According to a new study in Nature Geoscience, we still don’t know:
No one knows exactly how much Earth’s climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study suggests scientists’ best predictions about global warming might be incorrect.
The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth’s ancient past. The study, which was published online July 13, contains an analysis of published records from a period of rapid climatic warming about 55 million years ago known as the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM.
“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”
July 16th, 2009 | 1:25 pm
“Something wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in the climate models” indeed! How about simply stating what many knew from the outset of all the climate ravings, and what the more recent articles are edging up to ever so slowly–that the carbon dioxide brings global warming due to human activity, and that we must do something drastic now, and not next year or next decade, is a giant hoax.
July 16th, 2009 | 2:46 pm
One has a firm irrational prejudice about a complex empirical question, owing to one’s (equally irrational) political ideology — as it were perhaps the irrational prejudice that human activity has nothing to do with global warming. It would be awkward for one’s ideology, which is a kind of marketolatry, if unfettered ‘development’ were actually to turn out to be dangerous to the habitability of the earth that God made for us. One knows f###-all about science, and doesn’t care, because one simply needs one’s ideology to “keep warm”, as Eliot said; one’s ideology is a beloved teddy bear. One hears (distantly) of one particular scientific article printed in an august scientific journal which seems to offer some partial confirmation of one’s prejudice. (The same journal has printed innumerable articles taking a different general position from your conclusion about this one.) One leaps into the air with glee and shouts “Told you so”.
It is quite amusing that you TAKE COMFORT from the fact that current models UNDERESTIMATE the amount of warming that took place in an earlier era. Ominous, I should say.
July 16th, 2009 | 4:29 pm
H. Teichman, I think you misunderstand the glee.
I suggest to you that there is a different ideology which steeps an empirical question — the truth or falsity of a particular hypothesis — in an overbearing moral framework. The outrageous selfishness and gluttony of our consumerist culture has no bearing on whether man-made carbon emissions are causing a warming of the surface of the earth. It’s either true or its not, regardless of whether I drive an SUV.
It’s just refreshing to see actual science being done, rather than ideologues resorting to an argument from authority or groupthink dominated researchers who live in fear that the grant won’t be renewed.
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