more than their share of ice cream. Lifestyle of global warming proponents doesn’t change the truth one bit.
If you compare historic temperatures, CO2 levels, and solar activity, the undisputed rise in global temperature most closely coincides with increased human output of greenhouse gases. Humans aren’t totally responsible…there have been ice ages and warming periods without us around. But until I see a better explanation (and nobody’s showed me convincing solar data that explains the majority of warming yet…), human-manufactured CO2 is the model that, to me, explains the rise in temperature best.
I agree. Lifestyle changes or the lack thereof do not in themselves prove anything. My point is I don’t think the majority of even the proponents of anthropogenic global warming are totally convinced. Why? Because the data isn’t convincing. There’s not enough discovered fact supporting any position right now.
A percentage of smokers and obese people do do something about their situation. But I see zero percent of my coworkers riding their bikes during rush hour. Where’s the conviction? No real activity… just hot air!
According to wikipedia (where you pointed me), solar activity has only been accurately measured for the last few decades. The current warming trend started a century ago. So how does anyone KNOW that global warming can’t be attributed mostly to solar activity and not CO2? No one can know that.
I’ll tell you the sticking point for me. The pictures posted above are startling. We can all agree that huge volumes of ice are melting worldwide. But how can this be if the average air temperature has only gone up an average of 1 or 2 degrees C? Could it be because of variations in radiant solar energy, which doesn’t necessarily correspond to a linear increase in air temperature? Radiant energy heats different media differently. And certain wavelengths could heat snow and ice more dramatically more than air. That could explain the mass meltings without a corresponding significant air temperature increase.
And I was just kidding about the umbrella thing. What we really need is an orbiting solar sail! It could encircle the earth like a giant ring and double as a power source.
I agree that everybody should keep an open mind…but at a minimum, we should at least start being really really cautious. I mean, if you think there’s a rabid dog in the neighborhood, you take precautions even if you don’t know it’s there or not. We’re pretty sure CO2 is at least part of the problem (if not the MAJOR part of the problem…) but corporations are hardly taking any precautions…just keep churning out the low-mileage super SUVs and trucking in fruit from South America instead of helping to promote and sell local food.
Speaking of the orbiting solar sail, isn’t it about time we start moving OFF the planet? Your mention of an orbiting solar sail reminded me of the gigantic Gerard O’Neill space habitat plans circulating in the 1970s: Space Habitat. Thought we’d be there by now.
So you believe that the method and meaning of average temperature from 100+ years ago equates to the same method and meaning of average temperature today? A manual reading of a glass thermometer (maybe accurate to 0.2 degree) from a ship in the North Atlantic shipping lanes (i.e., nearer the Arctic than the tropics) has the same meaning as a satellite derived and remote buoy sensed average temperture which includes ALL the tropical seas?
And that similar methods and readings on land (in mostly rural settings) relate directly to continuous computer readings accurate to maybe 0.01 degree taken in nearly all Urban areas and from big concrete airport heat islands (where most “official” temperatures are recorded)?
How big is that error bar? Pretty much wipes out any so-called trend.
“So you believe that…”
Yes.
“How big is that error bar?”
Not as big as you imagine.
The big temperature change still exists, even if you factor in the .2 degree error between old and new readings. Also, many of the sites where the old readings were taken were in remote points at sea and in the wilderness that are still remote today…they weren’t all taken in rural areas that are now urban. There’s no question that the average global temperature has risen in the past hundred years.
Some people need to “see” it for themselves, I guess.
It’s easy to see:
1. Glaciers are melting and/or gone.
2. Many island peoples and low lying civilizations have already had to leave and many others are trying to find a place to relocate their societies.
Can’t argue that ice melts because it is getting warmer, not colder.
Can’t argue that when you have to sand bag your island, the water is getting higher.