A CLOSER LOOK AT CLIMATE CHANGE (PART 11)

MORE QUESTIONS

Revised 8/6/2011

According to Dr. Robert Balling, Director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University, there is a confounding mishmash of data being used by climate scientists across the spectrum to argue for or against the following:

1. How much has the earth really warmed since the end of The Little Ice Age?

2. How reliable are the temperatures in the historical record going back into the 19th Century?

3. Does the placement of thermistors since the 1970s play a role in the temperature record as compared to the temperature records obtained from earlier in the 20th Century?

4. How does the surface temperature readings jive with the atmospheric temperature soundings taken by satellites?

Dr. Balling delved into these questions and more in an article appearing in the September 2003 issue of the George C. Marshall Policy Outlook Institute (GCMPOI) where he appears to take a reasoned approach to the issue. This article is a rather refreshing departure from the often acrimonious debate between the so-called climate apocalyptics and climate skeptics.
Using temperature data compiled by Dr. Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK, Dr. Balling constructed a chart that shows two warming spurts - one from the mid 1910s to about 1945, and another one from about 1970 to 2000. Between 1945 and 1970 there was a level stretch where temperatures didn't appear to increase at all, and since 2000 the global temperatures seem to have stabilized as well. Revision: the 2000-2010 decade has turned out to be above average.
The rate of temperature rise between 1915 and 1945 worked out to 0.16° C per decade, for a total temperature increase of about 0.48° C . The rate of increase from 1980 to 2010 was about 0.17° C per decade, for a total of 0.51° C. In other words, the rate of temperature increase in the first half of the 20th Century was essentially the same as the rate of temperature increase since 1980, but the global temperature spurt during the first half of the 20th Century cannot be blamed on greenhouse forcing due to human activities.
According to the data compiled by Jones, the global temperature has increased by about 1° C since 1900.

But, according to Dr. Balling, climate change is not a settled science by any means. Balling surmises that the temperature record is incomplete since only about 30% of the earth's surface was monitored at various times throughout the latter part of the 19th Century and first half of the 20th. It's only been since about 1970 that the current coverage of about 80% has been established.
However, there are built-in biases to the modern day temperature record that need to be taken into consideration. For example, traditional mercury-in-glass thermometers have been largely replaced by electronic thermistors that record continuously and accurately. These instruments detect and record heat-carrying eddies that traditional thermometers fail to register. When recorded temperatures made by these instruments are compared to traditional temperature readings done by mercury thermometers, a bias toward warmer temperatures is introduced. Further biases are introduced by the nature of  the shelters housing  these instruments, which can trap heat, whereas mercury thermometers could tolerate being more in the open. Cooling biases in the temperature record are removed by the continuous recording of temperature by thermistors because thermometer readings were formerly taken at discreet times in the early morning, analogous to a snapshot (as opposed to a motion picture provided by a thermistor). Nowadays, these formerly discreet temperature readings are swallowed up in the continuous record. All taken together, these factors may lead to a warming bias of at least 0.05° C.
A very strong bias can be introduced by the "urban heat island effect", where solar heat  is retained by asphalt and concrete along with anthropogenic heat generated by heated buildings. Further localized urban heating can sometimes be attributed to higher CO2 levels in the air because of the breathing of a million people (more or less) coupled with the general absence or scarcity of trees that take up CO2. This isn't usually a factor with adequate mixing, but during temperature inversions a virtual lid is placed over a city for days, trapping CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) to produce a measurable anomaly.

These factors taken together can introduce a warming bias of an additional 0.1 - 0.15° C. And finally, during the last few decades many weather stations have been moved from cooler river valleys to airports usually located at higher (and thus warmer) elevations. All these biases taken together can add as much as 0.2 - 0.3° C to the observed temperature record covering the last several decades.

To be sure, many (though certainly not all) climate models contain algorithms that are designed to normalize out these biases. Those that take these biases into account tend to be more conservative.

Overall, Dr. Balling concedes that there has been an undeniable increase in global surface temperatures since about 1970 that cannot be wholly explained by increased solar activity or a temperature rebound from the Little Ice Age, which was probably a factor in the heating spurt prior to 1945. Many models appear to jive with the observed data when surface temperatures are plugged into them. But temperatures aloft should also be increasing, according to most climate models. They're not. Many models predict even more warming in the lower troposphere than at the surface, but that is not the case. And that's problematic. The National Research Council’s 2000 report acknowledged that “if global warming is caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it should be evident not only at the earth’s surface, but also in the lower to mid-troposphere.” Writes Dr. Balling: "Warming near the surface with little to no warming in the lower to mid-troposphere is not a clear greenhouse signal!"

These observations of the surface and tropospheric discrepancies begs the question of whether the climate models are engineered to function solely on surface temperatures and giving mid and lower troposphere thermodynamics a lesser weighting per the models' algorithms.

Additional factors may be involved in the observed heating of the planet. Rain forest destruction in Brazil, rapid growth of population centers in India and China - it's a lot more complicated than just burning coal (and petroleum products) and noting the increase in greenhouse emisions. In Brazil, deforestation has depleted the original Amazon rain forest by nearly 18% - by nearly three quarters of a million square kilometers. This has not just removed a substantial carbon dioxide sink. The enormous amounts of carbon dioxide discharged into the atmosphere from the burning of the clear-cut forestation has added to the CO2 being emitted by industrial and power-generating facilities by as much as 25%. The elimination of a carbon sink coupled with the hyperproduction of carbon from burning the killed vegetation presents a huge double whammy!
Brazil has slowed down its removal of rain forest in recent years, and has now been surpassed by Indonesia as the world's number one destroyer of rain forest canopy percentage wise, but remains the world's number one deforestation culprit overall in terms of land area cleared.
In West Africa, the rain forest is now over 90% gone, which further endangers, and may eventually drive to extinction the mountain gorillas that once thrived there. Likewise, thousands of species are disappearing every year because of the problem. Deforestation programs (tree pogroms?) are occurring in other parts of the tropical and subtropical regions of the world with ongoing decimation of biodiversity. Thousands of species a year - gone forever!

To be sure, the depletion of carbon sinks by deforestation and subsequent burning of the killed vegetation has to fit in with the anthropogenic contribution of the greenhouse gas component of the atmosphere, one would think. But we don't hear as much about that as we hear about COAL, and COAL - generated electrical power. People like James E. Hansen, Joe Romm, and other like-minded apocalyptics are pretty quiet on the deforestation issue. They don't even say much about the greenhouse emissions from the burning of petroleum products for transportation purposes. To them, COAL is the greatest enemy mankind has ever faced in the history of mankind.
I just don't get it.

There are other factors involved in the anthropogenic contribution as well. Examples:

The rapid growth of urban centers in China over the last few decades has not only encroached on forestation and green areas, but is contributing a substantial heat island effect. At last count China has 44 cities with populations of over one million - many of them resembling Manhattan in skyline grandeur (at last count, as of August 2011 the count of 1,000,000 plus cities is more than 100.). Some 43% of Chinese live in an urban environment. Worldwide, nearly 50% of the world's 6.7 billion people live in an urban environment. And as is well known, urban landscapes act as heat traps.

The human population explosion has more than doubled the world's population over the past 50 years, from 3.1 billion to 6.7 billion. There are 1.4 to 1.6 billion metric tonnes of CO2 emitted by exhaling humans alone, but that amount is dwarfed by the 207 billion metric tonnes emitted by the earth's biomass every year. The anthropogenic contribution to the annual CO2 discharge into the atmosphere?  29.2 billion metric tonnes, or about 14.1%. 
To be sure, autotrophs take a lot of that back up when they perform photosynthesis, so if we can neglect the autotrophs and consider just the heterotrophs (organisms that eat other organisms), well, they still contribute 89 billion metric tonnes - three times as much as is produced by human activity alone.

How all this stuff balances out is still often not factored into the BIG PICTURE. Some serious climate researchers most likely do have all of these non-anthropogenic sources of CO2 factored into their models, but many don't. There are a vast plethora of climate models written by programmers who have varying degrees of motivation to get the models to say what they want them to say. Unfortunately, it's usually the models that predict global mayhem that get the press coverage - after all, those are the predictions that make the best copy and get the most attention. The mass media is instrumental in pushing apocalyptic scenarios - a case in point is the 2004 movie Day After Tomorrow, a feature length film that depicts an instantaneous ice age caused by man-made global warming. Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth is another example of environmentalist overkill that tends to defeat its intended purpose by being too far-fetched. The decidedly non-scientific Hollywood culture is overly prone to participate in the climate hysteria - it's good for the box office.
There have been some studies, in fact, that seem to suggest that the more drastic the drumbeat of climatic upheaval, the more people tune the whole thing out.

All in all, climate is a fascinating and complex dynamic system that is confounding to even the best climate scientists. There are so many variables and feedbacks, both positive and negative, to consider when contemplating ramifications of our contemporary culture's effect, whether small or large, on the immense and complicated machine that is Mother Earth.