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Global Warming
To George Lockwood
and the spirit of curiosity
David Archer
University of Chicago
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
The right of David Archer to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the
UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by
the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
QC981.8.G56A73 2007
551.6–dc22
2006009415
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which
has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices.
Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental
accreditation standards.
Online models vi
Preface vii
Glossary 187
Index 193
Color plates appear between pages 168 and 169
To George Lockwood
and the spirit of curiosity
Global Warming: Understanding the forecast is based on class lectures for undergraduate
nonscience majors at the University of Chicago, developed by Ray Pierrehumbert and
myself. The class serves as partial fulfillment of our general education or “core” science
requirements. We teach the class, and I have written this textbook, in a mechanistic
way. We aim to achieve an intuitive understanding of the ropes and pulleys of the
natural world, a fundamental scientific foundation that will serve the student longer
than would a straight presentation of the latest predictions.
The text aims at a single problem – assessing the risk of anthropogenic climate change.
The story ranges from science to economics to policy, through physics, chemistry,
biology, geology, and of course atmospheric science. We see the distant past and the
distant future. In my opinion, by looking at a problem from many angles, the student
gets a pretty decent view of how a working scientist really thinks. This is as opposed to,
say, taking a survey tour of some scientific discipline.
The text is suitable for students of all backgrounds. We do make some use of algebra,
mostly in the form of what are known as (gasp) story problems. The student will be
exposed to bits and pieces of chemistry, physics, biology, geology, atmospheric science,
and economics, but no prior knowledge of any of these topics is required. One can
learn something of what each field is about by learning what it is good for, within the
context of the common unifying problem of global warming.
I have provided a project associated with each chapter after the first, either a computer
lab or a paper-and-pencil exercise, suitable to do in lab sessions or as homework.
The first three are paper-and-pencil exercises, aimed at building a foundation for
understanding the computer lab exercises that follow. The models run on our computers
at the University of Chicago, which can be accessed through web pages. No special setup
of the computer is required and students can work just as equally well in a computer
lab as in Starbucks (actually, it would be interesting to see if that’s true).
This book has benefited through thoughtful reviews by Andy Ridgwell,
Stefan Rahmstorf, Gavin Schmidt, and a fourth anonymous reviewer. The web interface
to the models benefited from inputs by Jeremy Archer. The visible/infrared radiation
model was constructed by Ray Pierrehumbert and Rodrigo Caballero. The ISAM carbon
cycle model was provided by Atul Jain. The back cover photo of the glacier was taken
by Lonnie Thompson. The project in Chapters 11 and 12 makes use of model output
provided by G. Bala, and was plotted using ferret, developed at the NOAA PMEL.
Instructors may request a CD with solutions and artwork from the book via this
email address: [email protected]
Everyone always complains about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.
Mark Twain
to rise by a few degrees centigrade (Chapter 12). This is pretty small compared with
the temperature differences between the equator and the poles, between winter and
summer, or even between day and night. One issue this raises is that it is trickier to
discern a change in the average when the variability is so much greater than the trend.
Careers are spent computing the global average temperature trend from the 100+ year
thermometer record (Chapter 11).
A small change in the average relative to a huge variability also raises the question
of whether a change in the average will even be noticeable. One way that the average
weather matters is in precipitation. Ground water tends to accumulate, reflecting rain-
fall over the past weeks and months and years. It may not matter to a farmer whether
it rains on a Tuesday or Saturday, but if the average rainfall in a region changes that
could spell the difference between productive and nonproductive farming. A change
in the average climate will change the growing season, the frequency of extreme hot
events, the distribution of snow and ice, the optimum growth localities of plants and
agriculture, and the intensity of storms.
In addition to day-to-day weather, there are longer-lasting variations in climate.
One past climate regime was the Little Ice Age, approximately 1650–1800, bringing
variable weather, by some records 1◦ C colder on average, to Europe. Before that was the
Medieval Optimum, perhaps 0.5◦ C warmer over Europe, coincident with a prolonged
drought in the American southwest. We will discuss the causes of these climate changes
in Chapter 11, but for now it is enough to observe that relatively small-sounding
average-temperature shifts produced noticeable changes in human welfare and the
evolution of history. The climate of the Last Glacial Maximum, 20,000 years ago, was
so different from today that the difference would be obvious even from space, and
yet the average temperature difference between then and today is only about 5–6◦ C
(Chapter 8). Another implication of these natural climate shifts is that it makes it more
difficult to figure out whether the present-day warming is natural or caused by rising
greenhouse gas concentrations and other human impacts on climate.
of the Earth by altering the energy flow either coming in or going out. In our sink, one
way to raise the water level is to turn up the faucet and wait a few minutes. The water
will rise until it finds a new equilibrium water depth. We can also alter the water level
by partly constricting the drain. Egg shells and orange peels work well for this purpose.
If the drain is partially obstructed, the equilibrium water level will rise.
The incoming energy to Earth might change if the Sun changes its brightness. It is
known that there is a small variation in the brightness of the Sun correlated with the
number of sunspots. Sometimes sunspots disappear altogether, presumably changing
the solar output. The Maunder Minimum was such a period, 1650–1700, and coincided
with the Little Ice Age.
Some of the incoming sunlight is reflected back to space without ever being absorbed
(Chapter 7). It we somehow make the Earth brighter, more reflective, it will tend to
cool. Clouds reflect light, and so does snow. Bare soil in the desert reflects more light
than vegetation does. Smoke emitted from coal-burning power plants contains particles
that can reflect light. Thus, changes in cloudiness, land cover, and smoke can change
climate.
The climate-forcing agent at the heart of the global warming problem is the green-
house effect from rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. CO2 , a greenhouse gas,
makes it more difficult for energy leaving the Earth to escape to space. Water vapor
and methane are also greenhouse gases. Most of the gases in the atmosphere are not
greenhouse gases, but are completely transparent to infrared (IR) light. The outgo-
ing energy from the Earth passes through them as if they were not there. Greenhouse
gases have the ability of absorb and emit IR light. The impact they have on climate
depends on their concentration because the more the gas, the more the light absorbed
(Chapter 4). The strength of the greenhouse effect also depends on the temperature
structure of the atmosphere (Chapter 5).
Water vapor is a tricky greenhouse gas because the amount of water vapor in the
atmosphere is determined by climate. Water tends to evaporate when the air is warm
and condense as rain or snow when the air is cool. Water vapor, it turns out, amplifies
the warming effects from changes in other greenhouse gases. This water vapor feedback
doubles or even triples the temperature change we expect from rising atmospheric CO2
concentration. Clouds are very effective at absorbing and emitting IR light, acting like
a completely impenetrable greenhouse gas. A change in cloudiness also affects the
incoming visible light energy flux by reflecting it (Chapter 7).
Human activity has the potential to alter climate in several ways. Rising CO2 concen-
tration from combustion of fossil fuel is the largest and longest lasting human-caused
climate forcing agent, but there are other greenhouse gases, such as methane (CH4 ) and
other hydrocarbon molecules, nitrous oxide, and ozone, the concentrations of which
are also changing because of human activities. Particles from smoke stacks and internal
combustion engines reflect incoming visible light, altering the heat balance. Particles
in otherwise remote clean air may change the average size of cloud droplets, which has
a huge but very uncertain impact on sunlight reflection (Chapter 10).
Many of these climate drivers themselves respond to climate, leading to stabilizing or
destabilizing feedbacks. There are several examples where the prehistoric climate record
shows more variability in climate than models tend to predict, presumably because there
exist positive feedbacks in the real world that are missing in the models. For example,
climate cools, so a forest changes to a tundra, allowing more of the incoming sunlight
to be reflected to space, cooling the climate even more. A naïve model with forests that
does not respond to climate would underestimate the total amount of cooling. In the
global warming forecast, the feedbacks are everything. The forecast would be much
easier in a simpler world (Chapter 7).
The forecast for the coming century is also tricky because some parts of the climate
system take a long time to change, such as the melting of an ice sheet or the warming
of a deep ocean. Coming back to our sink analogy, not only do we have to estimate the
eventual change in the water level in the sink, but we also need to predict how quickly
it will rise. For the sink this is not so bad whereas for climate it makes prediction
considerably harder (Chapter 12).
whereas the costs of climate change are paid by everyone. In this situation there is a
natural tendency for everyone to overexploit the commons. The solution to this is some
form of collective regulation. International negotiations have resulted in an agreement
called the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to limit emissions of CO2 gas. The Kyoto Protocol,
if successful, would curtail emissions by about 6% below 1990 levels, while carbon cycle
models show that eventual cuts of order 50% would be required to truly stabilize the
CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.
Carbon emissions could be lessened quite a bit by conservation and efficiency.
Sources of carbon-free energy such as wind and solar energy are rapidly being scaled up.
A forecast of the amount of energy that civilization will require in the coming century
suggests that large, new sources of energy may be required in the future. Nuclear energy
is essentially carbon-free but it would take a new nuclear power plant of current design
built every other day for the next 100 years to keep up with the forecast energy demand.
New ideas include solar cells on the Moon, beaming energy back to Earth as microwave
radiation, or high-altitude windmills, mounted on kites tethered in the jet stream.
With our growing technological and intellectual prowess, as well as our exploding
population, we are inevitably taking over the job of managing the biosphere. May we
do it wisely!
Energy travels through a vacuum between the Sun and the Earth by means of
electromagnetic radiation, or light. Objects can absorb energy from light, and they can
also emit light energy, if the vibrations of their chemical bonds generate oscillations of the
electrical field. An object that can emit all wavelengths of light is called a blackbody. The
spectrum of light from a blackbody sparked the development of quantum mechanics, a
revolution in physics and natural philosophy.
however thin, connecting a planet to anything. The space between the Earth and the
Sun is a pretty good vacuum. We know how warm it is in the sunshine, so we know
that heat flows from the Sun to the Earth. Yet, separating the Sun from the Earth is 150
million km of vacuum. How can heat be carried through a vacuum?
Light carries heat through a vacuum. Electrons and protons have a property called
electric charge. What an electric charge is, fundamentally, no one can tell you, but it
interacts through space via a property of the vacuum called the electric field. A positive
electric field attracts a negatively charged electron. This is how, in the olden days, a
TV tube hurled electrons toward the screen in a picture-tube television until electronic
flatscreens came along. It functioned by releasing an electron and then pushing it
around through the electric field. The electric field interacts with another property of
the vacuum called the magnetic field.
If the strength of the electric field at some location, measured in volts, changes with
time, and if the voltage oscillates up and down for example, this will cause a change
in the magnetic field, such as a compass would point to. This is how an electromagnet
works, converting electrical field energy into magnetic field energy. Going the other
direction, if the magnetic field changes, it can produce an electrical field. This is how a
generator works.
It turns out that the electric and magnetic fields in a vacuum fit together to form a
closed cycle like the ringing of a bell. The up-and-down oscillation in an electric field will
cause a complementary oscillation in the magnetic field, which reinforces the electric
field in turn. The two fields “ring” together. Such a little bundle of electric and magnetic
waves can in principle hurl through the vacuum forever, carrying energy with it.
The ringing of the electromagnetic field in light differs from the ringing of a piano
string, in that light can come in any frequency. Frequencies, of oscillators or of light
waves, have units of cycles per second (hertz, Hz) and are denoted by the Greek letter ν
(pronounced “new”). It turns out that different frequencies of light travel at the same
speed in a vacuum. Within some nonvacuum medium, such as air, water, or glass,
different frequencies of light might vary in their speeds a little bit, which is how a prism
separates white light into its component colors. But in a vacuum, all light travels at the
same speed. The speed of light in a vacuum, c, is a fundamental constant of nature.
The constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum makes it easy to relate the frequency
of light to its wavelength, the distance between the crests of a wave. We can figure out
what the relationship is between frequency and wavelength by thinking geometrically,
imagining the wavy line in Fig. 2.1 to be moving past us at some speed c. If the crests
are 1 cm apart and moving at 10 cm/s, then 10 crests would move past us every second.
Alternatively, we can make use of units. Pay attention to units, and they will lead you
to virtue, or at least to the right answer. Problem: assemble the two things we know, ν
and c, such that the units combine to be the same as the units of λ. Solution:
cm c[cm/s]
λ =
cycle ν[cycle/s]
Don’t take my word for it, check and make sure that the units are the same on both
sides of the equation.
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