Climate Change and Global Warming Introduction

As explained by the US agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there are 7 indicators that would be expected to increase in a warming world (and they are), and 3 indicators would be expected to decrease (and they are):

Throughout Earth’s history the climate has varied, sometimes considerably. Past warming does not automatically mean that today’s warming is therefore also natural. Recent warming has been shown to be due to human industrialization processes.

John Cook, writing the popular Skeptical Science blog, summarizes the key indicators of a human finger print on climate change:

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO₂ has increased since the Industrial Revolution:

The above covers hundreds of thousands of years and shows how atmospheric CO₂ levels have dramatically increased in recent years. If we zoom in on just the past 250 years, we see the following:

NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) tracks atmospheric global temperature climate trends. As environmental engineer, D Kelly O’Day, explained on ProcessingTrends.com (link no longer available): To facilitate assessments of long term trends, climatologists compare the mean for a base period with the annual mean. Differences between the annual mean and baseline mean are called anomalies. GISS uses the 1951 - 1980 period for their baseline period. They use the difference between the annual mean and the baseline mean to determine the global temperature anomaly for the year.

O’Day originally produced a chart showing global temperature anomalies between 1800 and 2006 using data from NASA. I updated the chart he provided to include recently updated data up to 2014:

In the 1880 - 1935 period, the temperature anomaly was consistently negative. In contrast, the since 1980 the anomaly has been consistently positive. The 1909 temperature anomaly (-0.47oC) was the lowest year on record. Since 1909, global temperature has warmed, with the most recent years showing the highest anomalies of +0.6 oC in the past 120 years.

A NASA’s GISS animation also shows how most parts of the world have experienced this warming, recently:

And, as Sir David Attenborough explains, natural variability alone does not explain recent temperature rise:

As well as the links above, see also Skeptical Science¹², which, while examining the arguments of global warming skepticism, provides information on causes of anthropogenic global warming.

In different parts of the world, there have been various weather events that at first thought would question global warming. For example, some regions have experienced extremely cold winters (sometimes record-breaking), while others have experienced heavy rain, etc.

The confusion that sometimes arises is the difference between climate change and weather patterns. Weather patterns describe short term events, while climate change is a longer process that affects the weather. A warming planet is actually consistent with increasing cold, increasing rain and other extremes, as an overall warmer planet changes weather patterns everywhere at all times of the year.

To get an idea of how looking at short term changes only can lead to a conclusion that global warming has stopped, or doesn’t exist, see Alden Griffith’s has global warming stopped¹³?

(As an aside, those crying foul of global warming claims when going through extremely cold weather in Europe for example in 2010, later found their summers to be full of heat waves. The point here is that a specific short period such as a cold winter — or even a hot summer — is not proof alone that global warming has stopped (or increased); short term variability can mask longer term trends.)

This means, for example, increasing temperatures can actually mean more snowfall¹⁴ — at least until it becomes too warm¹⁵ for significant snowfall to happen.

The additional concern, as meteorology professor Scott Mandia explains, it can take decades for the climate temperatures to increase in response to increased greenhouse gas emissions¹⁶. So up until now, perhaps it has been easier for skeptics to deny climate change is occurring or that humans are responsible.

As the IPCC’s fifth major report draws to a conclusion in 2013 it notes that scientists have increased their certainty of human-induced warming to 95%. It was extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century, as summarized¹⁷ by the IPCC.

As their fifth report started to come out, a number of climate skeptics and media outlets were arguing that the slowdown shown in surface temperatures in recent years proved global warming had stopped or paused. Yet, this slowdown was in surface temperatures only even though the overall trend (using a more longer period which is more valid in climate change analysis) showed an increase in temperatures. Two simple graphs help illustrate this:

The next graph is an animation from Skeptical Science showing how time-frames to interpret climate data is significant:

For further information on the above see also Does the global warming pause mean what you think it means?²⁰, from Skeptical Science.

As this infographic shows, most of the warming is going into the oceans:

As John Cook, creator of the graphic above says (see above link), Just as it takes time for a cup of coffee to release heat into the air, so to it takes time for the ocean to release its heat into the atmosphere..

The implications of this is further explained with Inter Press Service’s freezer analogy: The world’s northern freezer is on rapid defrost as large volumes of warm water are pouring into the Arctic Ocean, speeding the melt of sea ice ²³.

Indeed, as this chart also shows, the warming in the oceans has been occurring for quite some time:

One of John Bruno’s colleagues, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, talks about the impact climate change will have on ocean ecosystems. A summary of the video here says that

Rapidly rising greenhouse gas concentrations are driving ocean systems toward conditions not seen for millions of years, with an associated risk of fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation. Changes in biological function in the ocean caused by anthropogenic climate change go far beyond death, extinctions and habitat loss: fundamental processes are being altered, community assemblages are being reorganized and ecological surprises are likely.

D. Salmons also has a post at Skeptical Science that explains the impact of warming Arctic’s relation to the very cold recent winters further, using the following NASA map:

As Salmons explains,

Jaan Suurkula, M.D. and chairman of Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and Technology (PSRAST⁴⁷), paints a dire picture, but notes that he is only citing observations and conclusions from established experts and institutions. Those observations and conclusions note that global warming will lead to the following situations, amongst others:

• Rapid global heating according to a US National Academy of Science warning;
• Dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions;
• Ozone loss aggravated by global warming;
• Ozone loss likely to aggravate global warming;
• Warming of the oceans leads to increased green house gasses;
• Permafrost thawing will aggravate global warming;
• Oceanic changes observed that may aggravate the situation;
• A vicious circle whereby each problem will exacerbate other problems which will feedback into each other;
• Massive extinction of species will aggravate the environmental crisis;
• Sudden collapse of biological and ecological systems may occur, but will have a very slow recovery;
• While effective measures can decrease global warming and other problems the World community has repeatedly failed to establish cooperation.

The vicious circle Suurkula refers to is worth expanding. In his own words, but slightly reformatted:

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB)⁹⁰ is an organization — backed by the UN and various European governments — attempting to compile, build and make a compelling economics case for the conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity.

In a report titled The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for National and International Policy Makers 2009, TEEB noted different types of carbon emissions as colors of carbon:

Brown carbon

Industrial emissions of greenhouse gases that affect the climate.

Green carbon

Carbon stored in terrestrial ecosystems e.g. plant biomass, soils, wetlands and pasture and increasingly recognized as a key item for negotiation in the UNFCCC.

Blue carbon

Carbon bound in the world’s oceans. An estimated 55% of all carbon in living organisms is stored in mangroves, marshes, sea grasses, coral reefs and macro-algae.

Black carbon

Formed through incomplete combustion of fuels and may be significantly reduced if clean burning technologies are employed.

But a mitigation approach needs to consider all these forms of carbon they note, not just one or two:

Global trade is an important feature of the modern world. The production and global distribution of manufactured products thus form a large portion of global human carbon emissions.

The Kyoto Protocol assigns carbon emissions to countries based on where production takes place rather than where things are consumed.

For many years, critics of the Kyoto Protocol have long argued that this means rich countries, who have outsourced much of their manufacturing to developing nations have an accounting trick they can use to show more emissions reduction than developing nations.

The BBC noted back in 2005 that this outsourcing was already taking place¹⁰⁴, but this idea started way before the Kyoto Protocol came into being.

In 1991 Larry Summers, then Chief Economist for the World Bank (and US Treasury Secretary, in the Clinton Administration, until George Bush and the Republican party came into power), had been a strong backer of structural adjustment policies¹⁰⁵. He wrote in an internal memo:

Although the discussion above wasn’t about carbon emissions, the intention was the same: rather than directly address the problem, off-shoring dirty industries to the developing nations and let them deal with it.

More recently, The Guardian provided a useful summary of the impacts of this approach: carbon emissions cuts by developed countries since 1990 have been canceled out by increases in imported goods from developing countries¹⁰⁶ — many times over.

They were summarizing global figures compiled and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US¹⁰⁷. And the findings seemed to vindicate what many environmental groups had said for many years about the Kyoto Protocol as noted earlier.

In more detail:

In addition, as Climate News Network notes, Asian countries have been cutting emissions faster than Europe and the US¹⁰⁹. At the same time, there are signs of progress in Europe and the US, too. Germany for example is known to be pushing for renewables more than most. While recently the US has seen a drop in carbon emissions¹¹⁰ while seeing some economic growth.

It has been known for some time know that developing countries will be affected the most. Reasons vary from lacking resources to cope, compared to developed nations, immense poverty, regions that many developing countries are in happen to be the ones where severe weather will hit the most, small island nations area already seeing sea level rising, and so on.

German Watch published a Global Climate Risk Index¹¹¹ at the end of 2011 listing nations that would be affected the most from climate change based on extreme weather such as hurricanes and floods.

Between 1991 and 2010 they found these were the most affected nations:

1. Bangladesh
2. Myanmar
3. Honduras
4. Nicaragua
5. Haiti
6. Vietnam
7. Dominican Republic
8. Pakistan
9. Korea, DPR
10. Philippines

Much of Asia, as well as wealthier areas such as the US, Russia and Australia have also experienced specific incidents of very damaging extreme weather that the climate risk index captures:

¹¹²

Into 2013, November saw possibly the largest ever typhoon, Hiayan, make landfall and cause incredible devastation to parts of the Philippines with at least 10,000 feared dead¹¹⁴ and more than 9 million affected.

Hiayan struck just days before the start of a major UN conference on climate change perhaps acting as a wakeup call to the negotiators regarding potential impacts of inaction. While no single event can easily be attributed to climate change, as the Institute for Public Accuracy notes, this devastating typhoon demonstrates how the Global South pays the price for emissions historically from the North¹¹⁶.

As revealed towards the end of January 2006, NASA’s top climate scientist said NASA and the Bush Administration tried to silence him ¹³⁴.

While NASA said this was standard procedure to ensure an orderly flow of information, the scientist, Dr. James Hansen disagreed, saying that such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.

Dr. Hansen, according to the New York Times reporting this, noted that these were fresh efforts to silence him because he had said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth a different planet. (By contrast, the Bush administration’s policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.)

Furthermore, After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be dire consequences if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

Earlier, in 2004, Dr. Hansen fell out of favor with the Bush Administration for publicly stating before the presidential elections that government scientists were being muzzled and that he planned to vote for John Kerry.

The New York Times also notes that this echoes other recent disputes, whereby many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.

Furthermore, Where scientists’ points of view on climate policy align with those of the administration, however, there are few signs of restrictions on extracurricular lectures or writing.

And in terms of media manipulation, the Times also revealed that at least one interview (amongst many others) was canceled because it was with NPR, which the public affairs official responsible felt was the most liberal media outlet in the country. This implies a political bias/propaganda in terms of how information is released to the public, which should be of serious concern.

At the beginning of June, 2006, the BBC Panorama documentary followed up on this and found that many scientists felt they were being censored and that various reports had been systematically suppressed, even altered. In one case, a major climate assessment report was due out a month before the 2004 presidential elections, but was delayed because it had such a bleak assessment, and the Bush administration did not want it to be part of the election issues. It was released shortly after the elections were over.

Panorama also interviewed a pollster who had advised the Bush Administration when they came into power in 2000 to question global warming, that humans caused it if it existed at all, to hire skeptical scientists, and play down its impacts. (The advisor has now distanced himself away from the Bush Administration’s stance today because he felt the science was more certain than it was in 2000.)

Just weeks before hurricane Katrina¹³⁵ devastated parts of Southern United States, Panorama reported that Another scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) … had research which established global warming could increase the intensity of hurricanes. He was due to give an interview about his work but claims he was gagged. After Katrina, the NOAA website said unusual hurricane activity is not related to global warming. When a leading scientist was asked why NOAA came out with such a statement, he suggested it was ideologically driven.

(The BBC Panorama documentary is called Climate chaos: Bush’s climate of fear¹³⁶ and as well as a summary, you can watch the actual documentary online.)

Despite attempts to discredit global warming concerns, the Bush Administration has now conceded that there is climate change and that humans are contributing to it, but Panorama reports that a lot of vital time has been lost, and that some scientists fear US policy may be too slow to carry out.

Almost a year after the story about attempts to silence NASA’s top climate scientist, many media outlets have reported on a new survey where hundreds of government scientists say they have perceived or personally experienced pressure from the Bush administration to eliminate phrases such as “climate change” and “global warming” from their reports and public statements. A US government hearing in the US is also pursuing this further¹³⁷ as the seriousness of climate change is becoming more accepted.

There has been a similar concern in Australia. At the beginning of 2006, the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) revealed that some business lobby groups have influenced the Australian government to prevent Australia from reducing greenhouse gas emissions¹³⁸. This lobby group included interests from the coal, electricity, aluminum (aluminium), petroleum, minerals and cement industries. The documentary exposing this revealed possible corruption within government due to extremely close ties with such industries and lobby groups, and alleged silencing of government climate scientists.

In what would seem to be a twist to suppression of government reports, it was widely claimed that the US Environmental Protection Agency had suppressed a report that was skeptical of climate change. However, it turns out that while the report was written by an employee on EPA time, but on his own initiative and not qualified to do so, and so couldn’t be published by the EPA and therefore was not suppressed¹³⁹. Furthermore, as the previous link finds, the report contained large pieces of plagiarism. In addition, the report was flawed¹⁴⁰ as RealClimte.org quickly showed.

The headlines about this episode talked of suppression and would likely increase the view amongst those still skeptical about climate change. Corrections to those headlines have been few, and less prominent, by comparison.