[Vision2020] A Republican Case for Climate Action

Ted Moffett starbliss at gmail.com
Fri Aug 2 17:51:15 PDT 2013


This NYT call for action from former republican administration EPA leaders
is an amazing development...

I try to avoid discussing climate change as a political issue, though it is
politicized to the nth degree.  To some, it's madated that if you are
a liberal, you take global warming seriously, if you are a republican,
forget about it!

But I think the issue can be framed within the context of conservative
values, treating the environment as a resource that should not be spent and
squandered as though there will not be a debt to pay for reckless
over consumption of eco-system capital, in the future.

And I was surprised to read their reference to the "deep ocean warming
faster than the earth’s atmosphere."

They know their stuff!

Given the claims that global warming has stopped that we hear often
recently, this in part explains where the thermal content generated by the
energy imbalance from anthropogenic global warming in Earth's climate
system, has gone, resulting in less atmospheric warming than might  be expected.

I was going to post this article months ago to Vision2020... It deals with
the issue of deep ocean warming, and the alleged slow down in global
warming, written by a climate scientist.

What I pasted in below may not show the graph or links to references,
nor does it include the voluminous online discussion included with
this article:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/04/the-answer-is-blowing-in-the-wind-the-warming-went-into-the-deep-end/

The answer is blowing in the wind: The warming went into the deep end

There has been an unusual surge of interest in the climate sensitivity
based on the last decade’s worth of temperature measurements, and a
lengthy story in the Economist tries to argue that the climate
sensitivity may be lower than previously estimated. I think its
conclusion is somewhat misguided because it missed some important
pieces of information (also see skepticalscience’s take on this story
here).


The ocean heat content and the global mean sea level height have marched on.

While the Economist referred to some unpublished work, it missed a new
paper by Balmaseda et al. (2013) which provides a more in-depth
insight. Balmaseda et al suggest that the recent years may not have
much effect on the climate sensitivity after all, and according to
their analysis, it is the winds blowing over the oceans that may be
responsible for the ‘slow-down’ presented in the Economist.


It is well-known that changes in temperature on decadal time scales
are strongly influenced by natural and internal variations, and should
not be confused with a long-term trend (Easterling and Wehner,
2009;Foster and Rahmstorf, 2011).

An intensification of the trades has affected surface ocean currents
called the subtropical gyres, and these changes have resulted in a
predominance of the La Nina state. The La Nina phase is associated
with a lower global mean temperature than usual.

Balmaseda et al’s results also suggested that a negative phase of the
pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) may have made an imprint on the most
recent years. In addition, they found that the deep ocean has warmed
over the recent years, while the upper 300m of the oceans have
‘stabilised’.

The oceans can be compared to a battery that needs to be recharged
after going flat. After the powerful 1997-98 El Nino, heat flowed out
of the tropical oceans in order to heat the atmosphere (evaporative
cooling) and the higher latitudes. The warming resumed after the
‘deflation’, but something happened after 1998: since then, the
warming has involved the deep ocean to a much greater extent. A
weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC) may
have played a role in the deep ocean warming.

The recent changes in these decade-scale variations appear to have
masked the real accumulation of heat on Earth.

The new knowledge from this paper, the way I read it, is the
revelation of the role of winds for vertical mixing/diffusion of heat
in a new analysis of the world oceans. Their results were derived
through a set of different experiments testing the sensitivity to
various assumptions and choices made for data inclusion and the ocean
model assimilation set-up.

The analysis involved a brand new ocean analysis (ORAS4; Balmaseda et
al., 2013) based on an optimal use of observations, data assimilation,
and an ocean model forced with state-of-the-art description of the
atmosphere (reanalyses).

By running a set of different experiments with the ocean model,
including different conditions, such as surface winds and different
types of data, they explored which influence the different conditions
have on their final conclusion.

The finding that the winds play a role for the state of the warming
may not be surprising to oceanographers, although it may not
necessarily be the first thing a meteorologist may consider.

Other related discussions: OSS
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett


On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 5:48 AM, Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com> wrote:

>  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>
>
> ------------------------------
> August 1, 2013
> A Republican Case for Climate Action By WILLIAM D. RUCKELSHAUS, LEE M.
> THOMAS, WILLIAM K. REILLY and CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN
>
> EACH of us took turns over the past 43 years running the Environmental
> Protection Agency<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/environmental_protection_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.
> We served Republican presidents, but we have a message that transcends
> political affiliation: the United States must move now on substantive steps
> to curb climate change<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
> at home and internationally.
>
> There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts:
> our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern
> records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea
> level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected.
>
> The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence
> grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to
> act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes “locked in.”
>
> A market-based approach, like a carbon tax, would be the best path to
> reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but that is unachievable in the current
> political gridlock in Washington. Dealing with this political reality,
> President Obama’s June climate action plan<http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/climate-action-plan>lays out achievable actions that would deliver real progress. He will use
> his executive powers to require reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide
> emitted by the nation’s power plants and spur increased investment in clean
> energy technology, which is inarguably the path we must follow to ensure a
> strong economy along with a livable climate.
>
> The president also plans to use his regulatory power to limit the powerful
> warming chemicals known as hydrofluorocarbons and encourage the United
> States to join with other nations to amend the Montreal Protocol<http://ozone.unep.org/new_site/en/montreal_protocol.php>to phase out these chemicals. The landmark international treaty, which took
> effect in 1989, already has been hugely successful in solving the ozone
> problem.
>
> Rather than argue against his proposals, our leaders in Congress should
> endorse them and start the overdue debate about what bigger steps are
> needed and how to achieve them — domestically and internationally.
>
> As administrators of the E.P.A under Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Ronald
> Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush, we held fast to common-sense
> conservative principles — protecting the health of the American people,
> working with the best technology available and trusting in the innovation
> of American business and in the market to find the best solutions for the
> least cost.
>
> That approach helped us tackle major environmental challenges to our
> nation and the world: the pollution of our rivers, dramatized when the
> Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire in 1969; the hole in the ozone
> layer; and the devastation wrought by acid rain.
>
> The solutions we supported worked, although more must be done. Our rivers
> no longer burn, and their health continues to improve. The United States
> led the world when nations came together to phase out ozone-depleting
> chemicals. Acid rain diminishes each year, thanks to a pioneering,
> market-based emissions-trading system adopted under the first President
> Bush in 1990. And despite critics’ warnings, our economy has continued to
> grow.
>
> Climate change puts all our progress and our successes at risk. If we
> could articulate one framework for successful governance, perhaps it should
> be this: When confronted by a problem, deal with it. Look at the facts, cut
> through the extraneous, devise a workable solution and get it done.
>
> We can have both a strong economy and a livable climate. All parties know
> that we need both. The rest of the discussion is either detail, which we
> can resolve, or purposeful delay, which we should not tolerate.
>
> Mr. Obama’s plan is just a start. More will be required. But we must
> continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten
> our planet. The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the
> changes will get, and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time
> to waste.
>
> The writers are former administrators of the Environmental Protection
> Agency: William D. Ruckelshaus<http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/william-d-ruckelshaus>,
> from its founding in 1970 to 1973, and again from 1983 to 1985; Lee M.
> Thomas <http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/lee-m-thomas>, from 1985 to 1989; William
> K. Reilly <http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/william-k-reilly>, from 1989 to
> 1993; and Christine Todd Whitman<http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/christine-todd-whitman>,
> from 2001 to 2003.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
> art.deco.studios at gmail.com
>
>
>
>



More information about the Vision2020 mailing list