Global warming: Climate change and evolution

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/01/global_warming

Climate change and evolution
Jan 24th 2011, 14:31 by M.S.

OUR topics this morning are global warming, evolution and feathers.
Let's start with the warming. Despite a frenzied last-minute drive
involving snowstorms in Europe and the eastern United States, planet
Earth failed to save itself from another last-place finish in 2010:
once again, it was the least cold year on record. The World
Meteorological Organization announced its finding last week that
global mean temperatures for the year were 0.53°C above the 1961-1990
mean, 0.01°C warmer than 2005 and 0.02°C above 1998. With the
comparison having a margin of uncertainty of 0.09°C, the three years
are considered tied for the hottest year on record. That followed
results the previous week from NOAA, which found 2010 and 2005 tied as
the hottest years ever, and NASA, which found the same thing. (They
both think 1998 was a bit colder.)

http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_906_en.html
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110112_globalstats.html
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20110112/

By itself, as we always say, one hot year doesn't prove anything. The
fact that every one of the twelve hottest years on record has come
since 1997 is a little harder to wave away. 2010 was also the wettest
year ever, corresponding to the expectation that higher heat means
more water vapour. More countries set national high-temperature
records in 2010 than ever before, including the biggest one, Russia.
Arctic sea ice in December was at its lowest level ever, temperatures
across a broad swathe of northern Canada have been 20° C higher than
normal for the past month, the record temperatures are coming despite
the lowest levels of solar activity in a century and a La Nina effect
that should be making Canada colder rather than warmer, and so on. It
is of course possible that global warming plateaued this year; it's
also possible that it plateaued this morning. One can always hope! For
now, though, this is the basic shape of things:

http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/long%20term%20temps%20chart.gif

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1701
http://climateprogress.org/2011/01/05/nsidc-lowest-december-arctic-sea-ice-extent-in-satellite-record/
http://www2.ucar.edu/currents/cold-comfort-canadas-record-smashing-mildness
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/03sep_sunspots/

The George Will "global warming has ended" moment shows up as that
little dip towards the end, before it returns to trend. So, what
effect will the new data have on that meme? Quite possibly none.
People who tried to cast doubt on global warming in 2009 based on a
few years one could isolate so that they didn't show a discernible
trend will now no doubt respond that a couple of very hot years don't
prove anything. Which underlines how often the conclusions one draws
from data are determined by a combination of the hypotheses you're
framing, and at what point you start looking.

http://www.foe.org/george-will-uses-washington-post-column-lie-about-global-warming

This brings me to the feathers. In this month's National Geographic,
Carl Zimmer sums up recent paleontological progress in figuring out
when and how feathers evolved, and how they fit into the relationship
between dinosaurs and birds. Apparently there have been tons of new
feather-bearing fossils unearthed over the past 15 years, and
scientists can now use microscopic analysis and knowledge of how
modern feathers work to actually figure out what color some of the
feathers on these dinosaurs were. It's pretty clear that the
development of feathers came long before they had anything to do with
flight, but it's still not so clear whether feathered dinosaurs
evolved into birds or whether they (and feathered proto-crocodiles!)
shared a common feathered ancestor. Anyway, towards the beginning of
the article comes this:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/02/feathers/zimmer-text

The origin of this wonderful mechanism is one of evolution's most
durable mysteries. In 1861, just two years after Darwin published
Origin of Species, quarry workers in Germany unearthed spectacular
fossils of a crow-size bird, dubbed Archaeopteryx, that lived about
150 million years ago. It had feathers and other traits of living
birds but also vestiges of a reptilian past, such as teeth in its
mouth, claws on its wings, and a long, bony tail. Like fossils of
whales with legs, Archaeopteryx seemed to capture a moment in a
critical evolutionary metamorphosis. "It is a grand case for me,"
Darwin confided to a friend.
Think about how that must have looked to contemporaries. Darwin
publishes his theory that species develop through evolution from other
species. Okay, many people think, wild idea, but can one species
really change so deeply over time that it becomes a different species?
Wolves into dogs, sure, but fish into lizards and so forth? Then, two
years later, a fossil is discovered that suggests dinosaurs evolving
into birds. To first have a theory presented that suggests these
outlandish transformations, and then to have an example turn up that
perfectly describes the theory's most improbable consequences, with no
possibility of prior knowledge—this is an extremely convincing
sequence of evidence.

But if you grew up, say, 150 years after "The Origin of Species" was
published, you didn't experience that remarkable sequence of evidence.
You get the theory of evolution and the fossil background presented at
the same time. So if you want to be an evolution sceptic, the fossil
record just becomes another set of data you can poke holes in, along
with the theory. After all, nobody understands what function feathers
served before they were used for flight. If they were for mating
displays, why did they turn out to be perfect for aerodynamics? How
come nothing has feathers anymore that doesn't fly, or isn't descended
from something that did? Darwin's theory can't explain it! And so on.

Now, back to global warming. For me, or anyone older, the thesis that
rising global temperature data were due to a greenhouse effect
produced by industrial emissions of CO2 and other gases, and that this
might lead to environmental disaster, was something we first
encountered as a mind-bending idea being thrown around by scientists
in the mid-1980s. The first time we heard a scientist authoritatively
state that the evidence was in, and that global warming was real, was
when James Hansen said it while presenting his research to Congress in
1988. That was a daring claim for Mr Hansen to make at that point. It
was daring because it was very clearly falsifiable. If, after 1988,
global temperatures had stopped rising, or had started to exhibit a
lot of volatility—if there had been a decade-long cooling episode,
such as the world saw in the late 1930s and 40s—then Mr Hansen would
have been discredited. But that didn't happen. Instead, for a decade
and a half after Mr Hansen made the call, global mean temperatures
kept going up and up. They bounced around a bit in the mid-2000s, and
have now resumed rising again.

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1988/Hansen_etal.html

For people my age or older who were paying attention over the past
couple of decades, that really ought to be convincing. But for people
who just joined the conversation when "An Inconvenient Truth" came
out, things are different. For them, the evidence of global warming
was presented at the same time as the theory. And so they're
susceptible to people trying to poke holes in the data or the theory.
The temperature rise from 1998-2008 isn't statistically significant,
tree ring data is unreliable, and so forth. Give them another two
decades, and they'll probably come around. Unfortunately, by that time
an enormous amount of damage will already have been done.

As to why George Will buys this stuff, I have no explanation. Maybe,
in the internet age, we're all effectively getting our memories wiped
every week or two, and it's as if we don't remember the sequence of
events; everything is presented simultaneously. Or maybe we
selectively wipe our own memories of the sequence of events when they
threaten to prove inconvenient to our interests or our ideological
predispositions.

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