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If you believe the leading AIs, they are absolutely insistent on the idea that "climate sensitivity" (the amount temperature will ultimately change as a result of additional CO2) is 3 degrees C. per doubling of CO2 within a range of uncertainty from 2.0 to 4.5 degrees C.
Climate alarmists aggressively patrol the web to keep dissident views scrubbed from Wikipedia and elsewhere. And journals and universities rigorously enforce alarmist orthodoxy. But with some minimal effort, the excellent work of qualified skeptics (AKA "denialists") Nic Lewis, Judith Curry and Roy Spencer can still be found. Their methods arrive at a lower range with a likely measure of 1.4 (Lewis and Curry) or 1.75 (Spencer) per doubling.
I decided to try to establish a worst-case scenario to compare the likely effects with different sensitivity measures if all known coal and oil were burned. Please check my math. I claim no expertise.
Here is the working data:
At present, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is accepted to be 420 parts per million. So if no excess CO2 is reduced by increased plant growth or added from outgassing in warmer oceans and we do burn ALL of the coal and oil in all known reserves, the ballpark figure for CO2 is 964 ppm (420+544 additional ppm).
To figure the temperature change based on the known physics of CO2, we would use the formula:
So we have 964 as the numerator and the pre-industrial atmospheric figure of 280 ppm as the denominator. (Yes, I know that in the larger history of Earth's climate, that seems like an absurdly low base point. Yes, there is probably some upper range at which the rate of CO2 absorption of certain OLR wavelengths falls off. Yes, it is a rough estimate...)
The
value is the assumed climate sensitivity figure, so let's see how it plays out with different assumed sensitivity figures:
So, if it turns out that sensitivity is 4.5, burning it all gets us almost halfway to the temps of the Cretaceous Period—a vastly warmer world. But if the 1.5 figure is right, Chicago will be more like Baltimore and Baltimore more like Nashville in terms of average annual temperatures. That would be the absolute worst case. Also, keep in mind that warming tends to make regions similar because the warming would increase the daily minimum more than the daily maximum, especially in drier areas. In other words, there would be more noticeably warmer nights in Siberia than hotter days in Nairobi.
Given the generally lousy prediction track record of alarmists, the distinct skew in treatment of the subject, and the use of observational data rather than reliance on models by the skeptics, I am inclined to believe that there is no catastrophe in the making.
Discussion (12)
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Atmospheric CO2 has been 20X current levels in the past. And there was no run away global warming. Over geologic time the CO2 level actually follows temperature, not the other way around.
We are actually at near all time lows for CO2.
Also the modest increase in CO2 has led to higher crop yields, more forestation, and a decrease in desertification by making plants more drought tolerant. It is absolute insanity to destroy our economies over a mirage.
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In case anyone does not know it, we are still in an interglacial period within an ice age. The ice age is not over. Repeat: the ice age is not over. It merely pauses occasionally. Like Ahnold, it will be back. And there is nothing we can do to prevent it. The thermal maximum was 8,000 years ago. The Holocene may hang on for long enough for me not to care, but our great-great-grandchildren may wish that AGW were true instead of made up.
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That is fun. The feedbacks make all models suspect. That said, I have never heard a good explaining for how more CO2 is supposed to make the troposphere warmer.
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* One question that bugs me is that if the concentration of CO2 drives temperature, why does it ever cool? Where does the CO2 go and why? The casual official answer is that rock erosion eats CO2 which seems inadequate. Seems like there should be more curiosity about that.
* Reading some articles that try to jibe sensitivity estimates with the before and after the enormous temp changes Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) seems more like theology than science.
* The pre-industrial levels of CO2 were literally bad for the planet because plants start dying when it's too low. One theory for the ups and downs in our ice age was that when the grasslands across Asia and North America die and turn to dust, all that dust gets picked up by wind currents, carried over the ice packs thus changing their albedo so they melt, it warms up, oceans out gas CO2 and start the cycle over... dunno if that's true but it is fun to speculate and to realize that low CO2 is not good.
* Al Gore got the Vostok ice core wrong in his book--as @Kozak already noted, in that series over 400,000 years CO2 follows temp. In the movie Gore asks an audience to see if they see a correlation as the two graphs, one blue, one gold, move up a down one following the other. He does not tell them which is which as they ooh and ah. What a weasel he is. He knew by then it was a bogus causal claim.
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Generally, CO2 goes in/out of the oceans following the global temperature. In the long run, *all* the CO2 ends up in limestone, unless some smart apes learn to burn wood and make cement and free CO2.
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