What Do We Think About Climate Change

Crossing fingers for you, Boston...

Cheers.

 

thanks
I would love get on permanently
doesnt pay much but Im ok with that
and building is dead I wouldnt mind if I never build anything else again but for myself
best
B

 

Well, some says it does matter what we do or what we don't do....
If we can reduce our impact that our way of living by some fraction.... Maybe that's still a sensible attitude.:?:

http://assets.panda.org/downloads/climate_change___coral_triangle___full_report.pdf

btw; Boston; Good luck, if I read your postings correctly.

 

But Knut, just reading the preface from that document, it makes totally nonsense to me. First phrase:

"The world is currently facing the greatest challenge of all time. Rapid climate change is transforming the conditions under which life has persisted for millions of years."

This is absolutely untrue. Climate has changed more rapidly and dramatically than nowadays many, many times in the history of planet Earth and life has flourished in conditions much more environmentally demanding than those of the present moment.

All ice ages have been much worse for life in Earth than current times. We are living in a short warm period between glaciations to which we'll come back sooner or later. And that's what should concern us, not the slight warming we are experiencing as the planet recovers from the Little Ice Age.

Earth has also lived periods of global temperatures much higher than today (as much as 10º) with life blooming all around. Talking about our current interglacial period, the Holocene Optimum was well warmer than today for several thousands of millions of years. Even within the written history of mankind there have been warmer periods than today, as the Roman and Medieval warm periods, where the populations thrived because there was more available food and less diseases. Just the contrary to the cold Dark Ages and Little Ice Age, when famine, pandemias and depopulation were the norm.

You, norsemen, were able to grow crops and cattle in Greenland in the Medieval Warm period (which is not possible nowadays becasue temperature is lower) and were expeled out of there when the cold arrived.

Planet Earth is able today to produce enough food for more than 6.5 billion people (6500 million in european notation), precisely because the climate is mild (Bad distribution of such food is our fault, not Nature's). This in spite of the alarmist famine predictions of 30 years ago when we were around half that amount.

Coral reefs thrieved in the Myocenic, with athmospheric CO2 concentrations over 1000 ppm for 150 million years and even over 2000 ppm for several millions. Life on the planet has always adapted to the changing conditions by extinction of many species and the uprising of new ones. That's how it has been and always will be. Perhaps the humankind will have the dubious honour of auto-extinguishing itself, but our planet will survive to such extinction and life will go on without us.

I'm afraid that work you posted is just another bit of the same discredited global alarmist political agenda some of us are critizising.

Cheers.

P.S. Have a look at these news:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090423100817.htm
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2008/12/27/Coral-recovering-from-2004-tsunami/UPI-27701230403966/
http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/pressreleases/20090203-baker.html
http://portal.unesco.org/es/ev.php-URL_ID=8077&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

 

Just more info......................
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2009051...nmentoceans;_ylt=Ai8WVH0lNalGz0fVJvEX0VJ34T0D

 

rasorinc,
from the news in your post:
"Researchers do not know how quickly the shelf would collapse. But if such a large amount of ice melted steadily over 500 years it would raise sea levels by about 6.5 millimeters per year."

I'd say to that:
- first of all, they do not know if the Antarctica ice sheet is going to collapse at all. That is speculative.
- second, if it does, they do not know how quickly it would melt, as they recognize. Talking about somethinhg they do not know is again speculative.
- third: average rate for the 20th century has been around 1.5-1.8 mm/year. Tide gauge data for that century show no significant acceleration. Present rate may even be slowing down.
- fourth: sea level has rised around 130 m from its lowest level at the last Ice Age, and did it so at a maximum rate of around 4 cm a year during the Meltwater Pulse.
- fifth: during the Holocene it has nearly stopped. See attached image.

Sea levels go up and down naturally and we can do nothing to stop it. Humankind will have to adapt to whatever happens, as it has always done.

Cheers.

 

"as it has always done" (and always will)

that just about sums up this thread!

 

Infrared satellite readings show that the Earth has been getting greener (at least) since 1982, most likely thanks to warming climate which led to increased rainfall and CO2, plus the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 increases. Worldwide, vegetative activity generally increased by 6.17 percent between 1982 and 1999. This and better agricultural technologies have led to bigger and better crops around the planet. Such abundant crops have been the reason there is enough food for the present 6.7 billion people we are on the planet.

Now let's see what was being said when Earth's population was a 'mere' 4 billion people, back in 1975:

From Newsweek magazine:
...The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”
http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm

The real famine test for humanity’s farming systems will not come during warming times. It will come with cooling times, specially during the next full Ice Age, when huge sheets of ice a mile thick will once again cover Canada and Russia, and the Northern USA Plains will be too cold to farm. Then, humanity and most of the planet’s wildlife will converge on the relatively small usable land area nearer the equator, and in denser numbers than the planet has ever known.

Hopefully, that test may not come soon, but we should be prepairing for it, as even an slight cooling may threat the ability of Earth to feed humanity. Projections say in 30 years world's population numbers will probably reach a huge 9 billion figure.

What will happen if a cooling scenario comes to be true, as astrophisicists and geologists stubborngly keep on saying it will happen up to at least 2030 -2040? What if cool times come to be longer and deeper than expected?

I think our politicians and institutions should concentrate on worrying about how to produce enough food and energy for that scenario, par example by strongly boosting the investigation on the genetical engineering of a set of even higher-yielding and still more stress-tolerant crop varieties, to feed humanity from lower and lower temperatures and less and less available land, as well as promoting more nuclear plants and boosting the investigation on fusion technologies, instead of losing their time and our money in the global warming alarmism nonsense.

Cheers.

 

A really fine explanation of the relation between the sunspot number and the microwave flux that has has changed significantly in recent years.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/14/the-solar-radio-microwave-flux/#more-7843

Arctic ice still melting slower than at any time in the last 7 years.

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png

SOHO HO HO HO.

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/realtime-update.html

 

On another forum I've found a pair of posts which explains with the finest logic, why a positive feedback with water vapor is simply impossible, using data taken directly from the IPCC AR4 as well as everyday observations of weather.

Knut: Please read these 2 posts carefully; all your questions are answered!

I'll quote it unabridged:

Michael:
January 5th, 2009 at 7:23 pm

"There are two ways of supporting or disproving theories. The first is by experimental observation, the second is by theoretical analysis. The first has been discussed endlessly in relation to AGW on this site and others. Let me offer an attempt at the second approach.

As a preamble however I would like to point out that the study of the absorption of radiant energy by matter is NOT climatology, it is spectroscopy. In fact most of the science behind climatology is derived from other disciplines thus it is not justifiable to take the view that only input from climatologists is relevant. In my case, I have spent the last 33 years very successfully carrying out research for a major spectroscopy company.

Having become interested in the AGW issue I tried to derive the direct effect of CO2 from first principles. What I found was that the relationship between CO2 concentration and retained energy was logarithmic and that each doubling of CO2 would retain about an additional 3.5 watts/sq meter. Consulting the literature I find that the logarithmic relationship is widely established, I simply re-derived an already known relationship. As to the magnitude, the 4th (ie: latest) IPCC report states that the increase in CO2 concentration from 280 to 390 ppm has increased retained energy by 1.77 watts/sq meter. 280 to 390 ppm represents 0.48 doublings so the IPCC number is 1.77/0.48 or 3.7 watts/sq meter. Pretty reasonable agreement. That means the increase from 390 to 560 ppm - a further 0.52 doublings will increase retained energy by 1.9 watts/sq meter. Using Stefan’s law relating temperature with energy radiated by a black body (known and proven for more than a century) an additional 1.9 watts/sq meter will increase the temperature of earth’s surface by about 0.34 degrees C. That’s a long way from the claimed 3+ degrees C - how come? The claimed answer is positive feedback from water vapour. My immediate thought on hearing this was to note that every single naturally stable system I can think of exhibits net negative feedback so to suggest that climate (which is clearly stable) exhibits strong positive feedback makes me very suspicious, however suspicion is not evidence so lets look at the numbers.

To get 3 degrees temperature rise requires an additional 16.5 watts/sq meter (again from Stefan’s law). If 1.9 comes from CO2, the remainder, 14.6 must come from water vapour. That would mean the positive feedback co-efficient was 14.6/16.5 or 0.88 (where 1 = runaway) WOW. Looking up the relationship between temperature and water vapour pressure in the CRC handbook I find that a 3 degree temperature increase results in approximately a 30% increase in water vapour concentration (at constant relative humidity). The logarithmic relationship applies to all greenhouse gases including water thus a 30% increase is 0.38 doublings implying that each doubling of water vapour contributes an additional 14.6/.38 watts or 38 watts/sq meter. To put this in perspective, water vapour at present only contributes 84 watts/sq meter in total. A sensitivity as large as this raises many extremely serious paradoxes and is, I believe absolutely impossible. This post is already too long for me to enumerate these but if anyone is interested I am more than willing to outline some of the paradoxes in a subsequent posting.

The models making this prediction also predict that the impact of this water vapour feedback mechanism is a hot spot in the tropics at an altitude of about 8 km. According to the models, if the positive feedback effect of water is true then this region should be warming at least 2 times as fast as the surface. However again when I read the literature I find that 1000’s of balloon measurements and the satellite measurements all fail to find such a hot spot- and in fact this region is warming significantly less than the surface. The prediction is not supported experimentally suggesting the original hypothesis is false.

The above only considers positive feedback from water vapour but in fact water vapour also generates very powerful negative feedback. Atmospheric water vapour gives rise to clouds and they cause cooling because they reflect incoming energy from the sun back into space. For Earth the albedo is dominated by clouds. At present it is about 0.3 which means that 30% of the incoming energy from the sun is reflected back into space (about 100 watts/sq meter- which is greater in magnitude but opposite in sign to the greenhouse impact of water vapour 84 watts/sq meter). So to consider one without the other is biased thinking.

What is the relationship between water vapour concentration and cloud levels? I admit I don’t know for sure but I suspect it is much closer to linear than logarithmic. If there are two opposite feedback mechanisms of similar magnitude, one varying logarithmically with concentration and the other linearly, linear will dominate as the concentration rises. This again suggests feedback from water vapour is more likely to be negative than positive. If so, the direct 0.34 degree rise from an increase of CO2 to 560 ppm would be reduced not increased by the impact of water vapour.

There is also experimental evidence easily observable by any lay person that the feedback from water vapour is negative. Again, I am happy to outline this in a follow up post if there is interest."


Michael:
January 6th, 2009 at 7:27 am

"In my previous post I said I would outline evidence easily experienced by a lay person suggesting that water exerts a negative feedback effect. Here it is.

The IPCC model is based on massive positive feedback in our climate system yet every stable natural system that I can think of exhibits strong negative feedback around the equilibrium point. Negative feedback is the opposite of positive feedback. It acts to oppose any disturbance acting on a system and seeks to maintain the current equilibrium. In short it is a stabilising factor whereas positive feedback is a destabilising factor. Long term stability of any system almost guarantees that there is strong negative or stabilising feedback in operation. The climate, while showing periodic variations, has been stable enough for life to form and flourish for millions of years despite significant changes in forcings over the millennia and this makes it virtually certain that strong negative feedback is in operation. Any analysis purporting to show otherwise should be viewed with considerable circumspection. It suggests a strong likelihood that the model is either incomplete or seriously flawed.

We have all experienced the very significant temperature difference between a clear night and a cloudy night in winter. Clear nights are much colder than cloudy nights. Clouds act in exactly the same way as greenhouse gasses, by trapping energy radiated from the surface and returning it to the surface instead of allowing it to radiate out to space. What our senses are showing us is that greenhouse effects are not just long time constant, global issues. They are easily discerned in our local environment over timescales as short as an hour or two.

Now consider the following scenario. We know the earth rotates about an axis tilted about 23 degrees relative to the sun, which is what gives us the seasons and what sets the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Imagine a location on the tropic of Capricorn (23 degrees south) - say Mackay in Queensland. In summer the sun is directly overhead - average solar input of around 310 watts/sq meter. In winter the sun is at maximum elevation 45 degrees - average solar input of around 220 watts/sq meter. That is a difference summer to winter of about 90 watts/sq meter which, if there was neither positive nor negative feedback, would give a temperature difference summer to winter of about 16 degrees (from Stefan’s law). The positive feedback suggested by the IPCC model, would act on this forcing in exactly the same way as the claimed forcing from CO2 rise and would inflate the 16 degrees to about 90 degrees C, extinguishing all life in Mackay. Yet the summer winter temperature difference in Mackay is only about 6 degrees. That is not only far less than IPCC’s 90 degrees but is far less even than the 16 degrees predicted in the absence of any feedback at all. How is that possible?

Maybe the thermal mass of the environment averages out much of the summer winter difference? Unlikely, considering the significant temperature change between day and night. If the temperature can change significantly in a few hours it could certainly change profoundly over 6 months. Also, if the above were the reason one would also expect to see it similarly averaged out in places like Melbourne, yet anyone living there can testify first hand that such is not the case, the summer/winter variation is greater than at Mackay.

What does stand out at Mackay relative to Melbourne is that the humidity is much higher in summer than it is in winter. Higher humidity means more water vapour content in the air. According to the IPCC model, this should translate to even more greenhouse heat retention and thus even higher temperatures. Now remember our experiences with cloudy versus clear nights, the effect should be easily discernable in our local environment over a few hours. Yet the effect is not observed, more water vapour is not leading to higher temperatures in fact just the opposite would seem to be the case. This suggests that maybe water vapour causes a net negative feedback effect rather than net positive feedback.

Certainly increasing atmospheric water vapour does increase retained energy to a very small degree but this impact is nowhere near as strong as claimed by IPCC. It is also far from the only effect of water in our environment and some of the other effects exhibit strong negative feedback. For example, greater humidity leads to more clouds which reflect a larger fraction of the incoming solar energy back out to space and away from Earth’s surface. Or the very large amount of energy absorbed by evaporating water. Energy which is then transported upwards and eventually re-radiated high up in the atmosphere where the greenhouse effect is reduced. Or the energy taken to lift all that water several kilometres into the atmosphere against earth’s gravity (after all that is where the energy for hydroelectricity comes from). These are all negative feedback effects. (in fact the energy absorbed by evaporating water is a very significant factor in reducing the summer winter temperature difference at McKay and in the tropics generally).

Is this consistent with a larger summer/winter temperature variation in Melbourne? Yes it is, because in Melbourne the humidity summer versus winter varies less so the negative feedback from water vapour is correspondingly smaller."


Jimbo

 

Comparing the Four Global Temperature Data Sets.

If CO2 is responsible for elevating global temperatures, then temperatures should have continued to climb from 1998.

There are four groups measuring global temperatures.

GISS - Goddard Institute for Space Studies and home of James Hansen,
Hadley Centre - British Meteorological Office research centre
UAH - The University of Alabama, Huntsville, home of Roy Spencer with his colleagues including John Christy of NASA and
RSS - Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, California, a company supported by NASA for the analysis of satellite data.

It is not a difficult task to plot both the figures for CO2 and the temperatures provided by the four groups on the same sheet of graph paper and look at the results. This task has been undertaken by the Friends of Science website http://www.friendsofscience.org/ and is attached to this post.

It is inconceivable that even after a decade since global warming ended and seven years into a cooling trend with no end of cooling in sight, that world leaders are unaware of these facts and are still pursuing initiatives to stop global warming. Something is terribly wrong with the official international science bodies such as the IPCC who have not come forward and properly informed the world leaders of current global temperatures.

Something is terribly wrong with the individual government science bodies who did not come forward and inform their own leaders when it was certain that global warming had ended, or when there was sufficient data to claim that we are now in a cooling trend. It is not as though this is highly guarded secret data that can only be accessed by a limited group of people.

Unfortunately the AGW concept is so enshined in the public psyche through the graphic propaganda of the last several years that all verbal arguments against this ideology fall on deaf ears, and get shouted down by an indoctrinated crowd. While these people are deaf they are not blind, and no matter how loud the shouting, a graphic representation of increasing CO2 and decreasing global temperatures will be seen above the din.

If every presentation contained a graph similar to the one on the Friends of Science website this “visual” will eventually get in front of leaders who will be forced to reconsider the global warming initiatives that have been so costly to the world. The second graph below is a plot of the average of the satellite and the Hadley Center global monthly temperatures versus the monthly seasonally adjusted CO2 from NOAA ESRL since 2002. Note the clear downtrend in temperatures even as CO2 continues to rise.

 

That's the beauty of politics, you don't need to know or really prove anything. It is the field of human endeavour where pseudoscience thrives.

 

The Sun has hit a 100-year low in sunspot activity, a 50-year low in solar wind pressure and a 55-year low in radio emissions. The decay of the sunspot cycle 23 with its very weak activity, the delay in the arriving of cycle 24 and the cooling of oceans and low troposphere temperatures since at least 2002, seem to be the first indications of the new trend, as it was predicted on the basis of solar motion cycles two decades ago. As to temperature, only El Niño periods should interrupt the downward trend, but even El Niños should become less frequent and strong.


A couple of precursors:

Fairbridge, R. W. and Shirley, J. H. (1987): Prolonged minima and the 179-year cycle of the solar inertial motion. Solar Physics 110, 191-220.

Abstract:

"The authors employ the JPL long ephemeris DE-102 to study the inertial motion of the Sun for the period A.D.760 - 2100. Defining solar orbits with reference to the Sun’s successive close approaches to the solar system barycenter, occurring at mean intervals of 19.86 yr, they find simple relationships linking the inertial orientation of the solar orbit and the amplitude of the precessional rotation of the orbit with the occurrence of the principal prolonged solar activity minima of the current millenium (the Wolf, Spörer, and Maunder minima). The progression of the inertial orientation parameter is controlled by the 900-yr “great inequality” of the motion of Jupiter and Saturn, while the precessional rotation parameter is linked with the 179-yr cycle of the solar inertial motion previously identified by Jose (1965). A new prolonged minimum of solar activity may be imminent."



Landscheidt T. (2003): New Little Ice Age Instead of Global Warming? Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2-3, 1 May 2003 , pp. 327-350(24)

Abstract:

"Analysis of the sun’s varying activity in the last two millennia indicates that contrary to the IPCC’s speculation about man-made global warming as high as 5.8°C within the next hundred years, a long period of cool climate with its coldest phase around 2030 is to be expected. It is shown that minima in the secular Gleissberg cycle of solar activity, coinciding with periods of cool climate on Earth, are consistently linked to an 83-year cycle in the change of the rotary force driving the sun’s oscillatory motion about the centre of mass of the solar system. As the future course of this cycle and its amplitudes can be computed, it can be seen that the Gleissberg minimum around 2030 and another one around 2200 will be of the Maunder minimum type accompanied by severe cooling on Earth. This forecast should prove ’skilful’ as other long-range forecasts of climate phenomena, based on cycles in the sun’s orbital motion, have turned out correct, as for instance the prediction of the last three El Niños years before the respective event."

Cheers.

 

There will have to be snow in July in Death Valley before the no-growth nuts of the Climate Change Cult will admit they are wrong. Why? Because they will lose their chance to rebuild human society through administrative fiat in the name of saving the world. You have a better chance of them seeing the God they don't believe in rather than hear them admit they are wrong. All we can hope to do is educate enough people that the no-growth folks are the dangerous ones and their agenda is not about saving the environment.

 

well you guys are just having a love fest over here

clearly this guy hasnt been paying attention to what those predictions actually were
my favorite part is that the predictions were made fifty years ago and are exactly coming true

which they did

posting local data as some kind of proof rather than global one could show that we are in an ice age or a tropical rain forest

at least G is admitting that its greener these days
which is what happens when you speed up the biological process with yup
plant food ( co2 ) and temp

also I notice there is a lot of ice melting these days
any ideas
cause generally when ice melts it means its getting warmer

just stopping by to see whats up
sounds like nothing new
just the same old denial

if folks would contribute to the solution as avidly as they deny the problem it just might be that we could have licked this thing long ago