A Climate Change Consensus

Recently on BBC Television there was a series called: Earth - The Climate Wars.

The starting point that they chose as the beginning of the Climate Change debate was a letter written to the US president in 1972 that warned of climate change, but not of Global Warming but of a new Ice Age.

Therefore while I have a great deal of respect for the presenter, Dr Ian Stewart, my critical attention went into alert mode. As the programme was suggesting that it was only at this point in time, had the idea of man made climate change really occurred to anyone. While I was less critical of the rest of the first episode as the science was sound and accurate, the opening still rankles as it was quite wrong.

The theory of Human induced Climate Change first emerged in the Victorian era. Chemistry showed that a blanket of Carbon Dioxide helped retain heat, and burning the billions of tones of Coal that powered the Industrial revolution was creating pollution as was seen in the grime and smog that enveloped the industrial towns of Britain. Further, in the 1920s the British Interplanetary Society first proposed using algae to produce a carbon blanket on Mars so that humans could colonise our planetary neighbour, they just had to work out how to get there first. However the quality of the science was so good that NASA used it as the basis for their own plans. Therefore, the scientific basis of CO2 inducing a warming of the globe was well understood more than a century ago.

The first president to be alerted to the dangers of Climate Change was Roosevelt in the 1940s. And he took the situation seriously and instigated a project so that Sulphur was introduced into the atmosphere. Along with cloud seeding experiments this seemed to have the desired effect although the experiments were stopped in the 1960s as there had been a couple of flooding events that could have been caused by this in neighbouring states in the US. Also, as controlling the weather and climate was not as predictable or simple as first thought, and the warming wasn't seen to be happening as fast as had initially been predicted, the threat of climate change was quietly forgotten.

Where this programme was starting from though, was an important point in the scientific proof of Man Made Climate Change, as based upon the evidence it did look as if the climate was cooling. The effect of Sulphur on the climate was real, it does have a cooling effect and was also causing Acid Rain. With the majority of emissions coming from Coal fired power stations and a few cold years of temperature records to back up the hypothesis, the idea of a new Ice Age appeared to be the correct one.

I even remember the buzz at school, as in a Horizon programme on Television By Dr Paul Ehrlich based on the work of Stephen Schneider, now a professor at Stanford University. I did not see that programme but it did get discussed in class. What makes this vivid in my memory was that I was at the time reading a Science Fiction book where a planet was being transformed by adding CO2 to the atmosphere to create a greenhouse effect and when I asked as a naïve child well how can it create an ice age when CO2 was being pumped into the atmosphere, when in this book it was used to heat a climate, well I was well and truly put in my place by the teacher. To him the book was just Science Fiction and the programme was Science fact. Oh I did have some supportive teachers, not!

However, what is significant is that the people like professor Stephen Schneider, now acknowledge that they were wrong. Had they had the data available today that the US military had added Sulphur to the atmosphere, or that the sulphur from Coal was masking the effects of CO2, then the dip in temperatures would not have lead to the conclusions that the then available data did. Further, it would not have provided the seeds of doubt that has caused people to dismiss the reality of climate change.

I know myself that frequently if I spoke about Climate Change that people would dismiss it as nonsense or say that we are heading for an Ice Age. At least now I have the ability to counter them by asking why the believe that Climate Change isn't happening or if they say well I read in my newspaper that its nonsense I just ask if they have ever read a Scientific Paper on the subject.

But that's now, back in the seventies and the eighties it was different, and it was not until the heatwave years of 1976 and 1977 that I first heard Global Warming being discussed by the media. And it was the rather catchy name that the media coined for Climate Change of Global Warming that also held back anyone taking the problem seriously as Global Warming sounds like quite a nice thing to have, especially in the depths of winter.

Fortunately there were people who understood that increasing the blanket of Carbon Dioxide was not good news and back in 1945 Professor Keeling of the University of California started making the measurements needed to show that CO2 was increasing and that humans were responsible. This is government funded and his son Professor Ralph Keeling continues the work to this day. However, it was not until 1979 that the US government finally commissioned a report to look at the possible effect of Climate Change from a military scientific group called Jason.

Their report was not well received but it did draw conclusions and predictions that were latter mirrored by the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) report years latter. So the US government does what all good governments do with something they don't like, they commission a second opinion. That second report drew the same conclusions. Well as you folks with long memories may remember, in 1980 Regan was elected and he commissioned a third report. While this third report authored by Professor Nierenberg did agree with the two previous reports that Climate Change was happening, what was different was that he concluded that it was not Human Induced and anyway it would happen so slowly that solutions would be found long before it became a problem. Well its one way of resolving a crisis just find someone that will say what you want to hear, Climate Change solved. Or should that be ignored?

As well as Professor Nierenberg becoming the Director of the influential Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and chief spokesman for the sceptics of Climate Change.

Now I have no problem with people challenging the science or asking questions of the data, as only from and by checking an hypothesis can we ensure that the data and hence the conclusions are correct. After all if there are faults in the data then this would effect the effects of a changing climate.

The sceptics raised three basic questions the first was: Is the earth actually warming?

A fair question, but as around the globe weather stations have recorded weather and temperature readings over at least a century and some data goes back even further. This indeed did show a rise in temperature But there was a potential flaw in the results as where cities have grown and expanded this creates what's called an “Urban Heat Island” and this could be effecting the data, showing a greater rise than was actually happening. Therefore, to confirm the data and to expand the data set to include the whole planet data from satellites would be used.

The readings for the first half of the 1980s agreed with the thermometer readings but for the second half of the 1980s the data did not show any increase in fact it looked like there was a fall in the global temperature Now one of the data sets must be wrong, but witch one? The solution was actually in the friction of the earth as over time a satellite will fall closer to the earth lowering its altitude and this drag also slowed the satellites These two effects on the satellites meant that the equations used to unify the data were wrong, when corrected though the satellites data confirmed the thermometer results and yes the Earth was warming. That was that argument over.

Then the Sceptics said but in the past things were warmer, historical accounts show that places like Greenland and Britain were warmer. According to historical texts Greenland was reputed to be a green and fertile land. It could be that it was propaganda to get settlers to move there a thousand years ago. Also in the Middle ages we apparently were growing grapes for wine in Britain. Now had there been the Internet in the Middle Ages I suspect that the pictures of Greenland would have been similar to now, and I bet the British wine reviews were not complimentary.

So a way had to be found to measure what the temperature was over the last thousand years or more. This was done by Dr Michael Mann of Penn State University. By using what are called Climate Proxies it is possible to determine the temperature in past years. By reading the growth rings of some very ancient trees, Bristle Pines one set of data was produced. Then using corals from the Red Sea, and snows from the mountains of Peru other data sets were established. This produced the famous Hokey stick graph. However, it failed to find this warmer period in the middle ages.

Other scientists have repeated this using other climate proxies and confirmed the data, but all Dr Michael Mann got for his troubles, from the sceptics, was abuse and accusations of scientific fraud.

Well that proves that there was no Middle Age heat wave, but just like Ronny Regan before the sceptics threw their bottle out of the pram at the facts not fitting their desires.

Well the sceptics had one last argument that Climate change was not caused by human activity but by the Sun. Now as all our weather and the climate is driven by the Sun, so this theory could not be dismissed. Also when historical data was looked at there did appear to be a correlation to sunspots and temperature. The theory was that the solar wind produced by sunspots was deflecting the effects of cosmic rays. In the 1750s in Britain there was what is called the little Ice age when in winter the Thames would freeze over and ice fairs would be held on the frozen river. This coincided with a period when there was little to no sunspots, so the theory was worth examining. When the data was examined there did appear to be a correlation. That was until 1980 when the two data sets diverged and sunspot activity decreased and the temperature rose and did not fall as would have happened had the theory been accurate. It is worth noting that the sceptics still use this data but exclude the sunspot data that doesn't support their claim that its the sun. It is such a shame that the facts just ruin the the theory that it is nothing to do with human activity. Coincidently the little Ice age was caused by volcanic activity on the other side of the Earth, and was nothing to do with sunspots.

However, while I am personally disgusted by the people that have buried their heads in the desert sands, and give a blanket denial that Climate Change is real and that its the result of human activity, their actions have ensured that the science that shows that climate change is happening and that its man made is completely watertight. Yet all the delays to action that the sceptics caused, leave us with far less time to tackle the problem. The enforced rechecking of the science has highlighted a problem that no one expected. That of a rapid shift in the climate. From looking at Ice Cores there is now proof that in the past there has been sudden increases in the globes temperature. Professor Jim White of University of Colorado, discovered that in several points in the planets history there have been rapid jumps, one in particular was a jump of five degrees Celsius in a single season. We don't know what caused this jump, but it shows that a changing climate may not be the slow and gradual process that all had assumed. Incidently, it was the debris of dead beetles in soils from around the globe that pointed to the time period that climate scientists needed to look. As in one layer there were the bodies of beetles that thrived in cold and then a layer of beetles that needed warmer conditions, but with no intermediate stages.

Had Thalidomide or any drug had the same rigours scrutiny that Climate Science has had to endure then many tragedies would have been avoided. One thing that is reassuring though is that even the real scientists that were sceptics now agree that Climate change is real and that it is man made. The problem still remains that this doubt that they created has infected large portions of the population.

Therefore, we all still need to counter the doubters, but at least the real scientific community is united. The next problem is the politicians. Even those that claim to be trying to tackle Climate Change are still not being consistent or always following policies that really will make a difference.

Nor should we allow ourselves to be detracted by other problems, in fact if economic policies had been based upon sustainability and not hubris, that difficulty would never have arisen.

The one thing that the science has shown us is that the impacts we will see from Climate Change is that it will produce effects that we never expected. Professor Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado works on the glaciers in Greenland and every year they are learning new and unexpected aspects of the effects of global climate change. Many of these effects are just not in the computer models for the climate. Therefore, any predictions regarding the impacts and the timing of these impacts will be wrong. It will and is happening faster and potentially more dramatic than anyone could have ever expected.

Real positive change is coming, it will not be easy but only if we make it difficult for ourselves. There is no quick fix for this, nor will there be some sudden scientific new discovery that will solve the problems. I personally think that once we really start to take on the challenge of dealing with climate change, we will all gain and start to shape a positive, caring and brighter future.