by Judith Curry
Jim Hansen’s new paper, and his PR strategy, are raising a whole host of issues that are arguably a backfire for his objectives.
Last week, several media articles appeared about an alarming new paper by Jim Hansen, that was just being submitted to a journal and was not yet publicly available:
- Washington Post: The world’s most famous climate scientist just outlined an alarming scenario for our planet’s future
- National Observer: 2-degree target may still cause catastrophic sea level rise, James Hansen warns
- The Daily Beast: Climate Seer James Hansen Issues His Direst Forecast Yet
My first reaction was this: Why, of all the major news outlets, is only the Washington Post carrying this? No AP, etc.? Why haven’t I received a copy of this paper (usually a reporter or one of the skeptical news outlets would send me a copy). I figured the press release and paper were sent to only a few favored journalists?
The ‘favored journalists’ hypothesis quickly evaporated as articles like this then started to appear:
- The Conversation: Study predicts multi-meter sea level rise this century but not everyone agrees
- Mashable: The godfather of global warming’s frightening prediction is getting the cold shoulder
The paper is now available online, for all to evaluate:
Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that 2°C Global Warming is Highly Dangerous.
J. Hansen, M. Sato, P. Hearty, R. Ruedy, M. Kelley, V. Masson-Delmotte, G. Russell, G. Tselioudis, J. Cao, E. Rignot, I. Velicogna, E. Kandiano, K. von Schuckmann, P. Kharecha, A. N. Legrande, M. Bauer, and K.-W. Lo
Abstract. There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 C warmer than today. Human-made climate forcing is stronger and more rapid than paleo forcings, but much can be learned by combining insights from paleoclimate, climate modeling, and on-going observations. We argue that ice sheets in contact with the ocean are vulnerable to non-linear disintegration in response to ocean warming, and we posit that ice sheet mass loss can be approximated by a doubling time up to sea level rise of at least several meters. Doubling times of 10, 20 or 40 years yield sea level rise of several meters in 50, 100 or 10 200 years. Paleoclimate data reveal that subsurface ocean warming causes ice shelf melt and ice sheet discharge. Our climate model exposes amplifying feedbacks in the Southern Ocean that slow Antarctic bottom water formation and increase ocean temperature near ice shelf grounding lines, while cooling the surface ocean and increasing sea ice cover and water column stability. Ocean surface cooling, in the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, increases tropospheric horizontal temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, which drive more powerful storms.We focus attention on the Southern Ocean’s role in aecting atmospheric CO2 amount, which in turn is a tight control knob on global climate. The millennial (500–2000 year) time scale of deep ocean ventilation aects the time scale for natural CO2 change, thus the time 20 scale for paleo global climate, ice sheet and sea level changes. This millennial carbon cycle time scale should not be misinterpreted as the ice sheet time scale for response to a rapid human-made climate forcing. Recent ice sheet melt rates have a doubling time near the lower end of the 10–40 year range.We conclude that 2 C global warming above the preindustrial level, which would spur more ice shelf melt, is highly dangerous. Earth’s energy imbalance, which must be eliminated to stabilize climate, provides a crucial metric.
The paper is in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, the discussion forum of the European Geosciences Union journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics [link]
Andy Revkin has two superb posts on the paper, which I will be referencing in m discussion below:
- Whiplash warning: when climate science is publicized before peer review and publication
- A rocky first review for a climate paper warning of a stormy coastal crisis
Reviews of the science
While the paper has not yet undergone formal peer review by the journal, journalists have elicited numerous reviews/comments from scientists. From the Washington Post:
Michael Mann “Their climate model scenario wherein Greenland and Antarctic meltwater caused by warming poles, leads to a near total shutdown of ocean heat transport to higher latitudes, cooling most of the globe (particularly the extratropics), seems rather far-fetched to me.” “Whether or not all of the specifics of the study prove to be correct, the authors have initiated an absolutely critical discussion.”
Kevin Trenberth, called the paper“provocative and intriguing but rife with speculation and ‘what if’ scenarios.” Trenberth objected in particular to the climate modeling scenarios used to study freshwater injection as ice sheets melt. “These experiments introduce a lot of very cold fresh water in various places, and then they see what happens.” “The question is how relevant these are to the real world and what is happening as global warming progresses? They do not seem at all realistic to me.” “There are way too many assumptions and extrapolations for anything here to be taken seriously other than to promote further studies.”
Richard Alley,“Many parts of the new paper are likely to stimulate much technical discussion and further research in our community, as we try to weave together the deep-time and recent history to provide useful projections for the future.” “This new paper is not ‘the answer,'” “Particularly, replacing the simple assumptions about doubling times of ice loss with physically based insights is a major focus of our field, but is not yet done and not likely to be ready really quickly.” Alley acknowledged that the IPCC’s sea level rise estimate “is well on the optimistic low-rise side of the possible outcomes,” and added that “the estimates in the new paper of freshening, and discussion of stabilization of the southern ocean and influences on precipitation, are interesting and important.”
From Revkin’s second post:
Tad Pfeffer: If you look at this from the point of view of somebody who’s trying to use this information for anything other than scientific satisfaction, whether or not these very, very rapid rates of sea level rise happen in the next few decades or the next few centuries makes all the difference in the world. The question of when does this start is not really addressed in this paper that I can find, and has been addressed only peripherally in most of the papers about ice sheet instability that I have seen. Ian Joughin made some statements recently [context] that I thought were pretty solid about it being a few centuries before this kind of very rapid sea level rise can take place and that makes sense to me because there are some very important things that you have to do in order to turn on the rapid response of the Antarctic ice sheet – you have to get rid of a couple of big ice shelves for starters. And it’s going to take a few centuries to do that. From a strictly geophysical, glaciological, point of view, a few centuries may not make much difference. But from the point of view of a planner, a policymaker, again these are the people who care about what exactly we’re saying. It makes all the difference in the world. And that’s the part I find missing in this paper. They have to say something about when this is going to occur. They may not be able to say with any great precision, but they have to say something. Because if this is something that’s going to happen in the next few decades, yeah, it’s something we’ve really got to wake up and pay attention about. If it’s something that’s going to happen in the next few centuries then there are a lot of other issues that we have to sort out first.
Without going into any details here, Revkin’s second post provides scientists’ comments that shows the whole section on Eemian superstorms appears to be without basis.
JC comments on the science
This is an intriguing and wide-sweeping paper that has put together a multi-disciplinary team to examine the possibility of near term catastrophic sea level rise.
For context, Hansen et al. present a much more extreme scenario than the last report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the most recent assessment in 2014 “Expert assessment of sea-level rise by AD 2100 and AD 2300.”
Should we only pay attention to UN and NAS sanctioned assessments by expert teams? Absolutely not (note I will have a follow on post in a day or two that delves into this issue). As stated in my previous post What is the plausible ‘worst scenario’ for climate change?, we should be putting extreme scenarios out there and assess whether they are plausible, possible, or essentially impossible.
The biggest issue raised by Hansen is the potential (plausible? possible?) for a catastrophic >5 m sea level rise in the 21st century. Hansen et al. have proposed a a new mechanism for faster sea level rise – can we falsify this? The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) is arguably the most alarming potential impact of global warming. WAIS has collapsed before during previous interglacials, and will undoubtedly collapse again (with or without AGW), with a ~5 m sea level rise. The issue is whether the WAIS can collapse on timescales of decades to a century. Based on what we know (summarized by Tad Pfeffer above), this is a process that would take centuries.
I am not an expert on sea level rise or ice sheets, but here are a few things that frame my own understanding, including some recent research:
- Sea level has been rising for millennia. I am not convinced that there is a significant acceleration of sea level rise that can be attributed to human caused global warming (see this previous post).
- Recent research from Scripps finds that the Greenland ice sheet did not melt as much as expected during the Eemian but that may mean Antarctic ice sheets melted more than expected
- A new paper summarized by Cato that found that the size of the Greenland ice sheet—especially the best observed portions covering the west and southwestern parts of Greenland—during the mid-Holocene was smaller than it is today—but not by a whole lot.
- Study finds surprisingly high geothermal heating beneath west antarctic ice sheet [link]
So it looks like we should be more worried about WAIS than about Greenland, and it seems that natural processes (natural climate change and geothermal processes) have caused large sea level changes in the past during interglacial periods (albeit not rapid ones) and will continue to cause sea level to changes in the future. Human contribution so far to sea level rise does not seem particularly significant, given the early 20th century rate of sea level rise is about the same as the current rate. Our ways of inferring future rates of sea level rise from ice sheet melting is crude – we can speculate but not with much confidence. The danger posed by sea level rise is a function of the rate of change far more than the actual sea level itself.
Does Hansen et al. make any contribution to all this? Well their proposed mechanism with feedbacks is of interest and should be explored further. But their conclusions regarding an alarming rate of sea level rise are at best possible (and not plausible).
Policy relevance
The policy relevance of the Hansen et al. paper is the articulation of a possible worst case scenario of sea level rise. In robust decision making, the plausible worst case scenario informs decision making but does not necessarily dominate the decision making process.
What role does a ‘possible’ worst case scenario play, apart from clarifying what is plausible? Well, to alarm people and to help build political will to ‘act’ on emissions reductions, particularly for forthcoming Paris COP.
Regarding the policy relevance of the paper, Science Insider writes:
Whether this paper will become a key point of reference in the ongoing climate talks isn’t clear. In advance of the Paris meetings, negotiators from nearly every country in the world have provisionally agreed to the 2°C target. That there is even such an agreement in the offing seems like a victory, but whether it will be reached is still up in the air. Recognizing this, 24 academic and professional institutions in the United Kingdom yesterday issued a sternly worded joint communiqué that called on the international community to take immediate action on reducing emissions. The statement suggested that to have a chance of reaching that 2°C goal, Earth must become a zero-carbon world by the second half of the century. . . But how influential this paper will be is unclear, given its flaws.
Hansen has previously suggested that scientists are often too hesitant to say just how dire the situation is. A 2007 paper he co-authored, titled “Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise,” suggested that scientists felt constrained from sounding a full-fledged alarm on how high the waters will get, in part because of the cautious nature of scientific inquiry and the scientific method. But, he says in that paper’s abstract, “there is a danger in excessive caution.” The new paper, he told reporters yesterday, is “significantly more persuasive than anything previously published about just how dangerous 2°C warming would be.”
Hansen’s political agenda is evident as per Revkin’s post:
The new paper, which Hansen told me he’s been working on for eight years, was being rushed into public view with the hope of influencing negotiations at the December round of talks in Parisaimed at crafting a new global climate change agreement. You can hear from Hansen on the reasoning in the recording of his phone conference call with some reporters on Monday.
Also from Revkin regarding a passage apparently in the press release:
The paper got attention in advance because of this passage:
We conclude that continued high emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable andlikely to occur this century. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization. This image of our planet with accelerating meltwater includes growing climate chaos and storminess, as meltwater causes cooling around Antarctica and in the North Atlantic while the tropics and subtropics continue to warm. Rising seas and more powerful storms together are especially threatening, providing strong incentive to phase down CO2 emissions rapidly.
The backfire
The cited criticisms of the paper all make valid points. The criticisms of Mann and Trenberth are somewhat surprising to me, since I have seen them support papers that are at least as dubious as Hansen et al. Apart from the paper’s flaws, I suspect some of the backlash from these scientists is associated with the fact that this paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and is an integrative, interdisciplinary assessment that challenges the IPCC and other established assessment reports. Revkin cites Tad Pfeffer: “One of the things that troubles me most is that the rapid-fire publication of unsettled results in highly visible venues creates the impression that the scientific community has no idea what’s going on.” There is clearly a concern that such independent assessments, especially by well known and/or reputable scientists, can undermine the authority and messaging of ‘establishment’ assessment and scientists.
Revkin provides some interesting insights into their publicity push and the media response:
But by late Tuesday, as other coverage built, so did questions about the way the study was released, and the quality of its analysis. Another sign of trouble was that, despite the publicity push, the Associated Press, The New York Times, the BBC and The Guardian (despite its yearlong push for climate action blending advocacy and reporting) were among those who steered clear of the study. Listen to the taped call to get a visceral sense of the concerns of Seth Borenstein, the longtime climate reporter at the A.P.
That portentous section above — which in many ways is the only part of the paper that is news given how it centers on the “likely” inundation of most coastal cities in this century without aggressive emissions cuts — is not in the version the journal has posted. It’s in a shorter version, lacking references, that a publicist at Glover Park told me was going into more of a lay publication.
The final draft posted for discussion has more nuanced language, in line with what those arguing for more near-term climate and coastal risk have already articulated.
Maybe we’ll all be a little slower on the draw next time when work is promoted before it is publicized or peer reviewed. There are other merits to slowing down a bit in examining an issue that will be with us for generations — long past Paris. This is amarathon, not a sprint.
I think part of the backfire is associated with having Glover Park handle the media push. Glover Park provides strategic communications campaigns for corporations, non-profit organizations and industry associations. The Group is also involved in lobbying, but it definitely seems to be non-partisan (i.e. open to pretty much all paying customers – I wonder how much Hansen paid for their services and where the funds came from).
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen publicity for a research paper being handled by such a group (Glover doesn’t seem to have prior experience with this, since they rather bungled it for Hansen). Press releases are usually issued by universities, journals or funding agencies. Advocacy groups and think tanks also issue press releases for their own reports. But what about retired or independent scientists? And for scientists whose universities won’t issue a press release? E.g., Georgia Tech declined to issue a press release on Lewis and Curry; the paper was publicized on my blog and by the GWPF. In Hansen’s case, presumably NASA or Columbia could have issued the press release. But probably not including Hansen’s most alarming statements.
In any event, it is refreshing to see the maturity shown by some journalists is handling this issue. They seem to be well trained re the ‘sanctity’ of peer reviewed papers. I am also wondering whether Hansen’s explicit policy advocacy, coupled with a scientific research paper (esp one that had not undergone peer review), contributed to distrust of the research? You would hardly expect Jim Hansen to write a paper saying AGW is less alarming than we thought.
A combination of weak/speculative science, issuing the press release prior to peer review or at least public availability of the paper, a direct challenge to establishment assessment reports, policy advocacy, and use of a professional publicity/marketing/lobbying group to handle the publicity seems to have contributed to the backfire. I doubt that this paper will have any serious influence on the Paris deliberations.
JC reflections
That said, I am very sympathetic to what Hansen did. I regard him as a fellow maverick – thinking for himself and not afraid to challenge the ‘consensus’ – Hansen and I are of course on opposite ends of the climate maverick spectrum, with Hansen more alarmed and myself being less alarmed.
I think what Hansen did raises a whole host of very important issues about climate research, the science-policy interface, and how research is publicized. I will be addressing these issues in a follow-on post (which should be up Mon or Tues).
RESEARCH:
Hansen’s paper stirs sharp debate after public release
Malavika Vyawahare and Christa Marshall , E&E reporters
Published: Friday, July 24, 2015
A paper led by former NASA scientist James Hansen that spawned criticism about climate change impacts and the peer-review process before it was published was released online yesterday by the open-access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
The study has painted a much more dire picture of sea-level rise, ice melt and many other consequences of climate change than is accepted by many scientists and endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It also sparked criticism about the publicizing of a non-peer-reviewed study before its publication online. Yesterday, one scientist called some of the conclusions “irresponsible,” while another said the paper’s scientific approach was “more speculative than convincing.”
The paper — which was co-authored with 16 other scientists — goes beyond IPCC estimates of future ice melt and sea-level rise, suggesting ocean levels could rise several meters if temperatures increase by 2 degrees Celsius. It calls for rapid reductions in CO2 emissions and “emergency cooperation among nations” to address climate change.
“We conclude that the 2 degree global warming ‘guardrail,’ affirmed in the Copenhagen Accord (2009), does not provide safety, as such warming would likely yield sea level rise of several meters along with numerous other severely disruptive consequences for human society and ecosystems,” the paper states.
It also urges for policies to reduce CO2 emissions, saying, “A carbon fee is the sine qua non for phasing out emissions, the urgency of slowing emissions also implies other needs including widespread technical cooperation in clean energy technologies.”
The study’s claim that many current estimates are conservative is in part based on the argument that ice sheets may be more vulnerable than the IPCC has estimated, partly because of the effects of warming oceans. The modeling assumes that additional fresh water being released into the oceans because of melting glacial ice can speed up ice loss from Antarctic and Greenland ( ClimateWire, July 22).
But the study has drawn controversy not just because of its findings but the manner in which they were made public without going through a prior peer-review process. Scientific studies are vetted by independent experts in an internal review process, which allows authors to identify errors and incorporate feedback before the results are published. But in open-access journals like Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, drafts of the paper undergo public peer review, thus the findings are in the public domain before they are final.
Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington, questioned the floating of the paper before its online release. “It certainly would have been better to let the paper go through peer review before widely publicizing,” he said.
‘More speculative than convincing’
Hansen has defended his decision to choose public peer review, partly because of the need to influence climate negotiations in Paris later this year. If the authors sent the paper to a traditional journal, “it might be too late,” Hansen said this week, according to audio of a press conference this week provided by Columbia University. The choice was made “so that we can have this discussion now with the scientific community and try to make the story clearer to negotiators this December in Paris,” he said.
In recent years, Hansen turned to climate activism, participating in protests against coal plants and being arrested on several occasions, including at a Keystone XL pipeline protest in 2011 at the White House. His words about fossil fuel extraction being “game over” for the planet were a frequent rallying cry for environmentalists.
Yesterday, some scientists praised aspects of the paper, despite ongoing skepticism about many of its details.
“The paper provides a useful reminder that a 2C warming, if maintained long enough, will not prevent a very large, multi-meter sea-level rise. And I hope it reminds policy makers that the risk of delaying large and comprehensive emissions reductions is just not worth taking — even if the probability of a very fast sea-level rise were low, the impact would be disastrous,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, in an email.
However, he said the paper is “more speculative than convincing” as a scientific analysis, so its value likely will be the degree to which it incites other, more detailed research. Oppenheimer said there is “little if any new, convincing argument or evidence” on how fast a huge spike in sea level might occur.
Joughin was harsher in his criticism about some of the details, saying that Hansen’s projected doubling time of around 10 to 20 years for ice loss from ice sheets is “simply not realistic, as there is not a physical basis for assuming that type of exponential change.” He compared the study’s conclusions and methods about ice loss to trying to predict stock market growth for the next few centuries from one decade of data. The actual rate of increased ice loss is expected to be much slower, he said.
“Sea level will continue to rise at ever faster rates, and we will see meters of sea-level rise over the next several centuries,” he said. But the idea of projecting multiple meters of sea-level rise in 50 to 100 years based on wild extrapolation of present rates “is simply irresponsible,” he said.
However, Oppenheimer said that this sort of public release of a paper is not uncommon, especially when the science is relevant for a looming event like the Paris summit.
“It’s a judgment call on the part of the authors who weigh the cost of putting out what is inevitably an unfinished product versus the benefit of political relevance,” he said.
The paper will be open for comments from the scientific community until Sept. 17. Hansen did not respond to requests for comment about criticism from other scientists.
Twitter: @MalavikaVy Email: malavikav@eenews.net
It’s good to see the broader climate community refusing to support this sort of alarmism. Thing is, I’m very sure that when people actually look at the implications of 4-5 meters sea-level rise by 2100, they’ll see it isn’t really the “catastrophe” it’s made out to be.
A very significant factor in how technology, civilization, and culture evolve this century, but by no means justifying the sort of world-wide bureaucratic empire the alarmists are trying to impose.
Especially given the tiny probability it’ll happen.
COP21 is coming, and the hiatus/pause has killed the hysteria post-modern scientists/propagandists had previously built up. But don’t worry, this is climate science.
The hiatus/pause is a progressive buzz kill?
POOF! We give you the Amazing Thomas Karl and the mystical disappearing pause.
The hiatus has caused even rabid warmists to reconsider their absurd estimations of climate sensitivity?
PRESTO! We give you the Fantastic James Hansen and his “we’re all gonna drown at 2C!”
The timing of all this statistical legerdemain, sorry climate science, is of course purely coincidental.
The day “climate scientists” stop tailoring their research, both objectives and results, to their political preferences, will be the day they may actually earn the appellation “scientist” again.
And this paper takes today’s standard tailoring to a whole new level.
Citing the Eemian SLR is disingenuous. NEEM ice core shows Greenland was 5-8C warmer thennthan now. The geological evidence is that Eemian SL peaked twice above present. The first peak, about +~7 meters, took about 3 millennia. The refreeze to present levels took about 4. The second rise to +~4 meters took another 3 millennia. Meltwater, not ice sheet collapse. Mother Nature already ran the experiment Hansen models and got a different result. See guest post Tipping Points. And Kopp et. al., Probabalistic assessment…Nature 462: 863-868 (2009).
The scant evidence to the contrary (just two papers) is geologically flawed, and in the case of the Australian paper, also proven academic misconduct. See guest post By Land or By Sea.
So in terms of worst plausible scenarios (per se reasonable to consider), Hansen’s 21st century SLR isn’t even possible in the real world. Pure pre-Paris scaremongering, as the publication process and PR both suggest.
A further comment. Downloaded Hansen’s paper to check the references. Sure enough, both the flawed Yucatan and Australian ‘sudden rise’ papers are extensively doscussed. No mention of the ‘smoking gun’ inconsistency betwen them. And for the Australian paper (O’Leary Nature Geoscience 2013) did not pick up the switcheroo between figure 1 and figure 3 that comprises academic misconduct. Merely parroted the abstract, which is deliberately false and misleading. See CE guest post By Land or By Sea also ver batim in ebook Blowing Smoke) for details, and the proof of misconduct using the paper’s SI. Speculative junk science built upon proven junk science.
I simply disagree with Judith about the ‘good effort’ thingy. This is a bad effort at pseudoscientific propaganda, aimed at Paris. Hope the backfire is loud and long with real consequences for the perps.
I also disagree that this was a good effort. It’s a poor piece of research and nothing more than scaremongering. Hansen has long had an agenda and this is intended to generate publicity for the Paris whining and gnashing of teeth Fest.
Tonyb
Tonyb, “great minds thinking alike”? Highest regards.
Speaking of junk how’s sales going for those ebooks you constantly plug here?
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/insolation-at-65-north.jpg
The 65° North insolation is always interesting.
Applying the measured/proven (not modeled/theoretical) GHG response of 0.2 W/m2 for 22 PPM increase in CO2, the current 400 PPM CO2 level causes 1.234 W/m2 more forcing than the Eemian 280 PPM level. The Eemian CO2 increase from 200 PPM to 280 PPM caused 1.164 W/m2 of GHG forcing.
However the 546 W/m2 Eemian insolation was 68 W/m2 more than the current 478 W/m2. This leaves the Eemian roughly 66.8 W/m2 (58-1.234) warmer than today.
There are two obvious comments:
1. A period that was 66.8 W/m2 warmer is not a good model for future sea level trends.
2. The claim that ice sheet melting during the Eemian was due to CO2 forcing is extremely bold and somewhat unwise in view of the facts.
The only tipping point we seem to be near is tipping back into the ice age.
http://www.dandebat.dk/images/e1578p.jpg
PA: You are comparing apples to amoeba. The overall earth change in W/m2 during the peak 65-deg North insolation is nearly zero. This gives rise to a TCS that approaches infinity so TCS is defined by climate science differently to include some, but not all feedbacks as forcings to get it into the same order of magnitude as 2xCO2 TCS.
The driver that ends glacial epochs is the lazer-beam focus of solar energy on northern ice sheets (ice sheets that are covered and layered with terra-tons of dust from the desertification), associated melting, concentration of dust, catastrophic collapse of ice sheets too big NOT to fail, albedo changes, and biochemical ocean current feedbacks. I call this leveraged forcing which is completely different from the overall average gentle light even warming associated with well mixed GHGs (WMGHG, like CO2) which, IMO, doesn’t even rise to the level of compound interest forcing. CO2 forcing is more like stuffing your mattress with dollar bills during periods of alternating inflation and deflation. Apologies to Herr Professor Doktor Mosher, in the real world, metaphors are a necessary tool to effective communicate science to the public. The abstract below summarizes the insolation versus WMGHG differences quite nicely.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n10/abs/ngeo1245.html
Of course, some might not like this paper because: models … perhaps confirmation bias will overcome that axiom.
Perhaps we are discussing different things.
The Eemian is being compared to modern times.
The peak insolation of the Eemian occurred due the middle of the interglacial. The insolation increase was so great that the interglacial had been underway long before the peak arrived.
If you subtract the 400 PPM forcing from the Eemian insolation the Eemian was 66 plus change watts per meter warmer than modern times.
However you are right – the 1.234 W/m2 increase in GHG forcing from 280 PPM to 400 PPM doesn’t really have much impact. The larger issue is what other forcing changes have been ignored to oversubscribe the post 1900s warming to GHG.
PA:
The 66 W/m2 increase you mention is just a local change. On the planet scale, you get -66W/m2 in the southern hemisphere, so there is no 66 W/m2 of net warming. The global average net warming is zero. You cannot compare it to CO2=1.2W/m2, which is a global average.
The 66 W/m2 increase you mention is just a local change.
Nope.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/eemian_2_lg.jpg
https://scienceofdoom.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/toa-solar-65n-bymonth-vs0-250k-lb.png
South Pole albedo is .9 to .934. Inland ice can be as low as .843. But the point is energy put into the South Pole is thrown away.
So the Eemain was at least 25 W/m2 warmer and how much warmer depends on whose data you believe and what assumptions you make.
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Chap_6-Illustration_45.png
But the statements that the end of the Eemian was the hot period seem absurd. And the claim that CO2 has any noticeable impact on temperature don’t seem justified either.
Hansen was interviewed today about this paper on CNN by Fareed Zakaria. He accepts skepticism, which is just the way it was back in the 80’s when he did his global warming predictions. He says that there is already a lot of criticism of the IPCC being too conservative on sea level rise, and he is addressing that area with this research. Coastal cities like New York will have some big decisions if sea-level rise accelerates, because at some point adaptation is no good as a long-term solution and a waste of resources, and you have to just give up the land.
So what is the mm/y^2.
Using the plot that JCH supplied on another post, the long-term value thru the inflections of the “fluctuations” is 0.00009 mm/y^2. Of course the rate from ~1985-2005 is about 0.075 mm/y^2. Time for a downturn?
http://pages.swcp.com/~jmw-mcw/sea%20level%20various%20refs.jpg
Curve differential: d(mm/y)/dy = 0.00009*(y-1890) -0.0032
“Century-long acceleration”, according to this plot, at 2015 would be 0.008 mm/y^2
Within the time clip, multidecal rates have been +/- 10x this.
As the last few decades of satellite SL data demonstrate (http://judithcurry.com/2015/07/15/decision-strategies-for-uncertain-complex-situations/#comment-719115), there are lots of fluctuations within the decades.
There are multi-century rate fluctuations, multi-millennial rate fluctuations etc that are ignored by looking at a time-clip this short. For example, over the last 100,000-yrs, the seas have gone from (current + some meters) down to (current – 115 meters) and back up to (current). When is this 100,000-yr behavior going to override the current century-long behavior?
The rate of sea level rise has pretty much been 3.0 mm/y since they started measuring it with satellites.
For a 1 meter 21st century rise in sea level – the rate of sea level rise has to increase 0.194 mm/y2.
So next year the rate has to be 3.194 not 3.0. And the year after that has to be 3.388, etc.
This is easy to check and if it doesn’t happen the theory of rapidly rising sea levels is wrong.
It is just that simple.
@PA: This [0.194 mm/y2) is easy to check and if it doesn’t happen the theory of rapidly rising sea levels is wrong.
Why wait when you can check it now by hindcasting?
15 years ago the annual rise would have been 3.0 − 15*0.194 = 0.09 mm/yr, and 20 years ago the sea level would have been falling at −(3.0 − 20*0.194) = 0.88 mm/yr. 100 years ago it would have been falling at 16.4 mm/yr or 1.64 meters per century!
Somebody’s theory of rapidly rising sea levels is clearly wrong, not sure whose though.
PA wrote: It is just that simple.
It would be that simple if they reported actual data.
It is not that simple because they “adjust” the data and show us the “adjusted” results.
“So next year the rate has to be 3.194 not 3.0. And the year after that has to be 3.388, etc.
This is easy to check and if it doesn’t happen the theory of rapidly rising sea levels is wrong.”
You are not supposed to ask for short term confirmation. The whole point of this article is to declare something happening even more rapidly then previously feared yet which can still not be verified nor discounted for 50-75 years – yet it still needed to be rushed out to influence policy (which IMHO automatically disqualifies it).
They can learn to live on the water. In fact, if they do, that adds a lot of available real-estate even if the sea doesn’t rise. So it counts as no-regrets.
http://gizmodo.com/5-parts-of-nyc-built-on-garbage-and-waste-1682267605
Already been done, much of New York City is built on garbage and waste.
The funny part of the sea level rise story is there is a lot of shoreline development built on fill – we filled in the ocean and built on it because it was basically free land.
But more could be done. Design buildings with floating foundations, anchored against lateral movement but able to move vertically with water level. Then a city could extend out to a depth of a few dozen meters. Perhaps a few hundred.
Would buildings be MORE or LESS susceptible to earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis than on landfill? Beach front property along the east coast of the US wax and wan.
AK,
You have some good ideas, as you usually do, and you correctly point out that living on or near water is not new. People have lived on floating islands constructed out of straw and transported people and goods in woven boats. Communities on stilts in tidal flats or not new nor uncommon. I saw an enviro-video warning about sea rise and other imagined horrors while in the background was a house with an attached dock, all on wooden posts, standing about six meters above a mudflat and standing water – obviously a tidal flat. That they didn’t notice the irony is an indication of the power of groupthink. One skeptical consultant would have spotted it immediately.
As a final note, the fertile crescent was basically a marsh and a tidal mudflat in the mouth of two big rivers. I am sure that those people had to deal with flooding 8000 years ago. In fact, they invented agriculture as a result. This is not new.
Hi Jim,
Maybe my confirmation bias is showing, but amazingly not even directly via ‘me’!
“o it looks like we should be more worried about WAIS than about Greenland, and it seems that natural processes (natural climate change and geothermal processes) have caused large sea level changes in the past during interglacial periods (albeit not rapid ones) and will continue to cause sea level to changes in the future. Human contribution so far to sea level rise does not seem particularly significant, given the early 20th century rate of sea level rise is about the same as the current rate. Our ways of inferring future rates of sea level rise from ice sheet melting is crude – we can speculate but not with much confidence. The danger posed by sea level rise is a function of the rate of change far more than the actual sea level itself.”
I think the late Stephen Schneider would have labeled this an “effective” paper.
Yes. Posing clearly Schneider’s repugnant moral dilemma. Noble cause corruption. Ends justify means. In his worldview. As for where Schneider now resides, there is an old aphorism, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’.
Schneider basically said it is ok to lie and to fake science in the cause of a greater ‘moral’ good that he ‘understood’. You want references, those can (famously) be provided. You can add hypocrite to previous adjectives like ‘bigot’ used to decribe me without any true knowing. Psychological projection? Appears so. Have another nice day.
PS, why not weight in on Hansen’s paper itself, the subject of this post. You know, prior peer review pros and cons, model weaknesses/ strengths, … Like I did, having studied the subject intensely for several years. Hint. Never bring an ad hom ‘knife’ to a ‘scientific fact’ gunfight.
Oh that’s real classy saying Schneider is in hell. You’re a real piece of work Istvan. I’m sure you’ll be joining Schneider, wherever he is. The sooner the better.
Schneider made a clear distinction beween “honest” science, which shows all the caveats, and “effective” “science” which “gets load of media attention”.
Effective “science” is not honest, you can’t be both “effective” and “honest” at the same time.
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand:
There is no other hand, the other hand is not science.
ristvan | July 26, 2015 at 7:24 pm |
“PS, why not weight in on Hansen’s paper itself, the subject of this post.”
Is that what you were doing talking about Schneider in hell?
“ristvan | July 26, 2015 at 5:13 pm |
Yes. Posing clearly Schneider’s repugnant moral dilemma. Noble cause corruption. Ends justify means. In his worldview. As for where Schneider now resides, there is an old aphorism, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions”
Anyone with a scintilla of integrity wouldn’t try to play the Schnieder canard. Doing so displays a complete absence of good intentions.
==> “Ends justify means.
Let’s be careful not to put words in Schneider’s mouth, eh?
Let’s not be selective in quoting Schneider, eh?
There are only a few cases where a metaphor is not a lie.
Schneiders dilemma is easily avoided.
Don’t try to simplify science with metaphors.
Don’t worry about being effective.
It’s not your job to inform the public.
Go back and do more damn science.
Same advice I give skeptics. Shut up and do science.
Dilemma solved.
Jos*u*
There is a lot more to Schneiders’ quote than you outline.
Here is the explanatory article that your quote probably came from
http://uppsalainitiativet.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/global-warming-policy-foundation-tries.html
It leads to the Detroit news article where Schneider makes a rebuttal-including those words you have cited
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/DetroitNews.pdf
Reading through the original quote that Schneider says was misrepresented, it seems clear that whilst a few words were originally left out, when they are put back in they make little difference to the meaning.
Both versions are in the links above
He doesn’t help himself by then saying;
‘WHAT WERE MY VIEWS in the 1970s? I opposed those arguing that a new ice age was imminent, and instead argued forcibly in my first book, The Genesis Strategy that society needed to be prepared to deal
with climatic variability in both directions.’
His 1971 paper and tv clips from 1978 suggests that he did think there might be an ice age. Then when more evidence was in he then suggested we needed policies for all climate states, then went warmist in later years
http://www.john-daly.com/schneidr.htm
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-they-predicted-global-cooling-in-the-1970s/
So Schneider did appear to be saying that sometimes scary scenarios needed to be offered up although it was preferable not to have to go outside of the facts.
What is your interpretation?
tonyb
tony –
I think it’s pretty tricky to argue that someone’s meaning behind what they said is something other than what they say the meaning is behind what they said. That kind of arguments takes a boat load of evidence that we don’t have.
I see a lot of “certainty” expressed by quite a few “skeptics” as to what Schneider meant, that: (1) stand in contrast to what Schneider said that he meant, (2) would seem to be in line with how we might speculate those “skeptics” tendencies towards confirmation bias (a bias we all have) would lead them, and which is stated as fact even though there isn’t sufficient evidence to distinguish their assertions from opinion.
Given that it’s next to impossible for me to engage in a direct exchange with someone here because of Judith’s moderation of my comments, I’ll just link to a couple of previous threads where I’ve been engaged in discussion about how Schneider’s comments play out in the climate wars: Besides, I wouldn’t want to subject you to more “long abstract musing,” right? :-)
The subthread starting here:
http://judithcurry.com/2014/12/17/ethics-and-climate-change-policy/#comment-656355
and in the subthread starting here:
http://judithcurry.com/2015/02/25/conflicts-of-interest-in-climate-science/#comment-679217
“Schneider basically said it is ok to lie and to fake science in the cause of a greater ‘moral’ good that he ‘understood’. ”
The exact philosophy behind critical theory.
The Hansen paper therefore is not science but a deliberate political action to scare the delegates of the Paris talks into climate “action”.
Joshua
I do not have any problem with Schneider, like Hubert lamb he changed his mind on global cooling when the facts showed otherwise in the early 1970’s. That is the sign of a good scientist.
I don’t know why he should claim years later that he never said what he did about a possible problem with cooling.
As regards his comment on scary scenarios, it is very common for people to say They have been misquoted when their words cause more of a ripple than they expects.
If you look at what Schneider said, the edited and full version, it is difficult to see a message other than he would try to be honest with the data but that it might not always be possible if the subject warranted some scary scenarios.
I will read your links. Good night to you.
Tonyb
@Michael
Agreed. For once at least.
Schneider had trouble telling the truth.
In his climategate rant he called upon everyone to call it “Deniergate”.
In his talk kto an Australian audience later, when they were complaining about being called “denier” when raising questions, he claimed to detest such behaviour and that he alwys fought against it.
Schneider had trouble with being truthful.
“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. ”
I guess that might be considered Schneider’s playbook.
Schneider’s dead. Let him rest in peace. He wasn’t Stalin or Hitler fercrisakes.
Wow – you direct quote him on being less than 100% honest and you’re immediately accused of comparing him to mass murderers plus told that you cannot point out uncomfortable facts about a dead person.
I’d say you hit a nerve.
His statements clearly show he was willing to twist the truth (aka pervert science) to influence policy. This does not change because he’s taking the dirt nap.
“There are only a few cases where a metaphor is not a lie. ”
Almost everything said is done using metaphor, Mosher.
I thought you took English? That’s a language, right?
Name a science paper that doesn’t use metaphor, Mosher. Just one.
Hansen’s 5 meters has always been met with skepticism at RC.
But I did not see 5 meters in this paper. Is 5 meters in here.
It repeatedly says multiple meters, which I guess starts with 2?
His melt rate scenarios stop abruptly at 5 meters of rise, not that is what he thinks will happen. These are just tests.
Our analysis paints a different picture than IPCC (2013) for how this Hyper- Anthropocene phase is likely to proceed if GHG emissions grow at a rate that con- tinues to pump energy at a high rate into the ocean. We conclude that multi-meter sea level rise would become practically unavoidable. …
I found the section Jim D is talking about. It is not a discussion of SLR by 2100. I don’t see 5 meters in the paper.
From the abstract. “[S]everal meters in 50” years implies around 5 meters by 2100.
You guys just won’t give it up. Lol. It’s weird.
Our analysis paints a different picture than IPCC (2013) for how this Hyper- Anthropocene phase is likely to proceed if GHG emissions grow at a rate that con- tinues to pump energy at a high rate into the ocean. We conclude that multi-meter sea level rise would become practically unavoidable.
You guys just won’t give it up. Lol. It’s weird.
Might seem weird to you because it is focused on integrity, but it doesn’t seem weird to an actual scientist.
I have no problem with the paper; I have a big problem with the press releases on the paper. Those press releases contained predictions not found in the paper, but since Hansen was involved in those press releases, he bears responsibility.
Your attempt to distract from the issue by debating only what is in the paper, pretending that there was no extra-paper press release, is both disingenuous and scientifically dishonest, and it is those behaviors I find most troubling.
I find people who go by press conferences and bad books and reporters more than deeply disturbing.
As much as.
I find people who go by press conferences and bad books and reporters more than deeply disturbing.
But it’s OK with you for the author of a paper to misrepresent the paper’s contents in press release. Hmm.
Abstract. There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 C warmer than today.
To me this means he is expecting 5 m to 9 m sea level rise.
1 m rise requires 0.194 mm/y2 acceleration.
2 m rise requires 0.471 mm/y2 acceleration.
5 m rise requires 1.301 mm/y2 acceleration.
The current sea level rise is 0.30 mm/y (satellite measured).
The peak forcing in the Eemian was over 66 W/m2 greater than today (and it occurred in the middle of the interglacial) so the statement that the Eemian was only 1°C warmer is just silly.
Current satellite rate is ~3mm/y and “flat”, so mm/y^2 = ~0
@PA: 1 m rise requires 0.194 mm/y2 acceleration.
Even that least-case scenario is easily refuted by hindcasting back to 1985 when GEOSAT was launched. Sea level would have been rising at 3.0 − 30*0.194 = −2.82 mm/yr, i.e. falling at 28 cm per century!
The more extreme 1.301 mm/y2 scenario (for 5 m in 2100) hindcasts to a decline of 3.603 m per century in 1985.
I think a different model is called for than quadratic.
The more extreme 1.301 mm/y2 scenario (for 5 m in 2100) hindcasts to a decline of 3.603 m per century in 1985.
There are two issues:
1. What it takes to hit these high sea rise numbers.
2. What is possible.
The annual sea level if we assume constant acceleration (ever more rapid melt) gets into the 16 mm range by 2100 if we want to hit on meter.
The less than 1/2 of the WAIS ice sheet that is melting receives about 10 GW of energy per m2 per year or enough to melt 2770 GT of ice if every erg is usefully applied.
Only about 1/3 of the energy (I welcome better estimates) can be usefully applied – energy will go into the air, into the substrate, fall at the wrong time of year, etc.
2770/(3*320) = 2.89 mm/y sea level rise. That is about as bad as it can get.
http://www.ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20120013495
“During 2003 to 2008, the mass gain of the Antarctic ice sheet from snow accumulation exceeded the mass loss from ice discharge by 49 Gt/yr (2.5% of input)”
Most of the EAIS is too high to melt. WAIS melting is going to increase snowfall and cause EAIS ice growth. .But we are going to ignore that and just say the Antarctica worst case contribution to sea level rise is 2.89 mm/Y.
And she’s the family breadwinner, teaching martial arts these days. (I’m retired.)
Not saying that you couldn’t knock her block off, or that she’d be unimpressed by your 0.38.
Regarding paper vs press release – isn’t this just the same methodology as the IPCC assessment reports being quite a bit different in what they declare than the ‘summaries for policy makers’ that accompany them?
If it stinks for the IPCC it should follow that it stinks for Hanson et al.
Umm, Steve, that 9% of GDP for 1 meter SLR? The paper you cite actually says “between 0.3% and 9.3% of global GDP” and that is if nothing is done with regards to adaptation.
C’mon now…
Jch
So what is your interpretation of hansens estimate of sea level rise by 2100?
The royal society paper I cited a few days ago seemed to suggest 5 meters. The science reporters who read it thought he said five. Multimeter means at least two but why use a word like multi if you only mean 2?
Best estimate of hansens thoughts on this? 2 meters? 3 meters? 4 meters? 5meters?
Tonyb
I think there is some uncertainty about how many meters.
Hi Joseph
This was an interview given to the ‘Observer’ (stable mate of the Guardian)
‘The greatest danger hanging over our children and grandchildren is initiation of changes that will be irreversible on any time scale that humans can imagine. If coastal ice shelves buttressing the west Antarctic ice sheet continue to disintegrate, the sheet could disgorge into the ocean, raising sea levels by several metres in a century. Such rates of sea level change have occurred many times in Earth’s history in response to global warming rates no higher than those of the past 30 years. Almost half of the world’s great cities are located on coastlines.’
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/feb/15/james-hansen-power-plants-coal
The reference to Children and grandchildren obviously means well within this century. ‘Several’ means more than two but not ‘many’ so with ‘multi’ we seem to be inching towards this 5 meters that those who read his papers -including the Royal society one I cited- believe he means.
Can we agree on that amount as reasonably representing Hansen’s thoughts on this?
tonyb
It’s a range with may and could and if.
jch
So, do you think the world should be ordered on the basis of ‘may and could and if.’?
I think the tens of thousands of delegates attending Paris are there in the belief that ‘will’ is the first word on the sea level rise scary scenario.
tonyb
Sometimes you need to act even when there is uncertainty if the potential consequences can be severe. But ultimately if there is an agreement we are going to do what is politically feasible and return to the issue again in the future. I don’t think this one paper is really going to have much impact on that.
For example, if you live in a bad neighborhood, you worry about crime even though the chances of being the victim of a crime are actually small. So people leave or avoid these neighborhoods for that very reason. And I don’t think that it’s irrational to be concerned about your security even though the chances are small.
“Best estimate of hansens thoughts on this? 2 meters? 3 meters? 4 meters? 5meters?”
a distinction without a difference.
the suspect was fired upon by police and hit with several bullets and died
as a result of his injuries
tonyb question:
2? 3? 4? 5? bullets?
typical
“a distinction without a difference”
In a world where estimates are measurements, nature is unicorns, and there’s a hoax to perpetuate…
Andrew
Steven Mosher: “Best estimate of hansens thoughts on this? 2 meters? 3 meters? 4 meters? 5meters?”
a distinction without a difference.
Have you totally abandoned attempts to write sensibly?
Mosh
Bullets? What sort of analogy is that?
Are we faced with manageable sea level rise, or a rise so large that many of the worlds largest cities could not be protected? There is a difference in the scale of rise.
Care to either provide a better answer to the rise amount or a better analogy?
Tonyb
Matthew and Andrew
I didn’t see your reply before I wrote mine. So I wasn’t the only one baffled by his response.
Tonyb
“Are we faced with manageable sea level rise, or a rise so large that many of the worlds largest cities could not be protected?
for ~ 1 meter
up to 9% of GDP
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/9/3292.full.pdf
2, 3, 4 5 meters?
does it really matter what hansen meant?
Nope.
Mosh
Interesting link, thanks
tonyb
Steve Mosher
Since there has been no evidence of an increase in the rate of rise perhaps the alarmists who claim that such a increase will occur should have to state by when the increase in rate will be evident. Or in your view is just stating “in the future” reasonable?
Rob
Mosomoso and I have got the rise sussed out
http://judithcurry.com/2015/07/26/hansens-backfire/#comment-720897
tonyb
“Steve Mosher
Since there has been no evidence of an increase in the rate of rise perhaps the alarmists who claim that such a increase will occur should have to state by when the increase in rate will be evident. Or in your view is just stating “in the future” reasonable?”
1. there is evidence.
2. the evidence happens to be weak and subject to doubt. It is
nevertheless evidence.
3. I think hansen gave some estimates of when.. kinda shakey.
4. “in the future” is more reasonable than many other claims.
so it depends.
Then main point here is that tonyb is wasting time by focusing on marginlia. what did hansen mean 2,3,4,5.. really kinda third order
considerations.
The fundamental problem is this.
You need a data generating model to understand the data.
will sea level rise be linear or non linear?
That means understanding the physics FIRST.
hansen takes a stab at it.
others should do their own science and take stabs as well.
When an artic researcher says his colleagues we’re assasinated, does it really matter how many assasins he says were sent?
Precrime has determined there will be a shooting later this century, but we have not yet determined how many bullets will be fired or if there will be a fatality. Nevertheless, we have decided to arrest the perpetrator.
“Precrime has determined there will be a shooting later this century”
To put a date on it would be an unnecessary distinction.
Andrew
The beauty of science is that no one really has the final word. If warranted someone will almost always (if not always) do the research that either confirms or rules out the conclusion.
Definitely less than a foot:
http://clim.stanford.edu/multimeter.jpg
Unless he included the leads.
Very funny. haha
I recognize the stone from the pictures of the botched attempt to duplicate Woods greenhouse experiment your back porch. I also recognize the $10 Walmart sneakers.
Very funny. hahaha
I recognize the stone from the pictures of the botched attempt to duplicate Woods greenhouse gas experiment on your back porch. I also recognize the $10 Walmart sneakers.
On a side note I’d rather spend $10 on Walmart sneakers than $7.99 for one of Istvan’s ebooks. The former will probably last longer despite both being examples of things manufactured with little regard for quality.
The location: my living room. (Idaho quartzite.)
The foot: Merrell Men’s Moab Mid Gore-Tex Hiking Boot (color Beluga, US size 11.5).
0/2. Had you tried guessing the brand of multimeter you might have had a 50% chance of scoring 1/3. Don, was I too generous with 50%?
The beauty of science is that no one really has the final word.
The beauty of Climate Science is that Mother Nature really does have the final word.
She spoke with a pause, or halt, in warming. She spoke with increased snowfall when Polar oceans thawed.
She will speak with advancing ice extent as this warm periods ends as the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods ended when sea level dropped and ice extent increased.
@pope
+1
Mosher would probably tell you to do science. But you’ve really done science. You created a testable hypothesis. Data on temperatures and snowfall going forward will either support or falsify the hypothesis.
Steve Mosher,
You regularly suggest skeptics do their own climate science. When the last round of crazy high sea level projections were made (Stefan Rahmstorf and his minions) I did exactly that (“Estimate of future sea level rise”, plus an update. Rankexploits.com; Lucia’s blog, June 2011). I concluded that the projections of extreme sea level rise are not consistent with plausible physical mechanisms, not supported by the available data, and further, that the AR4 projected range (about 30-50 cm by 2100) agreed perfectly with my projections over a wide range of warming scenarios. Yes, projections ought to be based on and consistent with reasonable physical mechanisms (as my projections were!), but Jim “WestSide” Hansen’s projections are NOT…. they are wildly speculative and almost certainly multiple times too high. There is no plausible mechanism by which sea level rise will accelerate by a factor of 5 or 6 times (or more!) over the next 85 years, which is the only way Hansen’s scary story can come true. Hansen is just wrong, and the paper is rubbish, just like all the other catastrophic sea level rise papers.
That would by itself be OK; everyone makes errors, especially those who seem to border on deranged like Hansen. But the conscious PR push to promote a nutty, unreviewed paper in the MSM, with the explicit intent of frightening people before the Paris conference, means that Hansen has stopped being a scientist. He has completely jumped the shark and is just a AGW policy hack. He should be ignored when he pretends to be a scientist.
I’d give you the same odds of guessing the brand. What a coincidence.
I’m going to go ahead and collapse the wave function by saying it’s a Fluke. Not to be confused with what we’ll call it if you ever make a valuable contribution to the world’s knowledge.
Ihttp://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Gil9QiiUL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg
You could have got the same for $10 at Walmart, less the fake claim to waterproof, and spent the $90 savings on duplicating Woods experiment. I didn’t think you could possibly be as dumb as you look but I’ve been wrong before.
@DS: I’m going to go ahead and collapse the wave function by saying it’s a Fluke.
You’re correct, though many here would say that’s only a fluke.
@DS: You could have got the same for $10 at Walmart, less the fake claim to waterproof, and spent the $90 savings on duplicating Woods experiment.
Actually I paid zero for them. My wife gave them to me. They were $12 at a thrift store but she bought them while they were having a half-off sale. They were in essentially new condition back then, I’ve beaten up on them to the point where in a couple more years I’ll be happy to pay $180 to replace them if she doesn’t see that opportunity again.
You should come and live in Silicon Valley, where we have great flea markets and thrift stores where billionaires drop off stuff they have no use for, and where after your mortgage is paid off Proposition 13 keeps your property tax down to barely more than what it was when you bought your house decades ago. Not to mention cutting-edge schools like Gunn High and Paly High for those with kids.
We also have startups where if you want to be an angel investor in something you believe has legs you can put a few hundred thousand in while its market cap is insanely low and watch it appreciate at 2500% a year. Not all of them will succeed, but it still beats Route 128 in Massachusetts hands down.
Not that I’d do anything like that. ;)
Maybe you have something similar in Texas.
VP
Ah. Your wife is much smarter than you look! Shotgun wedding?
Yes indeed. Moreover she’s the family breadwinner, teaching martial arts these days. (I’m retired.)
Not saying that you couldn’t knock her block off, or that she’d be unimpressed by your .38.
Making those kinds of comments about somebody’s family situation is very low class, springy. You need a rest and some counseling.
VP, +
I had a similar thought. Nice follow through.
Regarding the multi-meter.
No, no, no… shotgun wedding not shogun wedding.
But now that you mention it is there an appreciable difference?
I need to add stevefitz to my list
of guys who do things.
that was a nice piece of work steve
“I need to add stevefitz to my list
of guys who do things.”
Keeping lists of people is something that commies do.
Andrew
I thought multimeters were what you used to measure voltage and current.
Thomas Fuller,
Sometimes multimeter is used by the climate deranged in an inappropriate way. Still, the play on words is lost on few. If someone doesn’t get the joke that is…. um…. sort of a Fluke.
Nixon was a Commie? That explains everything!
“Nixon was a Commie?”
Didn’t say he was. Although he may have been. Or not.
Andrew
No, your statement was not a perfect syllogism.
But it was perfectly silly.
Kent
Revkin quotes
The paper got attention in advance because of this passage and, particularly, the five highlighted words (my emphasis):
“We conclude that continued high emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to occur this century. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization. ”
Bill Clinton:
President of the United States President Bill Clinton visited the University of Warwick on Thursday 14 December 2000
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/archive/clinton/
Text of President Clinton’s Speech
“I might say, parenthetically, I believe there are national security and common security aspects to the whole globalization challenge that I really don’t have time to go into today, so I’ll just steer off the text and say what I think briefly, which is that as we open borders and we increase the freedom of movement of people, information and ideas, this open society becomes more vulnerable to cross-national, multinational, organized forces of destruction: terrorists; weapons of mass destruction; the marriage of technology in these weapons, small-scale chemical and biological and maybe even nuclear weapons; narco traffickers and organized criminals, and increasingly, all these people sort of working together in lines that are quite blurred.
And so that’s a whole separate set of questions. But today I prefer to focus on what we have to do to see that this process benefits people in all countries, and at all levels of society.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/archive/clinton/clintonspeech/
Rather than due to CAGW, Clinton foresees societal breakdown as a consequence of the globalization process!!
Michael B. Gerrard: Get ready for climate change refugees
Rather than leaving vast numbers of victims of a warmer world stranded, without any place allowing them in, industrialized countries ought to pledge to take on a share of the displaced population equal to how much each nation has historically contributed to emissions of the greenhouse gases that are causing this crisis. According to the World Resources Institute, between 1850 and 2011, the United States was the source of 27 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions; the European Union, 25 percent; China, 11 percent; Russia, 8 percent; and Japan, 4 percent.
To make calculating easy, let’s assume that 100 million people will need new homes outside their own countries by 2050. (That number could be way off in either direction — we won’t know until it happens.) Under a formula based on historic greenhouse gas emissions, the United States would take in 27 million people; Europe, 25 million; and so on. Even as a rough estimate, this gives a sense of the magnitude of the problem: The United States has been granting lawful-permanent-resident status to only about 1 million people a year for several decades.
Michael B. Gerrard is the Andrew Sabin professor of professional practice and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20150724-michael-b.-gerrard-get-ready-for-climate-change-refugees.ece
I’ve got a better idea.
Let’s move refugees to Africa and Central America highland.
Couldn’t hurt and may fix the whole mess there.
1 million a year for 35 years is well above your 27% of 100 million target.
Glaciers in the Himalayas wil be gone by 2035! Or 2350. Or something like that.
Here in geologically stable Australia, in an intra-plate setting away from the effects of glacio-isostatic rebound, you can find a dribble of sea level rise over recent centuries. Latest dribble may have started back in the late 1700s.
When will it end? Should it end? Someone should be a real maverick and say “dunno”. You just sort of purse your lips and make the sound. Go on, it’s easy.
Then we can all go back to bed.
Moso, reread CE guest post By Land or By Sea. Better yet, read it plus companions Pseudoprecision and Tipping Points in my cheap ebook. Your Australian colleagues tired to agree with your quite reasonable (on centential time frames) geological assessment of Australia. But got caught out, since the time frames are millennial. Enjoy my quicky tour of Australian earthquakes. WA is a problem; perhaps you are from Queensland?
Rud, never accuse me of being a Queenslander. Surveys show that the ideal human is a coastal New South Welshman living between 30 and 35 degrees latitude south. Scientists report that studies show that a majority of models concur that surveys demonstrate that this is so.
Btw, we did have a bad quake south of here, in Newcastle, a couple of decades back. Oddly, it brought about a local boom for the Hunter region.
Queenslander indeed!
I beg your forgiveness. Your bamboo bamboozled me. That happens often to us upsiders, when everything you do is upside down.
Heck. NE of Sidney, still well within NSW. BTW, lovely country. Once spent two weeks Sidney/Melbourne, including an Aussy Rules Football final (your rugbyeske Superbowl). Harvard and Yale modified that game in 1888? and the rest is OF COURSE American world history! Now, that proved to me you all really are truely upside down crazy. No helmuts!
Highest regards, with a hope you appreciate my admittedly feeble humor.
Buy my ebook! Buy me ebook!
Hansen puts in 5,10, and 20 year doubling times for the melt rate starting at 1 mm/yr sea-level equivalent, a current-day value. He stops the melting at 1 or 5 meters. For the 10-year rate, he also looks separately and Greenland and Antarctica as sources. Some of these scenarios lead to a colder than pre-industrial global average temperature by 2100. This melting leads to extended sea ice, a very cold Europe, and a greater prospect of strong storms in the Atlantic due to the enhanced temperature gradient as the AMOC stops. The energy imbalance remains positive at 1 W/m2, so at some distant time, warming will resume, but the ocean is highly disrupted by this and will take a long time to recover.
It’s almost like having the Water Chef back.
“Some of these scenarios lead to a colder than pre-industrial global average temperature by 2100.”
I wonder what ended the MWP? I’d consider this a victory. A jump to a regime that isn’t warmer.
I was thinking of the Younger Dryas, an abrupt cooling during a general increase in forcing. It only took a decade and might have been an ice sheet collapse. These freshwater dumps have to be watched. They have happened during positive forcing before.
Ragnaar – if we’re looking at the same thing, the dips are short-lived, so it’s quickly back to pre-dip levels.
So no YD.
You’re suggesting short lived cooling blips. There’s a lot of ice to burn through. I guess we have about 120 meters of sea level rise in the bank. I ask, what has sustain? Ice sheets. It’s an interesting subject. If the ice sheets attempted to advance on the South Ocean, would they succeed? 100s of meters of ice versus 0.0 – 2.0 C Ocean.
The other meaning of MWP is meltwater pulse. Several of these sea-level accelerations occurred during the Ice Age recovery and had sea-level rises of 4 m per century (40 mm/yr) sustained for several centuries during them. This shows how fast sea level can rise in response to certain glacial happenings.
The next time someone says “glacial progress” you might think twice.
Jim D:
Yes – sea level rise has been much faster in the past than it is in the present. And that was while CO2 was still at 280 ppm or so.
The average rate over the last 20000 years is 6 mm/year. So our period is 1/2 of the average historic rate.
So you cannot rule out that the increase in sea level rise is caused naturally somehow or even that a substantial % (say 1/2 for example) is caused naturally and not by humans.
It could be 100% human caused but it is still possible it is naturally occurring.
The science is not settled.
Those rises were during the transition to the Holocene which had the same kind of forcing change but a hundred times slower than we expect in the 20th-21st century from just CO2. It is not surprising if we trigger a meltwater pulse.
Those rises were during the transition to the Holocene which had the same kind of forcing change but a hundred times slower than we expect in the 20th-21st century from just CO2.
This doesn’t sound right.
https://i2.wp.com/i177.photobucket.com/albums/w219/fermiparadox/insulation-65n-20ky-10ky.png
The start of the Holocene had up to 100 w/m2 more insolation depending on the time of year. The CO2 forcing is 1.05 W/m2.
The current insolation is barely enough to keep us out of the ice age.
There just isn’t the energy for the postulated melting pulses.
PA, that is not the global forcing. It was only a few W/m2 due to the ice albedo.
PA, that is not the global forcing.
That’s true, however:
Ice doesn’t melt because of what the global average radiance is.
Ice melts because of what the local instantaneous radiance is.
That’s why snow and ice largely melt during the day,
and why snow and ice don’t melt as much during night.
Jim D | July 28, 2015 at 10:54 pm |
PA, that is not the global forcing. It was only a few W/m2 due to the ice albedo.
1. Your claim (or someone’s claim) about southern insolation seems to be incorrect.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7333/images/nature09751-f3.2.jpg
2. Early holocene forcing change. This is something computable so we. can get a rough figure of merit. Current insolation at 65°N is about 430 W/m2. There was 26 million km2 more NH ice.
We will assume the cover difference is only 2/3 of the year. Ice has a better than 0;9 albedo. The albedo of ground is around 0.2. Surface area of the northern hemisphere is 255 million km2, since the energy is largely needed in the northern hemisphere. 430*2/3*.7*26/255 = 20.46 W/m2 or about 5.6°C. And that isn’t the peak of the interglacial, that is just the point in the cycle when we started emerging from the ice age.(more melting than freezing).
So… it seems that a minimum of 20 W/m2 additional energy is needed to leave an ice age. The 1.16 W/m2 forcing of a 200 to 280 PPM CO2 increase won’t do it.
PA, that is not global forcing. It is summer insolation at 65 N. There is a major difference. The only thing they have in common is the same units.
PA, that is not global forcing. It is summer insolation at 65 N. There is a major difference.
Right.
And what do you think melts ice in the Arctic?
A.) Global Forcing?
or B.) Irradiance during the summer time?
I’m thinking B.)
Strategy wise, it’s good. Hiatus, pause. It’s a non-linear system. The SLR will accelerate. As Ellison said, we don’t know if it will jump to a worse or better state or that it just alternates between the two. You describe the paper as saying, possible cooling. I’ve described glacials as ice stacking. It’s worked for 400,000 years if the goal is to exit them. Like most things, the ice eventually falls down. It’s a water bank. Looks like we’re making a withdrawal. The amount is a question of the stability of the basins. Flat slopes, Minnetonka (Waters Big). Steep slopes, Florida will be Okay. Kind of related. Looks like Antarctica is rising 4 mm/year.
http://basementgeographer.com/glacial-isostatic-adjustment/
First Peter wadhams and his arctic death spiral now Hansen with his sea
Rise death spiral.
When will we stop listening to these absurd predictions?
Tonyb
I sorta stopped (or at least gained a jaundiced eye) in the mid/late 70’s after that previous “coming ice age” thingy. Then hear we’re gonna melt, but more recently more ice indeed may be coming after all.
All while being told I should A) trust the scientists especially some 97% of them, and B) do my own science.
Sheesh.
The quote by Tad Pfeffer: “One of the things that troubles me most is that the rapid-fire publication of unsettled results in highly visible venues creates the impression that the scientific community has no idea what’s going on.” is more troubling than Hansen’s PRELIMINARY paper undergoing review.
I can understand posting it for comment as as done in this case but it appears Dr. Hansen was seeking publicity for his SEPARATE role as a climate activist/advocate.
If this trend continues, ‘cllmate science’ has degenerated to such scholarly fields as philosophy, sociology, political science, English literature, and African studies. The danger is that it will infect the entire science establishment which is what a vocal environmental establishment would like to see.
The following quote by Iain Murray (“The Really Inconvenient Truth” P. 51-52) sums it best:
“In a world increasingly devoid of moral authority, the supposed impartiality of science provides a seemingly objective source of authority. That authority is a major threat to the environmental movement.”
George Devries Klein, PhD, PG, FGSA.
The proposed rapid acceleration of sea level rise when surface warming has slowed (or stopped, if your prefer satellite data) and when ocean warming is in the hundredths of a degree per decade range seems very strange. It seems that Dr. Hansen has abandoned the type of self-critical approach that is necessary for real science in favor of speculation in support of advocacy. I cannot understand how this stuff gets published. A paper with this level of speculation and unvalidated assumptions would not see the light of day in most fields of research. I understand that melting sea ice does not contribute to sea level rise, but the fact that Antarctic sea ice is at record high levels seems inconsistent with proposed rapid melting of Antarctic ice sheets. One would think that, if ice sheets were as exquisitely sensitive to warming as proposed, the warming in the last 40 years would yield a discernible signal in the form of acceleration of sea level rise-but that hasn’t happened. Extreme claims require solid evidence without the need for assumptions that are always in the same direction (toward more catastrophic events).
Well, gee. Lets pick 1 meter this century. So far the sea level rise is 3.0*15 = 45 mm or about 1.8 inches. 0.3 mm of the satellite sea level rise is virtual (CGSLR).
That leaves 955 mm left to go. The 3.0 mm/trend for 85 years nets us 255 mm. Thats 300 mm. We need 700 more mm.
To hit 700 mm with constant acceleration, the sea level rise has to increase 0.194 mm per year – and the longer the sea level rise is delayed, the greater the required acceleration. After 85 years (2100) the sea level rise will be 19.4 mm/y.
To hit 700 mm with constant acceleration, the sea level rise has to increase 0.194 mm per year – and the longer the sea level rise is delayed, the greater the required acceleration. After 85 years (2100) the sea level rise will be 19.4 mm/y.
Constant acceleration of 0.194 mm/y2 is impossible, PA. If it were true then starting from 3.0 mm/yr today and looking back would entail a decline in sea level of 28.2 cm/century back in 1985 when GEOSAT was launched to make such measurements.
There was not remotely near such a decline in 1985!
Why do you keep repeating obvious rubbish like this, PA?
velocity with an initial velocity of 3 mm/y and a “constant” acceleration
mm by time t = [3+a(t-0)]*t
for 700 mm in 85 years: 700 = [3+a*85]*85;
a = 0.0615 mm/y^2; velocity = 8.24 mm/y for the span (0.32 in/y)
2.75x increase over 3.0 mm/y
for 5700mm in 85 years: a=0.755 mm/y^2; velocity = 67.2 mm/y for the span (2.64 in/y) 22.4x increase over 3.0 mm/y
VP – there is NO retro (past history) for this; this is what would be need in the future to achieve the specified increases in levels
I believe this is what PA is trying to get across:
3 mm/y for 85 years = 255 mm
his remaining 700 mm must be achieved in 85y by the acceleration component: a/852; therefore a = 0.097mm/y2
if the acceleration is delayed for 35y, then the 700 mm must be achieved in 50y: a/502; therefore a = 0.28mm/y2
If the immediate past can’t be taken as indicative of anything, what changed in 2015 that makes the immediate future any different?
Not the same mechanism, but the logic people are using here if applied to a tsunami would indicate that it’s safe to walk down the beach to take a closer look at the declining sea level.
In this case the mechanism is increasing meltwater lubricating the bottoms of glaciers. If a 0.5 °C rise occurring over 25 years has just started the meltwater running, there’s some concern that a 4 °C rise occurring over a century could dump a lot of glaciers into the sea. They don’t need to melt to raise the sea level, which won’t change as a result of their melting, only as a result of their sliding into the sea.
There’s also the possibility that the rise in temperature won’t be that great, or that the meltwater under the glaciers won’t significantly increase the glaciers’ rate of flow. But treating that as the only possibility is like treating a retreating sea before you can see the tsunami coming as surely just an exceptionally strong tide.
VP – Don’t believe that I have indicated that the past is not significant. Indeed, I have indicated just the opposite. I jdid the eval of what I thought PA was trying to get across. To my knowledge, his approach was NOT to deny the immediate past, but to indicate what would have to occur in the future, based on that immediate past, to get 1m SL rise by 2100 based on the fact that the immediate past WAS fairly flat at 3mm/y. I doubt that he was advocating that an acceleration will occur necessarily, only what would be required by the math to reach a target of 1m SL rise in 2100 smoothly; abrupt catastrophic events, like meteors, tsunamis, etc, not considered.
I took his effort to be informative about a single scenario: the change in the current SLR needed to get to some future point. Nothing more. That is all I intended; nothing more.
I should clarify that my question (“If the immediate past can’t be taken as indicative of anything, what changed in 2015 that makes the immediate future any different?”) wasn’t intended to be unanswerable. If one drops a ball then its acceleration at the moment of release changes discontinuously, from constant 0 to constant g, a step function. The ball’s position then changes from a constant height h to one that depends quadratically on time.
In this case lubricating the runways of glaciers could be likened to releasing a ball, with the time taken to achieve release measured in years instead of milliseconds. The glaciers needn’t all release at the same. And some are on steeper slopes than others and can therefore be expected to accelerate faster (though unlike the sum of distinct exponentials, which need not be an exponential, the sum of distinct quadratics is always a quadratic).
While some glaciologists claim to be seeing some sliding starting, others disagree. Until there is more agreement among glaciologists it’s hard to argue that serious release has begun yet.
I would be surprised if we did not have more clarity about glacier release by 2030. By then there may be good observational support for PA’s quadratic model. Meanwhile if the glaciers are still largely stuck to their beds today then sea levels between now and say 2020 aren’t likely to tell us much about what they’re likely to become by 2100.
Joel Williams | July 28, 2015 at 9:45 am |
his remaining 700 mm must be achieved in 85y by the acceleration component: a/852; therefore a = 0.097mm/y2
…
To my knowledge, his approach was NOT to deny the immediate past, but to indicate what would have to occur in the future, based on that immediate past, to get 1m SL rise by 2100 based on the fact that the immediate past WAS fairly flat at 3mm/y.
1. A correction to “a/852; therefore a = 0.097mm/y2”. 0.097 is low by a factor of two.
D = 1/2 *a* t**2 + v0* t + c, c = post 2000 change, v0 = current rate of increase, a = required constant acceleration in sea level rise to meet 1 meter target.
c = 45 mm (adjusting for El Nino)
v0 = 3.0 mm/Y (subtracting 0.3mm/Y of CGSLR known as GIA or virtual sea level rise).
1000 mm = 1/2 * 0.1938 * 85 * 85 + 3.0 * 85 + 45
2. Yup you got it. I was simply computing the acceleration that is required to meet the lowest of these projections. All the ice isn’t going to melt tomorrow, there is a lot of inertia involved. It has to ramp up and a constant acceleration is as good a model as anything.
If you look at the total energy per square meter available in the cold icy regions (needed to melt the ice) the 19+ mm/y values in 2100 that these scenarios require are just unrealistic.
VP’s point about projecting this into the past and showing how unrealistic it is just makes PA’s point about how ridiculous it would be for the sea level to keep increasing at the necessary rate to hit 1 meter, not to mention 2, 3 or 5 meters.
Completely unrealistic.
I say lets wait until 2100 and see what the actual sea level increase has been and then decide what to do based on that actual observation rather than these crazy scenarios which find no support in what has happened before.
Sometimes the best decision is to do nothing.
@PA: If you look at the total energy per square meter available in the cold icy regions (needed to melt the ice) the 19+ mm/y values in 2100 that these scenarios require are just unrealistic.
Whether that’s the case is immaterial because you only need to slide the glaciers into the ocean on a bed of meltwater, which current energy can easily produce. That could happen a lot sooner than when they eventually melt, though drifting equatorward will speed that up because there is plenty of heat in the oceanic mixed layer.
VP – since you are into a “catastrophic” event, like a sheet of ice “slipping and sliding into the ocean, happening in Antarctica, suppose that the entire Ross Ice Shelf broke off suddenly. What are your postulations on what will happen?
1) tsunami – how big and who will be affected?
2) how much will the floating berg cause world wide SL to rise?
3) since ~90% of an iceberg is under water, how much additional SL rise will occur after it all has melted?
4) Do you think the rest of the Antarctic Continent’s Ice will do more than melt run into the sea or sublime to be redeposited some where else? How fast or is this “catastrophic”, too?
5) What are your prospects that the current interglacial period will end?
You seem to indicate that you know when “numbers” are not right, hence must know what they actually are, then this exercise should not be too difficult.
3) since ~90% of an iceberg is under water, how much additional SL rise will occur after it all has melted?
For ice to raise sea level, it has to start on the land. If formerly land-based ice is floating around an ocean in the form of an iceberg, the SLR it’s going to cause has already happened.
JCH – obviously; but if 10% of the ice is not going to raise SL why would we be worried about 9x that?
Please let VP answer the Qs.
VP comes and goes.
Whether that’s the case is immaterial because you only need to slide the glaciers into the ocean on a bed of meltwater, which current energy can easily produce.
https://eideard.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/580872main_antarctica20110818-43_1600-1200.jpg
That is an interesting observation. But much of the Greenland and Antarctic ice is core-locked and would have to move uphill to get to the sea. There is some peripheral ice that is susceptible to skidding. However if you drop all that ice into the ocean this may give you more precipitation inland. Inland snowfall in Antarctica especially in the east, is basically water that is gone for good. Plus increased snowfall reduces insolation.
2400 GT of snow on average falls on Antarctica. The claimed loss is a tiny fraction of that. A small increase in snowfall makes the ice loss a moot point. And then there is this:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120013495.pdf
During 2003 to 2008, the mass gain of the Antarctic ice sheet from snow accumulation exceeded the mass loss from ice discharge by 49 Gt/yr (2.5% of input), as derived from ICESat laser measurements of elevation change.
It is interesting that now that ICESAT is toast we are getting these claims of increased loss.
When ICESAT II gets launched in 2017 we might get a better picture. The current ice loss situation isn’t troubling, the acceleration of ice loss is mentioned as a potential issue. It appears there are significant impediments to things getting a lot worse.
Regarding precipitation, here is the graphic which I gather is the main conceptual model of Hansen’s ideas:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/22.png
He conceives of precipitation being a feedback by preferentially falling over the ocean rather than land which further extends sea ice extent by freshening.
This would be a marginal effect and would not pertain to summer ( Antarctic sea ice melts back ).
There are numerous other problems – warm water some how flows preferentially toward glacial grounding lines and stays there to melt the ice. But what happens when melting occurs? localcooling? how, if this is a stable situation, does the melt cooled water dislodge? If the process is supposed to diminish bottom water formation, how does any warmer water intrude? Why does this idea depend so much on things that aren’t known, like sub-ice temperatures around Antarctica? and about bottom water formation rates? The grounding lines of Antarctic glacial ice are not very deep – how deep is the cooling layer of the Southern Ocean? Why didn’t such a thing happen during the Holocene Climatic Optimum? Did it really occur at the end of the Eemian? Looks like there were blips in SLR but that the longer term temperature and sea level trends were already downward:
http://blogs.shell.com/climatechange/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Eemian.jpg
Way too much speculation about this. It appears as if this is an attempt to justify why Model E was so wrong about the cooling Southern Ocean and the increase in Antarctic sea ice. But there were already papers proclaiming that Antarctic sea ice increase was due to dynamics. They could be all be wrong.
The Hansen graphic doesn’t look exactly like the situation.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Antarctic_shelf_ice_hg.png
The current shelves don’t appear to be a stable formation. So the question is: was it always this way, is it because the ice has thinned since the start of the interglacial, is it because of erosion, or is it because of post MWP regrowth?
Don’t know what the scholarship on this is – but the worst that will happen is a retreat to the current grounding line. If the ice sheet thickens the grounding line will advance.
On a more reassuring note, Huss and Farinotti (2012) have estimated the volume of the planet’s glaciers at roughly1.7E14 m3. Even if they all slid into the ocean, melted or not, they would only raise the sea level by about 0.934*1.7/3.62 = 44 cm or about a foot and a half.
However there are other ways of raising sea level. Supposedly global warming of 1 °.C adds 20-60 cm. AR5 WG1 FAQ 12.1 Fig. 1,
http://clim.stanford.edu/GMTCto2100.jpg
claims 4 °C of warming by 2100 under RCP8.5, which could therefore add a further 1.6 m, bring the total to 2 m, more or less. Note that unlike other means of raising sea level, this one does not change the mass of the sea and therefore does not entail any isostatic rebound of the sort theorized in the 1850s by John Pratt.
Yet another method is the brute force one of simply melting some ice. To reach 3 m requires only 1 m more, a volume of 3.62E14 m3. It takes 3.33E8 J to melt each 1 m3, so a total of 1.2E23 J.
AR5 WG1 Fig. 13.2 (p. 1162),
http://clim.stanford.edu/HeatTo2100.jpg
claims an additional 2.5E24 J of ocean heat between 2015 and 2100 under RCP8.5. This is way more than enough to melt the glaciers floating into shipping lanes but has no impact on sea level, only thermal expansion. This is said to represent 90% of Earth’s total heat over that period, leaving a mere 10% or 2.8E23 J to warm the rest of the planet.
Now the 1.2E23 J needed to add 1 m to sea level by melting ice is 43% of that. Could the polar regions be so cold as to suck down 43% of the above-ocean global warming between now and 2100, via atmospheric transport in the poles’ role as the planet’s refrigerator?
I have no idea. If someone has a knock-down argument showing it is completely impossible by 2100 I’d be very interested. PA?
5 m is definitely a stretch, but was anyone claiming 5 m? Not the IPCC. Not me. Not Hansen as far as I know.
Disclaimer: not wanting to be biased by Hansen’s point of view I deliberately avoided reading his paper before writing this. At some point I’ll take a look at it.
Vaughan Pratt, the accepted values are that if all the glaciers melted it is worth 70 meters of sea-level, 7 m from Greenland and the rest from Antarctica. We had 140 m from the last Ice Age until now, so we have 1/3 of the glacier volume of the Ice Age left at this point, which is a lot. Hansen’s 5 m rise takes only 7% of the current glacier volume.
@JW: What are your postulations on what will happen [if the Ross Ice Shelf breaks off catastrophically]?
1) tsunami – how big and who will be affected?
I have no idea. The Tohuku tsunami created waves 133 ft high, but by the time they reached our house at the edge of Monterey Bay (the one with the carpeted living room) they were down to a couple of feet. So I would imagine Dunedin, NZ, 2500 miles north of the shelf, might get a wave of a wave of up to a foot maybe (see answer to your second question). Christchurch is better protected. Wellington could cop almost as much as Dunedin. Ask HAS, it’s his ox that’s going to be gored if anyone’s so he’ll surely have been more worried about it than me.
2) how much will the floating berg cause world wide SL to rise?
Based on a very rough estimate of 1.5E14 m3 volume for the whole shelf, combined with the fact that about 90% of it is submerged, around a millimeter perhaps. Two at the most. Depending on the exact stresses in the shelf it could even lower the sea level by a millimeter.
3) since ~90% of an iceberg is under water, how much additional SL rise will occur after it all has melted?
Zero. (Either that was a trick question or you need to pay more attention. :) )
4) Do you think the rest of the Antarctic Continent’s Ice will do more than melt run into the sea or sublime to be redeposited some where else? How fast or is this “catastrophic”, too?
AC’s good for this century. By 2300 terrorists will have blown everything to bits making the question ACademic.
5) What are your prospects that the current interglacial period will end?
Well, certainly not before 2300. If our descendants survive the terrorists then probably not before 3000 either, unless Milankovitch theory is to committed warming as paper is to rock.
@Jim D: Vaughan Pratt, the accepted values are that if all the glaciers melted it is worth 70 meters of sea-level
Accepted by you and whose alarmy?
By Al Borg’s army.
I still want to know why you do not like Archer’s ice-melt statement.
Vaughan Pratt, every source I have found has numbers in the range I stated. Here is one. It is a commonly done calculation.
http://www.usgs.gov/faq/categories/9750/3476
Here is another
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question473.htm
VP- thanks for replying
I see JimD claims all the glaciers will do 100x your SLR. Do wonder what all those “ice cubes” will do to sea temps. Lot of heat needed to convert ice to water! Global temps have decreased slower than they rise every 100,000 years according to the Vostok Ice Cores.
I wonder why the current “heat wave” did not behave like the previous 3 and peak big time in the first 6000 years after temps first reached our current ones. Of course, our “heat wave” is right in there with two of the 3 in the next 5000. Why would anyone expect our “heat wave” to peak at the end?
http://pages.swcp.com/~jmw-mcw/Duration%20of%20warm%20periods.jpg
Jim D, not only do you have my full attention, you have me sitting bolt upright when I’d rather be going to bed
The IPCC and various other sources claim the glaciers can contribute around 43 or 44 cm of sea level rise. Try typing
volume of Earth’s ice
to google and see if you don’t get 170,000 cubic km for glacier volume. That’s 1.7/13500 = 0.013% of the planet’s water.
The USGS, which has an office just down the road from me, claims 70 m. With the average ocean depth being around 3700 m, that’s around 2%!
This is bind-moggling.
All I can think is that either somebody has their decimal point off by a couple of places, or glaciologists can’t agree on the definition of “glacier”, or the USGS can no longer afford to hire glaciologists.
I’m going to tune in to KWTF tomorrow morning after a good night’s sleep to see if they have any recent news on this extraordinary discrepancy. Let me know if you come up with any reconciliation in the meantime.
The world’s gone mad.
Vaughan Pratt | July 28, 2015 at 11:05 pm |
@Jim D: Vaughan Pratt, the accepted values are that if all the glaciers melted it is worth 70 meters of sea-level
Accepted by you and whose alarmy?
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/waterworld.html
Well, there is 30,000,000 km3 of ice on the planet and 90% is said to be in Antarctica. The uncertainty in the Antarctic ice volume (4500000 km3)
is greater than all other ice volumes combined. The Antarctic ice volume is quoted as 25 million to 30 million km3 depending on the source.
30e6 km3/230 mm/km3 / 1000 mm/m= 130 m
10% of that is 13 m. That includes Greenland and every other chunk of ice on the planet outside of Antarctica. The Himalayan glaciers for reference are in the 2955 to 4737 km3 range.
VP, I don’t know where the 70 m number is coming from either.
Vaughan
I suspect that JIm D got that figure from here.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/if-ice-melted-map
tonyb
climatereason | July 29, 2015 at 4:03 am |
Vaughan
I suspect that JIm D got that figure from here.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/if-ice-melted-map
tonyb
As a courtesy to VP I tried to find where this claim comes from.
I took the logical step of “asking a scientist” to see what a scientist thinks to establish the facts.
http://www.amnh.org/ology/features/askascientist/question18.php
If all the ice covering Antarctica, Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). The ocean would cover all the coastal cities. And land area would shrink significantly. But many cities, such as Denver, would survive.
The increase in surface area is why the increase in sea level is only 70 m. Which means most ice melt sea level claims are 50% too high.
Now to where the claim came from:
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycleice.html
Which points to:
http://nsidc.org/glaciers/quickfacts.html
Which is a dead link.
The active link is the glacier quick facts page::
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/quickfacts.html
“If all land ice melted, sea level would rise approximately 70 meters (230 feet) worldwide.”
Presumably either the original NSIDC page was wrong, or more likely – someone in the USGS was cruising the NSIDC glacier quickfacts page and thought the 70 m just applied to glaciers. The USGS seems to defer completely to the NSIDC on matters of ice.
The NSIDC site has some other troubling statements: “Glacierized areas cover over 15 million square kilometers (5.8 million square miles).”.
They define half of the world’s ice sheets as glaciers.
http://www.livescience.com/24168-glacier-volume-sea-level-rise.html
“Researchers calculated the ice thickness for 171,000 glaciers worldwide, excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which hold the bulk of Earth’s frozen water. Through a combination of direct satellite observations and modeling, they determined the total volume of ice tied up in the glaciers is nearly 41,000 cubic miles (170,000 cubic kilometers), plus or minus 5,000 cubic miles (21,000 cubic km).
If all the glaciers were to melt, global sea levels would rise almost 17 inches (43 centimeters), the scientists found.”
And that’s the way it is.
100,000 km3 is as a good a number as any for glacier volume.
The “100,000 km3 is as a good a number as any for glacier volume.” is an editing error and should have been deleted.
Actually 100,000 km3, or 1E14 m3, is not that far below Huss and Farinotti’s estimate of 1.7E14 m3 for all the world’s glaciers. They claim good accuracy and have a follow-up paper in 2013 describing their methodology for estimating their accuracy. They say 1.73E14 m3 will yield 43 cm SLR, with which AR5 pretty much concurs (one or two cm less), and for which I showed the calculation elsewhere in this thread.
A number of Antarctic glaciers are “shelf-locked” in the sense that their mouths are supported by floating ice shelves as shown here (from Wikipedia):
http://clim.stanford.edu/IceShelf.jpg
The Ross Ice Shelf is the biggest of these.
@PA: Don’t know what the scholarship on this is – but the worst that will happen is a retreat to the current grounding line.
No, because in that case the glaciers currently supported by the ice shelf will lose that support and slide into the ocean. The above figure shows the sequence. Not fast enough to cause a tsunami thousands of miles to the north though.
An ice shelf acts like a cork bottling up the glaciers feeding it. Popping that cork (shelf collapse) releases the genie of the glaciers.
The problem with the cartoon wrt this paper:
It’s not clear the veracity of Step 2 ( water percolating from the top ).
But even if accurate, the paper speaks of the cooling of the Antarctic surface, sea ice and entire Southern Ocean, which is necessary as part of multi step idealized process.
But surface warming is not necessary because inland basal melting always occurs because glacial ice traps the small amounts of geothermal heat which are more than sufficient to produce liquid water at the base.
Further, if the grounding line should rise, it would be rising into the cooler waters above ( Hansen’s ideas ) and melt less?
Since there’s very little actual measurement very much less any actual measured trends this is all speculation. But, it does conjure up ideas of warm water plumes diving down, against buoyancy, from the tropics, and like so many animate worms, seeking out the basins of the outflows to specifically warm glacial bases. I don’t think it happens that way.
http://clim.stanford.edu/IceShelf.jpg
Well…
http://persephonemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/antarctica-bedmap.jpg
Larson A was stable for up to 12000 years.
Larson B was only about 4000 years old.
Larson C probably dates to the last interglacial.
Ross probably dates to the last interglacial.
The issue here is topology, topology, topology.
The bulk of West Antarctica is core locked (the center is a low spot).
The ice shelves are mostly Archimeded (covered by the principle). Where the ice shelves have collapsed some of the glaciers have apparently tripled their speed so on the edges there is a downward grade in spots (as evidenced from the topology map…
The situation is complex with a number of moving parts. Is this a collapse and replace cycle? Is this late interglacial melting? Is this late interglacial melting with a CO2 assist? Is this late interglacial melting with a CO2 assist and some volcanic help?
But let’s take a worst case. The WAIS would add about 0.4 mm/Y given its last decade average and if we assume all the loss accelerated 3x that would be a 0.8 mm/y boost to sea level.
Any claim between 0 and 0.8 mm/y sea level increase is defensible.
.
Stuck in localized ice,. say, who can count the ways.
http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/02/odonnell-et-al-2010-refutes-steig-et-al-2009/
I was on vacation for a week. Is the Global Warming Hoax over yet?
Andrew
Nope. Hence this post and thread. But it is beginning to suffer delirium tremens. Wadham has jumped the Arctic ice shark. Hansen is trying to do so in public. And Karl’s desperate data revision is in full view. And Don’t miss Jim Steele’s vivisection of the new bumblebee alarm paper.
Thank you for keeping me up to date, rist!
Andrew
The difference is, if Wadhams was on the skeptic side he would have a lead post on WUWT by now and everyone there would be nodding along. As it is, no one on his own side of the debate has bought into his idea.
Do you have a bumblebee chapter in one of your ebooks?
Springer,
The fact you found yourself agreeing with Michael should tell you something.
Give it a rest.
Btw, loved the “at least you had a box. And idle hands” comment. Wasn’t going to better that.
Jim D goes off to fantasy land …
@Jim D | July 26, 2015 at 6:24 pm |
The difference is, if Wadhams was on the skeptic side he would have a lead post on WUWT by now and everyone there would be nodding along. As it is, no one on his own side of the debate has bought into his idea.
We are engaged in grand unintentional (and I think reckless) experiment that everyone is involved in. That is what will be the effects of artificially increasing CO2 emissions. I find it bit disconcerting that we want to roll the dice with our climate.
But if we ignore all the science on impacts and only assume that Earth will warm within a particular range in response to CO2 emissions I think we still have reason for concern because uncertainty about the impacts (what and how much) could still mean that severe and even unforeseen consequences are possible.
Joseph, we all roll the dice all the time. Jobs, spouses, …
Are you making the ridiculous absolutist precautionary principle arguement, or do you have something along the nuanced lines of probable, plausible, possible, impossible wrt CO2 induced AGW? If so, how much, and where is the C (catastrophic)? This thread is about Hansen trying to inject ‘C’, and failing miserablely even in the eyes of his fellow warmunists. What say you to that narrower specific?
Do you have a warmunist chapter in one of your ebooks? Or one on rolling dice?
You should report yourself to Judith for stalking, Slinger. You have her number.
Justin, it’s easy not to be concerned when you can summarily dismiss all the research that indicates climate change poses risks. Especially, when you have never read it and or don’t understand it well enough to adequately critique it.
Enough Please Springer, we heard ya for cryin out loud.
As a labor-saving device Judy sets her threshold for trash talking on CE rather higher than Anthony Watt’s on WUWT. The terrible twos is when your child learns your threshold by experimentation. Springer has been in that age bracket for far longer than your average two-year-old.
Just buy some carbon credits and you’ll be fine.
Or are you selling?
Joseph,
Don’t panic…take deep breath. There is disagreement over TCR and ECS and the models overestimate sea level rise. We need a sober assessment of the current situation so that we can formulate an appropriate response.
Hansen is pulling a David Brower tactic. Keeping at the leading edge of hysteria, makes others look “reasonable”.
Brower described the increasingly radical arch of his professional career to E magazine:
“The Sierra Club made the Nature Conservancy look reasonable. I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We’re still waiting for someone else to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable. ”
https://www.activistfacts.com/person/3507-david-brower/
That’s what Sanders and Trump are doing
Trump knows the game. Did you see all the Hispanics behind him during his recent speech on the border? His exclamation that Mexican’s love him, he’s employed thousands, and that they’ll vote for him? The left plays radical sensationalism at every angle, the right typical plays it straight in politics, relatively speaking. Trump is playing the game, unflinching to PCisms. Not a big Trump fan, but am enjoying watching him play the system the way the left plays it.
The title suggests the spirit of the paper: “…Modern Observations that 2°C Global Warming is Highly Dangerous.” Observations? What the authors call observations I call speculations.
“What the authors call observations I call speculations.”
CG,
And if you can keep the upchuck down through that, you can try:
“2°C Global Warming”
A highly contrived number about an imaginary “index”.
Child, please.
Andrew
So, I’m not extremely versed with glacial ice, but what we’re talking about is sheathing of ice because of ice flow, not melting, correct?
And ice motion is caused by gravity ( the slope of canyons which channel the ice off the continent ) and basal melting from trapped accumulations of geothermal heat, correct?
Since melting from atmospheric heat appears not to be the cause of ice sheet ‘collapse’, why is global warming implicated at all?
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/08/18/science/18green_ice/18green_ice-blog480.jpg
Well, actually reading the paper does help –
‘…Our climate model exposes amplifying feedbacks in the Southern Ocean that slow Antarctic bottom water formation and increase ocean temperature near ice shelf grounding lines, while cooling the surface ocean and increasing sea ice cover and water column stability.’
Obviously a lot to consider, but one question on a relative basis to ask, if the theory is that CO2 warming will or is inducing this process, why did not a similar event occur during the Holocene Climatic Optimum ( or as Hansen calls it, the ‘Altithermal’ ) when ocean temperatures were warm for thousands of years?
Also, the opening sentence of the abstract continues to offend:
‘There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 ◦ C warmer than today.’
Hansen still seems to think that average temperature explains climate. San Francisco and Saint Louis have nearly the same average annual temperature, but which one would you visit?
Hansen, by this statement, also seems to think that CO2 is more important than orbital variation and that seasons don’t matter, only average temperature.
Global warming doesn’t matter.
It’s your CO2 they’re after.
They want to control you.
The whole “the ocean is eating Antarctic” meme is interesting. Is the ocean floor near Antarctica instrumented well enough that we know there is a trend?
Found a paper on the energy dynamics of the Antarctic.
http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~wal00105/papers/vanasetal2005.pdf
I can’t see where a little IR forcing from CO2 is going to make a lot of difference. The “recent warming is causing ice sheet speed up” is another troubling meme – one would think anything that affects the ice sheets would have happened decades or centuries in the past. It isn’t like an electric race car set where you have a throttle and get fast response.
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No one is drowning in the Maldives because Americans drive SUVs. And, what if the seas do rise? It has happened before but change is slow. The recently discovered ancient port of Wadi el-Jarf on the Suez is thought to be the oldest harbor in the world. It dates back to the time of the Pharaohs (2600 BC). It’s submerged limestone anchors and an L-shaped wharf from the shore (determined using a tacheometer) is partly out of the water at low tide: proof that what is fast for the earth is in our terms at the pace of the long slow march of human civilization.
Even the slowest walkers will be able to move inland fast enough to keep their shoes dry.
@bed: Even the slowest walkers will be able to move inland fast enough to keep their shoes dry.
Most certainly.
http://clim.stanford.edu/flood.jpg
A chance for them to meet new people, get some much-needed exercise, experience the fresh air of the countryside, all in the company of 50 million other displaced people who may have neglected to bring sleeping bags.
I live out in the country above Stanford at 250′ above sea level. I’m so looking forward to this exhilarating experience for those living at inconveniently lower altitudes that I plan to buy a Humvee for every member of my family along with an armory to keep these people off my property. If it all pans out this will be the greatest experiment of the 21st century.
;)
See – adaptation is a good idea.
Vaughan, perhaps I am wrong, If the rate of sea level rise happens according to one of Hanson’s many imagined worst case scenarios, then I think the best course of action will be to hand out 50 million pairs of slightly too short pants. Then everything will be coming up Milhouse.
“we should be putting extreme scenarios out there and assess whether they are plausible, possible, or essentially impossible.”
I suspect the larger question here is who do you believe, the “modelers” or the “measurers.” While all science is an imperfect “model,” in my view greater truth is revealed by measuring. You have an idea? Prove it not by iterating over your assumptions, but by taking the output of your individual assumptions and comparing it to the output of the real world.
It seems to me more of that is going on lately, but often I get the feeling that (some) scientists are seeking obscure evidence that validates the model’s predictions rather than proving the model’s assumptions.
For instance, NOAA’s claim the Hiatus is dead. It feels more like an attempt to validate the model than test model assumptions.
“These questions endure even as the basic theory of a rising human influence on climate has steadily solidified: accumulating greenhouse gases will warm the world, erode ice sheets, raise seas and have big impacts on biology and human affairs”
One of the wonderful aspects of speculation, it has no bounds. Statements of “facts” which include impacts with resultant human and biological importance is an attempt to resonate with others what is held so strongly as a belief by oneself.
Is CO2 in the atmosphere going up? YES. Is CO2 a trace atmospheric gas with absorption and emission properties? YES. Is atmospheric CO2 a danger to human kind? Don’t Know. Doubt It. The first two statements we can measure. The last statement is a speculation, a speculation I might say, which has no bounds. CO2 feeding a fertile imagination, like corn.
The speculative nature of the Hansen discourse lends no more validity to the current brouhaha over climate change than any other antics he has performed before or after he retired. His belief system drives his utterances. At least to this observer, these utterances should neither be accepted nor rejected because this is just how he views his world. He’s welcome to his thoughts. Followers of Hansen are just as likely to regurgitate what they hear from him from time to time as any other preacher is parroted. After all, saving mankind from itself is as old a meme as man himself. Maybe James Hansen is the “second coming.” I guess we will have to wait and see. Prayer should not be in the lexicon for anyone outside of his establishment.
As for me, I take with a grain of salt what I actually see and hear. What I see in James Hansen is an old fool.
I don’t believe the Hansen papers first purpose is to advance science, this is a sideshow. Like the McNutt editorial these things are political fodder to pull from for policy leaders.
Obama is headed into his last year in office, Hillary is stumping; policy politics needs to create unassailable perceptions to advance the AGW agenda, these things provide soundbites. It’s completely irrelevant if this paper succeeds in the peer review process. Hillary or Obama have sensational ammunition and leading names in science to provide as citation to reporters; “the leaders in climate science have said…” If pressed they’re completely covered.
Regardless of the veracity of McNutt’s or Hansen’s work, or others, the work has accomplished its purpose. I expect a full court press from Obama on policy initiatives during his last year. AGW policy is in his crosshairs. Most of the major news outlets don’t need to jump on this bandwagon. Lower tier news outlets can play the buzz with impunity which is all that’s needed politically. Cynical enough?
” Cynical enough?”
Realistic. They are getting the base fired up for 2016. I’m getting an endless stream of “Occupy Democrats” and other left-wing propaganda showing up in my newsfeed on FB. Almost nothing from the other side.
Here’s link to Hansen’s interview on CNN
http://climatecrocks.com/2015/07/26/jim-hansen-on-sea-level-and-the-lifeblood-of-science/
“Not only would it be 10 feet, but it would imply that in the next decades after that it would be even more.
JC (quoting JH): Not only would it be 10 feet, but it would imply that in the next decades after that it would be even more.
So about 15 multimeters?
And then even more?
At some point oscilloscopes may be a more practical unit. Otherwise desks will start to get cluttered.
He said 50 years, so a little over 3 meters by 2065. What on earth does even more in the decades following that mean? More than an additional 3 meters by 2100? Fine. worst case, as much as 6-7 meters by 2100.
Or maybe not as much as.
It was better the first time with the sneaker. You make a habit of peaking early, huh?
Peak oil was not so long ago. Everyone, pray for peak Springer real soon now.
This is Himalayan Glaciers part Deux.
According to Wiki, Maldives economic growth is robust. Although real concerns exist about coral mining and the big “Asian Brown Cloud” due to particulates from biomass burning and inefficient industrial processes, Hansen would like to stoke alarm due to global warming, irrespective of the evidence: “An INQUA research in 2003 found that actual sea levels in the Maldives had dropped in the 1970s and forecasts little change in the next century.”
Even if global warming wasn’t a hoax a rise of sea levels still is impossible to predict–e.g., some scientists believe that with global warming there would be increased precipitation and it could fall as snow on a frozen Antarctica and stay there resulting in falling sea levels.
I have always thought more weight should be given to the paleoclimate data than to climate models, on account of it being, well, data. I would like to see much more effort going into that analysis. But for some reason I don’t trust Hansen to do it.
Jim “west-side-highway” Hansen is no maverick, he is a joke….. and a bad one at that. There is zero evidence in support of his many predictions of
even wrong”. This is science? Heck
no!
So was this a science paper or a brainstorming session for plot ideas for the sequel to day after tomorrow. Did they mention killer wolves?
Are climate modeling scenarios really called experiments, as Ternberth is quoted as saying.
If you have better experiments why are you keeping them a secret?
Rising seas ‘threatening the fabric of society’,says Jim.
Yikes, no time fer pier review, it’s urgent! Hafta’ fast
forward ter Paris.
… But there’s those satellite measurements and here
in Oz, the lack of significant sea rise is confirmed by
a similar lack of sea level change as measured since
at least 1888 against the Ross-Lempriere benchmark
carved in rock at Port Arthur in Tasmania tidal gauge
measurements,documented in ‘ Testing the Waters,
A Report on Sea Levels,’ by John Daly.
http://www.john-daly.com/ges/msl-rept.htm
“Pier review…”
We will need more piers. The fishing is going to be great! All those flooded buildings will make structures for reefs!
Lotsa’ new industries fer innovative humans, jw,
imagine!
David Archer’s referee comment
Archer’s referee comment has the following sentence.
The melting water actually results in an increase in heat uptake by the planet, with the increase going directly into the ocean, exacerbating the feedback.
I have no idea who Archer is addressing this to. Certainly not to me, since I was unable to infer from it any change in temperature in anything.
Either he was addressing it to sycophants who’ll buy anything sufficiently technical sounding, or there’s a secret society who understands the thermal implications for feedback of melting ice.
I’d much prefer to belong to the latter audience.
I think he’s talking to skeptics who think increasing Antarctic sea ice extent is scoring points for their side.
JCH, if you’re trying to talk to sceptics then you don’t start off with: “This is another Hansen masterwork of scholarly synthesis, modeling virtuosity, and insight, with profound implications.”
I’ve never been in a secret society, but maybe those are codewords.
‘Sycophant’ is the word you’re struggling for
JCH:
Increasing Antarctica sea ice extent is scoring points for the skeptics.
Here is why.
Increasing Antarctica sea ice flies in the face of the theory.
It is not as if increasing Antarctica sea ice was predicted.
New observations lead to new theory – which is what Hansen has done.
He may be right or not – but good for him for coming up with a new theory in the face of new observations which are inconsistent with the existing theory. That is actual science.
But this does shows the science is not settled.
This shows that we do not understand climate change.
This helps show why the models are currently garbage and why they are so far off from reality.
This shows that we have no idea how high sea level will be in 2100.
This shows that we have no idea how much of the warming from 1850 is natural or human caused.
Which in turn means we can make no meaningful policy decisions.
We simply do not know enough to spend trillions on possibly useless actions.
Sometimes the best decision is to do nothing.
Those praying at the alter of “it ain’t happenin'” are the sycophants.
Nice try Richard. Expanding sea ice in the Antarctic is a sign continental melting is getting worse fast. Around here there were all sorts of comments about global koolin’ being upon us. How else could ice expand? Well, they were wrong.
JCH, no. It could be a sign, but is not likely. How and where is there increased melt causing super cold ice to flow into the sea?
Where is ice flow happening and where is ice extent increasing? Are they the same?
JHC said ” Around here there were all sorts of comments about global koolin’ being upon us. How else could ice expand? Well, they were wrong.”
Wrong if Hansen’s new theory is right (you mean).
A new theory which hasn’t even been published yet.
So my point is that we don’t know why the ice is expanding – we have one new theory, which may or may not be correct. That is good.
But what we don’t know is a lot more than what we do know.
The science is not settled.
Perhaps we should take that into consideration as the policy makers ponder trillion dollar actions which may have no benefit (or very little benefit for the cost).
In my opinion we should keep doing science, keep gathering data, keep investing in new energy technology which doesn’t not produce carbon and is cheaper than hydro-carbon based energy.
I would even favor replacing end of life coal power plants with nuclear, even though nuclear is more expensive than hydro-carbon energy (today).
But lets not spend trillions based on sheer guesswork.
Sometimes the best decision is to do nothing.
Check back in 10 years and lets reevaluate.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
The Minoan and Roman periods were warmer than today – in fact much of the interglacial was warmer than today.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/wp-content/blogs.dir/443/files/2012/04/i-014d49954afc609035448add010dacc8-450px-Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
Sea level doesn’t seem to have been affected much. If small changes in temperature cause huge ice sheet displacements – there would be some evidence. The reason people go to the Eemian which had a different heat flow pattern, is this interglacial has been pretty blah.
There isn’t evidence for tipping points or tilting points or leaning points or whatever.
Expanding sea ice in the Antarctic is a sign continental melting is getting worse fast.
You believe that because it fits your narrative – that’s how confirmation bias works.
But there is a much simpler explanation that doesn’t require all the unmeasured collection of processes Hansen describes.
Variation in the Southern Annular Mode increases offshore wind in places, leading to increased Antarctic sea ice, and indirectly a cooler Southern Ocean.
Unless there’s actual observed data demonstrating a phenomenon, simple wins.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n12/abs/ngeo1627.html
Great reference JCH.
You do know David Archer was claiming 10 meter slr well before this paper by Hansen, right?
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-climate-cold-arctic-eemian.html
Umm. The Arctic was cold (not melted) during the Eemian. I interpret this as the current south – north heat transfer wasn’t occurring.
This would seem to result in a much warmer south pole.
If the heat transfer patterns were very different for the Eemian it might not have much value as a guide.
@timg56: You do know David Archer was claiming 10 meter slr well before this paper by Hansen, right?
When? (The rise, not the claim.)
I can’t find it. Archer is mostly an “after 2100” sort of guy.
Damn Vaughn, now I have to see if I can access his book on Amazon and find the time frame.
A pain doing it from my phone while on vacation at the beach.
From memory I want to say he was saying 100 – 150 years out, but it could have been longer.
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David Archer has posted a formal review at ACPD, well worth reading
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/15/C5209/2015/acpd-15-C5209-2015.pdf
Dr. Curry,
I see by the time tag that the hour was late and maybe you had something else to say but you needed your rest.
Why do you believe that the David Archer formal review at ACPD was well worth the read?
The formal review looks nothing like a review for a medical manuscript. This would be more appropriate for inclusion in “letters to the editor”, or a press release from a university’s lab to be included in a newsletter on what is happening within the department.
Obviously you saw something in the review that should be highlighted. I would like to know what that something was.
This is a formal review for the journal, it is worth seeing how the discussion journal works. The review itself provides some perspective on west antarctic ice sheet collapse, and provides a different view than the reviewers solicited by the media.
Reviews for scientific papers in my field varies with the type of paper. Not many papers of Hansen’s length and scope actually get published.
The Archer review relies heavily on the faulty papers purporting to find abrupt SLR in the late Eemian dissected in guest CE post By Land or By Sea. One is so bad it constitutes a pretty clear case of academic misconduct. And its PR by the main auther makes clear the misconduct was knowing and intentional. Shows how gross errors compound in climate science. Use bad papers to claim observational support for Hansen’s fantasy, when none exists. Ignore all the papers that show abrupt SLR in the Eemian did NOT happen. Archer reveals himself as a poor scientist who has not studied the literature closely.
Archer should also know that Rignot’s 2014 Pine Island Glacier finding (one of six entering the Amundsen Embayment is (a) >2x any other PIG ice loss estimate and (b) does not support SLR of even half a meter, let alone 5, and (c) is hardly representative of WAIS. His biases and underlying ignorance are on full display. Guest CE post Tipping Points.
A vivid public example of climate pal review.
Archer authored a book which had an ice burg as the cover illustration and in which he warned of a possible 10 meter rise in sea level.
As if he doesn’t have skin in this game.
Hilarious.
‘another Hansen masterwork of scholarly synthesis, modelling virtuousity, and insight with profound implications.’
speaking of Hansen ‘a creative and intellectual volcano’
I think I’ve read wine reviews that were more objective.
‘Paper was sassy, earthy and elegant with herbaceous after tatste.’
Of course, I thought, we know what makes volcanoes explosive – they’re full of gas and hot air.
It’s NOT a Review, it’s a brief COMMENT:
Yes, a comment by the ‘Referee’.
And whatever it is, it’s pretty funny though sadly full of adjectives.
Ignored Low Climate Sensitivity?
While Hanson appeals to the IPCC, it appears he ignores recent evidence of low climate sensitivity. He does not appear to address the consequent sever Type B uncertainty bias in his models. See:
PATRICK J. MICHAELS , Statement, HEARING ON AN ANALYSIS OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S SOCIAL COST OF CARBON, COMMITTEE ON NAURAL RESOURCES, US House, July 22,2015
@DLH: recent evidence of low climate sensitivity
This is even less scientific than your absurdly fallacious arguments for the science in Intelligent Design.
1. What definition of “climate sensitivity” are you referring to? Earth System? Equilibrium? Transient Climate Response? Something else?
These have very different values, and very different durations for their estimation. If you don’t know the difference you don’t know what you’re talking about.
2. What is your threshold for “low” and how does it compare to that of those who are not proponents of Intelligent Design?
3. What definition of “recent” do you consider to be sufficiently indicative of the likely temperature in 2100? 6 weeks? 6 months? 6 years? 60 years?
Your ramblings have convinced me you don’t have the slightest clue about science. Your move. Persuade me you do by giving even a half-baked answer to just one of these questions.
Vaughan Pratt | July 28, 2015 at 1:08 am | Reply
“This is even less scientific than your absurdly fallacious arguments for the science in Intelligent Design.”
Is there something about left coast and northeast universities that somehow breed religious bigots?
I know Hagan pretty well. We don’t always agree but he’s smarter and more widely read than you are, Pratt. He could give you lessons in a half dozen sciences and you could possibly give him lessons in one and your one isn’t really relevant to any natural science.
So far DLH and DS are the only ones defending ID on CE. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Ice Nine terminology that would make them a karass.
@DS: Is there something about left coast and northeast universities that somehow breed religious bigots?
Aha! Springer admits a connection between Intelligent Design and religion. Let’s see ID spin-persons spin their way out of that blooper!
Well, Stupid Design is a religion as well. It posits life came from Aliens or a statistically impossible random event.
Claiming that 10 million atoms self assembled into a functioning cell is less likely than the existence of God.
Claiming that life came from aliens is just the impossible once removed.
Vaughan: stop acting like a prat.
whatever measure one wants to use…earth system, equilibrium or transient climate response, a low value has the same implication…Not only that, but the three are hardly independent of each other, a low value for one, implies a low value for all.
really, youre going to waste your time on this level of equivocation?
=>So far DLH and DS are the only ones defending ID on CE.
You smoked out another one, doc. He couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
OMG! Is that another one? Do all the Davids belong to the ID brotherhood?
Hey David congrats. Patrick Michaels really got under Pratt’s skin.
The guilt by association is getting so thick here you can cut it with a knife.
SOOOO predictable.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/299371/guilt-association-patrick-j-michaels
Ironic that apocalyptic beliefs are common in both atheist climate scientists and fundamentalist Christians.
They both have about the same track record in successful prediction of when the apocalypse is coming. Another common attribute!
In yet another stunning similarity both believe that the apocalypse is caused by man’s sins (carbon or otherwise).
Amazing.
The Church of Climate Catastrophy maybe needs to settle on a single prophet. Looks like Hansen is being rejected by his own church even as we speak! Historically that’s a good sign!
It is the usual Alinski leftist nonsense.
Spenser is attacked based on the following rules:
RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)
It is what it is. It is a leftist sin to have conservation Christian beliefs, and he is saying things they don’t like. Spenser might as well get out the red paint and start drawing circles on his clothing.
Ironic that apocalyptic beliefs are common in both atheist climate scientists and fundamentalist Christians.
Based on his rants I’d pegged Springer as both. Now he seems to be claiming to be neither. What a topsy-turvy world we live in!
Springer. Thanks for reference to Pat Michael’s excellent article. PS On predictions Judeo-Christian prophets have a higher prediction accuracy. e.g. 310 Old Testament Prophecies Fulfilled by Yeshua the Mashiyach. For a comprehensive list see Payne Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy
IPCC projections are consistent with our understanding of the time scale of the ice-albedo feedback and equilibrium change in sea level rise due to paleo climate data.
The time scale of decay towards equilibrium of the ice-albedo feedback is on the order of a few hundred years. This can be seen in the output of GCMs and one can also see why this is roughly the case since the time scale of decay should be approximately the amount of time it takes to melt a square meter of glacier ice with the forcing change that would result from a loss of a square meter of ice in polar regions.
The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are approximately 2.5 km thick. The density of ice is approximately 917 kg/m^3. The enthalpy of melting ice is 333.55 kJ/kg. Annual average insolation at a pole is roughly 173 W/m^2. Ice albedo for these ice sheets is about 0.7. Tundra albedo is roughly 0.2. The mean cloudiness of Earth is about 0.5. Therefore, the time scale of decay of the ice-albedo feedback is approximately 2.5km*917kg/m^3*333.55kJ/kg / (0.5*(0.7-0.2)*173W/m^2) = 560 years.
From Paleoclimate data we know that the Eemian was approximately 1.5 C warmer and had sea levels were ~ 4.5 m higher. So this suggests that the equilibrium change in sea level is approximately 3 m / C. If the sea level response to a change in temperature is an exponential decay to equilibrium then given that the 0.8 C temperature increase since pre-industrial times occurred over a relatively short time period relative to time scale of the ice-albedo feedback, the expected rate of sea level rise should be approximately 3 m / C * 0.8 C / 560 y = 43 cm per century. Which is consistent with the half meter per century prediction by the IPCC.
Hansen’s ‘predictions’ of sea level rise, which assume a constant doubling time are completely unphysical. The rate of change of radiative forcing doesn’t have a constant doubling time so why would sea level rise? Radiative forcing is increasing roughly quadratically, so a quadratic fit to recent sea level data to make predictions seems far more reasonable. And not only that, but Hansen isn’t even fitting his bad model of constant doubling time to the data. He is just choosing arbitrary values as going ‘well if sea level rise has an arbitrary doubling time of X then we will get a sea level rise of Y’.
If I obtain sea level data from here (http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_data_cmar.html) and fit a quadratic trend, it suggests that sea levels will rise by 31 cm from 2015 to 2115.
To me it seems that James Hansen is completely disrespecting the scientific method, using unphysical assumptions to get the conclusion he wants, and completely neglecting proper statistical analysis.
If you want to do it that way, you can take your loss rate as linear, so in a century you have lost (100/560=)18% of your ice. Hansen’s 5 m only requires a 7% loss.
That doesn’t make sense. You aren’t even taking the amount of warming into account. You are just taking 2 numbers (100 years for a century and 560 year decay time), dividing them and then assigning the result to something unrelated.
What you computed was not a decay time, but energy available per unit time, so linear makes more sense.
Just a thought. If you want to be really cool and work in ‘all’ the basic ‘magic math numbers’, reform your equation moniker to 0=e^i*pi + 1. There is even a serious math history book on that theme. A chapter on the evolution of each symbol.
Yep, written that way you get both the additive and multiplicative identities. How do you get pi on the iPad? This thing sucks for writing.
@-1=e^iπ:
If you’re not Martin Davis you’ve stolen his identity. Hopefully you don’t also have his credit card.
An internet mate of mine, Spangled Drongo, old yachtsman, compiled a list of biggest decadal sea level rises going by Jevrejeva et al [2008]. (SD spent a lot of his life under sail in highly competitive conditions. He’s someone with a compulsive eye on the sea, alert to every change, long or short term.) It’s only a list of decadal rises based on the one study, but worth a bo-peep:
1804-1813 12.75
1803-1812 10.67
1728-1737 10.30
1789-1798 8.38
1842-1851 7.87
1858-1867 7.82
1788-1797 7.72
1861-1870 7.66
1808-1817 7.58
1785-1794 7.18
And here are the top ten decades since “CAGW”.
1989-1998 4.66
1990-1999 3.95
1991-2000 3.86
1956-1965 3.79
1986-1995 3.78
1974-1983 3.71
1952-1961 3.65
1993-2002 3.63
1988-1997 3.44
1975-1984 3.30
You can see Hansen’s problem, even with swampy old Manhattan – and even after some doofus drastically narrowed the mouth of the Hudson in the 80s to make more real estate.
That’s average annual rise for each decade, of course, not the total rise for the decade. SLR is sluggish but not that sluggish!
Is there a bigger, more obvious climate beat-up than the sea level thing? They’ll take any old bit of subsidence or erosion anywhere as proof. No wonder Hansen looks like he’s swallowed a bristlecone. Burp.
Mosomoso
What we have to remember is that hansens argument is that sea level rise in the future will be non Linear, that is to say the sea will suddenly rise due to our past actions and may do so several times.
Therefore extrapolating current sea level rise and just adding a bit more to it each year over a century is not how he sees things. In that respect he has a lot in common with Peter wadhams who also saw a sudden rapid change, this time in the arctic ice.
People are now edging away from wadhams looking at him nervously. Hansen has played the clever game by forecasting things beyond the lifetime of anyone posting here.
Tonyb
I was thinking of Hansen’s near term predictions for NY many years ago. All the fudging and back-tracking over that has taught him to go strictly long-term, maybe.
This non-linear thing is sort of like the transition from graceful ballet to Can-Can? And just in time for you-know-what.
Look out Jevrjeva et al! Jimbo is warming the punters up for Paris!
Mosomoso
Proves my point, one minute you’re sitting on a hill watching ballet and the next minute you’re up to your neck in water watching can can dancers float by.
Tonyb
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I look forward to Judith’s knee jerk response in a day or two. We’ve certainly had plenty so far!
Tom
Some of us have been reading Hansen’s papers for years. This paper has been available for some time and has also been read.
What is your opinion of it?
tonyb
In view of the intervening period of time since the release of James Hanson’s latest paper, one would rather doubt that Judith’s response would ever be described as being of a “knee jerk” kind.
Sorry, I have misspelled her name – it was Hansen.
I was almost certain that an old woman had written this piece.
When someone makes such egregious errors in forecasting as Hansen did in
the 1980s about NYC, then he loses privileges and society should put him into a quasi-limited time out until he has proven his reformation.
In other words, who cares what he says.
We ‘re gonna be Venus any day now.
Verses your plain old jerk comments?
Judith,
Spreading fear for the future derives from ignorance, not enlightenment. That is the test for true science. The pursuit of knowledge (fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, if you like) is man’s greatest task. The truth from this knowledge is what it is, emotion free,,
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Time to discard peer/pal review to the dustbin of history. Open peer review via the web is required.
I used to marvel, as a joke as a kid, that the ocean exactly meets the shoreline without gaps or overlap anywhere.
That was back when it could be a joke.
No surprise that the Wash Post bit into it early. They have become a tabloid of circus atmosphere…
Political activism continues to corrupt Climate Science. Get the message out to the press in time for Paris. Who cares anymore about integrity, accuracy, peer reviews. So much for all the discussions (since climate gate) to clean up the process. Could Hansen have released this work in 2014 for peer review and publication? After all he claims he worked on the paper for eight years. Notice the large number of coauthors willingly giving their support to this sneak-around!
Shameful.
“Who cares anymore about integrity, accuracy, peer reviews.”
Anymore?
When did they ever care?
Let me ask Gleick or Mikey.
Gleik and Mikey
and Cook and Lew,
kinda tricksey,
find ways to do
feats of ignoble
-cause climate
-sci diss-ruption.
“What role does a ‘possible’ worst case scenario play, apart from clarifying what is plausible? Well, to alarm people and to help build political will to ‘act’ on emissions reductions, particularly for forthcoming Paris COP.” – JC
Or ” to inform people” and lay out the options on action.
Word choice is revealing.
Perhaps Judith is being alarmist about Hansens informing.
Sorry, I have been much more positive about this paper than the ‘establishment’ warm climate scientists. I actually find it to be an interesting and useful paper (even tho there is much in it that is not easy to defend scientifically).
If you were to dice and slice the paper, perhaps you could then serve us up with the parts of the dish that are worth eating? As far as I can see most parts of it are pretty rotten.
Tonyb
Dr. Curry,
I see by the time tag that the hour was late and maybe you had something else to say but you needed your rest.
Why do you believe that the David Archer formal review at ACPD was well worth the read?
The formal review looks nothing like a review for a medical manuscript. This would be more appropriate for inclusion in “letters to the editor”, or a press release from a university’s lab to be included in a newsletter on what is happening within the department.
Obviously you saw something in the review that should be highlighted. I would like to know what that something was.
I am not sure I understand the threading as I have read your response and I went back to DA’s review and I am pasting what I believe you have meant regarding positive aspects to this paper.
“The other is the recognition that warming ocean temperatures at the grounding line for the glaciers is driving a really strong flow and thus melting response. Temperatures at this depth tend to have a paradoxical inverse relationship with surface temperatures, which can cool due to fresh meltwater input, trapping heat in the subsurface.”
I accede to you expertise yet I had a lingering thought: particularly at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, or more to the point, under the WAIS under water volcano heating of the water has been suggested as an explanation for the differential behavior of East Antarctic and West Antarctic ice sheets.
An elaborate climate model may have been substituted for a simple explanation.
I don’t think the scientists who really matter have spoken yet. Maybe Archer. Perhaps some just won’t talk to the press, and who can blame them, but, as a for instance, what does Rohling think? A lot of this is rooted in his work. And Broecker?
Even the Water Chef. Lol.
Richard Alley is the only one of the scientists interviewed by the media (that I’ve seen) that knows anything about continental glaciers and sea level rise.
Just a comment about framing, irrespective of how your views compare to others.
By the way, latest summer edition of US CLIVAR includes five articles on the hiatus, warming the abyss and the global warming slowdown. Interesting and data filled perspectives, even if a little one sided.
See link; http://usclivar.org/sites/default/files/documents/2015/Variations2015Summer-1_0.pdf
Scott
Scott
The deep and abyssal oceans have been warming since the 1990’s according to Sarah Purkiss in your link
That is complete conjecture. I was an ‘expert reviewer’ for the oceans section of the draft ar5 and when the report stated This abyssal warmimg I asked to see the data that supported this but they were never able to come up with snything at the time.
Last year at a climate conference in Exeter organised by the Met office, Thomas stocker said ‘we do not have the technology to measure the deep ocrans.’
Our knowledge of the oceans down to 2000 meters is sketchy enough, to believe we have a handle on the abyssal deep is nonsense.
Tonyb
And if you ask the question how does the OHC warming, at any depth, compare to the trend before 1950, all you get is a little deer in the headlights look.
Yep, and I see this other side of reason, one you legitimately explore. From my public perspective it is that the Wash Post will predictably only support – inflexibly and benightedly I worry -one side of the argument.
@tonyb: Our knowledge of the oceans down to 2000 meters is sketchy enough, to believe we have a handle on the abyssal deep is nonsense.
I would say that the most important two numbers here are,
1. What is the total thermal flux in TW across the main thermocline; and
2. how certain are we of it (as a variance or whatever)?
As is informing people has ever been one of your objectives Michael.
New Scientist on Hansen
Michael Le Page reviews:
Pause for Hansen. Very funny.
Perhaps someone could explain the “Antarctic melting is already a century ahead of schedule” statement.
As long as steric influence is the largest source of sea level rise these statements simply don’t make sense.
PA With Antarctic ice continuing at above satellite era means, is that possible? See sea ice graphs.
Perhaps we have a disagreement about what sea ice, land ice, and steric mean.
http://www.un-igrac.org/publications/422
The ground water contribution is 0.8 mm/y and the ground water component is rising.
Greenland loss last year was 0 and looks to be insignificant.
The Antarctic contribution is guessed to be between 0.19 and 0.4 mm/y. ICESAT failed February 2010 and ICESAT-2 isn’t scheduled for launch until 2017. Not only isn’t there coverage – there isn’t overlap so we will have no intercalibration.
The recent increases in sea level would appear to be entirely steric … which means the sea level current value won’t be very informative until after the La Nina next year completes.
Lots of Antarctic sea ice would argue that the loss of ice sheet mass is decreasing – however on the subject of sea ice and mass loss there is a lot of dancing.
It will be interesting to see how the next IPCC report handles groundwater. Some other component has to give. When that happens they will have to retrack on their earlier assumptions. Trying to get 5 pounds of flour in a 4 pound bag.
What a load of BS. Imply that something very unlikely is happening and that it is soley caused by something that at best is a minor/negligible contributor to natural processes. Very dishonest.
aaron, “What a load of BS. Imply that something very unlikely is happening and that it is soley caused by something that at best is a minor/negligible contributor to natural processes. Very dishonest.”
It is marketing. You only think it is dishonest because you are not in the target demographic.
ck, they’ll just attribute the difference to increased retention of water on land by soil and biota, also more frequent rain and slower movement of moisture across land and back into the ocean. All of which are probably true and bode very well for society in a warming world with increasing GHGs.
What troubles me is any time I try applying any sort of engineering analysis to the numbers from the strong warming camp the numbers don’t add up.
They seem to take short term trends and assume they can continue forever.
What role does a public forum for peer review play other than for power advocacy and a public display of veiled intimidation by way of authority?
Hansen didn’t set himself up for public ridicule or damage of reputation from outlandish claims because risk assessment from the reaction to this paper was already calculated.
I just have to ask, if Hansen’s SLR projections are true, is there any Non-genocidal (or genocidal for that matter) CO2 reduction policy that will significantly affect it?
Canman
If all the denizens chip in for your fare would you like to ask that very question at the Paris fest?
tonyb
tonyb
Deep Argo now measures the abyss. Temperature and other parameters. Oceanographic vessels deploy them on tracks across the surface. Still no global coverage but as the importance of the unknown parameters of the deep become more obvious measurement solutions are being developed. The comment you refer to my have been offhand or flippant from Tom Stocker. Slowly the observations will improve and this is good.
Still sparse and huge error bars but improvements underway.
I understand your reaction to the CLIVAR articles but these are smart honest scientists. May be some confirmation bias or doing what is necessary to keep funds flowing. But the data is not tortured as in Karl.
Scott
tonyb
Here is a link for deep Argo.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-tech/deep-argo-diving-answers-ocean%E2%80%99s-abyss
Scott
Scott
Thomas stocker said it at a scientific conference as part of a team of expert lead authors representing the IPCC and discussing the science in the report. It was as part of a general discussion on oceans.
He was neither being flippant or offhand. Thomas stocker does neither very well.
The data is so frail it is on life support, maybe in ten years it might tell us something but not at the moment
Tonyb
Scott
We need much better information on land and especially at sea. Deep Argo are in effect still prototypes and we have no information of any consequence from them yet and until sufficient have been deployed for a decade won’t know what the data is telling us.
Here is the deep Argo workshop held last December
https://usclivar.org/sites/default/files/meetings/2014/ocb-presentations/Johnson_G.pdf
We do not yet have the technology to measure the deep ocean. It will be great when we have the ability to do so in a meaningful fashion
Tonyb
tonyb
Nice presentation.
Thanks,\
Scott
it is important that the science come up with an answer that lies somewhere between
1. Cant do anything we are doomed
2. Do something.
Agreed! except there is a third category, there is no need to do something! And a fourth, the cure is worse than the problem
Tonyb
Sometimes the right answer is to do nothing.
I say Lomborg and Ridley have the best in between answer. More energy research.
As Ed Banfield once said: “Don’t just do something! Sit there!”
“It is important that the science come up with an answer that lies somewhere between
1. Cant do anything we are doomed
2. Do something.”
Nonsense. That’s not science. Decision making about results, thaty is not the science. That’s what you twerk for, not science
Steven Mosher: it is important that the science come up with an answer that lies somewhere between
1. Cant do anything we are doomed
2. Do something.
Lots of suggestions over the past few decades: more research, robustifying the infrastructure, improved irrigation and flood control, saving more resources for disaster recovery. Mostly from lukewarmers like Bjorn Lomborg — not well received by alarmists.
Some of the greatest man-made disasters in history were made by following the chain
1. We must do something.
2. This is something.
3. We must do this.
Science does not provide answers to these questions. Science needs to provide objective input and data. Unfortunately too many climate scientists have decided that they need to skew the data to make it look like we are doomed unless policy makers adopt policies that suit a particular agenda.
Based on the current state of knowledge of climate it is abundantly clear that the likelihood that we are doomed is minimal and the need to expedite a manic drive to 100% renewables (wind and solar) would cause significantly more harm than good.
And that’s the truth!
NASA’s Pluto exploration gives a respite from the doom-and-gloom discussions of planet earth.
“The haze is extensive,” Summers says. “It’s forming high in the atmosphere, where the temperatures are hot (bold by jmw) … It’s a mystery.”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150727-solar-system-pluto-science-space-nasa-planets/
and
“Some parts are kind of baked, like near the equator, and other parts receive the condensation of these ices, as you can see on the north pole,”
“non-water ices are flowing around and surrounding those mountains, and pooling in large impact craters”
“Nitrogen ice, carbon monoxide ice, methane ice—these ices are geologically soft and malleable, even at Pluto conditions, and they will flow in the same way that glaciers do on the Earth
Feynman’s gasket would be a bit brittle at the “hot” temps!
I also like the fact that Pluto is 10C cooler than predicted because of the 3 phase transition of nitrogen.
I wonder about the source of that methane. Titan has some also. Interesting.
“That said, I am very sympathetic to what Hansen did. I regard him as a fellow maverick – thinking for himself and not afraid to challenge the ‘consensus’ – Hansen and I are of course on opposite ends of the climate maverick spectrum, with Hansen more alarmed and myself being less alarmed.”
if this were any other topic every reader here would WELCOME the healthy debate between you and Hansen.
kinda weird that they don’t see this.
I thought the debate was over? Besides, there is no debating with Mr. Death Train. He thinks more ants will die on a 80-deg F cloudy day (CO2 warming) than will die on a 70-degF sunny day using a magnifying glass (insolation warming). You can’t debate crazy.
Just go back to your hole until you and your hippie friends crank out the numbers on particulate albedo warming ;^) I want my free ice cream and I want it now.
Which are you, horst or graben? Maybe one scoop of each? ;)
Well, a debate between a climate scientist and James Hansen would be illuminating to us lesser lights that are not as familiar with the issues.
lets repeat.
The debate over whether c02 is a GHG is over. skeptics lost.
the debate is
A) how much warming OR
B) how much SLR
Note that B is dependent on A.
At some point skeptics will join the debate. for now they seem stuck on
1. Can Downwelling IR heat the ocean
2. Do the planets control sunspots
3. Cook was wrong
4. Mann was wrong.
5. Vikings and grapes
6. soot on snow
7. adjustments to temperatures..
and a bunch of other side issues
If B is related to A, can A be inferred from B? In tempo or lag offset?
The “settled” debate seems to be the political one for Paris where the white papers of the folks that matter are now being (or have already been) drawn up. Do you think the Dragons and Indians are ready to be confined to their cages?
Steven Mosher: and a bunch of other side issues
You omitted non-radiative transfer of heat from the Earth surface. Not a “side issue”, because more heat is transferred from the surface by advection/convenction and evapotranspiration than by radiation.
A) how much warming OR
You don’t seem to appreciate the role of non-radiative transfer processes in addressing that issue. The “radiation only” equilibrium models do not address the other issue that the layers of the surface and atmosphere can warm at different rates because they have a different mix of cooling mechanisms.
On the aspect of who is winning and who is losing, I think that over the past 10 years the scientific support of the lukewarmer positions has overwhelmed the scientific support of the “alarmist” positions, such as Hansen et al 1988 and Hansen’s public pronouncements. Very few people have ever written that CO2 does not absorb and emit long-wave IR. The skepticism has been directed toward the claim that, in the atmosphere, increasing CO2 has caused and will cause dire effects.
Another “non side issue” you evade is the “natural variability” that is independent of CO2. Your only reference is “Do the planets control sunspots”, which is only about one part of a possible mechanism behind the natural variability present in the temperature series. Without solid estimates of the natural variability, no hypothesis test or estimate of the amount of warming since 1880 that is due to CO2 can be made. Every calculation to date makes some guess as to the amount of the temperature increase since 1880 that is due to everything else.
18 years of no significant rise in temperature while CO2 was poured into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate, the earth got greener, and severe weather didn’t increase… the question has become whether CO2 causes more harm than good. Academics are losing the debate big time from lack of convincing evidence that anything bad is happening or will happen. Wake the phuck up.
Joined the debate a long ago.
As for your enumerated points, arguing anout 1 just shows confusion about physics. 2 just shows confusion. 3 is important, since the debate is not just about science, it is about the political policy choices that ensue. POTUS used Cook’s 97% meme. Important. 4 is also important– AR3 iconography, oft repeated (Marcott mess guest posted here). 5 is important, simplest way to show Mann wrong. Much easier than McIntyre’s Yamal larches, strpbark bristlecones, or centered PCA with red/pink noise. 6, we are still learning, at least I am. 7 your previous stnce is a tempest in a teapot, much ado about nothing. I think it is a symbolic issue, an indication of potential government institutional bias. Karl based on Huang, erasing the surface temp pause in the same issue of Science that without giving the key adjustment uncertainty (Kennedy 2011 buoy to ship intake 0.12 +- 1.7C rather illustrates that. Read David Rose, Spectator, 7/22/2015. He gets it for the UK, even if you don’t out in Berkeley.
Skeptics do not argue CO2 is not a GHG-Tyndall showed it was in 1859. That is denier land. Not skeptic land. Or lukewarmer land, where I happen to reside, albeit in its colder temperate zones.
IMO don’t paint with too broad a brush, as you just did. And don’t dismiss so easily the ‘sound bite’ side shows (Cook, Mann) that have a large influence on the public and on outcome stances, as Obama and the Pope illustrate. IMO you contribute interesting perspectives. In ice skating scoring parlance, technical points high. Degree of difficulty quite variable, as here. Style points low to zero.
and of course all the side issue folks come on to complain about being a side show.
There is one question. it can take two forms.
focus beuller
Steven,
Not so fast. SLR is not soley dependent on CO2. See volcanoes and geothermal and West Antarctica. That is not a side issue but is one in need of deeper understanding.
Steven Mosher: and of course all the side issue folks come on to complain about being a side show.
To you, climate science is a side issue.
SLR is probably not significantly driven by CO2. CO2 level in the atmosphere is almost certainly driven by ocean temperature so there is a relation. This relation was revealed by the 400+ year lag between temperature rise and CO2 rise found in air bubbles trapped in Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Sea level in the Eemian (prvevious glacial cycle) was some 9 meters higher than the current maximum achieved in the Holocene.
This lends strong support to temperature and sea level rise greater than any in the “Anthropocene” didn’t need human activity to drive it and that sea level (temperature) rise precedes CO2 rise in the naturally driven glacial/interglacial cycle.
CO2 appears to be a non-concern in potential adverse climate change while natural cooling cycles should be the great concern as the current interglacial period is older than average and not getting any younger. The benefits of fossil fuel energy to humanity is immense and the fertilization of the atmosphere and potential for some modest warming in high latitude winters makes it just what the doctor ordered for a growing biosphere.
Steven Mosher | July 27, 2015 at 4:45 pm
“lets repeat. The debate over whether c02 is a GHG is over. skeptics lost.”
Skepticism is healthy and covers a wide range of views and beliefs
Everyone is a Skeptic.
You, for instance, are skeptical about claims that GHG increases do not have negative feedbacks that put a brake on the mount of warming that the system, not the gas , can achieve.
So you make a simplistic catchall statement above that is patently false and even worse that you know is false.
Most Skeptics agree that CO2 is a GHG.
You know that.
There is no lost argument with most skeptics.
only with your attitude and selective use of English.
Skepticism is healthy and covers a wide range of views and beliefs
“the debate is A) how much warming”
Warming??? Well straight away bias. not unexpected
Which way will temperatures go is the correct English
In a world with cooling influences like a new Maunder minimum coming, With sulphate levels increasing raising albedo, Ditto with clouds, Increased vegetation mopping up the increased CO2,Volcanoes spewing cooling ash clouds.
Forgot about those did we, with the myopic, one gas to cause heating view.
There are over 30 postulated warmist causes for lowering the world temperature , Steven. Used by Warmists to explain the pause.
I am sure you have given credence to half a dozen.
If each one caused a half centigrade degree decrease in global warming we could be 15 degrees cooler [hyperbole as you like it so much]
“B) how much SLR Note that B is dependent on A.”
True but not only due to A
So there is no glacial rebound [ glacial isostatic adjustment] and no erosion ?
At some point skeptics will join the debate. for now they seem stuck on
“1. Can Downwelling IR heat the ocean.” Try can upwelling IR ever get to space?
“2. Do the planets control sunspots”
“3. Cook was wrong” only when posting skeptic stuff as Lubos
“4. Mann was wrong.” true [thanks for proving it]
” 5. Vikings and grapes” natural variation or natural feedback
“6. soot on snow” worse is soot in air
“7. adjustments to temperatures”. What warms the earth most?, the sun or your adjustments?
“and a bunch of other side issues” covered above
“Steven,
Not so fast. SLR is not soley dependent on CO2. See volcanoes and geothermal and West Antarctica. That is not a side issue but is one in need of deeper understanding.”
WHO SAID IT WAS SOLEY DEPENDENT?
not me..
You didnt see me argue that SLR was ENTIRELY reliant on c02 did you?
I said there was one question: and two forms
get that..
Steven,
You implied it. “The debate over whether c02 is a GHG is over. skeptics lost.
the debate is
A) how much warming OR
B) how much SLR”
(note that b is dependent on a)
Since your argument began by indicating skeptics lost the debate on CO2 which would lead to your A & B above. Unless of course you have another cause for “warming” and “SLR”. Theories?
“The debate over whether c02 is a GHG is over. skeptics lost.”
Besides the sky dragon types, can you point to which sceptics were actually involved in such a debate?
Wait a minute. I’m not a skeptic, but the big question I want to see resolved is ‘what is the sensitivity of the atmosphere to a doubling of concentrations of CO2e?’
TomFuller, “Wait a minute. I’m not a skeptic, but the big question I want to see resolved is ‘what is the sensitivity of the atmosphere to a doubling of concentrations of CO2e?’”
You blew it, you are a skeptic. You only need to know that increased CO2e will cause something that could be prevented provided we stop all CO2e. Even if we don’t stop all CO2e, what we do stop will save us from some portion of the unknown catastrophe that awaits.
Steven Mosher:
The only honest answers for the foreseeable future are (A) we don’t know and (B) we don’t know.
Until we have reasonably trustworthy answers to (A) and/or (B), the serious policy debate will continue to be over how much to spend on general precaution and specific preparation for things we don’t know will ever happen — let alone when they might occur in the next 100 years.
Who all is worried about rivers running red with white hot heat due to global warming? Is anyone that silly… that crazy?
Hansen’s been on the outside looking in since he came out in support of nuclear energy.
Yep. I suspect lots of people would be giving this paper more love if he hadn’t used the N-word.
The well-funded AGW government bureaucracy provides value to society in much the same way as bicycle thieves provide value when applying their skills.
It will be interesting to see how the APCD discussions of Hansen’s paper goes. Like Judith, I am interested in how this new format/process works.
So, registered and have posted a long critique of both Archer’s comment and Hansen’s premise. Essentially a long version of my main comments upthread. Referenced the relevant Blowing Smoke essays. A real time experiment indirectly supported by Climate Etc.
Denizens who are not interested in the rest of the book’s contents can read both essays, substantially unchanged, as previous guest posted here at CE. To those denizens whose comments and critiques improved the final book versions, thanks. Could not have imagined at the time how relevant they would become to Hansen’s newest magnum opus.
A dead thread update. My very specific comment was posted. Someone responded with several papers from one decade (first of 21st) which are not relevant to the entire century. (And who obviously had not read my referenced background materials, just a knee jerk). I responded one decade does not Greenland climate make. Try at least 3.
So, the forum appears useful. There has so far only been one other comment thread, the usual silliness about whether CO2 is a GHG. Not helpful at all.
That said, I am very sympathetic to what Hansen did. I regard him as a fellow maverick – thinking for himself and not afraid to challenge the ‘consensus’ – Hansen and I are of course on opposite ends of the climate maverick spectrum, with Hansen more alarmed and myself being less alarmed.
Two of the admirable features of the paper that deserve more notice are: (a) conjectures are clearly labelled as such before their consequences are worked out; (b) there is a fulsome (if perhaps non-exhaustive — I can’t tell) discussion of uncertainties. It would be a miracle if much of the paper survives scrutiny, but it is a tour de force of hypothetico-deductive reasoning with reference to empirical knowledge; there will doubtless be many future investigations focusing on particular parts of the argument.
MM, I cannot disagree with you and our hostess concerning the paper itself. If that were the main issue about it, I would be in full agreement. It isn’t.
The main issue is what its PR suggests, and what comments like reviewer Archer are saying. Propaganda wrapped in scientific working out of conjecture consequences is still propaganda. Lipstick on a pig, and all that.
I spent a lot of time (years) working through SLR for myself. Hansen conjectures the impossible, then works out the impossible consequences of impossible conjectures, then invokes the prcautionary principle. Even in the abstract. SciFi. Nothing more.
Nothing’s impossible. Some things are less likely than others. Write that down.
For instance it’s possible that a quantum fluctuation almost but not quite impossibly improbable produced the entire highly ordered universe we observe with at least 7 billion sentient beings able to observe and experiment. It is however more likely that a quantum fluctuation produced just a single sentient being with false memories of an environment that doesn’t really exist. Neigher religious bigots nor religious zealots seem willing to embrace either of those possibilities. The thing of it is the universe probably doesn’t care what they think, if they think at all.
Quantum unicorns are a possibility. Certain cranks suspect they are responsible for those annoying crop circles. Who really knows?
Quantum unicorns that exist only in the imagination of a sentient being are even more likely than real unicorns. Keep in mind the less detail involved the more likely it was created de novo by law & chance. Hence the Boltzmann Brain proposed by super famous 19th century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann the father of statistical mechanics. If you don’t know Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics you really don’t know shiit about math, science, or engineering IMHO.
Have you heard of the L. Ron Hubbard Brain, springy? That’s your speed.
No Don. Never heard of L. Ron Hubbard brain. Since you did then that makes it your speed instead of mine. I’d add the caveat however that L. Ron Hubbard is known the world over and had a net worth of $600,000,000 which, compared to a nobody like you, makes his speed quite a bit more than yours.
I guess Judith feels sorry for you, springy. Your comments are the most insulting on the board, but she feels you need to be protected from my relatively mild retorts. We need a list of the words that put her in a schoolmarmish mode. Anyway, go back to stalking Rud. I am done with you.
You never did know where to draw the line, Don.
Really? Most insulting? Istvan insulted half the population on the planet who happen to believe that there is a creator responsible for the order in the universe. A number of accomplished climate scientists too like John Christy and Roy Spencer. I insult a few selected people on a case by case basis usually. Wholesale insult I leave to experts.
I didn’t realize that you were punishing Rud. Carry on with your childish vendetta.
Quite so. I support their climate science completely. And alao absolutely object to their further proselytizing of fundamentalist ‘Christian Values’ like ID.
Which just shows that our world is not so ‘black and white’. It is nuanced.
No actually Rud you said that ID proponents cannot be considered reliable scientists.
I understand you’d want to walk back that remark but the internet doesn’t forget. You own it now. Man up to it.
No actually Rud you said that ID proponents cannot be considered reliable scientists.
http://judithcurry.com/2015/07/22/eco-post-modernism/#comment-719912
I understand you’d want to walk back that remark but the internet doesn’t forget. You own it now. Man up to it. Period.
Can you define the association fallacy, Rud? Without looking it up. Surely it’s taught somewhere on the way to a Harvard law degree.
ristvan | July 28, 2015 at 12:17 am |
“And alao absolutely object to their further proselytizing of fundamentalist ‘Christian Values’ like ID.”
First rule of holes. But far be it from me to take away your shovel.
What have you got against fundamentalist Christian values?
ristvan: The main issue is what its PR suggests,
Respectfully, I hope, I disagree; I think the main issue in the long term (and I am always thinking of the long term) is the scientific content of the paper.
A similar issue arose with the Romps et al paper which generated a lot commentary about the increased risk of fires. I think that the long term impact of that paper will not be the modeled increases in lighting ground strike rate or fire risk, but the modeling of the increased rate of transfer of energy from surface to mid-troposphere and higher by advection/convection.
We have gone from the science is settled to not even knowing if sea level rise will be linear or non-linear.
Well at least we now know we don’t understand the physics yet.
Lots of room for science for sure.
Not so much room for political action based on the current state of climate science (in my opinion).
Conclusion: Do nothing politically. Keep doing science and trying to understand the physics. Revisit this issue every 10 years.
+1
“We have gone from the science is settled to not even knowing if sea level rise will be linear or non-linear.”
No that issue has always been on the table. the IPCC pretty much took the
“linear’ route since predicting a loss of WA has always been dicey.
So,, thats why you see 1m from the IPCC and hansen and others have argued that this is conservative.
The science that is settled.. to repeat… is this
1. c02 is a ghg
2. its increasing due to man
3. It will warm the planet
What has always been at issue is
How much warming and How will this drive landed ice melt.
The science on that has never been settled. But Hansen has laid out
a narrative. whining about it doesnt change his science.
You actually have to do more science to displace his account.
mere criticism… well heck, thats a stupid pet trick
to use your words, Mosher. Hansen’s narrative is not science. it is a narrative speculation. Man, I could construct those all the time for potential investors. The narrative would always be always that they will get rich quick. Get the difference compared to audited financials?
yes Rud.
I wish you had done a more complete job on your reply.
I finished reading it and really wanted to read more..
so what I read was good, but I wanted to hear more..
Don’t mistake me as a fan of Hansen. But he has taken a stab
I wait for others to look at the same puzzle ppieces and construct a more coherent narritive.
Steven Mosher: mere criticism… well heck, thats a stupid pet trick
Mere criticism seems to have prevented Hansen’s narration from effecting a revolution in energy development. Kyoto, the Nobels, Gore’s Oscar, etc. made it look like a juggernaut was building, but the more recent conferences look like the movement is stalled. For policy purposes, it is sometimes sufficient to show that the alarums are exaggerated or baseless, or that proposed solutions are unlikely to work.
Mosher’s canned response: “Do your own science!”
To illustrate the stupidity of that advice lets say one doesn’t like a movie. Another person with a different opinion of it says “Make your own movie”.
Uh… no. I don’t make movies. I’m a consumer not a producer of movies. I will simply not watch movies I don’t like and will advise others to not waste time or money on it. Duh.
If U have never made a movie, your opinion doesnt count.
Steve,
That is right up there among the dumbest statements on this site.
You have allowed this stup*d argument to lead you into such a dumb statement.
Springer’s metaphor was relatively good in regard to your constant “do your own science” rant. And now you look foolish.
I believe everyone knows that it doesn’t matter if your fellow movie makers and the critics (who don’t make movies, but get paid to comment on them) love your films. If the ticket buying public doesn’t, you fail.
“I believe everyone knows that it doesn’t matter if your fellow movie makers and the critics (who don’t make movies, but get paid to comment on them) love your films. ”
tell it to an oscar winner.
Steven Mosher: If U have never made a movie, your opinion doesnt count.
If someone wants me to pay the price of admission, then my opinion does count. Lots of movies have lost $$$$ when people who had never made movies of their own decided not to attend a showing.
People don’t make movies. Teams do. Producers fund movies for different reasons–not always financial. Check out 100% of movies made about climate change as evidence.
Directors work on projects for different reasons–not always financial. Prestige, padding a resume, working with team members you like, etc.
Ditto for actors, crew and catering services.
I’ve worked on the team for several movies–including one martial arts film that you would have liked Steve–if it had ever been completed. Sigh…
Steve,
1, I don’t personally know any Oscar winners.
2, being cryptic rarely gets the point across.
The point is simple dave.
If you want to have influence you have to do some damn science.
Now, U are a smart guy.. Look what Nic Lewis did.. heck even Anthony published, willis, troy masters, jeff Id, Zeke, ATTP, monkton, a whole
host of guys less smart than you have had an influence. So, ya you can not watch the movie.. and be like every other putz in texas. or you can amplify your influence.
You know about shipping product right?
Steven Mosher: If you want to have influence you have to do some damn science.
Or, you could make a movie like Al Gore, or get appointed like Lisa Jackson. You could win an election, a la the Senators from Oklahoma or the then junior Senator from Illinois. You might try stand-up comedy or radio commentary. You could be a witty and well-informed online comment-monger like Marc Morano.
On everything, you have a narrow perspective.
Matthew,
Left out Tom Steyer. Influencing the influencers?
Think he’s ever done a ‘science’?
Peter wadhams says he didn’t claim other arctic scientists were murdered
he is making a complaint to the press council
http://greatwhitecon.info/2015/07/professor-peter-wadhams-complaint-to-ipso/
Tonyb
Bit of a problem for him, since he did. Chap has clearly lost his marbles.
Re: Glover Park Group
” The Group is also involved in lobbying, but it definitely seems to be non-partisan (i.e. open to pretty much all paying customers – I wonder how much Hansen paid for their services and where the funds came from).”
I had hoped Revkin, who raised the issue, would revisit his journalistic roots and dig into the question — so far he hasn’t. I have brought it to his attention several times — we’ll have to wait and see. Glover Park Group does not come cheap….
Kip
I suggest it was al gores climate reality project who funded it. They run campaigns using WPP who own Glover park
http://www.wpp.com/probono/2014/showcase/environment/climate-reality-project/
Alternatively the group does do some pro bono work so this might be an alternative to actual funding.
Tonyb
Tonyb,
From your link:
“Nobel Laureate and former US Vice-President Al Gore and his Climate Reality Project (CRP) requested WPP’s help in creating an integrated communications campaign to put pressure on world leaders to commit to reductions in carbon emissions. These commitments were to be discussed at a United Nations Summit in New York on September 23rd, 2014, and ratified at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris, in December, 2015. The aim of the campaign, in Al Gore’s words, was to put ‘a price on carbon in the economy, and a price on denial in politics.'”
Wow! This is the first I have heard about WPP and big Al Gore. Amazing!
Nobel laureate? I wonder if big Al is still in the carbon credit trading biz.
Tonyb, your knowledge never ceases to amaze. Thanks for connecting these dots. Stunning.
Do you talk about how amazing Tony Brown is in any of your ebooks?
WPP owns everything–I think they are an umbrella for hundreds of ad agencies, PR companies and even market research firms. And each member of the WPP family has no clue about what the other companies are doing.
Reply to Tonyb ==> Thank you — it may well be WPP — however, they are a large umbrella and may not know or decide what their little bits are doing.
I have queried Glover Park directly on the issue of who their client was.
If I get a reply, I’ll post it here.
Hansen, jumps the shark … again … and again … and again …
…’While capes caked off in slices
In the universal crisis.
But with one step backward taken.
I saved myself from going.’
Robert Frost.
We needed that! :)
+10 to you as well Beth :)
+10
10 ! Heh thx, Peter.. )
I imagine Hansen will be sad if the current El Nino wanes …
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/tlon_heat.gif
Here is an article by Hansen on the background to his paper.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-james-hansen/multi-meter-sea-level-rise-is-an-issue-for-todays-public_b_7875828.html
Jim D, you have a big problem. Hearty’s 1999 paper from Bermuda/Bahamas ‘data’ (mainly storms, not SLR) has since been rather thoroughly discredited. On multiple grounds Hansen ignored.. Choose shakey/just plain wrong (O’Leary, WA) stuff to justify the impossible? Right. Exactly what this thread, its comments, and my formal comments to the open journal are showing.
Rule one of holes. If in one and want out, stop digging!
Do you talk about the first rule of holes in any of your ebooks?
?
This O’Leary?
If so, look at his coauthors.
Actually, yes. You should read them rather than cyberstalking. I take it you are still offended by my explicit critique of ID. Or are you just mentally unstable, as it now appears?
Had to evict one of those types from my farm. Even the local Wisconsin county police would not accompany me after I appeared in person with the court order, requesting them to do so. Their having been out on so many calls from the sane youngest brother (my current tenant), and knowing what it might mean. So I did it myself, alone… . And with their prior blessing as to all possible outcomes. Ever been there, done that?
Respectfully request you lighten up. A lot. There is legal recourse, and all your previous offensive stuff has been archived for that explicit purpose.
Judith does not operate her blog to promote your kind of stuff. At least I do not think so. Please clean up your act. Or go away.
Istvan write:
“Or are you just mentally unstable, as it now appears?”
Sounds a bit on the libelous side to me.
Be careful, rud. He will borrow his neighbors big dogs and take pictures standing with them to scare you. Typical REMF behavior.
Well, you could dig sideways and up, creating a ramp and raising the floor beneath you with pile.
This link from that page to an article from last year is relevant to the mechanism. Expanding Antarctic sea ice trapping warm water as a positive feedback to the melting.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/01/antarctic-sea-ice-_n_5915800.html?cps=gravity_2845_-8976377466794668358
Oops, I meant this link.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/antarctic-sea-ice_n_5978238.html
That’s what I like about climate science. If there is more ice it means it is warming and a disaster looms, if there is less ice it means it is warming and a disaster looms. No matter what the observation the answer remains the same. It must be very easy to become a climate scientist these days. The answer is always you’re doomed, doomed I tell you.
Steve
“If there is more ice it means it is warming and a disaster looms, if there is less ice it means it is warming and a disaster looms. No matter what the observation the answer remains the same”
It’s the unscrewable pooch! And the money keeps on coming!
The skeptics just had the Antarctic sea ice crutch kicked away from them. The warmists have taken that territory now because the skeptics never had any idea why it was happening in a warming world while the warmists do.
I’m always impressed when scientists are completely wrong and then explain post hoc why the observations actually mean the exact opposite of what they would have meant under the initial expectations. Flexibility is a good thing. Let me know when they can stop showing off their amazing flexibility and start showing off their amazing ability to make accurate projections.
One has to use steroid induced motivated reasoning in order to ignore geothermal activity and its impact on warming waters from the West Antarctic Rift System. There is too much evidence to ignore a common sense deduction that tectonic transverse faults are at play in the region.
What exactly is causing the warm water, melt, and sea ice expansion?
How plausible is it that this is triggered by, largely, or even negligibly due to a 1/2% in radiative diffuse over the entire surface of world?
Personally, I think he’s just being used by his brethren as a sacrificial lamb, stalking horse or possibly even a Trojan one. We’ll let you float an outrageous idea, you’re already viewed as being a tad “Whacky”, plus your career is kinda over – Then the rest of us can seem to be “Real Scientists” tm, by pointing out just how “Whacky” you are in comparison to us. Lending us more credence with the wider scientific community and indirectly lending more credence to our not quite so “Whacky” ideas.
It’s Psychological Warfare, they are simply trying to manipulate their wider audience pre-Paris……
An irony here is that if Hansen is right, it is already too late for an emissions reduction to prevent a disastrous sea level rise and the best we can do is prepare for it, because it only takes 1 C, and our CO2 amount already commits us to that. On the other hand, if the skeptics are right about low sensitivity, it is not too late to do enough about emissions to prevent this 1 C scenario from happening.
If Hansen is right, then we might as well party like it’s 2099.
Never been a big Hansen fan, but he can spark a discussion and that in itself is a good thing. The advancement of science kinda depends on it. As always the big question in all of this is sensitivity. Hansen’s now trying to show that even the lower ends of the range are dangerous. Personally, I don’t think he’s done a good job but I actually think that was the point. None of this occurs in a vacuum and this is really a political endeavour. Unfortunately he’s become more of an advocate than a scientist these days. As to the wider question of what sensitivity is and what’s a safe range. I think the pause is important to this. As it would indicate that sensitivity is on the lower side and that natural variations play a similarly significant part. With regards to what’s safe and what’s not, I think that’s very interesting and it’s one of the reasons I follow the discussions on this site avidly. The world is not really steady state. It’s not a friendly environment generally. We have the good fortune to have experienced relatively benign and temperate conditions. In the short term I don’t think this will change very much even with our influences. Longer term.. The planet has spent longer swathed in ice than not, maybe we should be concerned more about that. A kilometre of ice above your head can kinda spoil your day….
As of yesterday the Greenland Ice Melt fell off a cliff. Below the multi-decadal average. Scratch off that source of hysteria.
http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/
http://www.eldoradocountyweather.com/forecast/greenland/Summit/Summit.php
http://www.dmi.dk/uploads/tx_dmidatastore/webservice/b/m/s/d/e/accumulatedsmb.png
Something weird is happening in Greenland. Apparently the ice sheet set a low record for albedo this year and things were melting briskly – but the last week something changed drastically.
The DMI data indicates there should have been a huge snowfall – but can’t find any reports of one.
Don’t know what is happening.
Just answered my question – the Summit has been flirting with 0-5°F temperatures. The data didn’t indicate snowfall, just 0 melting.
For the next 10 days the weather is going to float between -6°F and 22°F.
Why the Washington Post? It is the hiring of Chris Mooney from Mother Jones. Mooney is well known for pushing catastrophic climate change.
When discussing sudden sea level rise earlier, I mentioned that the study of the melting of arctic ice ledges/shelves that could cause this was a very new science and that the Met Office had a considerable degree of uncertainty on the subject and a few years ago had to advertise for an ice modeller. Here is the advert
—- —
‘Polar ice-sheet modelling scientist
Salary: £25,500 + competitive benefits, including Civil Service Pension
Generic Role: Senior Scientist
Profession: Science
Permanent post at the Met Office, Exeter
Closing date for applications: 11 June 2009
Background information
A significant uncertainty in future projections of sea level is associated with dynamical changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and a key aspect of this uncertainty is the role of ice shelves, how they might respond to climate change, and the effect this could have on the ice sheets. The goal of the post is to contribute to improved scenarios of sea-level rise, which is an important aspect of climate change, with large coastal impacts.
Specific job purpose
Incorporate a model of ice shelves into the Met Office Hadley Centre climate model to develop a capability to make projections of rapid changes in ice sheets, thereby leading to improved scenarios of future sea-level rise.”
—- — —-
Many things are uncertain in climate science and we really need to appreciate that our historic data is often poor and that we need to acquire information over decades before we can say things with certainty.
The ‘science is settled’ is clearly untrue.
Tonyb
What’s that they say about what to expect when you pay peanuts?
tonyb
thanks for all you have done. the science is clearly unsettled. The temps in the far arctic at night may be going from -64*F to -58*F so the far north has little impact on the humans on the rest of the planet. Hard to see MET saying Heathrow airport thermometers are equivalent to the CET record. But nature bat lasts and the sun changes may in fact bring back your ice age fairs on the Thames which will be bad for food production but good for CAGW meme reductions.
Scott
Tony
What weight do you give to Rosenthal et al (2013)? An ocean sediment study, of single cell animal shells from the intermediate waters of the western Pacific/Indian Oceans.
It concludes that those waters are getting warmer but are not as warm as they were during the MWP. It also says that there is evidence that those waters represent the Pacific Ocean at that depth.
Richard
tonyb
Also, what do you think about the Met contention that arctic warming demonstrates the earth global average temperature is increasing and that is an important fact?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/hadcrut4-paper?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer54ca4&utm_medium=twitter
Scott
“Many things are uncertain in climate science and we really need to appreciate that our historic data is often poor and that we need to acquire information over decades before we can say things with certainty.
The ‘science is settled’ is clearly untrue.”
No its quite true.
when people say “the” science is settled, they dont mean every aspect is settled.
They mean.
1. C02 is a ghg. settled
2. Man has cause the rise in c02, settled
3. More c02 will warm the planet, settled
4. How much? hmm lots of questions here
5. How will a warmer world impact ice shelves? lots of questions here.
Exactly. The other day somebody said the science of Antarctica was not settled because of involvement from volcanos. There is just no way to take them seriously. No way at all.
JCH,
That was me, and your expression of my offering is not at all what was being communicated in the discussion. Jim D & I were speaking of the Grace measurements (he posted a chart) all while affirming Grace’s inability to deal well with sea ice. The sea ice is not acting as was expected, volcanoes were relatively recently involved in the discussion due to the recent discovery of those to the size, extent, and effects (http://www.livescience.com/15006-underwater-volcanoes-discovered-antarctica.html).
I frankly do not appreciate your limited summary of my expression of the argument that the science of Antarctica is settled. In fact, I’ll further the argument that many of the top names in climate science are supporting my argument in the discussion of the current offering by Hansen.
In fact, I’d suggest that it is you by your commentary here on my argument are the one who cannot be taken seriously. And normally you’re one who should be offered reasonable respect for your positions.
✓1. C02 is a ghg. settled
✓2. Man has cause the rise in c02, settled
✓3. More c02
willshould warm the planet, settled✓4. How much? hmm lots of questions here
✓5. How will a warmer world impact ice shelves? lots of questions here.
6. There are benefits to fossil fuel use, increasing CO2, and increased planetary warmth, up to a point about which there are lots of questions.
7. The balance of benefit to detriment of fossil fuel use is very difficult to assess. Lots of questions here.
See, you are a skeptic.
Exactly. The other day somebody said the science of Antarctica was not settled because of involvement from volcanos. There is just no way to take them seriously. No way at all.
And do you take this paper seriously?
It makes lots of claims about things which are not measured such as bottom water formation and warm water incursion of glacial grounding lines.
I can speculate just as well as Hansen, but it doesn’t make it correct.
Richard
I am away from my computer so will look at rosenthal data tomorrow ŵhich I think is on my main computer
Tonyb
Scott
I think this is another of those ‘we don’t really know’ aspects of climate science.
Donald Rumsfelds famous quote, ‘there are knowns knowns, ‘ etc really sums up a lot ( but not all) of climate science, especially the historic record.
I am Especially nervous of extrapolation or interpolation when done to excess. For ecample Working out historic sea surface temperatures using one record in a grid cell in a year and spreading that to other grid cells Does not seem to me to be an accurate way of estimating the wider temperature.
There is an awful lot of speculative work on certain aspects of climate science which need to be recognised as such and not hailed as a definitive piece of work
Tonyb
Steven Mosher said “when people say “the” science is settled, they dont mean every aspect is settled.”
I disagree.
When you say the science is settled that is what you mean.
Other people say the science is settled and mean:
1. CAGW is happening.
2. The average global temperature will warm by 3C by 2100 (from pre-industrial times – say 1850).
3. The oceans will rise 1 meter by 2100 (or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5).
4. 110% of the warming since 1950 is human caused.
5. 100% of the warming since 1850 is human caused.
And so on.
Bottom line – I don’t think everybody means the same thing as you mean when they say the science is settled.
Tony
Thank you for the response. The Rosenthal et al paper “Pacific Ocean Hear Content During the Past 10,000 Years” is available free from Science; it offers free registration, with access to publications over a year old.
Richard
Richard Arrett
+1
Richard Swarthout
Pingback: Hansen’s backfire | SHOAH
“when people say “the” science is settled, they dont mean every aspect is settled.”
That’s ridiculous, Steven. The settled science crowd is insisting on moving on from the science to the drastic mitigation. They have settled on catastrophe and alarmism. Your cred is sinking.
“That’s ridiculous, Steven. The settled science crowd is insisting on moving on from the science to the drastic mitigation. They have settled on catastrophe and alarmism. Your cred is sinking.”
Well they are moving on because skeptics fought the wrong war and lost.
They wasted years of brain power on dragon slayer crap, sun nut theories,
UHI, color palettes, goddarian nonsense, and they avoided the big
question: how much warming.
politically they also fough the wrong war and failed to use the actual tools
they had to stop alarmism.
so now you have to live with the pen and the phone.
The one one hundredth of one degree pen and phone. Some victory.
Well they are moving on because skeptics fought the wrong war and lost.
I forgot, which one are you? a skeptic or a gullible?
1/100th.
ya. and my stupid party couldnt even stop that.
Here’s a good example of just how unsettled the science is from this very paper. Here is Figure 26:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/26.png
Notice one thing. On the right hand side is a comparison of kinetic energy for the Model E and one in which ice collapses occurred.
Hansen uses this to argue ( and I think argue is all he can do ) that this means ‘super-storms’.
Regardless of whether this is correct or not, it means that the meme that the gullibles follow was ‘more intense storms’ with global warming, but this demonstrates how incorrect more intense storms was. People who claimed to have the ‘settled science’ on their ‘side’ were wrong all along!
Also, this is Model E as recently run:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/ModeledSeaIceLoss.gif
Notice the modeled decrease of Antarctic sea ice? Hansen is now trying to convince you that his models were all wrong all along and if we just ad this one imagined process, we can go on justifying our models and remain the chief pro(fit)s of doom.
Steven Mosher:
You have repeated this mantra over and over.
Am I using the pen and the phone to write and call the scientists or the policy makers.
I assume you mean the policy makers, because science isn’t done with pen and phone.
What decisions have the policy makers made which you think reflect the scientific debate (which you think is over)?
As far as I can tell they have done nothing.
By which I mean Congress has done nothing.
The EPA did some stuff (which may be illegal).
The President did some stuff (which may be illegal) or rolled-back when a new president is elected.
But no laws were passed (that I am aware of) which deal with climate change (in the USA). I think of law makers as policy makers.
Could you please clarify – because I have always found your little mantra about the war being over (which I now interpret as CO2 has some warming effect) and having to use pen and paper (which I interpret as writing and call my legislators) confusing.
Steven Mosher: they had to stop alarmism.
Are you saying that alarmism has “won”? Internationally, the rush to spend money and effort to reduce CO2 emissions is pretty weak. The US reduced CO2 emissions without a policy to do so because the unregulated market used hydraulic fracturing to bring up lots of natural gas. Germany made big noises and lots of wind turbines, but increased coal burning to make up for the closing of nuclear power plants, as did Japan. For about 80% or more of the Earth’s human population the overwhelming move is toward more fossil fuel burning and extraction. The California experiment is not being widely copied within the US. The aggregate effect of Obama’s phone and pen is slight; Solyndra-like debacles and legislation to require CO2 reductions are much reduced (to say the least) since the Republican majority in the House.
It is more like a stalemate and some retrenchment have followed a few quick victories by the promoters of alarmism.
4. How much? hmm lots of questions here
5. How will a warmer world impact ice shelves? lots of questions here.
In the run up to the Pariee junket, the settled science crowd is selling a new paper every other day that allegedly addresses those questions:
4. OMG! It’s worse than we thought!
5. OMG! It’s worse than we thought!
yes Don, when you spend all your time fighting lost battles
( is c02 a ghg?) when you spend all your time avoiding the real questions, you lose the opportunity to something solid in those areas.
The HS, the temp record, the sky dragons were all side shows. distractions.. you guys got caught fighting battles that didnt matter.
you put your best troups on that line and left poor Nic Lewis to fend for himself.
“1/100th.
ya. and my stupid party couldnt even stop that.”
So the difference between your stupid party and the phone and pen geniuses is one one hundredth of one freaking degree. Some people might call that a crushing defeat for the alarmists.
Nic Lewis gets the same treatment from the 97 percenters as the other non-conformists:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-misinterpret-climate-change-research/
“yes Don, when you spend all your time fighting lost battles”
Not me, Steven. I gave a lot of time and money to support candidates in six Congressional elections. Won them all. Climate change not a major factor in any race I had anything to do with or in any that I know about. Can you name a Republican that lost a recent election due to not being alarmist?
Not me, Steven. I gave a lot of time and money to support candidates in six Congressional elections. Won them all. Climate change not a major factor in any race I had anything to do with or in any that I know about. Can you name a Republican that lost a recent election due to not being alarmist?
That was a lost battle and $$ what did those 6 do?
nothing.
You have lost track of the plot, Steven. Nothing is what we want to do, unless and until you can convince us otherwise. This is like a tug of war. The alarmists have been pulling with all their might for decades and they have managed to gain an inch or two. That is abject failure.
Steve writes —“That was a lost battle and $$ what did those 6 do?
nothing.””
My question–How can you miss the obvious that they opposed and helped prevent the implementation of non cost effective plans to mitigate CO2 emissions. Duh–stopping useless, propaganda based plans to stop climate change is useful.
Don
The tug of war in Paris clearly showing the warmist team being pulled over.
http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/sport-tug-of-war-1900-olympic-games-paris-france-the-tug-of-news-photo/79023270
Tonyb
Montfort, that was a tactical blunder to have mentioned Gore because that gives Mosher the opportunity to attack you on this minor slip-up whilst avoiding to respond to all the valid points you made. He always does that.
Sorry this was a response to the climatereason post just below.
Chris
Gore was actually prominently mentioned in the article I linked to regarding Watson. I can’t uninvent him or erase the mention.
To me he is utterly irrelevant. However, perhaps he still has more power behind the scenes than I think (and than Mosher wants) See my link above that his company has been behind numerous PR events promoting his ideas on global warming and carbon taxes and MAY be behind the promotion for Hansen’s latest paper via WPP.
tonyb
Prof Watson! then chairman of the IPCC said in 1997 in the Kyoto talks
‘The science is settled We are not gong to reopen it here.’
http://www.commdiginews.com/health-science/a-rare-debate-on-the-settled-science-of-climate-change-27129
Al gore and Various other people have also said it. I don’t see the qualification:
‘Well obviously we don’t mean all the science is settled, not ALL the aspects. Just the important bits…’
As we go further along the road to Paris, it appears that sea levels aren’t settled, glacier and ice ledge collapse aren’t settled, abyssal depth warmth isn’t settled, the impact of volcanoes isn’t settled, land temperatures aren’t settled. What exactly IS settled and why wasn’t that quantified at Kyoto?
Tonyb
Tony, it’s only settled unless it’s getting worse than we thought.
“Al gore and Various other people have also said it. I don’t see the qualification:”
That’s a stupid argument. If you want the qualifications read the science.
The IPCC reports are FULL of them.
If you want to stay ignorant listen to Gore
No one lWith any sense istens to gore but Watson and others had important positions and didn’t make these numerous qualifications that you do. You wouldn’t want to dilute a scary scenario with uncertainty would you?
Tonyb
I don’t think anybody has proven Watson said it. There is only one source. He actually said it was said in the local press. From the way he says it, one can question whether or not Henry Lamb was even there. It’s unclear.
So produce the local press.
Ten years earlier in 2000, Watson had said:
The overwhelming majority of scientific experts, whilst recognizing that scientific uncertainties exist, nonetheless believe that human-induced climate change is inevitable. Indeed, during the last few years, many parts of the world have suffered major heat waves, floods, droughts, fires and extreme weather events leading to significant economic losses and loss of life. While individual events cannot be directly linked to human-induced climate change, the frequency and magnitude of these types of events are predicted to increase in a warmer world.
The question is not whether climate will change in response to human activities, but rather how much (magnitude), how fast (the rate of change) and where (regional patterns). …
I wonder why you didn’t show us the Watson quote just before that:
In 2010, he warned the IPCC against overstatement:[12][not in citation given]
“The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.” Adding “We should always be challenged by sceptics. The IPCC’s job is to weigh up the evidence. If it can’t be dismissed, it should be included in the report. Point out it’s in the minority and, if you can’t say why it’s wrong, just say it’s a different view.”
They didn’t listen to him.
Sort makes a manufactured quote by an extreme political ideologue seems plausible.
Scientist don’t usually say that sort of thing.
Happy hour?
“No one lWith any sense istens to gore but Watson and others had important positions and didn’t make these numerous qualifications that you do. You wouldn’t want to dilute a scary scenario with uncertainty would you?”
Then why has every IPCC document detailed the very uncertainties you prattle on about?
AGain.. Dont listen to people. read the science.
I put the link in so people could, if they so desired, read the whole thing.
Why didn’t I paste the whole thing here. Because that’s rude. I highlighted what would highlight on the first try, and then I pasted it here, and made a small section into a link.
JFC.
Mosh said
‘Then why has every IPCC document detailed the very uncertainties you prattle on about? AGain.. Dont listen to people. read the science.’
You miss the point. Far more people will read a news report, listen to the sound bites of someone like Watson or see a sensationalised TV programme than will ever read the IPCC documents. People like Watson and Panchauri are the megaphone and what they say is what people will hear.
“Science is settled. Extreme weather events. Ice sheet collapse Unprecedented warming. Cities to be submerged by rising waters etc etc.”
This is what comes over. Whether it SHOULD be the message people hear is quite another thing but when politicians don’t even read the summary for policy makers (let alone the full document) how can you expect the ordinary people to realise there are many nuances and uncertainties..
tonyb
It’s quite a stunt.
You say that there have been climate extremes and tragedies in recent years (as in all years), then you say that they cannot individually be attributed to human activity (burden of proof off), then you say that there is a prediction that such events, with greater frequency and magnitude, will be due to human activity (the prediction exists, and you are only claiming the existence of a prediction).
You take three utterly disconnected propositions, merge them into a case as if one proposition flowed from the other.
Good try, warmies. Actually, it’s not even a good try. Without the green goo on their brains even HuffPo and Guardian readers could see through it.
Yes, climatereason and
mosomoso,
How often must a serf say it,
nuthin’ s evah categorically
unequivocally SETTLED.
Flawed humans on shiftin’,
continents in an evolvin’
universe, castin’ nets ter
try ter catch reality, we
can only, provisionally
surmise that it’s reality.
Retreat ter yer island
of safety ‘n certainty
and it’s curtains –
likely yer’ll turn inter
pillars of salt.
https://edge.org/conversation/heretical-thoughts-about-science-and-society
A real live example of adaptation…
Dealing with SLR, Jersey Shore homeowners raise homes after hurricane Sandy.
http://www.wsj.com/video/jersey-shore-homeowners-raise-homes-after-sandy/5B6992C4-3E63-4333-A2D1-67788F942852.html
Mosher,
The science isn’t settled until we, the people in the community, are convinced it is settled.
Like gravity.
The very large number of people who disagree with you, 40% not 3%, mean that the science is not settled.
A “climate scientist” is not a special beast, just a human being with brains like you and I.
The science should be able to be communicated well enough to prove to intelligent people that the steps are logical and not disprovable.
Your CO2 increase causes warming comment works in a test tube.
In the real world feedbacks from numerous other processes mean that the rise in temperature could be almost totally muted.
A simple example, increased water vapor [a GHG], leading to much more clouds and greater albedo means that more energy will be reflected to space meaning that the effective heat source drops in intensity hence the temperature must fall back or as Lucia would put it, fails to go up any more [She does not believe feedbacks can be ultimately negative].
If it’s completely muted, then that shows it caused warming. If not, then the feedback, without CO2-induced warming, would have caused cooling.
During the “paws, now all but paws up” ACO2 continued to warm the planet. The oceans got warmer, and ACO2 prevented the PDO from cooling the atmosphere. Possibly for the first time ever.
The CO2 part is settled science. My part, the muting of PDO cooling, has not sunk in yet. Mostly because these clowns think the AMO was pushing up the GMST. It wasn’t. The AMO actually is a potted plant. It may even do less tan a potted plant.
Who’s on first? You got a good head of steam on. Keep going.
“If it’s completely muted, then that shows it caused warming.”
No, if something is completely muted it did not happen in the first place.
No argument about CO2 increase potentially and actually causing an atmosphere to become warmer.
Lots of argument about whether the increase damps [mutes] itself by increasing albedo.
If it does then the earth is self regulating in this regard with variation in climate more dependent on other factors.
” If not, then the feedback, without CO2-induced warming, would have caused cooling. ”
This could be rephrased perhaps in a way that makes sense, I do not think you mean what you said you mean.
Feedback JCH.
Look it up.
The concept, not the known climate feedbacks, cause we don’t really know them. Maybe why models “parameterize” some of them by saying 3x.
The PDO is called a cycle because it gets warm, and then the warm goes away. A sweet little story.
And then along came the bruiser… ACO2.
Which did not turn off for 15-18 years… a fantasy.
angech2014
That is why the increase in observations is so important. But the concern with back altering historical records feels so much like rationalization to confirm a theory vs comparing to observations, it degrades the discussion. The Karl change of SST based on canvas and wood buckets and wide error bands vs buoy thermocouples makes one cynical of the bias and integrity of the CAGW crowd. The temps are in a Long Slow Thaw. Did that change recently due to increase CO2? Are oceans and clouds off setting a potential change? All interesting questions but integrity of observations is most important of the study efforts. Any demonstrated unethical behavior clouds the entire science.
Scott
The PDO is called a cycle because it gets warm, and then the warm goes away.
cycle:“move in or follow a regularly repeated sequence of events.”
PDO: Not so much.
Regular? No.
Repeated? No.
Neither for the last century:
http://cses.washington.edu/cig/figures/pdoindex_big.gif
Nor for the last millenium:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/PDO1000yr.svg
TE – I do not think the PDO is a cycle. Thanks for agreeing.
At ACPD both Nabil Swedan and Rud Istvan have had to defend their negative comments about the paper.
I actually think the best challenge is Whipple’s. He’s a PhD student who is studying Antarctica. Seems to me like the replies have to come author’s of the paper.
Swedan’s 4 replies to replies are dragonslayer stuff. The comments opposed to him seem to be people not having seen that view before, and they are just trying to put him right with physical reasoning. Little do they know how ingrained this dragonslayer stuff is. I wouldn’t bother.
JC is now mentioned on the ACPD thread in a comment by Jack Dale, who is trying to put Nabil Swedan’s very persistent skydragon stuff to rest. He quotes three skeptics who disagree with the skydragons: Spencer, JC, and Watts, basically saying, look, even the skeptics think this is crazy.
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I just watched a very interesting show on Netflix, called “The Honest Liar.” It’s about the Amazing Randi. In it they discussed “Project Alpha,” a hoax perpetrated by Randi and a couple of his young sidekicks. The two kids (they were about 18) purported to have psychokinetic power, and submitted themselves to rigorous scientific testing, of the sort that Uri Geller submitted to. Meanwhile, Randi was on the outside, getting reports from the kids on how they were tricking the scientists, and then sending letters to the scientists, warning them how they could be tricked, and giving them specific instruction that would defeat the slight-of-hand that the kids were developing. The thing that fascinated me so much was the way the scientists were so easily talked into breaking the rules that Randi was providing them, because they so badly wanted to believe in psychokinesis.
The relevance to climate science should be apparent.
The relevance to the weirdo skepticism of climate science should be apparent.
Only one side is going back in history and fudging temps (and all in one direction?). Great post qbeam.
A particularly enlightening segment of the show was what happened when some fellow–I forget his name–resolved to get a truly rigorous test confirming the psychic powers of the kids on film. This guy truly wanted to do a good job, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me (though the report of one observer suggested that he hoped to get proof sufficient even for the Amazing Randi) he refused every attempt that the kids made to get him to relax Randi’s rules for defeating slight-of-hand. For something like six hours the cameras rolled, but the kids could not perform any of their tricks.
But the fascinating thing was what happened after they gave up trying to get proof. Once the cameras were off, he immediately relaxed the rules, and the kids were suddenly able to perform all manner of “psychic” tricks. The reasonable conclusion from that evidence, I submit, would have been that the kids were fakes, exactly as Randi had said, and that Randi’s experimental method revealed the fakery. Instead, the guy had a total melt-down. He screamed, wailing that Randi’s rules had ruined everything, and if he had just not listened to Randi, he would have gotten all those psychic tricks on film!
Again, the relevance to climate science should be apparent. When you see someone getting excited by evidence supporting what they already believe, that’s normal human behavior, and reason to be skeptical. Good scientists are different. When they see evidence that what they believe is wrong, that’s when they get excited.
http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/01/04/132622672/could-it-be-spooky-experiments-that-see-the-future
http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf
Dr. Bem has done a number of experiments with two that seem to indicate a bleed through from the future into the current reality (retroactive influence).
If there really is something to this you could do a couple of iterations of the experiment concentrating the “winners” and should be able to get something really significant.
He also has an insight on why psychology has so few “psi” test successes. 34% of psychologists disbelieve in psi vs about 2% of the population.
I’ve noticed that studies that try to reproduce his experiments deviate in ways that would dilute the effect (much like NASA tests reactionless thrusters at about 1/1000th of their designed power levels).
I’m somewhat concerned that the scientific community suffers from a mental illness or defect that inhibits them from “reproducing” an experiment by exactly reproducing an experiment.
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as the paper is open to public comments, I’ve submitted one:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/15/20059/2015/acpd-15-20059-2015-discussion.html
Points made:
– No statistically significant acceleration of sea level rise since 1700
– 5 to 9 meters: to melt so much ice until the end of the century requires a sudden and spectacular change of the heat transfer across the surface of the Antarctic (from 0.9 mm/a to at least 60-100 mm/a seal level change due to loss of ice sheet). How are we going to see much more days with surface temperature above zero centigrade there? or to get the ice sheet flowing down rapidly into the ocean? Highly improbable if not impossible.
The paper makes no discussion of this necessary heat transfer
– Now simulations are called “experiment”, this is the new newspeak. Experimental scientist will soon need to call their experimental work “physical simulation” !
good comments, thx
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M. de Rougemont provided substantive critique 29 July 2015
(Unfortunately also a slew of downward radiation not possible comments by those who know little physics.)
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This article by Hansen et al. [1] is a book-length Magnum Opus that could be viewed as his legacy. In it, he is concerned with future climate catastrophes. First, in the title of this paper he warns us that “…2 degrees C global warming is highly dangerous.” There is nothing about this in his abstract, however, and I found nothing in the hundred-odd pages that follow it either. Hence, I will simply ignore this phrase. Next, he sees danger in comparing our climate with with previous interglacial ages. One such danger he describes this way: “Humanity faces near certainty of eventual sea level rise of at least Eemian proportions, … 5–9meters, … if fossil fuel emissions continue on a business-as-usual course.” Note his belief that fossil-fuel emissions are causing it. In the abstract he elaborates it further: “… There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 °C warmer than today….” According to him, less than a degree of temperature rise should be enough to bring our temperature, and with it sea level, up to those disastrous Eemian levels. These disasters include superstorms, or so he says in the title of the paper. Before taking this seriously, however, we should ask if there is a precedent for this. According to Hansen himself, global temperature increase for the entire twentieth century was 0.8 degrees Celsius. This should do as a stand-in for what this amount of warming can do to sea level and storms. So what did happen to the sea level rise during the twentieth century? Was the sea rise anywhere close to 5 meters or to 9 meters? Or maybe not? Maybe more like a meter or even less, a half meter? None of the above. Twentieth century sea level rise was ten inches, which is one quarter of a meter. With this meager precedent, is it possible for sea level rise to speed up by a factor of twenty or more immediately? He would need that to reach the Eemian levels by by the end of the century. He states that “…human made forcing is stronger and more rapid than paleo forcing…” But the problem with greenhouse warming is that it may not even exist. When Hansen lectured to the United States Senate [2] in 1988 he was aware that the greenhouse effect had never been observed. He attempted to fix this by proving to the Senate that greenhouse effect is real. He did this by introducing a hundred year warming curve which, he said, had only one chance in a hundred of happening by pure chance alone. That made it 99 percent certain that the greenhouse effect was the cause of this warming. In his concluding statement [3] to the Senate he claimed that “Global warming has reached a evel such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming.” Since he based it on the existence of the 100 year warming curve and since that warming curve was shown as his figure 1 in the Congressional Record [4] I took a peek at it. It turned out that the curve he showed was nothing more exotic than a global temperature curve from 1880 to 1988, as it existed then. It showed two warming periods but they were separated by 30 years of cooling. Now how can you call it a 100 year warming curve if one third of it is actually cooling, not warming? No one who understands global temperature would have the nerve to do that but Hansen did it. There was no peer review of his claim and he got away with it. He did not just get away with the claim but saw it become received wisdom, the justification for establishing the IPCC that same year. The existence of IPCC is totally focused upon Hansen’s “proof” that the greenhouse effect exists. Take it away and the reason for the existence of IPCC disappears. There is also a theoretical proof of the greenhouse effect. In 1896 Svante Arrhenius [5] observed that carbon dioxide in his laboratory absorbed infrared radiation and thereby became warm. From that he jumped to the conclusion that it must do so in nature as well, and this became the start of the Arrhenius greenhouse theory. It is necessary to understand here that laboratory demonstrations of the absorption of infrared radiation by carbon dioxide are not proof of the greenhouse effect. That is because the atmosphere is not pure greenhouse gas but consists of a mix of greenhouse gases and others. How this mix behaved was unknown until the work of Ferenc Miskolczi [6] in 2007. It turned out that the Arrhenius greenhouse theory does not work the same way in the mix of gases as it does in pure carbon dioxide. Simply put, the greenhouse warming it predicts is blocked, period. This abject failure of the greenhouse theory is made plain to all by the existence of the hiatus today. During this hiatus atmospoheric carbon dioxide keeps increasing while the parallel greenhouse warming, predicted by Arrhenius, is absent. This invalidates the Arrhenius greenhouse theory. The only greenhouse theory that correctly does describe the hiatus is MGT, the Miskolczi greenhouse theory. It differs from the Arrhenius theory in being able to handle more than one greenhouse gas at the same time. Arrhenius can handle only one, CO2. According to MGT, carbon dioxide and water vapor, both greenhouse gases, establish a joint absorption window in the infrared whose optical thickness is 1.87. This value comes from an analysis of radiosonde data. Importantly, Miskolczi [7] has proven that the Planck-weighted global average greenhouse-gas optical thickness is stable and stationary over time. If it is disturbed, the former value is restored. If you now add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it will start to absorb in the IR just as predicted by Arrhenius. But this will increase the optical thickness. And as soon as this happens water vapor will start to diminish and rain out, the original optical thickness is restored, and no Arrhenius warming is possible. This is an exact description of conditions during the hiatus, something no other theory can do. It is also a direct attack on the ruling greenhouse theory and invalidates claims that the greenhouse effect exists. With the demise of this greenhouse effect dies AGW, a purely imaginary construct invented to justify the establishment of IPCC. This fact has not been ignorerd by advocates of global warming who have written several dozen scholarly articles trying to prove that the hiatus does not exist. Among them is an article by Karl et al. [8] in the 4th July issue of Science. It is based on a re-written global history of temperature by NOAA, not likely to be either truthful or accurate. Looking through their article two things stand out. First, they claim warming where a hiatus exists but do not show any temperature graph to prove it. Secondly, in their data table (figure 1) there are only two actual data points that even come close to challenging hiatus data. The article itself has all the earmarks of a scientific fraud. We have to add it to another hiatus-related scientific fraud in the eighties and nineties. That one wiped out a complete hiatus. I discovered this while doing reasearch for my book [9] (“What Warming?”) in 2008. That hiatus of the eighties and nineties stopped global warming from 1979 tp 1997, a period of 18 years. The word hiatus was not even used then. You are in the dark about all this because in official IPCC temperature curves it was covered up and over-written by a phony warming called the “late twentieth century warming.” I discovered that HadCRUT3 temperature source was responsible for producing the fake warming and even put a warning about it into the foreword of my book. The hiatus itself is shown as figure 5 in my book and the role of HadCRUT3 in the coverup is displayed in figure 24. The only way to get the data for this was to use satellite sources which they fortunately did not control. Later it turned out that GISS and NCDC were also co-conspirators in this coverup. The connection is through common computer processing that left its footprints in all three publicly available temperature curves, all in exactly the same places. People thought they were noise but they are computer tracks. Now that the denialist authors know that they have two hiatuses to explain away instead of one they have a much harder, quite likely an impossible, task ahead of them.
We are now in a position to take a look and see where this leads us. The two hiatuses together block all greenhouse warming from 80 percent of the time elapsed since the beginning of the satellite era. The remaining 20 percent is taken up by the super El Nino of 1998 and a small step warming that began in 1999. In three years it raised twenty-first century temperatures up by one third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. If El Nino peaks are excluded, this was the one and only warming during the entire satellite era that began in 1979. Ten years later Hansen discovered that twenty-first century temperatures were all above twentieth century temperatures, except for 1998. He quickly claimed this as caused by the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect. This is complete nonsense. We have no idea what caused the warming to start in 1999 but physics tells us that it is quite impossible for the greenhouse effect to start and stop as the record shows. These two final happenings, the super El Nino and the step warming, are clearly not greenhouse-related and this allows us to declare the entire satellite era to be a greenhouse-free period. This makes it highly unlikely that any previous period ever was a greenhouse warming period.
What does all this mean? you might ask. It simply means global absence of the greenhouse effect and all that that implies. Here are some of the things that are implied:
.1. There is no anthropogenic global warming.
2. IR absorption by carbon dioxide is neutralized by parallel reduction of atmospheric water vapor.
3. Laws restricting the release of carbon dioxide into the air to stop warming are irrational. Atmospheric carbon dioxide in air is beneficial to plants.
4. Laws restricting the use of fossil fuels are irrational. Calling of trains that carry coal “death trains” is both stupid, ignorant, and irresponsible.
5. Alternate “clean” fuels that are subsidized by taxpayers must have their subsidies withdrawn. There is no justification for that.
7. Production of biofuels must be stopped. There is no justification for that.
8. Any and all carbon taxes are irrational and must be rescinded.
9. All EPA regulations aimed at emissions reduction in any way must be nullified.
etc. — extend the list at your own
****************************************************
References
[1] J. Hansen1, M. Sato1, P. Hearty2, R. Ruedy3,4, M. Kelley3,4, V. Masson-Delmotte5,
G. Russell4, G. Tselioudis4, J. Cao6, E. Rignot7,8, I. Velicogna8,7, E. Kandiano9,
K. von Schuckmann10, P. Kharecha1,4, A. N. Legrande4, M. Bauer11, and
K.-W. Lo3,4,
” Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 _C global warming is highly dangerous”
1Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions, Columbia University Earth Institute, New York,
NY 10115, USA
2Department of Environmental Studies, University of North Carolina at Wilmington,
North Carolina 28403, USA
3Trinnovium LLC, New York, NY 10025, USA
4NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025, USA
5Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement
(CEA-CNRS-UVSQ), Gif-sur-Yvette, France
6Key Lab of Aerosol Chemistry & Physics, Institute of Earth Environment,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an 710075, China
7Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
California, 91109, USA
8Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, California, 92697, USA
9GEOMAR, Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Wischhofstrasse 1–3,
Kiel 24148, Germany
10Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography, University of Toulon, La Garde, France
11Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York,
NY, 10027, USA
Received: 11 June 2015 – Accepted: 9 July 2015 – Published: 23 July 2015
Correspondence to: J. Hansen (jeh1@columbia.edu)
Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union.
[2] James E Hansen, “The Greenhouse Effect: Impacts on Current Global Temperature and Regional Heat Waves” presented to United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, June 23, 1988
[3] Reference [2], Conclusion
[4] Reference [2], p. 47, Figure 1,
[5] Svante Arrhenius, 1896
[6] Ferenk M. Miskolczi, “Greenhouse Effect in Semi-Transparent Atmospheres” Quarterly Journal of Hyngarian Meteorological Society, Vol 1, No, 1, January- March 2007, pp 1-40
[7] Ferenc M. Miskolczi, “The stable stationary value of the earth’s global average atmospheric Planck-weighted greenhouse-gas optical thickness” Energy & Environment 21,4 (2010) 243-262
[8] Thomas R. Karl, et al., “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus” Science 26 June 2015: Vol. 348 no. 6242 pp. 1469-1472
[9] Arno Arrak, “What Warming: Satellite view if global temperature change” (CreateSpace 2010)
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