Another Reason to Not be a Global Warming Fanatic

Here's a bit from a paper just published by the AMS (American Meteorological Society) by Stephen Schwartz:

According to current best estimates of climate sensitivity, the amount of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases added to Earth’s atmosphere since humanity began burning fossil fuels on a significant scale during the industrial period would be expected to result in a mean global temperature rise of 3.8°F—well more than the 1.4°F increase that has been observed for this time span. Schwartz’s analysis attributes the reasons for this discrepancy to a possible mix of two major factors: 1) Earth’s climate may be less sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than currently assumed and/or 2) reflection of sunlight by haze particles in the atmosphere may be offsetting some of the expected warming.

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A third possible reason for the lower-than-expected increase of Earth’s temperature over the industrial period is the slow response of temperature to the warming influence of heat-trapping gases. “This is much like the lag time you experience when heating a pot of water on a stove,” said Schwartz. Based on calculations using measurements of the increase in ocean heat content over the past fifty years, however, this present study found the role of so-called thermal lag to be minor.

You can see the difference between IPCC hysteria and the more moderate view of Schwartz in this graphic:



The above is material extracted from a posting on Anthony Watts' Watts Up With That? web site.

The money quote from the posting:

Schwartz observes that formulating energy policy with the present uncertainty in climate sensitivity is like navigating a large ship in perilous waters without charts. “We know we have to change the course of this ship, and we know the direction of the change, but we don’t know how much we need to change the course or how soon we have to do it.”

What bothers me is that the IPCC and its supporters have tried to stampede governments into imposing trillion dollar burdens on nations without having a sound understanding of the problem. No reasonable cost/benefit analysis was done. The money spent is wasted. It would be far better to spend it on improving energy technologies and encouraging conservation.