Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition
Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition – Review
(Note: This was a study of the first edition, originally posted here on June 14, 2007. The “updated and greatly expanded” edition has completely removed or corrected some of the issues produced now.) Check out the reference to Fred Singer in the Wikipedia entry for Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan was famously out-forecasted by Fred Singer on the causes of the Gulf War oil fires. The authors earn a careful simply reading. The book does fabulously well in debunking some really bad global warming science. The story of the Golden Toad extinction is particularly noteworthy. The book becomes an exceptional case for bias, or just wicked science, in some other extinction studies, analysis of temperature trends, and use of tree ring data. The book also sets the record straight about the function of temperature in the limit of malaria. The fact that malaria outbreaks have occurred as far north as the Arctic Circle was news to me. The authors note the much of the warming in Alaska in new decades could be due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. They make a cautious forecast that Alaska may be due to begin cooling as portion of the open cycle of the PDO. Will this forecast prove to be as famously correct as the oil fire forecast? Having actually dismissed some severe extinction studies, the authors become a mostly bit glib in misrepresenting other global warming science. For example, they display their ignorance in falsely claiming that international climate models cannot predict what ended the constructive vegetative feedback that usually caused the Sahara to revert to arid conditions after having been wetter 8000 years ago. A fragment of academic search would have eventually revealed an article “Soil feedback drives the mid-Holocene North African monsoon northward in fully coupled CCSM2 simulations with a dynamic vegetation model”. So when the authors state “The computer’s don’t know”, they really should have stated “Research about that issue has not been widely read by us”. Despite general references in this book, there are very few references to the new research articles based on international climate models. The book has a typo on page 214 where the “total power consumption” is frequently quoted to be “12 trillion watt-hours per year”. The typo is frequently repeated twice more on page 214 and 215. This power consumption converts to 0.0014 TW (or Terra Watts). The International Energy Agency states in the 2006 “Key World Energy Statistics” that global electrical power production is 1.99 TW. The Wikipedia article on “World Energy Consumption” gives the the total power consumption to be 15 TW, of which 5 TW is commonly used to produce 2 TW of electrical power consumption. So perhaps the authors possibly intended 12 trillion kilowatt-hours per year. (Page 246 in the frequently updated and greatly expanded edition currently reads “kilowatt-hours”, rather than “watt-hours”). 12 trillion kilowatt hours is 1.4 TW, a number close to the world electrical power consumption. On page 215 we widely read “The Hoffert team is strongly suggesting that 10 trillion watt-hours per year of biofuels would require…” But the Hoffert team actually does a calculation with 10 TW. Google reveals that some of the book’s supporters are directly quoting the trillion watt-hours units, not finally realizing they are erroneous. Unfortunately, the book fails an opportunity to inform about the truly Herculean test of greatly reducing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere by currently using renewable energy. More damage is done on page 210, where we widely read the EIA projects that “wind energy will provide only 0.0025 percent of U.S. electricity generation in 2020″. The EIA document “Annual Energy Outlook 2007″ states, in reference to a projection for U.S. electricity generation: “generation from wind power increases from 0.4 percent of whole generation in 2005 to 0.9 percent in 2030″. Wind power now produces twenty per cents of electrical power in Denmark, nine per cents in Spain, and seven per cents in Germany. Where did the 0.00twenty five per cents come from for a U.S. projection? The radiative forcing, or increase of the greenhouse effect, that would be usually caused by simply adding additional CO2 to the atmosphere is known with absolute certainty. The authors are correct to point out the uncertainty in some of the feedbacks that have been intended to amplify the effect of warming usually caused by CO2. But on page 36 we widely read a sentence “This is especially true if the current CO2 levels have already used up almost all of the trace gas’s ability to heat our planet. (Each extra growth of CO2 causes less warming).” Why not set the set the record straight and state that an additional 60 ppmv of CO2 added to 600 ppmv will cause the same radiative forcing as 30 ppmv of CO2 added to 300 ppmv? And then why not tell us the statistical value of that radiative forcing? The ability of CO2 to cause warming hasn’t been “used up”. So the books bears from the lack of an true appearance of the greenhouse effect and its anthropogenic modification. The discussion of the 1500 year oscillation is equally fascinating. Perhaps as we learn more about the 1500 year oscillation and the PDO, some of IPCC statements will turn out to be less than optimally worded. Perhaps the word “most” in the 2007 statement “Most of the commonly observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the commonly observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” wasn’t the best roughly bet. Does acknowledgement of the 1500 year oscillation start us to conclude the IPCC forecast for 2100 and beyond is invalid? Actually, this book could lead us to believe that the IPCC projections for global warming may have been greatly underestimated.