New technologies
and global warming scienceNew Scientific Advances: The Human Impact on
Global Climate Change
Senate
Committee on Environment and Public Works
Honorable
James M. Jeffords, Chairman
March
13, 2002
Fossil fuels currently provide around 84% of
energy consumed in the United States, and roughly 80% of the energy produced
worldwide. Those energy resources are key to improving the human condition and
the environment.
Human
use of fossil fuels has increased the amount of greenhouse gases, in particular,
carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is essential to life on
earth. Moreover, the greenhouse effect is important to life on earth in that the
greenhouse gases help retain energy near the surface that would otherwise
escape to space, leaving the planet a cold rock, like the moon.
Based on ideas about how climate works, the small additional energy resulting
from the air’s increased CO2 carbon dioxide content should warm is warming
the planet.
Projections
of future energy use, applied to the scientifically best most sophisticated computer simulations
of climate, have yielded wide-ranging forecasts of future temperature increases
from a continued increase of CO2 carbon dioxide concentration in the air.
These have been compiled by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC). The middle range forecast of their estimates of future
warming, based on expected growth in fossil fuel use without any curbs, is for
a 1 degree Celsius increase between now and 2050. A simulation counting in the
effect of the as yet unimplemented Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in 1997 and
calling for a worldwide 5% cut in CO2 carbon dioxide emissions from 1990 levels,
would reduce that increase to 0.94 C – an insignificant 0.06 C cut (Figure 1).
That means if increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are a
major problem, then much steeper cuts than those outlined in the Kyoto Protocol
are warranted.
One key scientific
question is: What has been the response
of the climate thus far to the small amount of energy added by humans from
increased CO2 greenhouse gases in the air? To prove
the reliability of their future forecasts, computer simulations need
verification by testing past, well-documented temperature fluctuations. New federal
investment in technology, especially that of space-based instrumentation, has
helped address the issue of observed response of the climate to the air’s
increased greenhouse gas concentration. Two capitol tests of the reliability of
the computer simulations are the past decades of surface temperature and lower
troposphere change.
Record
of surface temperature
In the 20th
Century the global average surface temperature (Figure 2) rose about 0.5 C,
after a five hundred year cool period called the Little Ice Age. The
uncharacteristic cold had followed a widespread warm interval, called the
Medieval Warm Period (ca. 800 – 1200 C.E.). The 20th Century warming
trend may have a human component attributable to fossil fuel use, which
increased sharply in the 20th Century. But a closer look at the 20th
century temperature shows three distinct trends:
First, a
strong warming trend of about 0.5 C began in the late 19th century
and peaked around 1940. Next, the temperature decreased from 1940 until the
late 1970s. Recently, a third trend has emerged -- a modest warming from the
late 1970s to the present.
Because
about 80% of the CO2 carbon dioxide from human activities was
added to the air after 1940, the
early 20th Century warming trend had to be largely natural. Human
effects from increased concentrations of greenhouse gases amount to at most 0.1
C per decade – the maximum amount of the surface warming trend seen since the
late 1970s. This surface warming would suggest a temperature trend of about 1 C
per century, which is less than that predicted by the computer simulations of the
air’s increased human-made greenhouse gas content. Accumulated over a century,
civilization will readily adapt to such a modest warming trend. However, the
recent trend in surface warming may not be primarily attributable to human-made
greenhouse gases.
Computer
simulations of climate in which the air’s greenhouse gas concentrations
increase owing to human activities predict detectable warming not only near the
surface but also in the layer of air above the surface, the lower troposphere,
which rises in altitude from roughly two to eight kilometers. Records from NASA’s Microwave Sounder
Units aboard satellites extend back 21 years and cover most of the globe
(Figure 3). The satellite-derived record is validated independently by measurements
from NOAA balloon radiosonde instruments, and those records extend back over 40
years (Figure 4). Those records show that the temperature of the lower troposphere
does vary, e.g., the strong El Niño warming pulse of 1997-98 is obvious.
However, no meaningful
human warming trend, as forecast by the computer simulations, can be found.
The
radiosonde record from balloons confirms the results of the satellites. Although
the radiosonde record lacks the dense spatial coverage from satellites, the
radiosonde record extends back to 1957, a period that includes the recent rapid
rise in the air’s carbon dioxide concentration. The balloon record shows no attributable
warming
trend change in global average temperature
prior to the dramatic shift in 1976-77. That warming, known as the Great
Pacific Climate Shift of 1976 - 1977, is not attributable to human causes but
is a natural, shift in the Pacific that occurs every 20 to 30 years, and can can affectaffect
global average temperatures.
When you
comparecompared
to it with the
output
from computer simulationsobserved response of the climate system,
the conclusion
is that the computer
simulations all have
forecast warming trends
much steeper over the last several decades than measured. The forecasts exaggerate
exaggerate
– to some degree
the warming at the surface, and profoundly in the lower troposphere.
The
complexity of the computer simulations of climate is one reason the forecasts are unreliable.[1]
The simulations must track over 5 million parameters. To simulate climate
change for a period of several decades is a computational task that requires
10,000,000,000,000,000,000 degrees of freedom. To improve the forecasts, much
better information is required, including accurate understanding ofto keep
things simple, the two
major, natural greenhouse gas effects – water vapor and clouds.
Given
the lack of an observed warming trend in the lower troposphere, the result is
that most of the surface warming in recent decades cannot owe to a human-caused
enhanced greenhouse effect. What might cause the surface warming, especially in
the early 20th century when greenhouse gases from human activities
had not significantly increased in concentration in the atmosphere? The 20th
Century temperature pattern shows a strong correlation to energy output of the
sun (Figure 5). Although the causes of the changing sun’s particle, magnetic
and energy outputs are uncertain, as are the responses of the climate to the Sun’s
various changes, the correlation is pronounced. It explains especially well the
early 20th Century warming trend, which cannot have much human
contribution.
Based
on the key temperature measurements of the last several decades, the actual
response of the climate to the increased concentration of carbon dioxide and
other human-made greenhouse gases content in the air has shown no significant
man-made global warming trend. The magnitude of expected human change is
especially constrained by the observed temperature trends of the lower
troposphere.
This
means that the human global warming effect, if present, is small and slow to
develop. That creates a window of time and opportunity to continue and improve
observations and computer simulations of climate to better define the magnitude
of human-made warming. Proposals like the Kyoto agreement to sharply cut
greenhouse gas emissions are estimated in most economic studies to have enormous
economic, social and environmental costs. The cost estimates for the U.S. alone
amount to $100 billion to $400 billion per year. Those costs would fall
disproportionately on America’s and the world’s elderly and poor.
*********
Figure
1 -- Forecast of year-to-year temperature rise from years 2000
to 2050 C.E.
(thin line) assuming an increase in the air's
greenhouse gas concentration from human activities, based on the Hadley
Center's model (UKMO HADCM3 IS92A version). The upper line (labeled
"Without Kyoto") is the linear trend fit to the model's forecast
temperature rise, without implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. The lower line
is the estimate of the impact on temperature with the implementation of the Kyoto
Protocol. By the year 2050, around 0.06 C global warming is averted by the
implementation of the Kyoto Protocol.
Figure
2 -- Surface temperature changes sampled worldwide and analyzed
by Cambridge Research Unit (CRU) and NASA-Goddard Institute of Space Studies
(GISS). The pattern of 20th century temperature change has three distinct
phases: an early 20th-century warming, a mid-century cooling, and a late
20th-century warming.
Figure
3 -- Monthly averaged temperatures sampled nearly globally for
the lower troposophere (roughly 5,000 to 28,000 feet altitude) from Microwave
Sounder Unit (MSU) instruments onboard NASA satellites. The large spike of
warmth resulted from the temporary natural warming of the Pacific Ocean by the
1997 - 1998 El Niño event. The linear trend is +0.04 C per decade (data are from
http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/temperature/)
Figure
4 -- The seasonal average temperature anomaly sampled worldwide
for the lower troposphere as measured by radiosonde instruments carried aboard
balloons. Although a linear trend of +0.09C per decade is present if fitted
across the entire period of the record, that trend is affected by the presence
of the abrupt warming that occurred in 1976-1977, owing to the action of the
Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The trends before and after the 1976-1977
Great Pacific Climate Shift indicate no evidence of a significant human-made
warming trend (source of data
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/temp/angell/glob.dat)
Figure
5 -- Changes in the sun's magnetism (as evidenced by the
changing length of the 22-year, or Hale Polarity Cycle, dotted line) and
changes in Northern Hemisphere land temperature (solid line) are closely
correlated. The sun's shorter magnetic cycles are more intense, suggesting
periods of a brighter sun, then a fainter sun during longer cycles. Lags or
leads between the two curves that are shorter than twenty years are not
significant, owing to the 22-year time frame of the proxy for brightness
change. The record of reconstructed Northern Hemisphere land temperature
substitutes for global temperature, which is unavailable back to 1700 (S. Baliunas
and W. Soon, 1995, Astrophysical Journal,
450, 896).
Dr. Baliunas is Deputy
Director at Mount Wilson Observatory, co-host of TechCentralStation.com, Senior
Scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics. The remarks herein are personal views and imply no
institutional endorsement by any of her affiliations.
[1] W. Soon, S. Baliunas, S. B. Idso, K. Ya. Kondratyev and E. S. Posmentier, 2001, “Modeling climatec effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions: unknowns and uncertainties,” Climate Research, 18: 259-275. See attached.