The big news this morning is that exit polls suggest Tony Blair will be re-elected to lead Britain for another 5 years. What does this mean for the environment?
Blair clearly cares about the environment and is concerned by what he sees as a situation of general and accelerating deterioration in the global environment. He has spoken about the need to “bring the environment, economic development and social justice together” and is particularly concerned about climate change.
During the election the Greens made much of the possibility that a future Labour government would commit Britain to a “nuclear future“.
The UK apparently has 14 ‘ageing’ nuclear power stations and Blair has not ruled out the possibility of a new generation of nuclear power stations on the basis that nuclear power is almost ‘carbon neutral’ and would help Britain meet its Kyoto targets.
ALSO TODAY (sent in from blog readers) …
Greenpeace in Court:
This week, opening statements were heard in Alaskan District Court in a case that charges Greenpeace with violating environmental law. Greenpeace is charged with criminal negligence by failing to have the proper oil spill response paperwork during an anti-logging campaign.
Global Dimming:
Today’s New York Times has an article about global dimming: “I think what could have happened is the dimming between the 1960’s and 1980’s counteracted the greenhouse effect,” Dr. Wild said. “When the dimming faded, the effects of the greenhouse gases became more evident. There is no masking by the dimming any more.”
A reader of this blog sent the link with the comment, “Actually, it is a clear contradiction, showing that nature (the Sun), not rising CO2, is responsible for Hansen’s ‘energy imbalance’.”
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
From my limited reading of the Australian press, I’m quite impressed with Blair on environmental policies.
The reader who sent in the comment clearly doesn’t understand much about global dimming, nor about the relationship between solar forcing and temperature.
Ken,
The N.Y. Times article reports on a paper in this week’s Science. There are actually several articles in this issue reporting on evidence for significant solar variability and climatic effects. A summary piece contains a table labeled,
LARGE INCONSISTENCIES and it presents the following figures:
Climatic observations and forcings. Equivalent change in albedo:
Enhanced greenhouse effect during industrial era (2.4 +/- 0.2 W/m2)
-7 (+/- 0.6)
Anthropogenic aerosol forcing during industrial era
+4 (+/- 4)
Albedo change estimated from earthshine data (2000 to 2004)
+16
Albedo change estimated from low-orbit satellite data (2000 to 2004)
-6
Change in irradiance at Earth’s surface measured with satellites (1983 to 2001)
-8
Change in irradiance at Earth’s surface measured at the surface (1985 to 2000)
-13
Change in irradiance at Earth’s surface measured at the surface (1950 to 1990)
+20
With a choice of values from -13 to +20 for changes in solar input one can get just about any result one might desire out of the climate models.
Despite all the claims, GW is still highly uncertain. In any case debating it is a waste of time. If GW is going to become reality it should become apparent over the next decade or two and in that time the world is not going to stop burning carbon based fuels. So, we will see.
Walter, your albedo numbers are out by a factor of a thousand.
And albedo is not the same as solar input.
If you suspect that it is the sun’s fault, look for changes in the total solar irradiance.
You can find the data here: ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SOLAR_IRRADIANCE/
Hi Ken,
I’ve downloaded some of the info from the link you provided – absolutely fascinating.
So the sun’s total energy output varies and has been cyclical and has fallen off over the last few years?
I read a paper you provided at John Quiggin’s site some weeks ago that included some of this type of data crunched and plotted against temperatures. My memory was that the correlation was good for much but not all of last 50 odd years – with late 1990s suggesting a poorer match with temperatures going up and sun’s total energy output not?
What is you summary of the situation – match between sun’s energy output and surface temperatures?
The soot etc in the air is reducing the warming that otherwise would be happening.
Jennifer,
Tom Rees’ website contains some graphs showing correlations between temperature and solar proxies. It can be found here:
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/solar/solar.htm
The graphs on this site haven’t been update recently, but they do still go up to about the late 1990s.
On more generic climate change stuff, Tom’s site is one of the best.
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/globalwarmingfaq.htm
I would generally agree with “correlation was good for much but not all of last 50 odd years – with late 1990s suggesting a poorer match with temperatures going up and sun’s total energy output not?”.
However, this correlation may be spurious if we go further back in time. Solar radiance generally moves in cycles of varying lengths (approximately 11, 22, 80 and 210 years). This implies (assuming that solar variable is the predominant short-term driver of climate) that in the not-to-distance past temperatures should have been higher than what they are today. No matter what you think of the various paleoclimate reconstructions, it would be difficult to argue that temperatures during the little ice age were higher than what they are today. If we ignore solar cycles as a proxy for solar radiation and look at isotope results (14C and 10Be), then the correlation between paleoclimate temperature reconstructions and solar proxies improves considerable.
For an overview, I’d suggest
Solar Forcing of Global Temperature Change Since AD 1400 by Paul E. Damon and Alexei N. Peristykh (Climatic Change 68, 101–111, 2005).
Causes of climate change over the last 1000 years by Thomas J. Crowley (Science 289, 270-277, 2000).