Paradigm Shift: How to Think About Global Warming

Posted by Greg Allen on 08.14.2007

A brief addressing of the rumors going around on conservative blogs about falsified NASA data, and then one of the more plausible disaster scenarios, a very important discussion for skeptics.

First, an addressing of some of the email I got about my last article, "Bridges Smidges."

I still think that a massive effort to repair bridges is a waste of money, but one reader wisely reminded me that bridges are funded by gas taxes—which I support. Basically, bridge disasters kill less than a hundred people in two decades while car accidents kill 40,000 people a year. So while the billions of dollars that are soon to be spent on bridge repair would be much better spent on improvements in automobile safety (from the perspective of lives saved per dollar spent) there is a lot of political momentum on the bridge issue and much less on car safety, and barely any towards raising gas taxes. Gas taxes, though, I would support increasing those if the revenue was flushed down the toilet. Bridge repair isn't the most pressing of issues, but obviously it is better than flushing money down the toilet. Also, some of that money might spill over into road repair, which is a far more logical concern. Even if the gas tax only goes up a nickel, every bit helps.

Next, some hullabaloo on global warming

A conservative blogger has discovered that some of NASA's global warming data wasn't updated for Y2K, the result? The hottest year officially on record is now 1934 (Think high school history class, the dust bowl kinda a crappy time all around) and not 1998 as had previously been stated. NASA acknowledged the error and publicly thanked the blogger for pointing it out. Unfortunately, he and the conservative blogs have decided that this proves global warming is a hoax all over again etc… That, however, isn't the whole story. 1998 was never actually the hottest year on record to anyone who knows statistics. Because of sampling error and incomplete data, the temperature recordings all have a .1 degree Celsius margin of error. Before the Y2K update, 1998 was .1 degree Celsius higher than 1934. In fact, the NASA guy originally writing the report said that the two years were "a statistical tie." After the update, 1934 is now .1 degree higher than 1998, still a tie.

It's not like NASA was the only data global warming hawks were going off. (Even if they were, the correlation between increased carbon emissions and temperature is as strong as ever). The NASA data affected deals with surface temperature. Oceanic values and high atmospheric values have long been considered a superior measure of long term temperature increases and that data is unaffected and still as incontrovertible as ever. Even if they weren't, the trends on the surface data remain the same. For a more detailed analysis of the issue, click http://www.tnr.com/blog/the_plank?pid=134205

Now I'd like to briefly talk about something that may turn out not to be a big deal at all, but even a low probability of it being true should be reason enough to take serious action. How many of you know what methyl hydrates are? I'd be willing to bet few if any, because they're complex hydrocarbons that typically aren't a part of daily life. Stored deep under the ocean, methyl hydrates are an extremely abundant gas form of fossil fuel. In fact, there's twice as much methyl hydrate stored carbon as all the other stored forms (oil, coal etc) combined. The stuff is potent enough that if it could be accessed, it could power the United States for centuries.

Thank god it can't be accessed. These gas pockets are buried deep under rock and soil beneath the ocean. Were one of these pockets to burst, the surrounding ocean would become totally unlivable for sea life. That's not the big issue though. Methane is ten times the greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide is. If one of these enormous gas bubbles were to burst, it could warm the planet by 5 to 10 degrees Celsius almost instantly. In fact, that's one of the theories of how the dinosaurs died, since 5 to 10 degrees would melt the ice caps and turn huge tracks of land, some half the size of the United States, into desert.

So how are these bubbles related to man made global warming? Well, since humans started spewing carbon into the air the temperature of the air has been warming by just a degree, but soon to be more. Gradually, this warming of the air has become warming of the ocean. As the ocean warms, so too does the ocean floor, and then the ocean floor will warm these methyl hydrate bubbles. NEWSFLASH: gas expands when it warms. The minor global warming being caused by humans could very possibly cause these bubbles to break free of their rock prisons and spew trillions of tons of gas into the atmosphere, causing horror stories beyond those of the worst global warming alarmists in weeks—not centuries.

Global warming is going to be really hard to slow or stop. Almost like pushing against an iceberg. But if we don't, there are many points of no return that we could cross without warning. That's why constant diligence is so important. Even if the probability is low (and it isn't) the results would be so catastrophic we have no choice but to plan for the worst, and do everything we can. I'm sorry if we all have to deal with $4, $6 or even $12 dollar gas. But I'd rather see you poor and miserable than dead. So it goes.