More info on global warming and what we can do. Sadly Al Gore won't touch this topic.

And it was not a Y2K bug.

So how exactly is that "global" temperature measured uniformly across the span of years?

Those vegan guys in comment number one manage to take a very good point and ruin it by being zealots. If we cut our red-meat consumption by 80-90%, that would generally be a good thing, but it would not require a vegan lifestyle, and I think you might get more traction if you made eating-meat-reduction your goal instead of vegan-evangelism.

The "correction" only made a difference to the people in Wackystan who never have and never will believe that Global Warming is taking place. It's the same 27-18% of the people who think a) we're winning in Iraq, b) GWB is doing a good job, etc. A while back, Kevin refered to a post about the 27% of IL voters who voted for Keys over Obama in the Senate race: it seems to be a permanent sub-pop that lives in a constant state of denial.

Yeah, but it's cooler in the US! Screw the rest of the world. USA! USA!

when a global warming skeptic finally found a bug

No, it when a global warming blogger (climageaudit.org) found a bug.

As a blogger, you should recognize another blogger's achievement.

I see Al is doing his ostrich impersonation. Idiot.

Al, you perfectly craven bootlicking Death Eater, by that metric, your pet war is lost. Or does it only work one way?

It seems to me if the most technologically advanced country in the world had their calibration off then the goat herders in Mongolia have probably been looking at their mercury thermometers upsidedown.

I also wonder whether the reflective head gear of the Bush-haters has a cummulative effect on light hitting the temperature sensors.

In Al-World:
A conservative can be wrong 99% of the time and Al won't bat an eye.
But a scientist can a mistake and therefore all science can't be trusted.

dr2chase,

Our goal is to reduce suffering as much as possible. As it says on the front page of the site:

What we choose to eat makes a powerful statement about our ethics and our view of the world -- about our very humanity. Whenever we choose not to buy meat, eggs, and dairy products, we withdraw our support from cruelty to animals, undertake an economic boycott of factory farms, and support the production of cruelty-free foods.

Regardless of any other beliefs we hold and however else we choose to lead our lives, each of us can decide to act with kindness and compassion. Making humane choices is the ultimate affirmation of our humanity.

"Those vegan guys in comment number one manage to take a very good point and ruin it by being zealots. If we cut our red-meat consumption by 80-90%, that would generally be a good thing, but it would not require a vegan lifestyle, and I think you might get more traction if you made eating-meat-reduction your goal instead of vegan-evangelism"

Or, alternatively, how about I say screw the breeders, I'm going to continue eating all the meat I want?

My meat consumption is going to, in the long run, lead to VASTLY less resource consumption than your kids will. Having no kids is by FAR the most aggressive way to cut resource consumption. But no-one is ever willing to accept that inconvenient little truth; instead we get one fairy story after another about how someone's pet project, whether it be destroying SUVs or switching to solar panels, is going to save us all.
The point is not these minor little side issues. The point is that there are 6 billion people on earth and, right now, with about 1 billion of us living like kings, the system is unsustainable. All the SUV cutting in the world won't allow six billion people to use some form of car, even if they are all ultra-efficient hybrids. All the meat cutting in the world won't remove the necessity for nitrogen fertilizers. The only way we get everyone in the world to live well is to get the number of everyone's in the world (substantially) below a billion.

I am not a vegetarian, but I do try to limit my impact by eating as much locally grown and produced food as possible, and about half of the meat we consume is game (deer and pheasant are prominent). We buy a steer every fall, and have it delivered to the locker for processing and take it home and put it in the freezer. When I buy meat at the store, I buy buffalo and grass-fed beef from a local butcher. We buy our eggs at the farmers market and I go to the country every fall to help a cousin can and freeze garden veggies and orchard fruits. Not everyone has those options, but there are small adjustments everyone can make.

Look into the "Hundred Mile Diet" and check out Slow Food U.S.A. for more info on eating better and reducing your carbon footprint at the same time.

My meat consumption is going to, in the long run, lead to VASTLY less resource consumption than your kids will.

I believe Jonathan Swift had the perfect solution to both problems.

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

I don't know why Vegans hate plants. Plants have been shown to sense pain and in many ways are somewhat conscious of the environment around them.

I think that bigotry against our celluloid chloroplast friends is still bigotry.

Personally, I have a lot of friends that are plants, and plants have supported me at some of the worst times in my life. Therefore, in thanks, I feel compelled to eat meat.

Maynard, what if you had a child that accomplished a lot of good in the world -- good that vastly outweighed the resources they consumed?

And is not being a breeder really an excuse to do whatever you want now, regardless of the suffering it causes?

Our goal is to reduce suffering as much as possible.

And would this better be achieved by a uniform 50% reduction in meat consumption, or by converting 10% of the population to vegans?

Are you purists, or pragmatists?

And what does reducing suffering necessarily have to do with global warming?

Meat eaters reverse effects of air pollution and help maintain biodiversity:

Estimated N deposition rates in south San Jose grasslands are 10–15 kg N/ha/year; Peninsula sites have lower deposition, 4–6 kg N/ha/year. Grazing cattle select grasses over forbs, and grazing leads to a net export of N as cattle are removed for slaughter. Although poorly managed cattle grazing can significantly disrupt native ecosystems, in this case moderate, well-managed grazing is essential for maintaining native biodiversity in the face of invasive species and exogenous inputs of N from nearby urban areas.

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1523-1739.1999.98468.x

Al: "Kevin, once again you miss the point of the critique given by McIntyre and the right roots. The fact is you were wrong before about the global warming data. Why should we trust your data now?"

Please your head out of your ass, Al,/b>, lest you further restrict your capacity to breathe properly, and therefore think rationally. We all fully realize that you obviously enjoy the view from up in there, but really, science has clearly and firmly addressed this issue, and the jury's verdict has been publicly rendered some time ago. Kevin is right, and you are wrong, wrong, wrong -- again, again, again.

What will it take to convince you otherwise, that global warming is indeed real and ongoing? Do some schoolchildren from the Ramona Mission Indian Reservation have to stake you naked to the 18th Green of the Indian Palms Resort & Country Club in Palm Springs, and then take turns focusing the sun through a magnifying glass upon your genitalia at 30-second intervals?

Sorry, but as much as the inherent and well-deserved justice of that particular warped vision might bring a wry smile to some of our faces, unlike your friends in the Bush Administration, we neither encourage nor condone the use of torture.

Alas, we must therefore leave you to be as you are, the online wingnut equivalent of some born-again evangelical dry drunk who harangues the passers-by on some downtown street corner, but only attracts the attention of his fellow winos and derelicts, until a police officer finally tells him to move along and stop bothering people.

So move along, b>Al,/b>, and stop bothering people.

Al works at an Indian call center - he is paid by the RNC to troll blogs and spit drivel. As is Egbert. It's seldom the same person, as can be derived from their writing styles and grammar. Al is obviously foreign since he has such a small grasp of American culture (he really is doing nothing other than looking for ways to drop RNC talking points).

Ex-liberal is the only genuine conservative voice on this blog.

It fascinates me that people read Al as anything other than a parody. I really don't see how he can be genuine, or a paid shill, or whatever.

I see this problem as twofold one:

1. Too many people -
2. - eating too much meat (whose production is too hard on the environment).

One solution.

Eat people.

And bio-fuels might be no solution at all for global warming because using them won't remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to make a difference. But a plan is offered that just might work.

http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12496-forget-biofuels--burn-oil-and-plant-forests-instead.html

Personally, I have a lot of friends that are plants, and plants have supported me at some of the worst times in my life. Therefore, in thanks, I feel compelled to eat meat.

Posted by: jerry

Is one of your friends named Al?

Here is an interesting link about the issue of "corrections" to the temperature measuring devices, etc. Draw your own conclusions, in any case it's good prep for what you might hear various places.

">Link

The RNC is going broke,Hence this is why we see such weak comments from the trolls.A coulple of years ago they had some trolls that at least tried.But that is what you get when you outsource,the extra lead in there toys and all.

What's intersting about the graph is its relative flatness between 1940 and 1980. What happened in 1940 to halt the earlier steady increase and what happened in 1980 to get it going again?

"Maynard, what if you had a child that accomplished a lot of good in the world -- good that vastly outweighed the resources they consumed?
"

Do you use that same argument against abortion? What if that fetus being aborted would have grown up to be Jesus? Or, even better, Al Gore? (Truthfully Gore/Edwards is my dream ticket, but that doesn't mean I think the other supporters are all especially wise.)
How does that argument not hold not just for the first kid, but for the fifteenth? Maybe it was the fifteenth kid that would have grown up to be Jesus?
Or maybe that kid grows up to be Hitler?
The point is, this is a stupid way of arguing, and every knows it, from Monty Python ("Every sperm is sacred") on.

"
And is not being a breeder really an excuse to do whatever you want now, regardless of the suffering it causes?
"

What are we arguing about here? "Suffering" (however vaguely defined) or saving the planet.
That was kind of my point, wasn't it? That pretty much everyone who claims to be interested in this subject is far more interested in riding their pet hobbyhorse than in actually solving the problem. You are not REALLY interested in whether a meat free diet changes the world situation from unsustainable to sustainable, all you care about is one more argument (however bad it might be) in favor of your real cause.

As the phrase goes "Here's why 9/11 shows that my favorite policy recommendations should be adopted immediately".

Junius Brutus

SO2 and other aerosol emissions.

The world moved out of recession with a bang in 1939, with the rearmament from war. Every nation on the planet that could find an empty factory, began to use it to produce weapons. Industrial production grew by magnitudes.

Not coincidentally, a number of big cities went up in flames, releasing more sulphur dioxide and more smoke (which blocks sunlight).

SO2 (sulphur dioxide) is a coolant. It cools the atmosphere. Unfortunately it is also water soluble (creating acid rain) and whilst CO2 sits in the atmosphere for 100 years, SO2 is gone very quickly. So it's not like you can solve global warming by having more acid rain.

Post 1945 world industrial growth was so fast that the effects of increased CO2 and CH4 (methane) were masked by rising pollutant levels.

However in the early 1970s pollution had gotten really bad. Tokyo traffic police carried oxygen bottles. Los Angeles was verging on 200 smog alert days a year.

So the US, Europe and Japan all passed draconian anti pollution laws. SO2 emission stopped growing quickly, and even fell in some countries.

The world began to warm up. Reductions in SO2 emissions in the rest of the world more or less offset Chinese emissions. And the rate of CO2 accumulation increased.

What we have seen since 1980 is the pure signal from the Earth's atmosphere of the way we are going. Heat is getting trapped, which once would have radiated back out into space. The planet, and particularly the oceans, are heating up.

We've pretty much ruled out other causes: solar radiation, which has been closely observed since the late 1930s, hasn't fluctuated much (and not in the right direction).

Aerosols are the 'new frontier' of climate research: we've got a much better understanding of what they do, and the magnitude of their impact.

The breakthrough year was 1991. Mount Pinatubo exploded, and James Hansen of NASA went out on a limb and said 'our models predict this much cooling due to SO2 and particulate emission'-- about 1 degree centigrade over 18 months. Lo and behold, the world was almost exactly 1 degree centigrade cooler.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/aerosol.htm

especially

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/aerosol.htm#L_1988

Junius Brutus

SO2 and other aerosol emissions.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/aerosol.htm#L_1988

The world moved out of recession with a bang in 1939, with the rearmament from war. Every nation on the planet that could find an empty factory, began to use it to produce weapons. Industrial production grew by magnitudes.

Not coincidentally, a number of big cities went up in flames, releasing more sulphur dioxide and more smoke (which blocks sunlight).

SO2 (sulphur dioxide) is a coolant. It cools the atmosphere. Unfortunately it is also water soluble (creating acid rain) and whilst CO2 sits in the atmosphere for 100 years, SO2 is gone very quickly. So it's not like you can solve global warming by having more acid rain.

Post 1945 world industrial growth was so fast that the effects of increased CO2 and CH4 (methane) were masked by rising pollutant levels.

However in the early 1970s pollution had gotten really bad. Tokyo traffic police carried oxygen bottles. Los Angeles was verging on 200 smog alert days a year.

So the US, Europe and Japan all passed draconian anti pollution laws. SO2 emission stopped growing quickly, and even fell in some countries.

The world began to warm up. Reductions in SO2 emissions in the rest of the world more or less offset Chinese emissions. And the rate of CO2 accumulation increased.

What we have seen since 1980 is the pure signal from the Earth's atmosphere of the way we are going. Heat is getting trapped, which once would have radiated back out into space. The planet, and particularly the oceans, are heating up.

We've pretty much ruled out other causes: solar radiation, which has been closely observed since the late 1930s, hasn't fluctuated much (and not in the right direction).

Aerosols are the 'new frontier' of climate research: we've got a much better understanding of what they do, and the magnitude of their impact.

The breakthrough year was 1991. Mount Pinatubo exploded, and James Hansen of NASA went out on a limb and said 'our models predict this much cooling due to SO2 and particulate emission'-- about 1 degree centigrade over 18 months. Lo and behold, the world was almost exactly 1 degree centigrade cooler.

OK, Kevin, I think that's quite enough about war and the economy and global warming. It's Friday -- where are the cats?

...what happened in 1980 to get it going again?

Ronald Reagan?

Shorter Al: "I'm in denial exactly like the losers you were citing as being in denial. What's wrong with you, anyway, Kevin Drum?"

Dan Rather may have screwed up, but that doesn't make widdle Georgie Bush any less of a yellow-bellied draft dodger. And we all know you wipe your big fact ass with the Koran every day. (Read it in Drudge!)

Valuethinker;
Don't forget the data from the three weeks or so immediately following 9/11 - over CONUS - it was something like 3 degrees hotter than measured average for those days in every specific location.

Why?

No jet contrails.

even more pure signal.

Junius Brutus "What happened in 1940 to halt the earlier steady increase and what happened in 1980 to get it going again?"

Good question! Some sources estimate the sustainable size of the world's population at 2 Billion--about the size of the population in 1970. Could that play a role?

Is one of my friends Al? Al Gore, maybe. I just get annoyed with pretentious, holier than thou suggestions.

As someone said up above, meat reduction is probably a more practical goal than complete veganism.

Actually, here is an interesting discussion of plants feel pain vs. meat eating.

http://www.islamicconcerns.com/plants.asp

I think that vegans are pretty despicable. I think only fruitarians can claim the high moral ground here.

I think I'll have some chicken.

jerry >"...plants have supported me at some of the worst times in my life..."

Cool dude, take another toke and then do the meat thing

"All animals except Man know that the ultimate purpose of life is to enjoy it" - Samuel Butler

Ha! You're still getting it wrong, Kevin!

You wrote that the measurements were off by a tenth of a degree... wrong!

In fact, they were off by a couple of hundredths of a degree.

Tiny, tiny, margin. It wouldn't have even shown up on anyone's radar, except for the fortuitous fact that 1998 was hotter by only one-one hundredth of a degree.

It's not even a molehill they're making a mountain over: it's a couple of grains of sand.

Could you split that graph into the part that is man-made and the part that is natural warming?

Over the 10-year period as a whole, climate continues to warm and 2014 is likely to be 0.3 deg C warmer than 2004. The overall trend in warming is driven by greenhouse gas emissions but this warming effect will be broadly cancelled out over the next few years by the changing patterns of the ocean temperatures. Want more information click on www.LifeOfEarth.Blogspot.com

Go to the NASA site and see what they do to the raw temperature data. It is worse than making laws and sausages. Then try to find out how they weigh each datum to find an average world temperature, from which all the rest of the crap comes.

Did the Y2K bug affect anything?

What's intersting about the graph is its relative flatness between 1940 and 1980. What happened in 1940 to halt the earlier steady increase and what happened in 1980 to get it going again?
Posted by: Junius Brutus on August 17, 2007 at 4:45 PM
----
Not coincidentally, a number of big cities went up in flames, releasing more sulphur dioxide and more smoke (which blocks sunlight).

SO2 (sulphur dioxide) is a coolant. It cools the atmosphere. Unfortunately it is also water soluble (creating acid rain) and whilst CO2 sits in the atmosphere for 100 years, SO2 is gone very quickly. So it's not like you can solve global warming by having more acid rain.
Posted by: Valuethinker on August 17, 2007 at 5:00 PM
---------

Yes, that was the part of the graph that struck as most interesting as well. It is interesting that the cooling event "peaked" right about the time of the partial test ban treaty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_Test_Ban_Treaty

Coincidentally the graph of Carbon-14 C02 on the same page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Radiocarbon_bomb_spike.svg
is illustrative of just how much "stuff" we were throwing up in the atmosphere. When we quit doing that the cooling spell ended.

If we are organically a part of the climate system and it is unconsciously "self-correcting" I can't remember the term here (Guyan?), maybe we are in for some sort of limited nuclear holocaust soon? A World War III, Hmmm?

Doc

Innovative way of looking at it: I hadn't thought of that. Thank you.

Do you remember the Larry Niven short story? The alien race builds a time machine (a Dyson cylinder ie a very long cylinder of pure neutronium, floating in space), but before they can test it, they die of biorythmn disruption due to prolonged spaceflight. Each race in turn that discovers the cylinder, then suffers with catastrophe. Whilst the interlocutors are talking about it, something happens to them.

Nuclear winter was always only a hypothesis with strong political content. Most climate scientists were studiously neutral.

Ironically, there have been a flurry of recent papers, where people have tested a 'limited' nuclear war at mid latitudes (ie India-Pakistan) against modern GCM models, which are far more sophsticated than what was available in the early 80s.

The results suggest very strong cooling effects. Really dramatic, and lasting for a number of years.

What a truly horrifying thought, that Gaia will 'self correct' by humans killing themselves off. What James Lovelock calls 'the cull'.

Valuethinker, haven't read any sci-fi since the '70s. I googled Larry Niven and got a ton of stuff-evidently he is very prolific. From what I recall of some sci-fi that I read back then, there were a lot of similar themes relating to Nietzchean (sp?) "eternal recurrence". Things happening over and over to people and they don't seem to get it-or worse-they are unable to change their fate even if they become aware of it.

I've got this hunch that we are going to:
1) Reach a consensus that AGW is happening and it is bad and all the hoax fussing will cease at some point.
2) We are going to realize that it is too late to stop it or -worse- we realize that we are in a "runaway" event and drastic man-made cooling efforts have to happen.
3) We begin controlled detonation of thermonuclear weapons that are carefully placed and designed to optimize the cooling effects.

I *think* Lovelock believes that there is going to be a big "reset" upwards to a new higher stable temperature, not a "runaway" event. That's what I remember though.

I've heard ideas of placing "sun-shades" in space and all of that.. I doubt that would give us enough "bang for the buck". Pun intended.

For the record, here's that link I tried to put in earlier:
">Link

To heck with html, here it is:

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/manmade.htm

Doc

He was a specialist in the 'big picture' science fiction. Ringworld and its sequels are about a planet 1000 miles wide, but 93 million miles long, orbiting around an earthlike sun, in a ring. The ramifications and implications of The Ringworld (obviously an artificial construct) are huge.

His 'Known Space' novels are his best. An incredibly imaginative interlinked (but standalone) novels about the region of habitable planets just around Earth.

In it, humans run societies where they kill other humans for their organs so they can live forever (not so far from the truth), where electronic pleasure stimulation replaces addictive drugs (but is just as addictive), where humans stage 'flash crowd riots' using matter transmitters, where a human cro magnon throwback called the Protectors turns out to have superhuman powers, where a billion year old alien race that exercises perfect mind control returns to human space. And then there are the Pearson's Puppeteers (think 2 headed ostriches) who are the universe's greatest cowards. Everything is a threat to a Puppeteer, and only the insane ones are able to leave their home planet and interact with humans. And there are the Kzinti, the all conquering feline warrior race that is defeated by the humans (but not in a simple way).

His stories though are very personal. They are extraordinarily rich in ideas (the examples above have often come true, to some extent eg Flash Riots). They are about the adaptability and resourcefulness of humans in the face of these incredible challenges. One remembers the characters very vividly: Louis Wu in Ringworld, the world's oldest man (300 years). Beowulf Schaefer, the 7' tall space pilot, the only man to ever successfully blackmail a Pearson's Puppeteer.

Since he fell in with Jerry Pournelle I don't think his work has been as good.

Anyway the story I mentioned, which is not set in Known Space, is, I think, in a book called Convergent Series.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/n/larry-niven/convergent-series.htm

or in the book

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/n/larry-niven/limits.htm

I also liked the series 'The Magic Goes Away', for an updating of Conan. In a prehistoric world, magic works and the world is governed by wizards and warriors. But one of the wizards works out that the manna, that creates magic, is *finite* and is rapidly being expended- -the age of magic is about to end. The reflections on the 1970s Oil Crisis are obvious, but now that we are again worrying about Peak Oil, the series again seems slightly uncanny.

Doc

I haven't read James Lovelock 'The Revenge of Gaia' yet, but I think he thinks it could go either way: the great cull by a slow build down, or the great cull by war, famine, plague and mass migration to a Meditterranean like Arctic Ocean.

He likens it to 1938, and he's old enough to remember 1938. Everyone with a brain knows what is coming, but we've all got our fingers crossed and hoping it will be 'alright'. Even though our intellect tells us it will be terrible.

Doc

On geoengineering there has been spirited debate. Realclimate.org had some good stuff on it, mostly because Paul Crudzen (Nobel Prize Winner for discovering CFCs impact on the ozone layer: he went home one day and told his wife 'the research is going well, but I'm afraid it may mean the end of the world') had a paper published in science about lobbing balloons full of SO2 into the stratosphere, to cool the planet.

The short answer is we are unlikely to dream up a piece of geoengineering that would do enough, soon enough, to help, and in any case, the side effects are large and unpredictable.

One has some (vague) hopes for genetically engineered algae, but seeding the ocean with iron pyrites didn't produce good results when it was tried in the 90s.

VT,

I remember the eerily cool summer following the Pinatubo eruption in the Midwest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo
If there was some way you could "goose" a few volcanoes to erupt that might do the trick. But wouldn't a big increase in SO2 make the oceans more acidic and make it tougher for them to absorb CO2? I wonder if there is an additive that could be manufactured for gasoline that would have the beneficial cooling effects of SO2 without the downsides of acid rain? It's kinda weird that we are taking all of the sulfur out of coal and petroleum-maybe we shouldn't be?

Kev:

Nice plot of world urban heat buildup. Remember that millions of poor children die every year due to lack of sanitation and clean water while your envirofetish friends continue to ululuate over rising temperatures measured in concrete jungle.

Why do you support death in the hear and now and fear a potential for discomfort at some point in future?

Doc

It's stratospheric SO2 that is a coolant. So what you need is very tall smokestacks (the original solution to power station pollution, which then caused the distance acid rain problem: the forests of Scandinavia and NE US and Canada were dying due to precipitation from the UK and the Midwest. Since the US enacted SO2 controls under the first Bush Administration, on large power plants, power plant SO2 emission has over halved (at a far lower cost than forecast) and the scope of the problem has been much reduced).

Close range, SO2 is just another form of smog that burns lungs. Ground level SO2 does no good (and in fact is lethal, part of the reason China has a soaring death rate due to respiratory problems).

Mathematically, you are on a hiding to nothing. If your coolant only lasts a few weeks (until it encounters water vapour) but your greenhouse gases last thousands of years (CFCs and HCFCs), one hundred years (CO2) or 20 years (CH4) in the atmosphere) then mathematically you can never keep up. You have to pour ever increasing amounts of SO2 into the atmosphere to maintain the same level of cooling.

(essentially I think the effect is a differential equation series that never converges).

One is reminded of the Simpsons' episode where they solve global warming by dropping ever bigger ice cubes in the ocean.

FWIW the latest climate models say we are in for cooler than average weather until 2014, due to shifts in El Nino, at which point, we will break back up to trend (a warming which was calculated to be 0.2 degrees C per decade, but now looks like it might be closer to 0.4-0.5). So we'll cool long enough for the sceptics and the politicians to get the upper hand, then get hot just in time for a panic about 2020.

Did you see NASA is reporting the lowest extent of Arctic Ice ever recorded? Which will in time allow full time passage of the Northwest Passage in time, but also extraction of oil and gas from the Arctic Ocean. Hooray! (not)

VT,

Thanks for the information. The good news is that CO2 *does* have an expiration date of sorts-100 years. That gives us hope that mitigating CO2 emissions CAN help solve the problem.

Curious though, in those models you spoke of that relate to dramatic cooling caused by a nuclear exchange... Just exactly *what* is it that causes the cooling? Is it simply particulates that are thrown up into the stratosphere due to the blast being close to the ground or is it more complex than that? I'm just looking for the mechanism(s) here that are causative.

Doc

That 100 years is a long stop date. The carbon cycle picks up most atmospheric CO2 *but* if you imbalance that cycle (as we are doing now) it means CO2 can sit around for forever. Since we are perpetually exceeding the planet's capacity to absorb CO2 (and in the case of deforestation of rainforest, actively reducing it), the CO2 concentration rises, and rises.

If we stop the concentration rise, the planet is likely to reduce the rate at which it is absorbing CO2 into the ocean, so the fall won't be be as swift as it might be at the current rate of natural sequestration which is inflated by natural system's response to the imbalance we have caused.

Re nuclear winter:

http://www.envsci.rutgers.edu/%7Egera/nwinter/nw6accepted.pdf

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2007/06/nuclear-december-or-unwarranted.html

looks like it is, simply, the dust and smoke clouds that would be kicked up by a nuclear exchange.

A modern city, when it burns, should burn for days or weeks: all the plastics, wood, stored fuel, and paper, and of course many materials burn at high temperatures (aluminium). Lots of smoke.

I don't think any respectable scientist would stake his or her reputation that nuclear winter would occur, but it's a reasonable guess that a city hit, by a 1 megatonne bomb, might produce as much aerosols as a fairly significant volcano.

VT,

That study was a good read. It is interesting that a small nuclear exchange would produce longer-lasting climate effects (but far less immediate impact) than a big one, because the soot would loft higher since the sun wouldn't be blocked as much by the quantity of the soot itself.

What I am trying to reconcile now is the difference between the climate impact of soot vs. dust in the stratosphere. IOW, the soot from burning cities in WWII shouldn't have produced much cooling beyond a decade or so. Any cooling that could be attributable to nuclear testing that occurred primarily in the '50's and early '60's would not have come from burning cities. There would have to be another source. The shape of the aerosol molecules (from dust and the fireball) kicked up by the testing could be similar I guess.

The whole thing is really creepy though. I could see a screenplay for an action-suspense movie where the CIA becomes confident that AGW is for real and that we have to intervene to stop it. Their solution: Provoke a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India to cool the planet and buy us time...

Horst Graben:

Your presumably right-wing friends don't want the USA to spend even as much of the little percent of GNP for foreign aid it already does. And why do you right-wing clods have one track minds? Can't a person care about more than one issue? We can alleviate both of those concerns, but sure as hell not by either falsifying them or not giving a crap.

I'm a bit late to the party, but Al's comment is telling on the ... the famous critique of the "hockey stick". The critique included a graph which used values for its y-axis almost an order of magnitude different than the graph it was critiquing. The complaint produced similar "hockey sticks" from random data but failed to mention that the shapes on their graph would look like an inconsequential blip on the other.

Back to you, climate septics.

Sigh. Of course the particular restatement last week had little impact, it was just for the US. Saying that the global number hasn't changed is missing the point:

1. NASA and NOAA still keep their temperature adjustment and aggregation software and algorithms a secret from the public that funds this work. They resist scrutiny. Hansen's error was discovered only through statistical analysis of his results, and persisted for years because HE DOES NOT ALLOW ANYONE TO CHECK HIS WORK. Everyone, skeptic and believer alike needs to be calling for climate scientists to open their work for scrutiny.

2. The correction Hansen made is only the tip of the iceberg of measurement issues in the surface measurement system. There are tremendous biases in the physical placement of temperature instruments, and huge questions that persist about algorithms to correct problems like urbanization. And this is just in the US, which has the most robust historical climate network in the world. Brazil, for example, only has 6 measurement points that cover over 60 years, and five of them are influenced by urbanization.

Climate scientists have resisted any scrutiny of the surface temperature record. This is not to say that the world has not been warming, because it has. Balloon and satellite measurements confirm this, but show much less warming. Many suspect that if Hansen were to stop being a obstructionist to real scrutiny of the surface temperature record, we would find that global warming exists but is much less than alarmists claim.