Scientists test radical ways to repair Earth's climate

Scientists in Cambridge plan to set up a research centre to develop ways to repair the earth's climate.

Watch the YouTube video - “Scientists test radical ways to repair Earth's climate.”

The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly

Modeling the Earth's climate is one of the most daunting, complicated tasks out there. If only we were more like the Moon, things would be easy. The Moon has no atmosphere, no oceans, no icecaps, no seasons, and no complicated flora and fauna to get in the way of simple radiative physics. No wonder it's so challenging to model! In fact, if you google "climate models wrong", eight of the first ten results showcase failure. But headlines are never as reliable as going to the scientific source itself, and the ultimate source, in this case, is the first accurate climate model ever: by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald. 50 years after their groundbreaking 1967 paper, the science can be robustly evaluated, and they got almost everything exactly right.

The Earth and Moon, to scale, in terms of both size and albedo/reflectivity.

If there were no atmosphere on Earth, calculating the climate would be easy. The Sun emits radiation, the Earth absorbs some of the incident radiation and reflects the rest, then the Earth re-radiates away that energy. Temperatures would be easily calculable based on albedo (i.e., reflectivity), the angle of the surface to the Sun, the length/duration of the day, and the efficiency of how it re-radiates that energy. If we were to strip the atmosphere away entirely, our planet’s typical temperature would be 255 Kelvin (-18 °C / 0 °F), which is most definitely colder than what we observe. In fact, it's about 33 °C (59 °F) colder than what we see, and what we need to account for that difference is an accurate climate model.

Read the Forbes story by Ethan Siegel - “The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly.”

Climate change: How do we know?

The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples
contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements,
provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased
 since the Industrial Revolution.

The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is extremely likely (greater than 95 percent probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over decades to millennia.¹

Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data, collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.

Read the NASA story - “Climate change: How do we know?”

Gabe Bowen goes back to consider the future

Although the future is an unknown place, the past can be studied.

Gabe Bowen from the
University of Utah.

University of Utah geochemist Gabe Bowen is one of those who are fascinated by what was.

He is the lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience that considers the rate at which carbon emissions warmed Earth’s climate almost 56 million years ago.

Bowen and his compatriots found that what happened so long ago resembles modern, human-caused global warming much more than previously believed.

What happened then, the study found, involved two pulses of carbon delivered to the atmosphere.

The University of Utah News Centre reported on the study’s findings in a story headed: “Past Global Warming Similar to Today’s”.

“There is a positive note in that the world persisted, it did not go down in flames, it has a way of self-correcting and righting itself,” Gabe Bowen, said. “However, in this event it took almost 200,000 years before things got back to normal,” he pointed out.

Talking with the decision makers

Talking with the decision makers – a letter to Victorian Member for the Legislative Assembly, Minister for Local Government and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Jeanette Powell.

Dear Jeanette,

I am unsure of your stance on climate change/global warming (call it what you prefer), but I have no doubt about Ian’s views in that he is a total skeptic about what we are experiencing being human-induced.

Jeanette Powell

Being a senior member of a conservative political party, I suspect you also stand with those who have decided reservations about the causation of climate change and so view what is happening as natural and cyclical.

Having read extensively for five or six years about the earth’s climate and listened to a host of speakers, from vastly experienced climatologists to some of the world’s greatest skeptics, I am absolutely convinced that emerging changes to our climate are without question the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.

The threat to the world, Australia and your electorate are so great that the need for a considered response exceeds, in importance, any other measured calculations presently before parliament.

Maybe that seems alarmist and apocalyptical, but sadly unless we attend to our behaviour, and within that work to build a resilient state in which profit and growth are relegated well down our list of priorities, then climate change and its implications will just that – a force so great that an unprepared community will be decimated.

It was in the late 1980s that the head of the New York City based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, James Hansen, and his colleagues warned the world of the damage by us (humans) to earth’s atmosphere.

Extensive research illustrated, beyond question, that our world could continue to operate successfully if we acted to limit the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.

Interesting, when the Industrial Revolution began about 200 years ago the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was about 270ppm, in the 1960s it was nearly 320ppm and today it is almost 400ppm.

Through your portfolio as Local Government Minister, I urge you to have your staff and anyone else you can influence throughout the Government, be they politicians or public servants, to consider how our State can best maintain a reasonable quality of life and equity for all as it engages with processes that will bring a stop to the present trajectory of carbon dioxide and return it to the 350ppm figure as suggested by Hansen.

I am convinced (and this is a truly difficult pill to swallow) that the richness and complexity of our society is that way because of our frivolous use of cheap energy and so it is absolutely critical that we make society poorer and so slow, appreciably, its consumptive behaviour; a behaviour that is depleting the world’s finite resources, seriously changing the world’s climate and dramatically endangering the quality of a world we will bequeath to those who follow.

Jeanette, it is remarkably difficult to escape from the “business as usual” paradigm for society as we understand it is driven by exactly the motivations that if we adhere to that template, society will unquestionably unravel.

Should you wish to talk more about this, I can visit at your office, meet for coffee, talk on the phone (5822 1766) or you can contact me via email at robed@sheppnews.com.au.

I do hope you will seriously consider this, decide on a course of action and then act.

Thank-you,

Robert McLean

February 20, 2012.