Sign of the Times This giant Manhattan billboard displays a running tally of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere.
Brandon Barrett
MIT analysis finds global-warming projections more dire
It's getting hotter faster: a sobering new MIT study on the odds of global warming shows that without drastic action, the planet is likely to heat up twice as much this century as previously projected.
Researchers in the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change reached these conclusions using the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate change that they've been refining since the 1990s. They ran the model 400 times, varying the values of the input parameters each time in such a way that each run had about an equal probability of being correct. This process reflects the fact that each of dozens of parameters--the rate at which the ocean's surface waters mix with deeper waters, the rate at which new coal plants will be built--has its own range of uncertainty. The multiple runs show how these parameters, whatever their specific values, interact to affect overall climate.
Study coauthor Ronald Prinn, ScD '71, the program's codirector, says the MIT model is the only one that looks at the effects of economic activity in concert with the effects of changes in atmospheric, oceanic, and biological systems. The new study, published in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, takes into account recent changes in projections about the growth of economies such as China's, as well as new data on some physical processes, such as the rate at which oceans take up both heat and carbon dioxide. When results of the different scenarios are averaged together, the median projection shows land and ocean surfaces warming 5.2 °C by 2100. The researchers' 2003 study, which was based on results from an earlier version of the model, projected an increase of just 2.4 °C.
Prinn and the team used the new results to update their "roulette wheel," a pie chart representing the relative odds of various levels of temperature rise (see "Wheel of Global Fortune," January/February 2008). The new version of the wheel reflects a much higher probability of greater temperature increases if no actions are taken to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
To help raise general awareness of how serious the problem is, the MIT team also developed a method for estimating the current output of greenhouse gases around the world, which is used to continuously update a "carbon counter" on a giant billboard outside New York's Madison Square Garden. Sponsored by Deutsche Bank, the 70-foot-tall display is similar to the famed national-debt clock in Times Square.
But there's good news from the model as well: if substantial measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions are put in place soon, the new projections show, the expected warming will be no worse than the earlier studies suggested. "This increases the urgency for significant policy action," Prinn says
Only an Illusion of Worsening Odds..
It is an illusion that more carbon dioxide will stop more infrared from escaping into space. In fact, CO2 already absorbs all 15 micron infrared emitted by the Earth. Goggle the report "The Lynching of Carbon Dioxide-the Innocent Source of Life", written by Dr. Hertzberg.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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1 Comment
Original Sin is Wrong: Article implicitly endorses it.
Global warming is not an agreed-upon phenomenon. It has neither complete moral support nor complete scientific support. Thus it is vital for Technology Review and MIT's Policy department to explicitly address all significant, relevant caveats to the article. There are three practical/scientific concerns and one overarching moral/political concern.
The practical/scientific conclusions are highly suspect. First, since 2003 global temperatures have *decreased*. How is that fact included in the model? Secondly, sunspots appear to be a much more potent cause of earth's variations than any other variable. Are sunspots included in this model of causation? Thirdly, has the model been vetted by former Tech Review columnist Richard Muller or by Ian Plimer or by another climate soother? Both weather and CO2 have changed dramatically on their own. Weather has been much colder and hotter, and people have survived. CO2 has been 100 times higher.
The single moral issue overwhelms all the many scientific issues, however.
The moral question is whether individuals have the right to life. Thomas Jefferson's declarations of the rights to liberty and happiness both presupposed the right to life. Back in 1776, the founders considered people good. Thus they valued their own lives and those of others.
Today, alas, in contrast, some moralists think people are evil because they consume good resources and create bad ones. That wrong pair of ideas must be fought on moral grounds. The fact of living is *not* itself a sin. It is only conceivable as a sin to those who espouse the religionist idea of original sin.
Demonizing carbon dioxide endorses the religious idea of original sin because if carbon dioxide is a toxin, then every animal's exhale is evil. This is a complete inversion of the meaning of the word "evil," which itself depends on life as the standard of value (see the Ayn Rand Lexicon). In other words, the concept of "toxin" is only made possible and necessary because we choose to live, and we need to know what causes death, the converse.
On the moral and political side, alas, the effects of climate alarmism are quite clearly toxic to those of us who admire the effects of 1776. The USA was founded specifically to enable a harmonious society among those who disagreed on religious issues (like CO2). Objective, limited law is how we achieved many years of a glorious "melting pot." Don't let it go.
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