Read This And Weep For The Colorado Ski Town

September 5th, 2006 at 06:54am Post Staff 43

Two important articles on climate change as it affects Aspen, Vail, and other ski towns.

The first talks about how Aspen is trying to deal with its global warming demons in a town where everyone is leaving on a jet plane.

The second, featuring data from Colorado College and the Aspen Global Change Institute and the City of Aspen, paints a grim picture that says Aspen could warm to the level of Los Alamos, New Mexico; and/or Amarillo, Texas.

Entry Filed under: Skiing, Snowmass, Crested Butte, Vail, Telluride, Aspen, Fractional Post

3 Comments Add your own

1. alpha6 | September 5th, 2006 at 8:47 pm

OK, this is one area where Michael and I disagree...

June 19th 2006 - In an unprecedented, uninterrupted eight-minute monologue on Keith Olbermann’s "Countdown," Gore characterized those scientists who dispute the reality of global warming as part of a lunatic fringe.

Later, on Charlie Rose’s show, Gore went further. Asked by Rose "Do you know any credible scientist who says ‘wait a minute – this hasn’t been proven,’ is there still a debate?” Gore replied, "The debate’s over. The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona.”

This flies in the face of such challengers as professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia who said: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

Famed climatologist and internationally renowned hurricane expert Dr. William Gray of the atmospheric-science department at Colorado State University went even further, calling the scientific "consensus" on global warming "one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people." For speaking the truth he has seen most of his government research funding dry up, according to the Washington Post.

Neither Gray nor Dr. Carter believe that the moon landing was staged on a movie set in Arizona.

Nor does famed Oxford professor David Bellamy who sniffs that Gore’s theory is "Poppycock!"

Writing in Britain's Daily Mail last July 9, Dr. Bellamy charged that "the world's politicians and policy makers ... have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credo of the environmental movement. Humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide – the principal so-called greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up.

"They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock. Unfortunately, for the time being, it is their view that prevails.

"As a result of their ignorance, the world's economy may be about to divert billions, nay trillions of pounds, dollars and rubles into solving a problem that actually doesn't exist. The waste of economic resources is incalculable and tragic."

Wrote Dr. Bellamy "It has been estimated that the cost of cutting fossil fuel emissions in line with the Kyoto Protocol would be [$1.3 trillion]. Little wonder, then, that world leaders are worried. So should we all be.

"If we signed up to these scaremongers, we could be about to waste a gargantuan amount of money on a problem that doesn't exist – money that could be used in umpteen better ways: Fighting world hunger, providing clean water, developing alternative energy sources, improving our environment, creating jobs.

"The link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth. It is time the world's leaders, their scientific advisers and many environmental pressure groups woke up to the fact."

In agreement with Dr. Bellamy were a host of other respected climatologists including the 19,000 who have signed a declaration that rejects Gore’s accusation that the rise of greenhouse gasses is caused by mankind’s use of fossil fuels. As has been pointed out, previous ice ages have been preceded by a rise on CO2 levels long before there were humans or fossil fuels or backyard barbecues.

Commenting on the scientists who support Gore’s thesis, Dr. Carter one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change, says, "‘Climate experts’ is the operative term here. Why? Because of what Gore's ‘majority of scientists’ think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to U.S. science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of who know, but feel unable to state publicly, that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

In April, 60 of the world's leading experts in the field asked Canada’s Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake – either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents – it seems like a reasonable request, wrote Tom Harris in the Canada Free Press.

According to Harris, a mechanical engineer, former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball notes that even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."

Adds Ball, among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not predictions but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."

Canada's new conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, has been urged by more than 60 leading international climate change experts to review the global warming policies he inherited from his predecessor.

In an open letter that includes five British scientists among the 60 leading international climate change experts who signed the letter, the experts praise Harper’s commitment to review the controversial Kyoto Protocol on reducing emissions harmful to the environment. "Much of the billions of dollars earmarked for implementation of the protocol in Canada will be squandered without a proper assessment of recent developments in climate science," they wrote in the Canadian Financial Post last week.

They emphasized that the study of global climate change is, in Harper's own words, an "emerging science" and added: "If, back in the mid 1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary." Despite claims to the contrary, there is no consensus among climate scientists on the relative importance of the various causes of global climate change, they wrote.

"'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified.

"Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise.'"

The letter is the latest effort by climate change skeptics to counter Gore's demonstrably false claims that there is a consensus that human activity is causing alleged global warming.

Listening to Al Gore makes one wonder if he is the one who believes that "the moon landing was staged on a movie set in Arizona.”

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/6/20/134405.shtml
2. Michael Brylawski | September 7th, 2006 at 10:44 am

Sorry Alpha-6, so much to disagree with in your post (did you write it or is it a post of another article)?

There are many, many egregiously misleading and overly simplistic comments in your post (e.g., cost will be $1.4 trillion, 'hundreds' of unaffiliated climatologists dispute global warming, etc.).

For an in depth, balanced overview of climate change from a preeminent climatologist, go to http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/

From this site (it has much more), some enlightening comments to provide perspective to your post. This reply is even longer, but it needs to be to address many of the overly simplistic and, sorry to say, false claims in your post:

ON WHY WE SHOULD BE SUSPICIOUS OF "IGNORE THE PROBLEM" ARTICLES: "Given the broad range of possible outcomes (from global warming), proponents of the many sides of the climate change debate (often dichotomized into “ ignore the problem ” versus “stop it ” camps, though it is actually an issue with many, many sides) deliberately selected and continue to select information out of context that best supports their ideological positions and their or their clients' interests. They frequently practice a phenomenon I call "courtroom epistemology": refusing to acknowledge that an issue (climate change, in this case) is multifaceted, and presenting only their own arguments, ignoring opposing views...The auto, oil, and other fossil fuel-intensive industry groups, uncoincidentally, tend to be the extreme optimists in the global warming debate though, ironically, they often are the pessimists when it comes to estimating the costs of fixing the problem. They attempt to trivialize the potential hazards of climate change and focus on the least serious outcomes and the most expensive mitigation policies to discourage political action.

This plays into the media's tendency to engage in "balanced" reporting: polarizing an issue (despite its being multifaceted) and making each "side" equally credible. The media dutifully report the dueling positions of ecology and industry, further confusing policymakers and the public with an endless parade of op-eds and stories quoting those suggesting that global warming is either “good for the Earth and too expensive to fix anyway” or “the end of the world but nonetheless relatively cheap to solve with solar or wind power.” “End of the world” and “good for the Earth” are, in my experience, the two lowest probability cases (as are "it would bankrupt us to mitigate climate changes" and "technology will solve climate change at no cost"). Neither side usually offers probabilities of such outcomes."

ON WHAT IS, AND IS NOT DISPUTED, ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING: "However, it is important to understand that the greenhouse phenomenon is well-understood and solidly grounded in basic science (see Climate Science). It is scientifically well-established that the Earth's surface air temperature has warmed significantly, by about 0.7°C since 1860, and that an upward trend can be clearly discerned by plotting historical temperatures. Such a graph would show a rapid rise in temperature at the end of the twentieth century. This is supported by the fact that all but three of the ten warmest years on record occurred during the 1990s. In addition, it is well-established that human activities have caused increases in radiative forcing, with radiative forcing defined as a change in the balance between radiation coming into and going out of the earth-atmosphere system. In the past few centuries, atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by more than 30 percent, and virtually all climatologists agree that the cause is human activity, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels and, to a considerable extent, land uses such as deforestation.

More controversial is the extent to which humans have and are contributing to climate change. How much of global warming up to this point has been natural versus anthropogenically-induced, and by how much will humans and natural changes in the Earth each contribute to future disturbance? The IPCC has attempted to tackle this in its Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES), which contains a range of possible future emissions scenarios based on different assumptions regarding economic growth, technological developments, and population growth, arguably the three most critical determinants of future climate change. These have been used to project the increases in CO2 concentrations (and other radiative constituents) out to 2100, and it is hoped that they will help policymakers weigh action to stem potentially devastating consequences in the future. (For more information, see Scenarios).

These and other climate change projections depend on detailed modeling. The most consistent way scientists codify our knowledge is by constructing models made up of the many subcomponents of the climate system that reflect our best understanding of each subsystem. The system model as a whole cannot be directly verified before the fact — that is, before the future arrives — but it can be tested against historical situations that resemble aspects that we believe will occur in the future (see Climate Modeling). The most comprehensive models of atmospheric conditions are three-dimensional, time-dependent simulators known as general circulation models (GCMs) — see Climate Science. The most useful GCMs are those that also project "surprise" events, and are able to test emissions scenarios that can avoid such surprises.

While modeling has become both more complex and more accurate as computing abilities have advanced and more is understood about the climate problem, scientists still have to deal with an enormous amount of uncertainty, as mentioned above. In climate modeling, one major unknown is climate sensitivity, the amount by which the global mean temperature will increase for a doubling of CO2 concentrations. Many scientists have done extensive empirical and modeling research on this subject, and most have found that most climate sensitivity estimates fall somewhere within the IPCC's range of 1.5-4.5oC. However, more recently some have estimated it could be lower than 1.5oC or it could be an alarming 6oC or higher (see Karl and Trenberth, 2003). (Remember that a 5-7oC drop in temperature is all that separates Earth’s present climate from an ice age).

Despite uncertainties surrounding sensitivity, the IPCC has projected that, if its latest estimate that on a global average basis, the Earth's atmosphere near the surface will warm somewhere between 1.4 and 5.8oC by 2100 is correct, likely effects will include: more frequent heat waves (and less frequent cold spells); more intense storms (hurricanes, tropical cyclones, etc.) and a surge in weather-related damage; increased intensity of floods and droughts; warmer surface temperatures, especially at higher latitudes; more rapid spread of vector-borne disease; loss of farming productivity in warm climates and movement of farming to other regions, most at higher latitudes; rising sea levels, which could inundate coastal areas and small island nations; and species extinction and loss of biodiversity (see table - Projected effects of global warming). Schneider, Kuntz-Duriseti, and Azar (2000) have argued that the best way to estimate the full extent of such damages comes from examining not just quantifiable monetary ("market") damages, but several metrics, termed the "five numeraires": monetary loss (market category), loss of life, quality of life (including coercion to migrate, conflict over resources, cultural diversity, loss of cultural heritage sites, of hunting grounds, etc.), species or biodiversity loss, and distribution/equity."

ON THE COSTS OF DEALING WITH CLIMATE CHANGE "For all countries, a main factor influencing implementation of climate policy today is based on a clarification of the overall costs of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 levels (see Political Feasibility). More pessimistic economists generally find deep reductions in carbon emissions to be very costly — into the trillions of dollars. For instance, stabilizing CO2 in 2100 at 450 ppm (current level is about 360 ppm) would, according to Manne & Richels (1997), cost the world between 4 and 14 trillion USD (this is the present value for the whole century). Other top-down studies report similar cost estimates (see IPCC 2001c, chapter , but we must note, paradoxically, that the results of even the most pessimistic economic models support the conclusion that substantial reductions of carbon emissions and several fold increases in economic welfare are compatible targets. To support this, Christian Azar and I developed a simple economic model and estimated the present value (discounted to 1990 and expressed in 1990 USD) of the costs to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at 350 ppm, 450 ppm, and 550 ppm to be 18 trillion USD, 5 trillion USD, and 2 trillion USD, respectively, assuming a discount rate of 5% per year (see Azar & Schneider, 2002). Obviously, 18 trillion USD is a huge cost, considering that the output of the global economy in 1990 amounted to about 20 trillion USD and is about 37 trillion in 2003. However, viewed from another perspective, an entirely different analysis emerges: the 18 trillion USD cost represents the present value of lost income over the next 100 years. In the absence of emission abatement and without any damages from climate change, GDP is assumed to grow by a factor of ten or so over the next 100 years, which is a typical value used in long-run modeling efforts. If even the most stringent target, 350 ppm, were pursued, the costs associated with it would only amount to a delay of two to three years in achieving this tenfold increase in global GDP in 2100. Meeting the 350 ppm CO2 stabilization target would imply that global income would be ten times larger than today by April 2102 rather than 2100 (the date at which the tenfold increase would occur for the no-abatement-policies scenario). This trivial delay in achieving phenomenal GDP growth is replicated even in more pessimistic economic models. These models may be very conservative, given that most do not consider the ancillary environmental benefits of emission abatement, among other shortcomings."
3. alpha6 | September 7th, 2006 at 12:19 pm

Michael Brylawski if you had actually read my post, you would see that I posted the link to the article at the end.

While I didn't write the article, I do subscribe by its premise.

I do not deny that global warming is occurring, although I would debate the extent to which it is taking place. If you care to deal with science and not scare tactics, I can point to the fact that temperatures now are about the same as they were in the Medieval Warm Period, some of the warmest centuries in the previous 8,000 years. That warm period, presumably not caused by industrial carbon dioxide emissions, was followed by what historians labeled the Little Ice Age, which led most notoriously to the extinction of the Norse settlements in Greenland. In turn, the Little Ice Age yielded to the current warming trend, which began around 1800.

In my view we are seeing a natural trend in global conditions that have been occuring since the earth began.

Do I think we should do more in combating the effects of greenhouse emmissions? Yes, but not because of the chicken little sky is falling global warming rage, but more to preserve the limited resources that we have available to us.