Articles by Joseph Romm

Messing with nature more won’t fix the messes we’ve already made

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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[JR: Geo-engineering is to mitigation as chemotherapy is to diet & exercise. You can find some more specific reasons geo-engineering is unlikely to make sense at these posts: "Geo-engineering remains a bad idea" and "Geo-engineering is not the answer." I will be blogging again on this shortly. In the absence of strong mitigation efforts, geo-engineering will not stop catastrophic outcomes, like the end of most ocean life.]

Time magazine has declared geo-engineering one of "10 ideas that are changing the world."

"Messing with nature caused global warming," Time wrote. "Messing with it more might fix it."

What are they thinking?

Get back to 350 ppm or risk an ice-free planet

Here is the draft [PDF] of the long-awaited defense of why we need an ultimate target of 350 ppm for atmospheric carbon dioxide, by NASA's James Hansen et al., titled "Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?" (Yes, they know we're already at 385 ppm and rising 2 ppm a year.)

The paper does suffer from one analytical weakness that makes it a tad less dire than it appears -- and some people believe the core element of this analysis is wrong (see very end of post), although I don't.

This paper is really just a continuation of Hansen's earlier analysis arguing that the real-world or long-term climate sensitivity of the planet to doubled CO2 [550 ppm] is 6 degrees C -- twice the short-term or fast-feedback-only climate sensitivity used by the IPCC. (You might want to read this post first, as it is a bit clearer on the difference between the two sensitivities.)

The key paleoclimate finding of the article:

We infer from the Cenozoic data that CO2 was the dominant Cenozoic forcing, that CO2 was only ~450 ppm when Antarctica glaciated, and that glaciation is reversible.

That is, if we stabilize at 450 ppm or higher, we risk returning the planet to conditions when it was largely ice-free, when sea levels were higher by more than 200 feet!

Roger Pielke Jr. defends his absurd delayer post … by quoting a global warming denier

Seriously! In a post ironically titled "You can't make this stuff up" (actually, you can -- that's what most deniers do), Roger Pielke, Jr. responds to my last post (which challenged his absurd defense of the "Earth is cooling" nonsense) as follows:

And people wonder why some people see the more enthusiastic climate advocates akin to religious zealots.

Who are these "some people" Pielke cites? Go to his link -- it's none other than NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who became famous in the climate arena for saying:

Hadley Center says we’re warming, not cooling

The deniers/delayer-1000s cite recent U.K. Hadley Center data to promote their "climate is cooling" disinformation. Even Roger Pielke, Jr. is peddling this nonsense with his recent inanely titled post, "Update on Falsification of Climate Predictions." Falsification? Give me a break!

According to the Hadley Center, the eight warmest years in the global temperature record of 150 are, in order, 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2007. Those are also the eight warmest years in the NASA record in a different order, starting with 2005, then 2007 tied with 1998. Where the heck is the cooling trend? Shame on you, Pielke, for lending your name and website to this delayer-1000 nonsense.

It is only fair to ask what the Hadley Center thinks its data shows (much as we've heard NASA explain that its data shows unequivocal warming). Answer: they believe it shows unequivocally that we are in a warming trend, including this decade. They make one of the best analytical points I have seen in the whole discussion of this cooling nonsense: