An Inconvenient Truth.

[elwen]

OMG! LJ posting form is different. Give me back my monospace font, dammit. :(

Anyways, the point of this entry was that I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth. For being a Gore fan and something of a global warming nerd (considering my focus at Caltech), it was long overdue. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there wasn't really any new information in there. Maybe some statistics I hadn't heard before, but the general phenomena I'd all learned before, many of them (e.g. soil moisture, ocean acidification) thanks to ESE 148c, Biogeochemical Cycles. Thank you, Alex Sessions. :D

Of course, knowing all the phenomena didn't make the movie uninteresting or anything. What can I say, I'm attracted to trainwrecks, so the imagery kept me strung along. Especially the projections of flooding if the Greenland ice melts. A certain Floridian still won't listen to me that Florida is a horrible place to live because it won't be around anymore in another 50 years at this rate. :P Also, I think I might well prefer earthquakes over hurricanes of increasing severity. Then again, foreseeability has its upsides.

I think the part that moved me the most was the photos of the Antarctic ice shelf collapsing in about a month, when they thought the thing would be stable for hundreds of years. That just made my gut clench.

The most amusing part was the talk about the ocean conveyor belt. Our prof for ESE 148b, Global Circulation, was pretty cynical about all the "thermohaline" circulation hype. (It is a real phenomenon, but very poorly understood.) I think she showed us the depiction of it that had been featured in The Day After Tomorrow, another movie that I should see one of these days. I kind of wanted Gore to go into more depth about the North Atlantic Deep Water because my ESE 148c paper was on abrupt climate change and its effect on early human civilizations, and NADW formation has always been a favorite culprit in abrupt climate changes. Hardly well-established and un-controversial, though. (Some argue that its a purely local phenomenon that couldn't have such widespread, global effects, and that the correlations are just optical illusions and a result of the human tendency to match patterns.) Oh, and I hadn't known about how the release of fresh water from the North American glaciers led to the "mini ice age" in Europe. I think that was the Younger Dryas cooling event, although in my paper I said it was associated with cooler sea surface temperatures (which may still be consistent, if the water was fresher and thus still less dense), which, well, as my paper says:

Around the same time, the Natufian communities in southwest Asia shifted from nomadic hunting and gathering to plant cultivation and animal husbandry. As a result of the Younger Dryas cooling, previously abundant wild resources dwindled, and foraging could no longer sustain the Natufians, which forced the agricultural revolution. Hunting and gathering required little labor, but it could only sustain small populations; the new strategies were labor-intensive but resulted in orders of magnitude of population growth, ultimately leading to the emergence of civilization. In this sense, abrupt climate change can be said to have fostered civilization. However, since then, the deleterious effects of abrupt climate change are much more obvious. (Footnotes omitted.)

Yeah, that paper was probably the only decent scientific paper I wrote while at Tech. It not only cites but integrates and synthesizes more sources than other papers I wrote, i.e. it's not just parroting stuff. The only other paper I wrote that I like was for frosh hum ethics class. ^^;;

Oh yeah, one thing that really bugged me about the movie was that he kept calling it "global warming pollution". How awkward and unscientific a term can you have? (Especially when he wouldn't call the phenomenon itself "global warming".) Just call them greenhouse gasses already. Especially if you're not going to go into how the same amount of methane is much worse than the same amount of carbon dioxide because it absorbs in one of the radiation "windows". And that some pollutants, like SOx, actually cause cooling.

*ahem*

...and, that was probably the amount of science geekery I had pent up this term. Back to your regularly scheduled law school whinging.

Comments

[fenugreek.livejournal.com]

I was also a little curious at his being so sure that the thermohaline circulation would stop and the world would end. I don't know if what we saw in ESE 148B is biased with respect to what the rest of the community feels or if Gore misinterpreted it or whatever. Eh. IMO, we're so screwed anyways...

What has always confused me is why the coal lobby doesn't try to pick up the pieces here and argue that we should switch to coal power exclusively to decrease our dependence on evil terrorist foreign oil and create a happy protective SOx-nucleated cloud shield to protect us from those freedom-hating global-warming death rays. I mean hey what's a little acid rain here and there...

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

I think the real problem if the thermohaline circulation stopped would be that the oceans would become anoxic, but wouldn't that take something like hundreds of years? (I seem to recall BS-ing calculations about this in ESE148c.) I kind of want to say that the "ice age effect" and the slower thermohaline circulation are both results of the same cause, rather than cause-result themselves. But I guess it depends on what happens first: did fresh, cold water make the circulation stop (as when the glaciers melted), or did a slowdown in the circulation make cold water spread further south (as scientists think sometimes happened)?

Now that I think about it, I guess his point was more that there are triggers in the system that can lead to abrupt changes, not necessarily anything more specific. Since you can't really tell everyone the temperature's rising and then say, "And it's going to cause an ice age." :P


Woo, SOx-nucleated cloud shield! But then we couldn't use solar panels. :(

[ling84.livejournal.com]

That was actually some last-ditch desperation idea that some scientists proposed - if global warming gets out of hand, add more junk to the atmosphere to help lower the temperature. Strangely enough, the article's headline was "Scientists say pollution may be helpful" - talk about optimism.

Ditto that I didn't learn anything that I didn't already know from extensive reading online, but it was still a good presentation. I nearly cried at the part about the Antarctic ice shelf collapsing. The melting glacier before-and-after pictures were also pretty moving to me.

I'm thinking of attending the Energy and Environment lectures (sponsored by the Earth Sciences folks) coming up this quarter. I don't know how late you stay on campus, but there are two more coming up and they're usually in the evenings, 7:30 PMish or so. I went to two of their talks last year and it was pretty neat. (Plus they had good free food. :P)

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember you posting about that. I didn't read the article, but I can guess the arguments. I mean, you can't deny that some pollutants do have a cooling effect. This is why secondary aerosol contributions to temperature change are a huge question mark (but likely negative) in IPCC reports. And that's why I wanted to study them in grad school. ._.

Like I was saying some entries back, I do like environmental issues, but I'm really more interested in the science, the cause and effect, rather than policy or solutions. Energy in particular tends to disinterest me, although I can't remember if I've actually ever been to talk or if I've just always thought, "Energy? That sounds boring." ^^;; Maybe I'll give it a try one of these days. I get forwarded all the announcements by the ELS mailing list anyway.