Global Warming has become a perrenial argument in my family.  Whenever I’m home visiting we invariably wind up having the same argument in the kitchen..

 My dad is a Meteorologist and Air Force veteran; he along with many of his colleagues feel that certain parts of the theory are lacking, and that those things discredit the entire concept of Anthropogenic Climate Change.  Whenever he starts throwing out specific scientific evidence to doubt global warming, I find that I lack the vocabulary and jargon to continue the discussion - hence he wins by default.

 He recently set off the old time bomb called Scott by sending me an article written by a colleague of his in the Colorado Spring Gazette entitled “Recent Climate Studies Show Threat Overblown“.

 A few gems from the column:

“The most interesting point is that there has been no apparent trend toward increasing global mean temperature since the late 1990s. Even while atmospheric carbon dioxide continued to increase over the past 10 years (it is still only a few hundred parts per million of the atmosphere), there has been no corresponding increase in mean global surface temperature.”

“What’s going on? It looks like the computer models used to predict the future climate may be overestimating the role CO2 plays in the very complex ocean-atmosphere system. It’s also possible that the models haven’t properly considered the role that that the sun’s energy output contributes over both the visible and non-visible spectrum. It is the sun, after all, that ultimately controls what the climate on Earth will be like. ”

“ The answers to these questions are unknown now and likely not knowable for some years yet. As I’ve counseled before, look skeptically at anyone who tells you that they know what the climate will be like in 50 years. The state of the science does not support a high confidence in such projections. ”

How does one counter such reasonable-sounding scientific arguments without being able to reply as a scientist?  I know that this breed of skepticism is cherry-picking figures and dithering over tiny details to avoid the larger issue, but I’ve never been able to refute the specific claims.

   Enter the Internets…

 For any of you who come across this sort of objeciton, I have dug up a few prime resources to deal with this kind of nonsense. 

#1 - For arguments written by scientists, for scientists, I highly recommend realclimate.org.  One perplexing argument in the above column states that  “recent studies show that even if substantial global warming were to occur, the net effect is likely to be a decrease in frequency and intensity of storms. This is due to an increase in wind shear aloft that inhibits tropical storms’ development.”  The author is suggesting that further global warming will actually reduce the intensity and frequency of hurricanes, not increase it.

  Me - I lack the apparatus to deal with a claim like that (what the hell is Wind Shear?), except to say that it flies in the face of the consensus opinion of scientists across the globe.   However, RealClimate was there with a great article addressing this very subject.  I picked out a few bits that I could understand, and sent my Dad a link to the article.  Read it and weep, Skeptical Human.

#2:  Richard Black of the BBC has done us all a favor and compiled a top 10 of climate skepticism, complete with counter-arguments.  Here is one glorious example:

1.  Evidence that the Earth’s temperature is getting warmer is unclear. 

Skeptic: Instruments show there has been some warming of the Earth’s surface since 1979, but the actual value is subject to large errors. Most long-term data comes from surface weather stations. Many of these are in urban centres which have expanded in both size and energy use. When these stations observe a temperature rise, they are simply measuring the “urban heat island effect”. In addition, coverage is patchy, with some regions of the world almost devoid of instruments. Data going back further than a century or two is derived from “proxy” indicators such as tree-rings and stalactites which, again, are subject to large errors.

Counter:  Warming is unequivocal. Weather stations, ocean measurements, decreases in snow cover, reductions in Arctic sea ice, longer growing seasons, balloon measurements, boreholes and satellites all show results consistent with the surface record of warming. The urban heat island effect is real but small; and it has been studied and corrected for. Analyses by Nasa for example use only rural stations to calculate trends. Recently, work has shown that if you analyse long-term global temperature rise for windy days and calm days separately, there is no difference. If the urban heat island effect were large, you would expect to see a bigger trend for calm days when more of the heat stays in the city. Furthermore, the pattern of warming globally doesn’t resemble the pattern of urbanisation, with the greatest warming seen in the Arctic and northern high latitudes. Globally, there is a warming trend of about 0.8C since 1900, more than half of which has occurred since 1979.

Thank you Richard Black!!

Finally, you can always rely on the position of almost every major science organization on the face of the plante to confirm that climate change is real, is happening, and while we don’t fully understand it the time to start changing our behaviour is NOW (okay, 20 years ago, but now is better than later)

For my dear Papa, the final nail in the rhetorical coffin comes from the American Meteorological Society itself (thanks fr digging this one up, Mollusk!)

American Meteorological Society (AMS) statement adopted by their council in 2003 said:
There is now clear evidence that the mean annual temperature at the Earth’s surface, averaged over the entire globe, has been increasing in the past 200 years. There is also clear evidence that the abundance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased over the same period. In the past decade, significant progress has been made toward a better understanding of the climate system and toward improved projections of long-term climate change… Human activities have become a major source of environmental change. Of great urgency are the climate consequences of the increasing atmospheric abundance of greenhouse gases… Because greenhouse gases continue to increase, we are, in effect, conducting a global climate experiment, neither planned nor controlled, the results of which may present unprecedented challenges to our wisdom and foresight as well as have significant impacts on our natural and societal systems.

#3: My mom’s personal favorite rebuke is that “in the 70’s they were convinced an ice age is coming - now they say it’s warming!”  Hence scientists know nothing and can be safely ignored.  I was born in 1978, so I have no real concept of what scientists were saying back then.  However, RealClimate and USA Today both came to my rescue with report of a research team that found that in the 70’s there were only seven scholarly articles that predicted cooling, while there were 44 already predicting warming, and another 20 that were inconclusive.  Bam - another Suburban Myth bubble popped thanks to the interweb!  There is literally no other way that I could counter these arguments, and there’s nothing like a published reference to settle a question like this.

                   So, armed to the teeth with fresh knowledge, go forth and pull heads from the sand! 

–My thanks to all the researchers and bloggers who have made this possible, and if any of you have similar experiences by all means share them–