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Alternate New York Times Headline: ‘Global Warming Saves Civilization’

If it weren't for coal and cars, how cold would we be?

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  March 10th, 2013 at 10:29 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Like Beauty, the interpretation of scientific data is often in the eye of the beholder. I’m an engineer with more than a smattering of book-learning in the geologic sciences. It has always struck me as appalling that the scientists who would reorder our very lives around their interpretation of climate science and its implications for our future have so little interest in earth history and the geologic time scale. The climate alarmist community seems to focus on anecdotes and anomalous weather patterns that we can observe over the course of a human lifespan but have a vauge explanation for abrupt and dramatic changes in the distant past.

But in terms of the geologic time scale, human history is the blink of an eye compared the 4.5 billion year age of the earth. The end of the last ice age, a monumental, undeniably non-anthropogenic warming event, happened about 12,000 years ago; to a geologist it may as well have happened a week ago last Thursday. Yet climate scientists rarely address the implications of that warming event on their modern-day warming theories.

But this week, a new study came out which alarmingly concludes that CO2-forced temperatures are at or near their Holocene (post ice age) maximum.

One could look at the same data and wonder how cold we might be if not for Global Warming.

The New York Times (along with just about every other mainstream news outlet) this week reported the news that, for them, closes the case on Global Warming:

Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years

Previous research had extended back roughly 1,500 years, and suggested that the rapid temperature spike of the past century, believed to be a consequence of human activity, exceeded any warming episode during those years. The new work confirms that result while suggesting the modern warming is unique over a longer period.

Even if the temperature increase from human activity that is projected for later this century comes out on the low end of estimates, scientists said, the planet will be at least as warm as it was during the warmest periods of the modern geological era, known as the Holocene, and probably warmer than that.

That epoch began about 12,000 years ago, after changes in incoming sunshine [!! - Ed.] caused vast ice sheets to melt across the Northern Hemisphere. Scientists believe the moderate climate of the Holocene set the stage for the rise of human civilization roughly 8,000 years ago and continues to sustain it by, for example, permitting a high level of food production. [Emphasis added.]

And their "Dot Earth" blog chimed in:

Scientists Find an Abrupt Warm Jog After a Very Long Cooling

While the researchers, led by Shaun Marcott of Oregon State, conclude that the globe’s current average temperature has not exceeded the warmth that persisted for thousands of years after the last ice age ended, they say it will do so in this century under almost every postulated scenario for greenhouse gas emissions.

That blog post has a curious graph and caption as a sidebar, which I have magnified here:

image0010

Indeed, it shows the abrupt warming at the very end of the last ice age, followed by several thousand years of temperatures well above the baseline (average for the years 1961-1990). For the last 5,000 years, though, the planet has been cooling, a trend that has even accelerated for the last 2,000 years.

But for some real perspective, let’s look at some data from the Vostok Ice Core. It affords a look at the last 400,000 years of earth history, encompassing several ice ages.

image001

The top graph shows CO2 concentration in the atmosphere; the bottom one shows average temperature departure from the 1950 value. Two observations are readily apparent:

  1. For the last 400,000 years at least, "normal" = "COLD!"
  2. The warm periods are but brief interludes between ice ages. Wild temperature fluctuations were common before any possible impact of human civilizations. The anomaly is the stability of the moderate temperatures during the Holocene, the last 12,000 years (indicated by my red arrow), when warm weather fostered the development of human agriculture, cultures and civilization.

Consider what a global ice age would mean. Cincinnati, OH and points north would be under a glacier hundreds of feet thick (not necessarily a bad thing, in the mind of some readers and SEC football fans). Agriculture would be impossible in North America. The planet could sustain a tiny fraction of its current population.

Even with a cooling of a couple of degrees Celsius, crop yields and growing seasons would shift dramatically for the worse. It would be increasingly difficult to feed the planet.

Given the choice between Global Warming and Global Cooling, give me Warming any day.

Here’s an interesting question for the Climate Change community: What would today’s global temperature be absent the man-made CO2 input since the Industrial Revolution?

Cross-posted at stevemaley.com.

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COMMENTS

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  • slicksleddog

    Of course we wouldn’t be in anything like an ice age in the absence of the recent global warming. (I’m assuming the existence of global warming, which is the view of the vast majority of meteorologists, per the American Meteorological Society poll cited in John Hayward’s 3/8/13 post, “‘Climate change’ cools off.”)

    Still, the mainstream media cites only the possible harms from global warming, and virtually never mentions the benefits. We hear a lot about deaths caused by heat waves, but it’s never mentioned that the number of lives saved due to milder winters is many times the number of heat wave deaths. Drought and crop failures make headlines, but increased crop yields in other areas don’t rate a mention. I think that costs from global warming will outweigh the benefits, but the view from the mainstream media is completely one-sided.

  • norris

    I have always had the idea that global warming would be in our favor.
    When the winters are warmer we burn less fuel to heat our homes .
    China ,North Korea, Siberia and northern Canada could produce enough food to feed the world twice over .
    Cold is a bigger killer than heat , many people travel to the equator for vacation and love it.

  • wgswst

    Yes. One learns this from looking at financial charts: The truth is in the timescale. Always.

  • jaydickb

    Most people don’t argue that global warming doesn’t exist, especially when viewed on a reasonably long time scale. We’re still coming out of the little ice age, apparently. It’s the cause that’s in dispute. If you view the above graphs, especially over 400,000 years, it is obvious that warming and cooling are completely normal. Thus, proving that human activity is causing warming should be very difficult. I haven’t seen any evidence that comes close to convincing me.

  • jpkoch

    Climatological time scales used to be measured in centuries, not decades or seasons. The globe has been warming since the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age (which occurred between 1650 and 1690). Of course, the global climate remained cool and unsettled until recent decades. Great Britain winters for centuries were cold, snowy and miserable. As late as 1947 and 1962, Great Britain experienced very cold snowy winters. In the US, the winters up to the late 1970s usually featured at least a third of the nation in a 20-30 day deep freeze (temps from -10- +15 deg F and lots of snow); as a matter of fact, some climatologists in the 1970s worried about a perpetually cold world where famine would rule. Little did they know that by 1976 shifts in the temperatures of the North Pacific would abruptly stop the “cold regime”. A few years later, scientist at NCAR discovered ENSO. A decade later, scientists at the University of Washington discovered the PDO.

    Lost in all of these discoveries are time scales. The DeVries solar cycle has a 400 year cycle (200 year positive, followed by a 200 year negative cycle). The DeVries cycle measures small changes in solar irradiance. Some scientists noticed that long term changes in the earth climate occur during the phase changes of this cycle. The last negative DeVries cycle (cold cycle) ended in 1820. That was about the same time the Little Ice Age ended. Soviet solar physicists believe the earth is currently entering a negative (cold cycle). And while, they don’t think this cycle will be as cold as the 500 year long Little Ice Age, it will be significantly colder than what we’ve seen between 1975 and 2007. Again, time scales are important. Many oscillations occur much longer than human life spans.
    A 30 year cold period during the last negative PDO (1947-1977) occurred during the childhood and early adulthood of the Baby Boomers. To them, “normal” was cold snowy winters, very stormy and wet springs, followed by warm summers and mild autumns. That all changed by the early 1980s. A 40 year old living in Chicago would have noticed in 1986 that the summers were very hot, the winters very mild, and the springs were drier and much warmer. Talk of snowless winters would have made sense to this person. Yet, few people realize that even 75 years does not necessarily spell “Climate Change”. Periodic changes in ENSO and the AMO/PDO could create drought conditions in the Nile, or the Andes. And this period conditions could last a few hundred years before cycling back to past conditions.

  • spinoneone

    Even the U.K. Met Office, which is heavily invested in “anthropogenic global warming” is beginning to back down. For the past 15 years they can’t prove that there has been a significant change in the average global temperature. [What happens where you live impacts you but isn't terribly important.]

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/9919121/Look-at-the-graph-to-see-the-evidence-of-global-warming.html

  • stevemaley

    There was a new study last week that tried to unravel the timing. They’ve moved from a position that CO2 lags warming by 800 years to saying it is coincident, or at most lags warming by 200 years. In any event, the CO2 reinforces warming via positive feedback.

    Who the **** knows? They’ll just move the goalposts anyhow. As far as I’m concerned, until they come up with a better explanation for the end of the Ice Age than “a little more sunshine”, then the whole thing is a sham.

  • realfactchecker

    Thanks for including the link. Bookmarked for ammunition. In arguments, facts are your friend.

  • barbara125

    And then there’s the “chicken or egg” question. Have humans thrived because of the warming therefore increasing their activity or have humans caused the warming by their activity?

  • http://www.ajharaldson.com lakeworthcane

    You all will want to take advantage of the early-bird discounts at my tropical Nova Scotia resort.

  • ardvarkmaster

    It matters not whether those Yankee schools are under a glacier or not, SEC football teams are consistently bringing home the the Crystal Football (though it sometimes gets dropped on the floor). Roll Tide!

  • BA Cyclone

    Truly, there are too many AGW believers claiming the mantle of scientific purity, it gives science a bad name.

    Thanks for the great post, Steve.

  • http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/ slehar

    >>>
    The end of the last ice age, a monumental, undeniably **non-anthropogenic** warming event, happened about 12,000 years ago;
    <<<

    Not so fast! There is a respected climatologist, William Ruddiman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ruddiman who claims that according to the Milankowicz cycles, orbital gyrations that account for much of the ice age data, a new ice age should have appeared 10,000 years ago, but that its arrival was forestalled by early peoples burning vast tracts of forest for agriculture, and that it was their carbon dioxide emissions that SAVED US from what would have been an ice age on us now! (see Early Anthroposcene Hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_anthropocene)

    Whether or not Ruddiman is right, this demonstrates how little we know about climate, and how rash it would be to trash our modern civilization and tax our carbon to kingdom come when it is actually making things better!

  • jpkoch

    You hit the nail on the head. Climate Alarmists depend heavily upon positive feedback loops; otherwise, their theory doesn’t work. Yet, more than a few scientists have called the positive feedbacks into question. On a purely theoretical level, AGW leads to more tropical cloudiness. The clouds over the tropics reflect sunlight back out into space, which of course is a negative feedback. If the tropics cool, there is less heat energy available to be advected poleward; thus, the poles cool and we are back to square one.

  • paxcat

    If the ice core is reliable, then this is a pattern repeating itself every so “seldom!”

  • stevemaley

    Wait… Aren’t you one of the Koch brothers?

  • stevemaley

    Across the river there is a museum with a whole different take on earth history…

    http://creationmuseum.org/

  • stevemaley

    It’s hard to imagine that a few cave dwellers barbecuing a mastodon every now and then were able to impact global climate, but YMMV.

  • mrfixit10

    Anyone with more than one brain cell firing and thinks MAN can alter the climate of Earth is a complete ________. you fill in your own adjective. Any Forest Gump answer will qualify.

  • grayarea

    Ok, so warming is real, and it might be partly caused by us, but hey, at least we dont have an ice age on our hands because without this CO2, we should be way colder… Is the takeaway? I think an interesting thing that is missing here is an explanation for why the last 63 years has seen the CO2 levels climb to nearly 400 ppmv, and why those years aren’t on the graphics or addressed in this article. I think we can all agree that the levels of fossil fuel burning has been dramatically higher since the 1950s. It should also be clear that 400 ppmv is not a typical reading historically.

    I think that the article does a nice job of pointing out the ebb and flow of CO2 and temperature fluctuation over a wider swath of time, but I also think its pretty clear that the years that were left out reflect a significant spike. It has to be a legitimate hypothesis that CO2 level we see is traceable to fossil fuel consumption and the industrialization of India and China. It’s also worth asking how much is too much?

  • stevemaley

    You may not have noticed that the graphics were not designed by me to “hide the spike” as you suggest. The first graphic is from the NYT blog. The second one, the one with CO2 concentrations, is taked directly from the Norwegian website http://grida.no, not a skeptic website by any stretch:

    GRID-Arendal a centre collaborating with the United Nations Environment
    Programme (UNEP), supporting informed decision making and
    awareness-raising through:

    * Environmental information management and assessment

    * Capacity building services

    * Outreach and communication tools, methodologies and products