Climate Science Complexities Overwhelm Our Current Ability to Accurately Predict the Consequences of Global Warming ─ that Means We Have to Think More Realistically about a Package of Solutions

12 October 2010

Cycles, climatic change, and the suddenly imposed limits of absolute quantities ─ an example of climatic complexity

All other inputs held equal, climatic warming should increase the planet’s land surface’s evaporation and plant transpiration. But since reality is complex, simple assumptions often fail, making modeling difficult.

For example, Martin Jung et al. reported in Nature that land evapotranspiration stopped increasing in 2008, largely as a result of depleted soil moisture in major parts of Africa and Australia.

Further complicating the picture was the timing of the regional soil dry-outs with 1998’s El Niño. Whether El Niño was causative is unknown.

Citation

Martin Jung et al., Recent decline in global land evapotranspiration trend due to limited soil moisture supply, Nature (advance online publication, 10 October 2010)

The bigger picture means regional trouble for agriculture and drinking water

Whether this trend is a simple cyclical one or a mostly direct effect of climate change, it illustrates the rapidity with which climatic patterns can change, thereby impacting human populations. Most of whom have no place else to go.

Climatic complexity explains why I agree with (incorrectly-dubbed) “climate change skeptic” Bjorn Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg and I don’t dispute the reality or significance of human-induced climate change.

We disagree with the world’s ineffectual efforts to ameliorate it. We also think that black and white scare tactics are politically and scientifically counterproductive.

Here’s what Lomborg said recently in an interview regarding his coming book Smart Solutions to Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2010):

[T]he current set of solutions isn't working. Since 1992, we've been trying to cut carbon emissions by [holding] grand international get-togethers where everyone promises [to cut emissions]. But unfortunately nothing happens and nobody delivers. . . .

Are there other and smarter ways?

[W]e brought together 28 of the world's top economists to look at all the different possible solutions to climate change and ask, "How much will it cost and how much climate damage will it avoid?"

What they found was that the best long-term solution to climate change is dramatically increasing research and development on green-energy technology.

Don't try to make fossil fuels so expensive that nobody wants to use them. That's not going to work politically, and economically it also turns out to be a very poor way to help the world.

Instead, make green energy so cheap that everybody wants to use it.

A vital role for government

There is no way that Lomborg’s vision can be achieved, without government-sponsored financial incentives to make green technology effective and deliverable.

The Chinese government is already doing this on a large scale. Our American one is not.

Nor is the United States government seriously planning for the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. I think it should.

Unless we want to take a serious chance on sitting in a place that suddenly find itself deprived of the water it needs for drinking and agriculture. That’s where science and the term, “evapotranspiration,” come in.

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Climate Science Complexities Overwhelm Our Current Ability to Accurately Predict the Consequences of Global Warming ─ that Means We Have to Think More Realistically about a Package of Solutions