Fractals of Change: Global Warming – Too Important for Junk Science

Fractals of Change: Global Warming Â? Too Important for Junk Science

I missed this post by Tom Evslin because I was on the road in the Rockies, but it's worth reading along with the comments that follow.

I tend to agree with Tom's basic premise: The earth is warming because the last Ice Age is ending. Warming may be accelerated because of recent and current human activity, but the forces at work in our earth and atmosphere are too vast and chaotic to be knowable well enough to enable any significant action to reverse the cycles of the earth.

Despite any actions that we have taken in the last 250 years (Industrial Revolution) or may take now or in the future, it's unlikely we can effect any significant change. The scale and scope of the forces at work are just too massive to be managed by mere humans. The fate of the earth is God's business.

I do not intend to embrace the hysteria of some with political and economic agendas that would have me take unusual personal actions that in my estimation will have little effect on the outcome. I also refuse to be infused with any guilt that some wish to apply.

For example, if the following is correct or even wrong by an order of magnitude, we have little hope of reversing global warming:

"...thawing of the Siberian tundra is thought to produce 100 times the greenhouse gas emissions of all burning of fossil fuels." And methane, the dominant greenhouse gas released by the melting tundra is about 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, according to some scientists (Sorry, I don't know the source of these statements, but here's some data about greenhouse gases) from Wikipedia, quoting another source. I won't try to provide references for the various views of scientists. Anyone interested can find them online.

Living on higher ground perhaps makes the most sense for people if they believe the 'fast disaster' scenario proposed by James Lovelock. In America, for example, 50% of the population lives in the the coastal counties of the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, there are tens of thousand square miles of the U.S. abve 3,500 feet in the West that are relatively unpopulated.

Here's some of what Lovelock believes (from the link above, an interview of Lovelock by a Washington Post writer earlier this year:

"He measured atmospheric gases and ocean temperatures, and examined forests tropical and arboreal (last year a forest the size of Italy burned in rapidly heating Siberia, releasing from the permafrost a vast sink of methane, which contributes to global warming). (Note: I find the previous statement a bit strange. Permafrost does not support forest growth, as far as I know, only tundra is supported where the thin top layer melts in summer. However, that thawing of the permafrost is releasing methane, is undisputed.) He found Gaia trapped in a vicious cycle of positive-feedback loops -- from air to water, everything is getting warmer at once. The nature of Earth's biosphere is that, under pressure from industrialization, it resists such heating, and then it resists some more.

Then, he says, it adjusts.

Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.

"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover."