Duffy: “Can you tell us about NASA’s Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we’re now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?”
Marohasy: “That’s right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you’ve got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you’re going to get a positive feedback. That’s what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite … (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they’re actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you’re getting a negative rather than a positive feedback.”
Duffy: “The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?”
Marohasy: “That’s right … These findings actually aren’t being disputed by the meteorological community. They’re having trouble digesting the findings, they’re acknowledging the findings, they’re acknowledging that the data from NASA’s Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they’re about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide.”
Joined: Aug 02, 2005 Posts: 962 Location: In your garden
Posted: Mon 31st Mar 8:57am Post subject:
Prof. Badtouch wrote:
I'm doing my lectures on pseudoscience at the moment, including a part on the accusations of climate science being a case of junk science. It's a genuinely interesting case of the intersection of politics the media and science. ...
This sort of stuff?
Quote:
Environmental skepticism presents itself as “speaking truth to power” through contrarian claims they say objectively “debunk” the myths of the environmental movement and environmental science. Yet, the analysis of this literature indicates that environmental skepticism is specifically issued from a conservative ideology supported by a coherent conservative countermovement opposed to environmentalism. This positions the bias of skeptic knowledge claims, and while environmentalists’ claims clearly have their own bias, the claim that the skeptical project is generated from a sense of objectivity and value neutrality is flatly rejected as part of an attempt to subvert reflexive interrogation and the implied counter-hegemonic resistance this entails.
Dr Green, the author of a peer-reviewed paper auditing the forecasting methods of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), opposed the bill because he claimed it was based on "invalid climate forecasts".
He told Parliament's finance select committee that authors of the IPCC fourth assessment report provided sufficient information to observe predic tions violated 72 of 89 accepted principles of forecasting.
There was insufficient information to judge how closely a further 51 principles had been followed.
"Some individual principles that were violated are so important that violation of any one of them alone invalidates the IPCC's forecasts," he said.
At this point I return to the Keeling graph, which demonstrates the strong coupling between atmosphere and plants. The wiggles in the graph show us that every carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere is incorporated in a plant within a time of the order of twelve years. Therefore, if we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what Nordhaus meant when he mentioned "genetically engineered carbon-eating trees" as a low-cost backstop to global warming. The science and technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to read and write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly, and the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more rapidly. I consider it likely that we shall have "genetically engineered carbon-eating trees" within twenty years, and almost certainly within fifty years.
Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. Keeling's wiggles prove that a big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world's forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.
It is likely that biotechnology will dominate our lives and our economic activities during the second half of the twenty-first century, just as computer technology dominated our lives and our economy during the second half of the twentieth. Biotechnology could be a great equalizer, spreading wealth over the world wherever there is land and air and water and sunlight. This has nothing to do with the misguided efforts that are now being made to reduce carbon emissions by growing corn and converting it into ethanol fuel. The ethanol program fails to reduce emissions and incidentally hurts poor people all over the world by raising the price of food. After we have mastered biotechnology, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed. In a world economy based on biotechnology, some low-cost and environmentally benign backstop to carbon emissions is likely to become a reality.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494
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