Thinking more about your comment overnight, Ken, Lynas does not directly say that his 5C and 6C scenarios are speculative in the book but he did refer to the PETM scenario as speculative in an interview on The Science Show. I think he would have done better to include them as examples of runaway climate change without linking them to any specific temperature levels.

He does make the point that we are releasing carbon into the atmosphere 30 times faster than 55m years ago (presumably based on Zachos) and 100 times faster than 251m years ago (presumably based on Benton). I recall the Stern Review (I think) saying that the change in climate from 4-5C (Lynas’ Five degrees) would be greater than a shift from 2-3C. Essentially the specifics become difficult at this stage because we don’t know how the major elements of the climate system will interact with each other.

The 2-3C scenario, according to Lynas, sees major problems in food production, with the drying heating and drying of the mid-temperate food bowls, the remobilisation of the Kalahari sand dunes enveloping Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe and Zambia, the drying of Central America, the SW of the US and problems with all areas that depend on melt water from mountain snow.

There is also the issue of rising sea levels which in the long term could be very serious if we choose to stabilise at 550ppm of CO2, roughly double pre-industrial times.

The reference system in the book is weird. The publishers didn’t want to interrupt the text and the compromise is less than helpful. Nevertheless when I look at Chapter 3 in more detail I’ll endeavour to link his claims with his sources.

His Five Degrees chapter is very much based on the PETM analogue of 55 million years ago.

My worry is that he doesn’t seem to take regard of the actual temperatures of the PETM. This graph indicates that it was considerably warmer but I’m not clever enough to work out exactly how hot it was. The third graph in this article by Paul Monk indicates that it could have been about 10C warmer. Lynas does say in the chapter that the sea temperature was estimated to have been 20C within 200km of the north pole at that time.

Lynas doesn’t cite any one authority, but he could have been persuaded by James Lovelock whose Revenge of Gaia makes extensive reference to the PETM event. At the time climate scientists seemed to play down the relevance of the PETM, but I was interested in the fact that David Karoly made mention of it the other night. And I’ve seen a few other references to it. Certainly the configuration of the continents was reasonably similar to today.

The Six degrees chapter is definitely based on the Permian-Triassic extinction event of 251 million years ago. He sees the trigger for this being the release of methane hydrates from beneath the sea. He says explicitly that we don’t know what temperature might trigger them but worries about those that are said to be fairly shallow around the Arctic Sea. His description of the effects is largely based I think on Benton, M. 2003 When life nearly died. (Thames and Hudson).

These effects are not explicitly related to temperature, rather to changes in the composition of the atmosphere and the sea. But temperature would be the presumed trigger.

I haven’t been able to find a review of Lynas’ book yet. There is an article in the Guardian which is really an outline. The book is available here in paperback (Fourth Estate) for about $28.

I’m hoping to do a review soon myself, but I can’t promise a searching critique of the scientific basis, not being a scientist.

Then I was planning to do something in more detail about the Three Degrees chapter, as that is the threshold for dangerous warming.

crickey needs peer review.

Hullo? What do you think YOU are? Chopped liver?

Brian, I would be very grateful if you could list some of the citations which Lynas’ uses to support these points. I am reasonably familiar with the scientific literature on global warming, and I’ve never seen implications like this in it.

Evolution does in fact take many generations; the reason that bacteria have evolved multiple resistance to antibiotics within a single century, is because the bacterial reproductive cycle is very short. E-coli (a fairly common household germ) has a reproduction time of 20 minutes. So, if you wipe out 99.9% of the little buggers in your dunny with Pine-o-Clean, two hours and twenty minutes later (10 generations) the population is back to its pre-Pine-o-Clean level. And, as you’ve effectively selected for Pine-o-Clean resistance, the little buggers are going to be a bit more difficult to kill next time you clean your dunny.

Rabbits and myxo - bad example. I recall from high school biology that there were a few strains of the myxo virus. In Europe, myxo is transmitted primarily by fleas which live on their host until it dies, then transfer to another. The deadlier strain of myxo is favoured by this environment - it gets to new hosts more quickly by killing off its current host. In Oz, the vector is the mosquito - mosquitos don’t feed off dead rabbits. This favours less virulent strains which don’t kill the host animal. But it’s the virus that is being selected, not the host.

In animals with slower reproductive cycles - measured in years, rather than minutes or weeks, the rate of evolution is much slower. And given the nature of the process, in a lot of cases (like that of our own species) we don’t know where it’s going - only where it’s currently got to.

Just look at all the examples…

Cheers…

Evolution takes many, many generations and does not operate in a significant way over that small a time frame.

Bollocks. Just all at all the examples of bacteria evolving into anti-biotic resistant forms, rabbits and the myxo virus mutually evolving toward a far more resistant rabbit on one hand and a less virulent variety variety of myxo on the other. There must doubtless be other examples of significant evolutionary change working surprisingly quickly, but these two will serve to demonstrate the principle. The fact that is that we don’t know how fast - or slowly - evolution may operate in many circumstances, and it would be foolish to rely on a naive belief that it must necessarily be slow and gradual.
Cheers…

This is not the first time McQueen has written a piece in Crikey implying that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a myth, generated by a combination of scientific conspiracy and a desire to place humans at the centre of the universe by making us the masters of our destiny, rather than corks in nature’s storms.

He doesn’t understand the science, doesn’t really even try because he thinks he knows the motivation of the scientists. For all his references to Popper he is being postmodernist in his portrayal of science uninfluenced from evidence.

For the record here are some clear predictions that have come from Global Warming. All of them have been confirmed with the exception of one which has half confirmation, for reasons we are starting to understand:

*Rising global average temperatures
*Greater warming at night than during the day
*Greater warming in winter than summer
*Greater warming at the poles than the equator
*Greater warming of the troposphere than the surface
*Cooling of the stratosphere

Yet McQueen has the gall to allege that climatologists don’t understand the basics of science and the need for testable hypotheses.

His final statement is:

Still, I believe there can be little serious argument over the importance of a policy of avoiding major further increases in combustion by-products.

In spite of the fact that he trained as a weather officer back in 1942, he has the good sense as an economist to leave the climate science to the climate scientists. Other economists please note.

He is persuaded by the seriousness of the foreshadowed outcomes if we do nothing to accept that p, the “social rate of time preference�, should be valued at zero. He explains the meaning of p thus:

This parameter allows for discounting the future simply because it is the future, even if future generations were no better off than we are.

I’m not an economist, but I can’t conceive of circumstances where you ever would. Wouldn’t such discounting be a value position?

Another point he makes succinctly is worth repeating:

The benefits from mitigation of greenhouse gases are the avoided damages.

Economists when modeling the costs and benefits of typically establish a reference scenario based on ‘business as usual’ fore the economy ignoring the effects of climate change. The problem with this is that it can give the false impression (eg. to media persons and pollies) that there is actually a possibility of a penalty-free business as usual future.

The global weather patterns are so complex and chaotic that frequency has almost no meaning in this context.

Your babble about phase is meaningless in a system of this nature.
Huggybunny

Death to Popper. Long live Feyerabend!

That would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease, a common enough prescription from the liberal-Left.

If you’re going to get on your high horse about “basic physics, suffering as usual these days at the hands of simplistic ideologists” I sugest that you first of all change your nickname and second address the basic science in a less confused manner.

First up, phase is not a property of an oscillating system, or at least not an intrinsic property. Phase is a relationship between two or more interacting oscillations. And this is complete nonsense:

And I said Huggy was wrong in ignoring the point in the phase of the cycle of the system at which the additional energy was added. In-phase, it will add to the total; out-of-phase, it will subtract from the total.

Total what? If you mean total energy, you are advancing the absurd proposition that it is possible to reduce the total energy in a system by adding energy to it. A fairly clear case of basic physics, suffering at the hands of of a simplistic ideologist.

Any future comments you post will be subject to peer review before publication.

Gummo, where did I say that phase was “a property of energy”? It is, however, a property of an oscillating system.

And I said Huggy was wrong in ignoring the point in the phase of the cycle of the system at which the additional energy was added. In-phase, it will add to the total; out-of-phase, it will subtract from the total.
No, not the whole story, but pretty basic physics, suffering as usual these days at the hands of simplistic ideologists.

leftybasher

Leftybasher, if you want to continue to contribute here, please cut the crap and do so with civility.

BULLSHIT! The sum of energy within an oscillating system is completely dependent upon the phase-relationship between the oscillations and the additional energy. Ever heard of PHASE, dummy?

Wrong! Write 100 times “Phase is not a property of energy”.

Phase comes into consideration when you have two waves interacting to form an interference pattern. Where the waves are out of phase the wave motions will cancel (roughly speaking). Where they are in phase they will reinforce each other and the amplitude of the combined oscillation will be twice that of one of the two waves alone (assuming both waves are of equal amplitude).

As to the total energy in the whole system, it’s the combined energy of the two wave motions. Thanks to the Law of Conservation of Energy which “PHASE” does not override.

My second point stands.

leftybasher

Huh? First you say ‘the weather system is anoscillatory’, then you say it’s oscillatory.
Hey, make up your damn mind, will ya!

Then you say, ‘if you add energy to an oscillatory system the amplitude of the oscillations MUST increase’.
BULLSHIT! The sum of energy within an oscillating system is completely dependent upon the phase-relationship between the oscillations and the additional energy. Ever heard of PHASE, dummy?

Typical lefty drivel. You don’t even understand you own, so-called, ‘basic, really basic, physics.’

Stick to hugging bunnies, or whatever the hell you do.

leftybasher

There was a thorough Fisking of his contribution at Le Rayon Vert.

Tim T, “non-scientists, usually politicians and MSM hacks” can mangle the climate change terminology, as you say. McQueen, however, is not restricting his criticism to non-scientists.

On winners and losers, Mark Lynas’ book Six Degrees spells out the implications, as far as can be ascertained from the scientific literature, for every degree of warming up to six. You don’t go far on this path before there are more losers than winners (we are just talking humans here). With 3 degrees (ie. 2-3C) you get whole slabs of the planet uninhabitable. With 5 degrees, it’s the South Island of NZ, maybe Tasmania, a circle around the Arctic and some high plateaus in the tropics that remain habitable. With six degrees it’s like the Permian-Triassic extinction event of 251 million years ago, when Homo Sapiens, not to mention all the other species, would be under threat.

I have reservations about the last two scenarios, but we would be in ‘runaway warming’ territory at that stage, so he could well be right.