Climate Thought for the Day
The catastrophe that Al Gore and others prophesy as a result of greenhouse
gases is actually not, even by their admission, a direct result of greenhouse
gas emissions. Even the IPCC believes that warming directly resulting from
manmade CO2 emissions is on the order of 1 degree C for a doubling of CO2 levels
in the atmosphere (and many think it to be less).The catastrophe comes, not from a mere 1 degree of warming, but from the
multiplication for this warming 3,4,5 times or more by hypothesized positive
feedback effects in the climate. Greenhouse gas theory gives us warming
numbers we might not even be able to find amidst the natural variations of our
climate; it is the theory of strong positive climate feedback that gives us the
apocalypse.So, In a large sense, the proposition that we face environmental armageddon
due to CO2 rests not on greenhouse gas theory, which is pretty well understood,
but on the theory that our climate system is dominated by strong positive
feedbacks. This theory of positive feedback is almost never discussed publicly,
in part because it is far shakier and less understood than greenhouse gas
theory. In fact, it is very probable that we have the sign, much less the magnitude,
of major feedback effects wrong. But if we are considering legislation to gut
our economies in order to avoid a hypothesized climate catastrophe, we should be
spending a lot more time putting scrutiny on this theory of positive feedback,
rather than just greenhouse gas theory.
