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Title: GLOBAL WARMING (The Complete Idiot's Guide)
Author: Michael Tennesen
Source: Alpha Books/Penguin Group
Data Base: Alpha Books
GLOBAL WARMING by Michael Tennesen
Introduction
A friend of mine called me the other day. Like most of us, my friend is a
concerned citizen. But he wasn't into any long explanation that day. His
questions were pointed: What is global warming? What is it going to do? Is
it going to affect me in my lifetime?
I tried to be succinct. Global warming is the effect that the greenhouse gases
(CO2, methane, and others) are having on the earth's climate. Though they
constitute less than 1% of the atmosphere, the greenhouse gases, especially
CO2, act like a blanket covering the globe. Without the greenhouse effect, the
average global temperature would be around 0°F (-18°C). With the greenhouse
effect the temperature averages a toasty 59°F (15°C).
The trouble is the volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been
increasing. The increase is due to the pollution caused by the burning of
fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). It's also caused by the fact that
we're cutting down the rainforest, which used to suck up a lot of that CO2. At
the current rate of increase, the volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
could double by the end of the century.
Most scientists agree that the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
is changing the climate. The controversy is over the amount of change, what
that change will bring, and whether it's worth the high repair bill.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a joint project of the World
Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, estimate
that if CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise, the world will warm up from 2.5
to 10.4°F (1.4°C to 5.8°C) by the end of the 21st Century.
If the temperature rises only 2.5° (1.4°C), we might be able to live with it.
If it rises 10.4F° (5.8°C) then there are going to be major problems. An
increase in the global average surface temperature of 10.4F° (5.8°C) is as
great a change as ended the last Ice Age. Only instead of happening over
about 50 centuries, it will happen in less than one. The increase could cause
major floods in some parts of the country, droughts in other areas, drown
large sections of Florida, and wreck havoc with nature everywhere.
Some results are expected in the next 30 years. Some are happening right now.
In the last century there has been a widespread retreat of mountain glaciers
outside the poles. Half the ice in the European Alps has melted. Summer Arctic
sea ice is 40% thinner. Glacier National Park has already lost more than 2/3s
of its glaciers. In another 30 years, scientists estimate Glacier National
Park will be glacierless.
Four Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed. The most dramatic of these collapses
was the Larsen Ice Shelf, which in 1995 disintegrated over the span of five
days. At one point a slab of ice the size of Rhode Island shattered free and
floated away.
This book will attempt to give you a grasp of the enormity of these issues,
the politics behind change, and what you can do about it.
What You'll Learn in This Book
The Complete Idiot's Guide(r) to Global Warming is divided into six parts:
Part 1, "Global What?" goes into the basics of global warming. We start with
predictions of what could happen if we forget about it--just to keep you awake.
Next we go into the atmospheric chemicals that make up the greenhouse effect.
Then we'll take you on a four billion-year tour of the atmosphere. And we'll
end up with a look at the ozone hole, our first climate catastrophe.
Part 2, "An Historical Perspective," we'll show you how scientists are getting
a better look at the history of our climate by looking at ocean bottoms, tree
rings, and polar ice. We'll discuss how the climate has made changes--big
changes--in the past and how we might not be ready for the future. We'll talk
about how the climate affected the Vikings and the Mayans, how industrial
pollution has tinted the air in the 20th Century, and how cutting down the
forest has changed the atmosphere we breath.
Part 3, "A Meteorological Primer," will explain some of the basics of weather
and climate. We'll tell you how winds are formed, how rain is made, and how
hurricanes are born. We'll talk about El Niño--a sample of what a little
warming can do. We'll look at the atmospheric variables that could be causing
global warming. And we'll also take a look at polar ice, deep ocean currents,
and some of the other stuff that could make global warming a lot more
dangerous.
Part 4, "The Crystal Ball," will discuss some of the effects that global
warming might have on Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and our low-lying
island nations. Then we'll gaze into the future of North America. How will
global warming affect commerce, agriculture, and health? We'll see what might
happen to our wildlife, plants, and national parks. And we'll take a look at
climate models and how they come up with their predictions for the future.
Part 5, "The Politics," will look at the Kyoto treaty, how it was built, what
it required, and where it's at now. We'll look at the international debate,
who's skeptical and who's not. How U.S. politics has evolved on the question,
and whether the causes of pollution reduction, energy conservation, and
rainforest preservation aren't worthwhile all by themselves. Finally we'll sum
up the argument.
Part 6, "The Solution," will go beyond the controversy into the answer. What
can you do around the home and in the garden to reduce energy consumption?
What about that car? Are SUVs and cheap gas such a great deal after all?
We'll talk about the rainforest, its value, and what you can do to save it.
And we'll end with a rundown of great new advances in alternative energies
including solar, wind, and fuel cell technologies.
SAMPLE CHAPTER
Chapter 20
SUMMING UP THE ARGUMENT
In This Chapter
* The historical evidence
* The role of CO2
* Says who?
* Says what?
Global warming and climate change are complex topics that bring together a
number of different sciences. The issues are vast and complex. The fix is
costly. The evidence is murky, and there is lots of speculation. In this
chapter we will try to restate the case succinctly, review the most important
facts, state the most current evidence, and discuss the scientists, their
science, and their predictions.
***Unraveling the Climate***
I’m standing in the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research under the football stadium
at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Thomas Swetnam, the bearded director
of the center that studies tree rings for clues to past climates, holds a piece
of wood from a dead giant sequoia tree in front of me that is about three feet
long, four inches wide, and a half inch thick.
It’s a section from the giant sequoia that was cut from the bark to the center
of the tree. It displays the annual rings of the tree as half moon lines
spaced tightly together. On this piece of wood are pins with little quarter
inch flags that have dates on them. The flags start at 1958 C.E. and go all
the way back to 523 C.E. Swetnam points to a section of the rings in the
center of the board that are labeled the late 1300s. Here the rings are closer
together than elsewhere on the board.
“That’s what got the Anasazis,” says Swetnam. He explains to me that from
about 800 to about 1200 C.E., the Anasazi Indians of the Southwest desert
built elaborate cities in a number of places in Arizona, New Mexico, and
Colorado. “But then in the late 1300s they ran into what the tree rings
tell us was a long drought. They had to abandon those fabled cites and move
south along the Rio Grande River.”
The Laboratory for Tree Ring Research was originally developed back in the
1920s to date these great Indian ruins, and they found they could create a
calendar by matching the tree rings in the wooden beams of the ruins. Now
the laboratory has joined with other scientists who are looking at a number
of past climate signals including tree rigs, ice cores, and marine sediments.
They’re trying to unravel another human mystery, as to whether we are headed
for a similar disruption in our society as the Anasazis encountered, only
this time due global warming.
***The Common Belief***
Most scientists now believe that man is changing the climate of the planet by
his emissions of greenhouse gases. The controversy is over the amount we’re
changing it and over the high costs of repairing the damage. Recently
scientists at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research put together a compilation
of global temperature estimates of the last 1000 years. The estimates were
derived from a number of sources including thermometers, tree rings, ice cores,
and marine sediments. The resultant graph from all these disciplines looks
like a hockey stick, where the end of the graph depicts a sharp rise, which
represents the increase in temperatures over the last 150 years.
This chart is one of the lead graphs in the 2001 report from the IPCC on global
warming. More than 2,000 scientists put together that report based on more
than a decade of research. They estimate that if the current rise of CO2 in
the atmosphere continues, the world will warm up from 2.5 to 10.4°F (1.4 to
5.8°C) by the end of the 21st Century. The resultant hurricanes, floods,
droughts, and sea level rise could drown much of Florida, trash our
agriculture, and cause extensive damage and disease.
It was French mathematician Jean Fourier who in 1827 discovered that certain
gases in the atmosphere act like a greenhouse. They let in sunlight--like a
greenhouse does--but prevent some of the sun’s warmth from radiating back
into space.
It wasn’t until the 1930s that anybody noticed that there were problems with
what scientists had come to call the greenhouse effect. Then during a period
of particularly hot summers in Europe, George Callendar, a British coal
engineer, discovered that the world was gradually getting warmer. He pointed
to rising levels of CO2 as the culprit.
Charles Keeling was the first to develop an instrument for measuring CO2 in
the atmosphere. In 1958 during the International Geophysical Year, he took
it up to the top of Mauna Loa, a high volcano on the Island of Hawaii. There
he recorded the rise and fall of CO2 in the atmosphere throughout the
seasons as plants grew and decayed. He left his instrument up there, put a
few more out in other parts of the world, and discovered that CO2 was
gradually increasing in the atmosphere.
***Murky Thermometers***
Scientists then started looking at the temperature, to see if there was a
correlation. It wasn’t easy. Historical temperature records stretch back 300
years in a few places, but only a few decades in most. Even in places where
we’ve been keeping records, if you put your thermometer in the middle of a
town and a city grows up around it, the asphalt and concrete buildings make
it warmer. It’s called the urban heat island effect.
Satellites have made the readings of the earth’s temperatures more accurate,
but historical records are lacking. To get an idea of what temperatures were
like in the past, scientists have had to look at certain proxies, like tree
rings, ice cores, and marine sediments, which they can analyze and extract
readings of historical temperatures.
***Calibrating the Computers***
One of the main reasons for studying the past is to help scientists predict
the future of the atmosphere. Scientists use basic computer models for
determining the weather and turn them toward the distant future. To do this,
the programs are simplified, so that instead of telling us weather patterns
in specific places, they tell us general climate parameters such as
temperature. This is necessary because weather programs test the limits of
today’s super computers just to predict the weather 10 days ahead. To give
us a picture of the climate 100 years out, you can only ask the computer
simple questions.
Scientists have had some luck predicting El Niños almost a year in advance,
but predicting climate 100 years out is untested science. To verify their
accuracy of the models, scientists run their computer programs on past
climate parameters and see if they predict the known outcomes. Our studies
of past climates help us calibrate the computers that we then point toward
the future.
***Tree Rings and the Climate***
At Tucson they’ve built a chronology of tree rings from pencil width cores
taken from the bristle cone pines in the White Mountains and the giant
sequoias in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. These trees are some of the oldest
on earth. One calendar that the lab put together of bristle cone pines went
back 9,000 years.
During those years there have been a number of climate events that have
affected man. A warming trend from about 950 to 1250 C.E. may have been a
welcome respite in the United States, but it also made it possible for the
Vikings in the Old World to rape and pillage Europe. The Vikings discovered
America at that time and established a settlement in Greenland. But when a
cooling trend known as the Little Ice Age came along about 1400 C.E., Viking
settlers in Greenland brought their farm animals into their homes. When
winter got too cold they ate the farm animals. They eventually died out
when no boats could land on their frozen shores.
The changes in the climate over the last 2000 years--though they were rough
on the Vikings--have represented slow one-degree shifts in the global
temperatures. For the last 10,000 years the climate has been fairly stable.
Prior to that it was a different picture.
***Ice Cores and Ocean Currents***
To look back further into the history of the atmosphere, scientists have
gone to both Greenland and Antarctica where they’ve uncovered a record of
both the temperature and the atmosphere buried in the ice. Though a portion
of the world’s permanent ice is locked into glaciers in high mountain
regions around the world, fully 99% of the Earth’s ice is in the great
ice sheets that cover most of the island of Greenland and nearly the entire
continent of Antarctica.
From 1989 to 1993, U.S. and European scientists spent five summers drilling
a 2mi (3.2km) core into the ice at the center of Greenland to get a reading
of the atmosphere over the last 110,000 years.
Inside the ice cores are samples of the air taken from the time when the
snow first fell. The air in the ice congregates into bubbles, is further
compacted, but upon release is a fairly accurate representation of the
atmosphere at the time the ice was formed.
Scientists determine the temperature at the time the snow fell by measuring
the amount of heavy oxygen (oxygen with an extra neutron or two) in the
compacted snow. It’s the first thing to fall out of the clouds when it gets
cold and the amount of it in the ice is directly proportional to the
temperature. The bubbles can tell you what was in the atmosphere when it
was formed.
The winds of the world do a good job of mixing the atmosphere. If you were
to release a large quantity of gas in Seattle, it would only take a few
years before people in Bangkok could measure what you’ve released. Dust
and sea salt don’t mix well, but most gases are in the atmosphere long
enough to mix globally.
The ice cores give us a marvelous record of the atmosphere that stretches
back 110,000 years. What they show is that for the last 10,000 years the
global climate has been very stable. The globally averaged temperature has
remained about 58°F (14.4°C), except for the last 150 years when it rose to
59°F (15°C). The Little Ice Age that froze the Vikings out of Greenland was
only about 1°F (.5°C) cooler. The present amount of global warming has made
us about 1°F (.6°C) warmer.
We are currently in an interglacial, a warm period between Ice Ages. The cycle
has occurred every 100,000 years for the last two million years. Over the
110,000 year record of the Greenland ice cores there has only been two stable
periods, the one we’re in now and the one that occurred in the middle of the
last Ice Age when Central Greenland was about 40°F colder than today.
The rest of the time, the earth’s climate was a roller coaster, swinging
wildly back and forth. You step out your door one year and it’s Southern
California. A decade later it’s Vancouver. Another ten years and it’s
Acapulco. From the end of the last Ice Age until the present, it’s been
real stable, except for a couple of dips.
***Younger Dryas***
The best studied one was the Younger Dryas Event. It occurred about 12,800
years ago. Back then the world was warming up out of the last Ice Age rather
nicely when all of a sudden it took a big dive. Europe was about 12-16°F
(7-9°C) colder than today. And it staid that way for 1200 years. Scientists
wonder if global warming could trigger another such event.
Younger Dryas was hell on nature. During the event, the mastodons, mammoths,
horses, and saber-toothed tigers all went extinct. Early man contributed to
this extinction through aggressive hunting, but scientists feel the climate
a major factor as well. When Dryas ended, it did so in a series of jumps,
with Central Greenland warming up 15°F in a single decade or less.
Scientists believe that the Younger Dryas event may have been caused by a
shut off of the Thermohaline Circulation (THC), a conveyor-belt-like current
in the deep sea that connects the major oceans of the planet. In this current,
warm salty Atlantic water near the equator moves north toward Greenland and
Labrador, where it sinks. The warmth that this current brings is the reason
that Europe is as warm as it is, though it is in the same latitudes as
Canada.
The sinking occurs in a couple of relatively small places in the sea, diving
more than a mile deep before the water flips around and heads south down the
Atlantic. The high salt content is necessary if the waters in the current are
going to make the dive into the North Atlantic and turn south. Scientists
feel that global warming could create enough ice melt and rain to dilute
the water in the current and shut off the circulation. If it did, Europe and
other parts of the Northern Hemisphere could get very cold while the Southern
Hemisphere could get very hot.
Scientists believe that the climate may be like a flip switch as opposed to a
dimmer. If you put pressure on the switch gradually it doesn’t flip all at
once, but hesitates until there is enough pressure and then flips all of a
sudden into a completely different state. Once there, it might just remain
for centuries. It’s happened before.
***The Rise and Fall of CO2***
CO2 may be a critical part of that switch. The Greenland ice cores give us a
picture that goes back 110,000 years, but cores drilled in Antarctica give us
a picture that goes over 400,000 years. What Antarctica has shown us is that
during the last four glacial cycles, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has
varied from 200ppm during the Ice Ages to about 280ppm during the present
interglacial. Over the last 10,000 years it’s remained steady at 280ppm, until
the Industrial Age when it started going up. It’s currently about 370 ppm.
What does that say? Well the difference between the Ice Ages and the
interglacials is only 80ppm of CO2. Though scientist don’t believe that CO2
caused the Ice Ages--that was caused by changes in the orbit of the earth
around the sun--it amplified the effect.
***Snowball Earth***
About 600 million years ago, an ice age got out of hand and froze the entire
planet during a period called Snowball Earth. It seems that once ice starts
forming, it may perpetuate itself by reflecting sunlight. Scientists who’ve
studied this period of the earth believe that the worldwide global temperature
average got as low as -58°F. The entire ocean froze to a 1/2 mi (1 km)
thickness. Life, which was pretty microscopic back then, was nearly wiped out.
***Hothouse Earth***
But CO2 kept accumulating in the atmosphere, put there by spewing volcanoes.
It increased 1,000 fold over 10 million years, and Snowball Earth turned into
Hothouse Earth. During Hothouse earth, the average global temperature soared
to more than 122F.
What all this shows is how important the content of CO2 in our atmosphere is
to climate.
***The Current Picture***
So what do we have now? What we’ve got is a period during which man has
affected the atmosphere on a more rapid scale than has ever been known in
nature. According to the World Meteorological Organization, nine of the ten
warmest years on record have occurred since 1990.
***Disappearing Ice***
Though scientists predict that the biggest stuff is yet to come, some changes
are already evident. There has been a widespread retreat of mountain glaciers
outside the poles just in the last century. Ice in the European Alps has
declined by half. There’s been a 40% decline in late summer Arctic sea-ice
thickness.
***Glacierless National Park***
When naturalists first hiked through Glacier National Park more than a
century ago, there were about 150 glaciers nestled into its high cliffs and
jagged peaks. Today there are only 35. In another 30 years, scientists estimate
even those will be gone. Glacier National Park will be glacierless.
***Warming up to Russia***
The United Nations Environmental Program recently completed a survey of
glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains and found that dozens of lakes were so
swollen from melting glaciers that they could burst in the next few years,
inundating villages throughout the region. The collapse of the Maili glacier
on the northern edge of the Caucasus Mountains ripped out trees and tossed
massive trucks like toys into the air. It buried a Russian village under 3
million tons of ice and mud and left at least nine dead.
***Antarctic Ice***
Four Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed including the Woldie Ice Shelf,
which measured 772 sq. mi. in the 1940s but has shrunk by two thirds today.
The Prince Gustav disappeared altogether. The most dramatic of these collapses
was easily that of the Larsen Ice Shelf. As scientists watched via satellite
in January 1995, it disintegrated over the span of five days. At one point a
slab of ice the size of Rhode Island shattered free and floated away. David
Vaughn of the British Antarctic Survey commented that it was as if a godlike
hammer had fallen on them.
Over the last 50 years, winter precipitation in the Sierra Nevada and the
Rocky Mountains has been falling more and more in the form of rain rather
than snow. The Southwest Desert depends on the snowpack to continue to deliver
water late into summer. With more rain and less snow, the summers will be
getting drier.
***Environmental Disasters***
Nature generally stands to lose the most from global warming. Plant life and
wildlife don’t have air conditioning. Generally plant life evolves slowly
with the climate. If the climate gets progressively warmer, then trees and
plants will migrate out of our parks and more northward. The trouble is roads
and cities break up the natural migration paths. Plants and trees are more
likely to die out along with the wildlife they support rather than migrate.
***Polar Bear Jail***
In Churchill Canada, 1,500 pound polar bears which used to feed on seals out
on the frozen Hudson Bay grow hungry as the ice on the bay melts earlier each
year. The bears are showing up in town much more frequently. Though the
Canadian Wildlife Service tries to trap them and helicopter them away, if
civilian encounters with polar bears continue, it could lead to catastrophe
***Starving Whales***
Only five years after being taken off the endangered species list, the gray
whales which migrate from the Bering Sea to Baja California each year have
been dying off in large numbers. The population has dropped from an estimated
peak of 26,635 whales in 1998 to 17,414 whales in 2002, a decline of more
than a third. The 35- to 50-ton beasts spend their summer in the Bering Sea
gorging on millions of amphipods--crustaceans that live in tubes on the
shallow ocean floor.
Though the whales migrate all the way from the lagoons off Baja California
to the Bering Sea to eat, the amphipods rely on their food being brought to
them by ocean current. But global warming may be altering ice patterns and
ocean currents in ways that prevents plankton from making its way through the
water column to the amphipods. The whales, which feed on these shrimp-sized
creatures, could be the largest victims yet of global warming.
***IPCC Predictions***
So what can we expect for the future? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) a group of over 2,000 scientists appointed by the United Nations
and the World Meteorological Organization concluded in their 2001 report the
climate will rise from 2.5° to 10.4°F by the end of the 21st Century. The panel
is made up of the superstars of climate research--university department heads
and lead government agency researchers from all over the world. And they’ve
been studying this stuff since 1988.
If the temperature only rises 2.5° we might be able to live with it. If it
rises 10.4F° then that’s going to be major problems. Ten degrees is as great
a change as ended the last Ice Age. Only instead of happening over about
13,000 years it will happen in less than ten decades. Some results are
expected in the next 30 years.
***Sea Level Rise***
The IPCC predicts that sea level will rise from 4 inches to 3 feet (.09 to
.88m) over the next century. The greatest impact will likely be in recently
developed coastal areas like Florida and parts of the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic
coasts. In Florida, sea level rises of only a few inches will advance the
shoreline as much as 400 feet in low-lying areas. This will flood shoreline
homes and hotels and erode the states treasured beaches. Seas level rise may
also damage the Everglades, offshore islands, and coral reefs. In short,
much of what has made Florida so precious may be lost in a globally warmer
world
***Going to Death Valley***
A warmer world is likely to be a wetter one with catastrophic storms and
floods over much of the globe. On the other hand some areas like the plains
and the deserts will get hotter and drier. Parts of the plains will turn into deserts.
In the Southwest Desert, where temperatures reach between 110-120°F
(43-48.5°C) in the summers, temperatures could start climbing up to 120-130°F
(48.5-54°C). To get an idea what that feels like, you have to go to Death
Valley California.
Death Valley is the hottest and driest place in the Western Hemisphere. On
July 10, 1913, the mercury here reached 134 degrees, a world record for many
years. When it gets above 115°F (46°C), the Visitor’s Center at Death Valley
National Park wraps its door handles in Styrofoam so people won't burn their
hands, and the maintenance people keep their tools in water so they won't
burn theirs. People use gloves to drive their cars so the steering wheel won’t
burn them. They shut their water heaters off in late spring since the tap water
is plenty hot enough.
Late July is the normal peak of yearly temperatures, with temperature readings
regularly approaching 130°F (54°C). Around that time there’s lots of
electrical outages, where the air conditioning goes off for as much as 4 or
5 days at a stretch. Then the park rangers sleep under wet sheets with wet
hair. Or they sleep on picnic tables outside with the sprinklers on.
Park rangers describe Death Valley in July as being similar to roasting a
turkey and you’ve just opened the oven to a blast of hot air. And the door
is stuck and so are you.
***The Costs***
Fixing global warming is not going to be cheap. The Kyoto agreement, which
would have required the United States to reduce its greenhouse emissions 7%
below 1990 levels, was only supposed to be a first step. Entirely stopping
climate change will require 50% to 60% cuts. This is likely to be hugely
expensive, requiring major reductions in the use of gasoline, fuel oil,
natural gas, and coal.
Doing something now about global warming is like taking out insurance. We
take out insurance on our cars and our homes in the event of major
catastrophes. We don’t expect them, but we want to be prepared.
Maybe it’s time to contact our agent.
***The least you should know***
--Greenhouse gases like CO2 keep us from freezing to death.
--The trouble is, we’ve increased its concentration in the atmosphere by
burning fossil fuels.
--Scientists have studied tree rings, ice cores, and marine sediments to
get a picture of our climate in the past.
--They use these studies to help them predict the future.
--Glacial ice is melting all over the world as a result of the current rate
of global warming.
--If we don’t do something quickly, it may start feeling like we’re living
in Death Valley.
-- End --