THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Reviewed 6/30/2011

The Climate Crisis, by Archer & Rahmstorf

Access to this book courtesy of the

THE CLIMATE CRISIS An Introductory Guide to Climate Change David Archer Stefan Rahmstorf Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN-13 978-0-521-73255-0
ISBN 0-521-73255-7	249pp.	SC/FCI	$39.99

Errata

Page 17:	"...and T is the temperature in kelvin."
	I believe the plural form is called for here: S/B "in kelvins" (or alternatively "on the Kelvin scale" with capital "K".)

Page 17:	"There is not much wiggle room in the Stefan-Boltzmann relation..."
	Implies there is some wiggle room.

Page 23:	"The rate of atmospheric CO₂ rise is accelerating, growing 20% faster in the period 2000-2004 than the growth rate was in the 1990s (Table 2.1)."
	S/B "Table 2.2".

Page 23:	"The rate of emission has accelerated in the past decades, up 37% since the 1980s (Table 2.1)."
	S/B "Table 2.2".

Page 24:	"The best guess is that overall the rate of the natural CO₂ uptake on the land surface is probably roughly comparable to the rate of CO₂ dissolution into the ocean..."
	Too much qualification; you've already said it's a guess. And what does "comparable to" mean here?

Page 24:	"More carbon than all the people on Earth is disappearing into the land someplace every year, but it's not clear where it's hiding."
	This is explained before, but it's still vague: S/B "More carbon than the total mass of all the people on Earth".

Pages 27-8:	"The concentration of methane, as measured in bubbles from ice cores, was steady through time for thousands of years until the industrial era when it began to rise, driven by an increase in human-released methane from agricultural and industrial sources (Figure 2.8)."
	Unfortunately, Figure 2.8 only covers the period from 1983 through 2005. And what of Ruddiman's work on prehistoric methane from rice paddies? Did the IPCC not consider his paper?

Page 28:	"More OH in the air would be like a larger flame on a candle, burning more quickly."
	This is a simile: S/B "burning methane more quickly".

Page 29:	"The lifetime of CH₄ therefore seems to be more-or-less constant."
	S/B just "constant".

Page 30:	"Although the aim of the Montreal Protocol is to protect the ozone layer, rather than to prevent global climate change, the Montreal Protocol has arguably done more to reduce global warming than the Kyoto Protocol has!"
	That's arguably remarkable!

Pages 36-7:	"Volcanic eruptions such as El Chichon (Mexico, 1982) and Pinatubo (Philippines, 1991, Figure 2.14) inject sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, resulting in strong but short-term cooling radiative forcings."
	No mention of the CO₂ released by these eruptions, and the fact that it's negligible next to man's output.

Page 39:	"Many people feel that significant changes are underway —"
	Missing space: S/B "under way".

Page 68:	"There you will read about all sorts of new melting tricks that ice sheets are showing us."
	Tricks, aye! But they don't try to hide the decline.

Page 69:	"There are also melting events in the prehistoric past, such as the Heinrich events (Chapter 6)..."
	If Heinrich events are mentioned, a few words explaining what they are might be in order. Also, this book needs a glossary.

Page 71:	"Ice can flow like crazy in narrow rivers called ice streams, narrow rivers bounded by slow-flowing ice on both sides."
	When Adama Obama hears about this, he's gonna go crazy!

Page 76:	"A deeper grounding line leaves room for a taller floating column ice, thereby accelerating the volume of ice flow out to the ocean."
	Missing word: S/B "column of ice". Also, just say, "accelerating the ice flow".

Page 76:	"As the ice is lost at the edges, the grounding line retreats deeper into the hole..."
	It's not made clear why this happens. I presume it's because the total mass becomes less, allowing more of the "tongue" to float.

Page 77:	"The combined volume of all the non-ice sheet ice is thought to be..."
	Missing hyphen: S/B "non-ice-sheet ice".

Page 78:	"Melting ice today also provides a temporary stream of fresh water, until the glacier is gone (Figure 4.12)."
	This is redundant to the previous sentence. If the intent is to emphasize the transient nature of these water sources, rewrite this.

Page 80:	"Trends in sea ice are shown in Figure 4.13."
	Missing words: S/B "Northern Hemisphere sea ice". That's what the figure shows.

Page 80:	"There has been a substantial decrease in sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, but not around Antarctica, an observation that is not explained in the Fourth Assessment Report."
	Neither is it explained here. Also, it's unclear which observation is unexplained in the FAR. Is it the loss of NH ice, or the constancy of sea ice around Antarctica?

Page 83:	Caption to Figure 4.16: "In regions where the deep soil is frozen year round..."
	S/B "regions of Siberia where".

Page 84:	"When frozen peat thaws, it begins to decompose, producing CO₂ and methane (another greenhouse gas)..."
	Readers should know by this point that methane is a GHG.

Page 88:	"They cruise up and down the oceans taking measurements over a specified depth range..."
	Make it clearer that this is a vertical movement: S/B "up and down in the oceans" or similar. And a verb other than "cruise" would serve better; with the phrase "up and down the oceans", it evokes Dobie Gray and the In Crowd getting respect from the people with notions.

Page 106:	"As we gaze back into deepest time..." "As we extend our scope into the deepest past..."
	While poetic, these phrases are inaccurate. Deepest time is what Steven Weinberg wrote about in The First Three Minutes. Here, the words to use can include "deep", "prehistory", "remote eras", or the like.

Page 114:	"It is chilling to note that the feedbacks going into the glacial world generally act in the direction of making a cold climate colder..."
	A pun my word, I was daunted by this dismaying and distressful paronomastic revelation...

Page 116:	"The Laurentide ice sheet collapsed several times during glacial time generating abrupt climate episodes called Heinrich events, in which the ice sheet collapsed into an 'armada of icebergs' (Chapter 4)."
	Chapter 4 mentions Heinrich events, but it doesn't describe them. And it does not contain the phrase "armada of icebergs."

Page 117:	Caption to Figure 6.10: "Ice core data from the time period 30 to 70,000 years ago show abrupt climate changes. the abrupt changes are apparent in the atmospheric CH₄ concentration, (curve b, driven by rainfall and area of freshwater swamps), and in the local temperature in Antarctica (curves c and d)."
	This should read "70,000 to 30,000 years ago", in keeping with the abscissa of the figure and the main text on the opposite page. The labels (a, b, c, etc.) are hard to spot, and the meanings of the designations at certain spots (e.g. H6, H5.2) are unclear.

Page 118:	Figure 6.11: Certain latitude bands of temperature anomaly are very narrow.
	Some represent islands (e.g. Tasmania); but it's unclear why a narrow region of North Eurasia should undergo a long period of +2°C anomaly.

Page 122:	"When the sun is bright, its magnetic field shields the Earth from cosmic rays, and the production of carbon-14 and beryllium-10 slows down."
	Wording: S/B "blocks more cosmic rays from reaching Earth". (Also, capitalize "sun" and say, "When the Sun is most active".)

Page 122:	"Ice cores preserve evidence of volcanic dust and aerosol deposition with the ice, but they provide no real information about how long the aerosol remained in the atmosphere (typically up to a few years), or exactly how much sunlight it caused to be scattered back to space."
	If there's no data on this, either justify the "typically..." or delete the phrase. (Also, probably S/B "within the ice".)

Page 122:	"Good climate records from direct measurements, thermometers, and other meteorological devices, have been available since about the year 1860."
	Wording: S/B "by thermometers and other meteorological devices".)

Page 123:	"One [fingerprint] is that the stratosphere is cooling while the ground surface warms. A greenhouse gas has that effect, because it acts as a radiator fin for the stratosphere, allowing heat to escape."
	Great googly-moogly! You've spent 120 pages explaining how greenhouses don't let as much heat escape — and now this! Shakka, when the walls fell... The way to explain this is to say that GHGs act like a blanket below the stratosphere, letting less heat reach it from the warming surface.

Page 126:	"Natural scientists can in principle not predict the future of climate, because it depends on human actions."
	Wording: S/B "cannot in principle".

Page 127:	"And regardless of their size — we cannot do anything to stop natural climate changes."
	This is incorrect. If the Sun were growing brighter (within its normal variation range), we could change the albedo of land surfaces on a large scale and thereby counteract that warming.

Page 127:	"But this should not stop us from taking full responsibility for the changes we are causing ourselves."
	Wording: S/B "we ourselves are causing".

Page 130:	"Preparations are already underway to include such scenarios..."
	Missing space: S/B "under way".

Page 132:	"There are many different approaches to determine climate sensitivity, using climate models..."
	Wording and punctuation: S/B "to determining climate sensitivity: using".

Page 143:	"James Hansen, head of the NASA Climate Institute in New York, has argued..."
	True, its purview today is climate, but the Goddard Institute of Space Studies has not been renamed.

Page 152:	"In the newspaper we read reports about trees blossoming or birds arriving at unseasonal times..."
	Wording: S/B "unseasonable times" meaning "arriving at times not appropriate for the season."

Page 164:	"...for only about 2°C warming the Cape Fynbos could shrink by 65%..."
	the Cape Fynbos ___?

Page 168:	"Water quality and oxygen content in lakes is expected to decline..."
	Number error: S/B "are expected".

Page 168:	"In tropical lakes, the productivity and fish yield is expected to decline..."
	Number error: S/B "are expected".

Page 176:	Caption of Figure 8.81 mentions Cairns in Australia.
	Australia is not indexed on page 176.

Pages 200-201:	Discussion of nuclear power
	Omits any mention of Gen-IV reactor designs.

Page 209:	"...sources in the chemical synthesis industry include ethylene manufacture, an ingredient for plastics..."
	Wording: S/B "the manufacture of ethylene".

Page 222:	"...and negotiations on this agreement are underway as we write."
	Missing space: S/B "under way".

Page 223:	"None of the twenty climate models submitted to the Fourth Assessment Report from research groups around the world predict warming of less than 1.5°C by the end of the century."
	Number error: S/B "predicts".

Page 224:	"We will have to face this problem and live up to one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever been confronted with.
	Wording: S/B "one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever confronted".

Page 229:	"We may either move into a phase of growing international tensions and conflicts over increasingly scarce resources [...] affected by climate change. Or...
	Wording: S/B "may move", or else these sentences should be combined.

Index Errors Found in Spot Checks

Page 241: "Australia, 28, 50, 51, 55, 57, 137, 154, 164, 172, 181, 213" — S/B 28, 51, 55, 57, 137, 154, 164, 172, 176, 181, 214. I put it down to last-minute formatting changes (LMFC), especially on page 50 where the word was barely pushed off the page — except for page 176, which was a clean miss.

Page 242: "¹⁴CO, 28" — actually on page 29.

Relative Strength of GHGs?

"The climate impact from human release of other greenhouse gases methane (CH₄), chlorofluorocarbons (Freons),and nitrous oxide (N₂O) was discovered in the 1970s. A property of the greenhouse effect is that a single molecule of a very rare gas, such as methane or a Freon, has a much stronger effect on climate than a single molecule of an abundant gas such as CO₂. The human-caused energy imbalance from these secondary greenhouse gases, added together, begins to rival the imbalance from CO₂, even though the trace gases are being emitted at a much lower rate than CO₂ (Chapter 2)." [Page 12]
"One important issue to understand is called the band saturation effect. Each molecule of greenhouse gas added to the atmosphere has some impact on the energy budget of the Earth. The first few molecules of a greenhouse gas in an atmosphere absorb a tremendous amount of the infrared light from the ground, but as the concentration of the gas increases, further additions of the gas have a weaker effect on the radiative forcing. This is because, at high concentrations, much of the light most easily absorbed by the gas will have already been absorbed even before you add the new slug of gas." [Page 22]
"The radiative forcing becomes less sensitive as the concentration of the gas rises, but it never becomes completely insensitive to further increases in the concentration. For CO₂, the radiative forcing is the same for any doubling of the CO₂ concentration. Changing CO₂ from 10 to 20 ppm will have about the same impact on the energy budget of the Earth in W/m² as changing CO₂ from 1000 to 2000 ppm, or any other doubling." [Page 22]

These paragraphs seem to say that the rarer greenhouse gases exert much more of a forcing effect than carbon dioxide. Also, the last paragraph seems to contradict itself.

Conclusions from Absent Data?

"The other place for CO₂ to go is the land biosphere. Unfortunately, the rate of carbon uptake and release by the land surface is a difficult quantity to measure." [Page 24]
"Perhaps by chance the land surface overall has remained nearly neutral as a CO₂ source or sink, with natural uptake balancing deforestation. The airborne fraction as it is presented here therefore largely tells us about ocean uptake." [Page 26]

Here, the first sentence notes that land-surface uptake and release rates are not well characterized, and the second sentence tells us that they are known to be in balance.

A Suggested Rewrite

"Other abrupt climate events were triggered by direct fresh water dumps into the North Atlantic Ocean. These include the Younger Dryas and the 8.2kyr climate events; both may have been caused by the sudden spillage of large ice-dammed lakes in North America. The IPCC considers it likely that business-as-usual climate change could slow down the overturning in the coming century, but estimates less than a 10% risk of a major abrupt climate transition, caused by human emissions, in this century." [Page 117]
Other abrupt climate events were triggered by direct fresh water dumps into the North Atlantic Ocean. These include the Younger Dryas and the climate event 8,200 years ago; both may have been caused by the sudden spillage of large ice-dammed lakes in North America. The IPCC considers it likely that business-as-usual climate change could slow down the overturning circulation later this century, but estimates a less than 10% risk of a major abrupt climate upheaval, caused by human emissions, during this period. [edited]

The second paragraph is my rewrite of the first.

In the Errata and in the three boxes above, I point out examples of wording that I think should be improved. This is not to be construed as arguing or implying that these passages are intentionally misleading, that they reveal cases where the relevant data are actually not known, that they contradict any portion of the mainstream climate-science consensus, or that they implicate the authors of this book in a purported attempt to fabricate support for a nonexistent crisis. Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake.