What Do We Think About Climate Change

I'll start my wood with oil. Thank you, oil industry.

 

Follow the CO2...




...and temperatures...



And now follow this interesting series:
"Searching the PaleoClimate Record for Estimated Correlations: Temperature, CO2 and Sea Level"
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/...ons-temperature-co2-and-sea-level/#more-11753

Cheers

 

Not Evil Just Wrong

Surprisingly my Internet Explorer cannot open the site http://www.noteviljustwrong.com/ but Mozilla Firefox does.

Cheers

 

A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009.

Reference: Tedesco M., and A. J. Monaghan, 2009. An updated Antarctic melt record through 2009 and its linkages to high-latitude and tropical climate variability. Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L18502, doi:10.1029/2009GL039186.

Figure: Standardized values of the Antarctic snow melt index (October-January) from 1980-2009 (adapted from Tedesco and Monaghan, 2009).

 

The United Nations Environmental Programme just released a major report in advance of the Climate Change Summit to take place in Copenhagen this December. The report is intended to “show how the science has been evolving” since the publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in the spring of 2007.

..... the greenhouse effect is expected, on a global average, to lead to higher temperatures (like inside a greenhouse), higher humidity (like inside a greenhouse), more precipitation (like inside a greenhouse), longer growing seasons (like inside a greenhouse), and enhance the fertilization effect of airborne carbon dioxide (just like commercial greenhouses which pump CO2 inside them to increase plant growth and productivity). Taken together, this brings up images of lush tropical foliage, not a dry, lifeless, desert.

Our guess is, a lush green world this isn’t the image that they wanted to conjure up about climate change and UNEP’s art department couldn’t come up with a way to make this seem bad (hint: next time, check with Al Gore).

Read more at:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/i...ort-deception-starts-with-the-cover/#more-385

Cheers.

 

Time has arrived for me to light my fire. Today; bamboo.

 

That would be a lush, flooded world, if a bit more of polar ice melts, as seems likely. Not that the tropics are that great to live in even without the flooding. According to this source at least 60% of the planet’s human population lives within 100 km (62 mi) of the beach:-
http://wps.prenhall.com/esm_abel_issuesocean_2/0,6649,228188-,00.html

Human populations near the coast tend to concentrate at the mouths of large rivers, which provide navigation into the interior, fresh water (until polluted of course) and generally less extreme seasonal climate variations. The same rivers almost always have large flood plains, good for growing food, flat and not much above sea level. Great places to live.

Arctic ice melting won't effect sea levels since it is already floating. I have to wonder what it will do to the vast currents that pump heat and nutrition around the Altlantic ocean, but let's not worry about that one right now.

Antarctic ice is another matter. So is glacier ice, but there won't be much of that left at the current rate. The seas have risen about 8" or 20 cm in the last 100 years. If 10% of Antarctic ice melts the sea level rise will be about 20 feet or 6 m. Added to the rise of sea level, many major cities are sinking due to a variety of effects such as depletion of ground water due to wells. London UK is a good example of this, but what's happening there is peanuts compared with places like Bangladesh.

As sailors a lot of us on this forum live close to the coast. How far will the coast move towards you? Not a problem if you live 100 ft - 30 m above sea level, perhaps, but what do you think the people who live closer are going to do, simply drown rather than disturb you?

Global warming has slowed down, even stopped for the last few years. A very few years, actually, but already those who don't want to be bothered by the whole thing are crowing and saying I told you so. Hopefully they will be proven right. Problem is, this apparent pause in warming coincides with an unusually long period of low sunspot activity. In past centuries a couple of sunspot minima neatly bracketed a mini-ice age in Europe. Not this time though; a little cooler in some places but by no means a return to the frigid conditions recorded in history. I for one wonder why that is. The two effects could just be cancelling. I have to wonder what is likely to happen when the sunspot rate returns to average. Will the global warming rate resume or even double?

The grand experiment on the Earth continues, watch this space for the next hundred years! (any lesser period will be meaningless)

 

What a typical load of bull dust. High moral ground combined with misinformation and the smokescreen of mixing some truth with boldface lies.

I am still waiting for Castro to get the Nobel price.

Co2 is not "pollution" it is not "poison" can not be compared with pollutants like plastic bags, is not "carbon". CO2 is ESSENTIAL for life, the more the merrier. "The most insulating gas?" it is this grandstanding nonsensical statement that nourishes the media and poisons our kids minds thanks to ignorant teachers that get their knowledge from TV ads.

Supporters of the "carbon" tax can be classified in two categories. Sincere ignoramus, or conspirators to the biggest scam in human history.

The only reason they have been allowed to get this far is democracy itself.

Politicians would sell drugs in primary schools personally if the voters asked for it, and so we have the global warming histeria pumped by media in voters mind, used as a tool to bribe for votes.

It will eventualy get undone. The question is when and how far into destroying the western economy we will put the brakes on.

For now keep on repeating to whoever wants to listen.
CO2 is good for you. Up CO2, up with crops.
Humanity will flourish with a CO2 rich athmosphere and a warmer climate.
Greenland may turn green once more. And that is a good thing even for Norway.

 

-not very likely. Unlike Obama, Castro actually achieved something, which if I understand the new Nobel rules for politicians would disqualify him.

-where in Knut's post was CO2 described as pollution or poison?

-that might be true. Problem is, nothing else will work as well in a democracy to reduce such emissions. It's called motivation, and like taxes on tobacco, it should work, better than that ridiculous Kyoto thing anyway.

I doubt that anyone associated with the movement to reduce CO2 emissions is ignorant of the use plants make of CO2; they're just aware that the volume of plants available to do that has been severely reduced over the same period of time that CO2 emmissions have gone sky-high. And of course, if they are right and are still unable to deal with the problem, while that may not be the end for humanity or civilization, life sure ain't gonna get any easier.

-and you accuse others of hysteria?

-only if you are a plant! For a human, it starts to get unhealthy at about 13 times the current levels in the atmosphere. The levels measured at Muana Loa in Hawaii have increased by 22% over the last 50 years, and the line on the graph is curving upwards. Lets assume the equivalent rate of increase remains constant, then CO2 levels will reach danger levels in 660 years. It's a simple calculation.

Now consider that most of the CO2 emissions are being absorbed by the oceans. Unlike the atmosphere, water does not have an unlimited capability to absorb CO2, so the rate is far more likely to increase than remain constant or decrease. Of course, over the next few hundred years humanity will be able to erect protective domes over its cities, and as even the plants choke to death, will also be able to create artificial food in factories. Sounds lovely!

It is a strange fact that acceptable levels for substances known to adversely effect humans are usually set at about 1/10 the level at which effects can be detected. For CO2, that would be about 30% higher than the current atmospheric level.

 

Oh my God - that last post is about to get ripped.

 

Your post has as much value as all the other mass hysterical scare mongering that is going on. Nothing new.
I won't even bother rebutting the worthless points made, and I must add probably in good faith, particularly the "danger levels for humans[ of CO2".

However it is worth revisiting my point about democracy. It is the western world form of government that allows this to happen. Of course I don't propose a revolution and subsequent monarchy, with me as king, only pointing at our weekness.
A small group of powerful people knowingly mislead a larger (yet still minor) group with extreme views like greens and environmentalist, who feet firmly set on high moral ground think they know better. A new religion is formed and our democratic government bows to vocal minority. The trend is set and just like any other vocal minority governments see a source of votes in it regardless of the value for the country, let alone the world.

The global warming religion has set in motion the modern version of the Spanish inquisition complete with its ritual burning of witches. The emission trading scheme...(the word emission invariably reminds me of passing wind) if adopted and if it achieved a reduction of 5% on the emissions of man made CO2, it would be like cutting one millimetre of a string that is one kilometre long...At a cost of trillions...and achieving absolutely nothing.

This equates to poring a concrete statue of an imaginary entity, say a green extraterrestrial on every square in the word and force people to kneel in front of it and pay tribute. Nothing new, it has been done before.
When I can fully understand from a psychological point of view why a person would join and embrace such ideas, it does not say much about such persons sanity, let alone discerning powers. Unfortunately as I stated before, most green people who think to know better and that run with this ideas are beside fervourous, also sincere. And that is the real waste in this religious movement.
I must emphasise that nothing in my post or my previous one has any animosity against any person who holds a different view. Yet I must use words that are as strong as the one used to support this tripe.

Kind Regards
Marco

 

1 km is
1000 m is
1000000 mm.....

1000000 *5/100 = 50 000 mm....

Think I'll choose whose estimates I'll rely on.....

Oh, and no animosity from me neither... (ehh, whatever that means...)

 

Had a nice bonfire this weekend, made s'mores with a carbonated beverage to wash them down. Bubbly!

 

Look at the graph that Guillermo just posted at #3535 and you can pick out numerous 'spikes' in CO2 concentration just as rapid as the recent one. So What? NEVER did the CO2 levels continue to rise until toxicity. Practical spectral saturation occurs at ~200ppm, so there's not even any additional GH warming of any significance from any of these spikes including the present one. And don't even bother to bring up that crap about the higher strata of the atmosphere taking up all the 'extra' CO2; those parts of the atmosphere are cooling, not warming!

This has been covered numerous times. The oceans have, for all practical purposes, INFINITE capacity to absorb CO2 because of buffering reactions that precipitate CO2 out as carbonate mineral.

The most recent time that the atmospheric CO2 residence time was measured was in 1992. The residence time was not found to have lengthened from the 5-6 years average measured over the previous decades. This means that ocean uptake of CO2 has not slowed.

Try to remember that the oceans are always saturated with CO2, in that they always hold in solution all the CO2 they can, determined by the sea surface temperature (SST). When the SST goes up, atmospheric CO2 increases. But the oceans continue to uptake CO2 if the atmosphere happens to contain more CO2 than the ocean/atmosphere equilibrium concentration, which is in turn set by SST. This equilibrium concentration sets the atmospheric CO2 concentration, NOT the 'incidental' atmospheric CO2 sources like volcanism, human industry, forest fires, decomposition and etc.

An easy way to understand why this is so is to just look at the size of the various CO2 'sinks'. The atmosphere is said to contain ~780 billion tons of CO2. Estimates for the total CO2 contained in the ocean are pretty variable but at least 19 000 billion tons and possibly as much as 40 000 billion tons of CO2. If the numerous residence time studies are to be believed, then 135-150 billion tons of CO2 leave the atmosphere annually, fluxed by the natural carbon cycle. Variations in CO2 content of 5-7ppm occur in monthly, yearly and longer time scales. Each ppm represents ~2 billion tons CO2, so these natural variations represent ~10-14 billion tons added or subtracted from the total.

Because of the equilibrium concentration (described by Henry's Law), the CO2 in the atmosphere is very much like the tip of the iceberg for the ocean/atmosphere system (they DO function as a system, you know). As we all know, the part of the iceberg that emerges from the surface is only about 1/10 of the total iceberg mass/volume. If we observed an iceberg of say 20 tons above water and we wanted to double the visible part of the iceberg, we know that we would need to add not 20 more tons as that would only get us a 22 ton iceberg protruding from the water. Instead we would need to add not 20 but 200 tons, as the other 180 tons will just wind up below the surface. It's similar for CO2 except that the ratio is more like 50:1. At best our 8 billion tons CO2 emissions annually are only going to add 160-320 million tons to the atmosphere, an amount far below our resolution to measure concentration as it is a fraction of a ppm.

The isotopic mass-balance studies corroborate what I'm saying here; nobody posting to this thread has yet to present a study that shows that anywhere near 21% of the CO2 in our present atmosphere is from fossil fuels. This is the amount we should expect if human industry were responsible for the ~100 ppm rise in CO2 concentration over the last 100 years. Virtually all that 'new' CO2 is naturally sourced. We are simply in the midst of another one of those 'spikes' you see in Guillermo's graph at post #3535, and not even a very remarkable spike in the historical context.

Jimbo

 

"A small group of powerful people knowingly mislead a larger (yet still minor) group ..."

Aw cumon, Marco! Nobody is misleading me, knowingly or otherwide, though you seem to be giving it the good old college try. I take the trouble to obtain my data from the source http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

This one will give you the longer term results http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html

This site is run by scientists and merely reports the facts. There is no mention of global warming, pollution, emissions, no calls for affirmative action, no warnings or dire predictions, no comments on the meaning of the steady year-to-year increase of CO2 or the fact that the rate of increase itself is steadily rising, just the numbers.

This is nothing to do with democracy, religion, scare mongering, morality, the Spanish inquisition, witch hunts, statues of extraterrestrials or any of the irrelevancy in your post. Please do not try to patronize us. We are intelligent people with serious and justified concerns.

Rebut the facts if you can, but use facts, not opinions, arrive at conclusions based on those facts and include your sources as I do.

Here's a couple of numbers I find particularly scary regarding CO2 levels, available on the above web pages:
in 1960 the rate of increase, averaged over 5 years, was 0.24% pa
for 1985 that had risen to 0.4% pa, and by 2010 it was 0.5% pa

As a scientifcaly trained individual (I have a Physics degree), that tells me there is an established, medium term trend that shows no sign of abating and corresponds neatly with the world-wide rise in fossil fuel consumption.

Some would have me believe the earth is warming due to natural cyclical causes and the CO2 is a side effect. I don't believe that, it does not match what I know about CO2 behavior. In the distant past, atmospheric CO2 has risen at the end of short ice ages and well after the start of the longer ones; there is a lag. CO2 is, of course, less soluble in water at lower temperatures, and it takes a few hundred years for the ocean water to mix, taking the cooler water lower, presumably releasing the CO2 and thus warming the planet up again. neat feedback mechanism, like a thermostat turning on the furnace in cool weather. Perhaps as things warm up there is a corresponding air-conditioner effect as plants grow more rapidly due to longer growing seasons, absorbing CO2, the seas doing the same, so the lower CO2 levels allow things to cool again. I believe we are turning on the thermostat in warm weather, hopefully the air-conditioning will kick in soon. My furnace will beat the air-conditioner any day though, which is a bit worrying. Even more worrying is the lag of this natural mechanism, hundreds of years, considering the CO2 increases by a measurable amount every year and has become a source of concern to many thinking folks over mere decades.


Hoytedow: what is the average height above sea level of Florida? Here's an intersting fact "The Mean Elevation of the state of Florida is only 100 feet above sea level" check it out at http://www.netstate.com/states/geography/fl_geography.htm
I don't think Florida is a good place to invest in real estate if you are looking at the long term ...

Jimbo: I've seen Guillermo's chart. I post results applicable over a few decades and you refer to a graph spanning 70 million years and claim you can see comparable rates of change! Your monitor must have a heck of good resolution! Let's see, that would be at least 1 million pixels. Where did you get it and how much did it cost? Your visual acuity must be formidable also, about 60,000 x human average!