What Do We Think About Climate Change

Talking of abrupt climate change....

Global warming alarmism? Well, things seem to be coming to a widening and more rational opinion about the present mild global warming in fact protects humankind instead of threatening it.

The vision of a burning planet, expanding deserts and lowlands dissapearing under the sea is rapidly falling down in the public's favour, as facts stubborngly show once and again its fallacy.

So the GWA crowd who makes a living from threatening people are now looking for new paradigmas:

"Mmmm.....so, global warming scenarios are no longer credible? mmmm.....let's think...mmmm..ok, how about a nice dose of global cooling alarmism instead? Excellent, but, how to keep the rationale of coming from warming to cooling...mmmmmm...that's it!: warming causes cooling! But....how? mmmmmm....hey! the conveyor belt! a sudden meltwater pulse caused by global warming may stop it! Great! Now we really have it!...."


If you don't believe me, read this:

"Here some of the things that might happen by 2020:

At first the changes are easily mistaken for normal weather variation--allowing (cooling) skeptics to dismiss them as a "blip" of little importance and leaving policymakers and the public paralyzed with uncertainty. But by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening. The average temperature has fallen by up to five degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of North America and Asia and up to six degrees in parts of Europe. (By comparison, the average temperature over the North Atlantic during the last ice age was ten to 15 degrees lower than it is today.) Massive droughts have begun in key agricultural regions. The average annual rainfall has dropped by nearly 30% in northern Europe, and its climate has become more like Siberia's.

Violent storms are increasingly common as the conveyor becomes wobbly on its way to collapse. A particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through levees in the Netherlands, making coastal cities such as the Hague unlivable. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.

Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil loss. The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America.

Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands--waves of boat people pose especially grim problems. Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges on a 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico. America is forced to meet its rising energy demand with options that are costly both economically and politically, including nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts. Yet it survives without catastrophic losses.

Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking warmer climes to the south. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in Africa and elsewhere. But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it from catastrophe.

Australia's size and resources help it cope, as does its location--the conveyor shutdown mainly affects the Northern Hemisphere. Japan has fewer resources but is able to draw on its social cohesion to cope--its government is able to induce population-wide behavior changes to conserve resources.

China's huge population and food demand make it particularly vulnerable. It is hit by increasingly unpredictable monsoon rains, which cause devastating floods in drought-denuded areas. Other parts of Asia and East Africa are similarly stressed. Much of Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea level, which contaminates inland water supplies. Countries whose diversity already produces conflict, such as India and Indonesia, are hard-pressed to maintain internal order while coping with the unfolding changes.

As the decade progresses, pressures to act become irresistible --history shows that whenever humans have faced a choice between starving or raiding, they raid. Imagine Eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations, invading Russia--which is weakened by a population that is already in decline--for access to its minerals and energy supplies. Or picture Japan eyeing nearby Russian oil and gas reserves to power desalination plants and energy-intensive farming. Envision nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, and China skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable land. Or Spain and Portugal fighting over fishing rights--fisheries are disrupted around the world as water temperatures change, causing fish to migrate to new habitats.

Growing tensions engender novel alliances. Canada joins fortress America in a North American bloc. (Alternatively, Canada may seek to keep its abundant hydropower for itself, straining its ties with the energy-hungry U.S.) North and South Korea align to create a technically savvy, nuclear-armed entity. Europe forms a truly unified bloc to curb its immigration problems and protect against aggressors. Russia, threatened by impoverished neighbors in dire straits, may join the European bloc.

Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Oil supplies are stretched thin as climate cooling drives up demand. Many countries seek to shore up their energy supplies with nuclear energy, accelerating nuclear proliferation. Japan, South Korea, and Germany develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt, and North Korea. Israel, China, India, and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.

The changes relentlessly hammer the world's "carrying capacity"--the natural resources, social organizations, and economic networks that support the population. Technological progress and market forces, which have long helped boost Earth's carrying capacity, can do little to offset the crisis--it is too widespread and unfolds too fast.

As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies. As Harvard archeologist Steven LeBlanc has noted, wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population's adult males usually died. As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.

Over the past decade, data have accumulated suggesting that the plausibility of abrupt climate change is higher than most of the scientific community, and perhaps all of the political community, are prepared to accept. In light of such findings, we should be asking when abrupt change will happen, what the impacts will be, and how we can prepare--not whether it will really happen. In fact, the climate record suggests that abrupt change is inevitable at some point, regardless of human activity. "


USA Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall, 2004

 

If that was published in 2004, Guillermo, it can hardly be described as "new." And I notice you don't tell us who wrote it or published it, either. Seems a little shaky for you to try passing it off as today's mainstream AGW.

 

I did, yet you chose to talk about something else.

I, personally, am not interested in being "taken seriously" since a) I am not the author. B) I don't know the credentials of the audience that is supposed to "take me seriously" so that is not important.

I put forward a position from a highly respectable author about sea levels NOT RISING.
No one has addressed the points made, even after posting from the UK parliament a string of publications.
You are clearly more interested in gossip than good news. The good news being that no one is going to drown as pretended by the alarmist who are after compensation for a non existing threat.

 

Have you ever considered the fact that you bore people to death with your repeating the same points even after being proven wrong 3 dozen times and a half?

Changin the subject may actualy bring up different replies. Sea rising or not rising is a subject more akin to a boating forum, something we are all familiar with and also something that is rather simple to prove wrong. All you need is to drive a few nails into the nearest jetty every king tide and live long enough to prove your point.

 

Troy I am surprised you did not notice it. That is the story line used to produce the movie "the day after tomorrow"

 

The "abrupt" climate change concept, as the GWA crowd like to say, is basically based in the warming of the 1970-2000 period, which was of around 0.6ºC, i.e. a rate of 2ºC per century

"Abrupt".....?


Well, THIS was really abrupt:

Warming: +/- 7ºC
Time period: +/- 50 years
Rate: +/- 14ºC per century
When: Coming out of the Younger Dryas

And, what was happening by then with athmospheric CO2?

Stomatal evidence for a decline in atmospheric CO2 concentration during the Younger Dryas stadial: a comparison with Antarctic ice core records.
McElwain, J.C., Mayle, F.E. and Beerling, D.J. 2002. Journal of Quaternary Science 17: 21-29.


The authors derived high-resolution (approximately 20- to 37-year accuracy) atmospheric CO2 histories from stomatal frequencies measured on subfossil leaves of Dryas integrifolia, Picea mariana, P. glauca and Larix laricina obtained from sediment cores extracted from two different sites in New Brunswick, Canada - Pine Ridge Pond (45°34'N, 67°06'W) and Splan Pond (45°15'N, 67°20'W) - that contained material spanning the period of time from approximately 13,000 to 10,500 years ago.

The data revealed a drop in atmospheric CO2 concentration of approximately 75 ppm at the onset of the Younger Dryas cold event. This drop in CO2 lagged the event-defining temperature drop by approximately 130 years. Then, at the end of the Younger Dryas, there was a rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration that was (within the time-resolution error bounds of the data) essentially coeval with the increase in temperature that brought an end to the Younger Dryas and initiated the Holocene. In absolute terms, the pre-Younger Dryas CO2 concentration was something on the order of 300 to 320 ppm, the concentration during the Younger Dryas interval approximately 235 ppm, and the concentration immediately afterwards somewhere in the range of 285 to 300 ppm (50 to 65 ppm increase).

To put things in perspective, CO2 concentration increased around a comparable 65 ppm for the 50 years 1960 - 2010 period (as per Mauna Loa data) when a +/- 0.5ºC temperature increase has happened.

 

Artic and Antarctic Sea Ice extent.

Global sea ice extent is close to the 1979-2008 mean.

 

I haven't seen the movie. But why am I not surprised that someone is posting movie storylines, and presenting them as supposed evidence of the thinking in the scientific community about AGW?

 

I addressed the point: he's outnumbered. I see no reason why you're taking only him and his credentials seriously, when he's badly outnumbered by other respectable scientists with equally serious credentials. Why should I believe him instead of them?

And if it turns out to be completely true that AGW will not result in a net loss of island land, what about it? Disproving one of the projected results of AGW is hardly the same thing as disproving the existence of AGW.

 

Sun cycle 24 still behaving under predictions.

 

'Climategate' debate: less meltdown, more well-mannered argument.
George Monbiot chairs the Guardian 'climategate' debate with Professors Trevor Davies and Bob Watson, and environmental journalists Fred Pearce, Steve McIntyre and Doug Keenan

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/jul/15/climategate-public-debate

 

Record-low thermospheric density during the 2008 solar minimum
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 37, L12102, 5 PP., 2010
doi:10.1029/2010GL043671
Received 19 April 2010; accepted 19 May 2010; published 19 June 2010.
J. T. Emmert, Space Science Division, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D. C., USA
J. L. Lean, Space Science Division, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D. C., USA
J. M. Picone, Department of Physics and Astronomy, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010GL043671.shtml

"We use global-average thermospheric total mass density, derived from the drag effect on the orbits of many space objects, to study the behavior of the thermosphere during the prolonged minimum in solar activity between cycles 23 and 24. During 2007–2009 thermospheric densities at a fiducial altitude of 400 km were the lowest observed in the 43-year database, and were anomalously low, by 10–30%, compared with climatologically expected levels. The density anomalies appear to have commenced before 2006, well before the cycle 23/24 minimum, and are larger than expected from enhanced thermospheric cooling by increasing concentrations of CO2. The height dependence of the mass density anomalies suggests that they are attributable to a combination of lower-than-expected exospheric temperature (−14 K) and reductions in the number density of atomic oxygen (−12%) and other species (−3%) near the base of the diffusive portion of the thermosphere."

When carbon dioxide gets into the thermosphere, it acts as a coolant, shedding heat via infrared radiation. It is widely-known that CO2 levels have been increasing in Earth’s atmosphere. Extra CO2 in the thermosphere could have magnified the cooling action of solar minimum.

“But the numbers don’t quite add up,” says Emmert. “Even when we take CO2 into account using our best understanding of how it operates as a coolant, we cannot fully explain the thermosphere’s collapse.”

In their GRL paper, the authors acknowledge that the situation is complicated. There’s more to it than just solar EUV and terrestrial CO2. For instance, trends in global climate could alter the composition of the thermosphere, changing its thermal properties and the way it responds to external stimuli. The overall sensitivity of the thermosphere to solar radiation could actually be increasing.

Important clues may be found in the way the thermosphere rebounds. Solar minimum is now coming to an end, EUV radiation is on the rise, and the thermosphere is puffing up again. Exactly how the recovery proceeds could unravel the contributions of solar vs. terrestrial sources.

 

clearly you have misunderstood the concept from the outset if this is your version of what Abrupt Global Climate Shift is.

you might want to look it up before posting again

B

 

Geologically speaking it is very new.