* This has nothing to do with the NASA guy.*
Alright, I'll walk you through the executive summary, then dig up some heavy reading links.
First, I'll preface by saying that I have always been skeptical of many of the claims by 'environmental wackos' and activists such as Greenpeace through the years. Also, that I'm not an emotional or Liberal Arts kinda guy - my undergraduate degree is in Mechanical Engineering - (not too touchy/feely, save the whales type) and my Masters in Political Economics (a boutique field, to say the least) is the cloth that capitalists, like me, are cut from.
I was going to start with the premise that 'apathy' was the real crisis we face, but I decided not to - nobody cares about apathy.
For 3 days after 9/11, the skies were very bright in urban areas from the lack of con trails spread across the skies, and a scientist began studying and plotting the gradient in high to low temperatures from thousands of reporting stations across the country. Matching similar historical data with the 3-day break in con trails, and continuing the recording of the data afterwards, yielded a surprising and puzzling result. The average temperature spiked up 1 deg C for the 3 day period.
That may sound like a small amount, but it isn't. It's huge - but puzzling. We don't consider con trails to be major pollution compared with the massive amount of other particulate matter we belch into the air everyday. And the Earth is heating up from greenhouse gases, right?
If the Earth is supposed to be heating up, and we removed a small amount of the total particulate pollution from the equation for 3 days, why did the temperature go up? Shouldn't it have gone down?
Clouds form from moisture condensing onto dust or pollen particles. As more moisture condenses on each particle, they eventually become heavy enough to fall as rain. But the particulate matter from con trails and other pollution is smaller and less water condenses onto each soot particle, forming clouds that are reflective.
All clouds filter sunlight, but these clouds are reflecting sunlight in addition to filtering it. The old double whammy. The clouds have been cooling us off from the heating effect of greenhouse gases. Dot number 1.
Next, some older studies that were dismissed as being uninteresting (they didn't make sense to us then, so we ignored them) showed that the Earth was getting less sunshine. Less sunshine? Controlled experiments from agriculture, repeated after decades, had shown that the Earth was receiving 20% less sunshine than 50 years ago.
Pan evaporation rates from around the world show an identical 20% reduction. It's identical because evaporation is a function of sunlight, not temperature. Two separate, but previously unconnected data confirmed each other, dot 1 and created dot number 2.
We don't have to connect alot of dots here. All of the models we have been using to estimate the impact of greenhouse gases have been wrong. We were worrying about the temperature of Earth rising 5 deg C over the next hundred years - 5 deg C overall heating is pretty much the breaking point for us humans. We reach 5 deg C rise and we're likely past the point of no return.
What we now know is that we have underestimated the heating effect of greenhouse gases. The clouds from our pollution have been reducing our normal heating from the sun and masked the true impact of the gases. We are far more impacted by greenhouse gases than we thought. The environmental wackos were wrong - it's much worse than their worst case. In fact, it twice as worse as their worst case.
Plug in the new numbers and we'll be at a 5 deg C elevation in 50 years and 10 deg C overall change in less than 100 years. The Earth was last at that temperature 4 million years ago - before man was around. Our goose will be cooked.
We've been like the proverbial frog sitting in a slowing heating pan of water.
We have two forces pulling from each end of a rope. One one side is greenhouse gases heating us up and our particulate pollution cooling us down. The gases are winning since the whole rope is moving toward them. The less we pollute the air, the hotter we get. How's that for a problem we got ourselves into?
So, let's just pollute more? No, because that pollution is killing us another way.
Particulate pollution from our industrial centers in the temperate zone are stopping the natural movement of winds north and south of the equatorial zone that create life-giving monsoons. We're changing our weather patterns and ocean currents, and overheating our tropical waters and equatorial areas. The result is stronger tropical storms from the higher water temperature, and longer seasons of tropical activity.
Okay, that is good news. You want to hear the bad news? The bad news is that we aren't polluting the air as much over the polar areas as we are in the temperate zone. Remember dot number 1? Not as many new, man-made clouds over the poles explains why we're losing the ice caps faster than we could explain. Now we can explain it.
There is a tipping point. The tipping point is the Greenland ice. We are fast approaching a point where we can no longer stop it's melting. You can't build a levee or dam up the water flowing under the ice that is melting it from underneath. It will be unstoppable after the tipping point. New Orleans is just a taste of things to come when you consider the effect of a 3' rise in the Atlantic Ocean along the eastern US seaboard and in Europe.
What is the tipping point? I don't think anyone wants to guess. Can we estimate from temperature alone, or will we just know it after it passes?
There are plenty of scenarios to consider, but none have a happy ending. The climatic changes are already starting and will continue. Exploring all the scenarios is a waste of time. The only thing we have to consider is how much time we have to act, and what action to take.
There is but one solution to the action: We must immediately go onto a war footing to reduce greenhouse gases.
There is but one time to start and that is now. We have only about a ten year window to make that happen, or we cannot stop the heating (and melting) momentum, no matter what we do. If we haven't
reduced greenhouse gases significantly in 50 years, we will have cooked our goose. We can't just curb the increase, or reduce the rate of growth or even cap them to todays level. That won't save your children or grandchildren.
If we get to that 5 deg C rise 50 years from now, it's unlikely we'll be unable to stop momentum from pushing to a 10 deg C rise just a few generations from now. That will be Armageddon because we are not a hearty species. How many of us will be left? Fifty percent of all the animal species on the planet now will be extinct or near extinction by then, at those temperatures.
We thought we had a few hundred years before distant relatives would have to deal with it. Now it looks like we, or are children are going to have do it. Vacation is over. You sat on your butt and got fat and lazy through most of your life. It's time to do something with your meaningless life.
The daily nonsense of Hollywood, Iraq, Iran, politicians, etc. is meaningless. This transcends all religions, nationalities, political persuasions, sexual preferences and colors of skin. If you are not part of a grassroots effort to encourage and mobilize your church, synagogue, mosque, school board, neighbors and co-workers to force your government to begin
something to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you are anti-humanity.
Here is some interesting reading to start.
