Global Warming

[Optimus Prime]

It's a fact the globe as a whole is warming up yet not so for the Southern Hemisphere where the sea temperatures are cooler than normal and Australia is cooling not warming. Also the Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent is above normal, much above at times;

Infact sea ice are has increased, especially in comparison to 1979 and the mid 80s

Any suggestions on the reason why the Southern Hemisphere has seen limited or very little warming recently while the Northern Hemisphere is at boiling point. I suspect human made CO2 which is greatly concentrated across the north has something to do with it.

Edited April 9, 2007 by Optimus Prime

[Mondy]

An excellent resource for all those concerned by the fiction being spread about global warming.

http://www.iceagenow.com/index.htm

[noggin]

Yes, Mondy me old chum, it is a good site for information which the media and politicians don't want us to know about. Thank goodness that there is somewhere to which reports of "colding" can go (and there is a lot of it going on in the world......)

[Essan]

If April is the hottest on record in 190 countries, but the coldest for 50 years in 1, guess which will be the only country to get mentioned in iceagenow The site is dedicated to the author's belief that a magnetic reversal caused the dinosaurs to all be wiped out overnight in 200ft deep snowstorms and that the same is about to happen to us.

In other words it's not exactly the most objective source of information Although Felix's book is quite amusing (in a bas science sort of way )

As for the difference between the N and S Hemispheres, that's easy: water. The S Hemisphere is not warming as fast as the N for the same reason that each summer, land temperatures peak much earlier than surrounded SSTs

[SP1986]

Right I don't want any kind of friction created here (I know how heated these debates can get) so this is in the best light...

I just wanted to place an alternative theory for more ice after the 198's period...

Based on science, perhaps there is more ice because the warming has allowed more moisture to be available within the atmosphere due to warming so therefore has produced more precipitation, and because the ice caps will maintain sub zero temperatures until they completely disappear then perhaps it is due to warming that ice has occurred (a large scale freeze thaw process)

To go with the graphs posted above it would be interesting to find some charts on rainfall rates, and temperatures within those periods.

Just an alternative theory (basically that as it gets warmer in the poles there may be more ice developing de to the existence of more moisture)

[Essan]

I would imagine that Antarctica would have to warm by a lot to have much effect on ice formation - after all, what difference if air temps are -40c or -20c?

Melting would however come from warmer SSTs or from higher sea levels (the later being one of the main reasons for post LGM melting).

I would have thought that synoptics also play a part in sea ice formation - a particularly stormy period will see sea ice break up, calmer spells enable it to reform etc.

[jethro]

An excellent resource for all those concerned by the fiction being spread about global warming.

http://www.iceagenow.com/index.htm

Has anyone read his book?

[Gray-Wolf]

Right I don't want any kind of friction created here (I know how heated these debates can get) so this is in the best light...

I just wanted to place an alternative theory for more ice after the 198's period...

Based on science, perhaps there is more ice because the warming has allowed more moisture to be available within the atmosphere due to warming so therefore has produced more precipitation, and because the ice caps will maintain sub zero temperatures until they completely disappear then perhaps it is due to warming that ice has occurred (a large scale freeze thaw process)

To go with the graphs posted above it would be interesting to find some charts on rainfall rates, and temperatures within those periods.

Just an alternative theory (basically that as it gets warmer in the poles there may be more ice developing de to the existence of more moisture)

The other thing that is seemingly glossed over is data collection of 'ice heights'.

As has been amply shown over the past year the EAIS and WAIS is underlain by both glacial streams and ponded glacial lakes both of which are far more dynamic than we would ever have postulated.

Recent (past 7 year) satellite 'measurement' of heights above seas level can vary over 20m in places due to the pnumatic forcing of the underlying waters (that is 2km of ice uplifted so you can imagine the pressures eroding the base of the sheets) and the increased basal 'flow' can lead to incridible 'ice rucks' as travelling ice 'backs up ' at impasses (until they are overcome and movement re-commences).

Does anyone have the Lat/long figures for where these 'ice height increases' were taken from for if not whose to say they are not 1980/90 data sets overflying the better understood terrain and measuring only the periodic upheavals of the ice and calling it 'increased depth'???

[Essan]

Has anyone read his book?

I finally read it at the weekend. As the late great Phil Lynott said Don't believe a word ...

[Thundery wintry showers]

Sorry, but I'm afraid Iceagenow is one of the most extremist anti-AGW sites one will ever find, and many of us have tried going around in circles debunking its nonsensical/circular lines of argumentation.

[Mondy]

So what, in your opinion, would be an extremist pro-AGW website? Or does it not work like that?

[Mondy]

Anyway,

The whole series can be viewed

[Gray-Wolf]

I take it no-one does have the info needed to show the ice sheet info as correct.......I bet folk here will still wield it about as a fact though!

I'm wading through Mondy's latest offering and have to agree with the bones of prog 1.

Political 'point scoring' and piecemeal efforts will have little if any affects on the pace/rate of change over the next 25yrs and time and money would be better spent preparing for the changes than trying to offset future changes.

The current ,incomplete, global forcasting models will only give us a taster of things to come and not the full picture, once again a tad foolish to make concrete plans on incomplete info (IMHO) better to bolster the obvious 'weak links' of food production and coastal living.

[Mondy]

I'll just throw this in here. Anyone have any thoughts on the link or indeed any other links shown within?

http://climatesci.colorado.edu/category/climate-models/

[parmenides3]

One of the sites I visit most days; make that every day. I also frequently post comments. Roger Pielke Sr. is a jolly nice chap and a serious scientist. He has several beefs, but the main one is that the IPCC is too politically motivated and as a result tends to overemphasise some science and ignore the parts which challenge the view that CO2 is the 'big problem'. I think this is a reasonably accurate description of him.

He also thinks that there are better ways to assess the impact we are having on the world, which are more to do with changes in land use, and 'vulnerability'. He is not a 'sceptic' as such, but better described as an 'IPCC sceptic'.

The trouble with using the metric for measuring climate change which Pielke wants us to use is that there is basically no historic data to work with. As a consequence, even if the data shows a warming trend over the past twenty years or so (which it does), there is no data to make a comparison with on the timescales climate science uses, so any inferences are weakened as a result.

It has also been pointed out that Politicians and the public understand 'temperature change' better than they would 'ocean heat content'; that there is a reliable temperature record going back over 300 years (the CET) (though Pielke works hard to show that, in the USA at least, this is open to challenge); that because the ocean is a dynamic system, fluctuations and changes are much harder to attribute accurately.

In recent months, Climate Science has championed the paper 'Recent cooling of the upper oceans?' by Lyman & Willis, which used the first ARGO data to show that there appears to be a large cooling signal between 2003-2005. Unfortunately, it now appears that the data was inaccurately calibrated, and a revision to the paper is due soon which corrects this apparent anomaly. That's scientific progress for you.

Even though I don't always agree with the points RP makes, I still recommend this as one of the best and most reasonable sites about climate science on the web. It works especially well when there are open debates going on between Pielke Sr and Gavin Schmidt, from RealClimate. Many of the people who post on these sites are your actual climate scientists. Don't ask why I bother to post; I'm just a bit presumptious.

I'll post a link to a very new paper on ocean temperatures as soon as I remember which journal it was in.

:)P

Edited April 13, 2007 by parmenides3

[Mondy]

Indeed. I've very recently noticed it's in the sceptics thread (pinned) :lol:

[parmenides3]

It's also in the 'basics' thread (pinned) and has been since day one. Yaa boo sucks.

P

[Mondy]

[BLAST FROM THE PAST]

A couple of things, CO2 will not be trapped in the Northern Hemisphere but if it fits the bill then of course it does. Why do we bother then taking CO2 readings from ice cores such as Vostok? Oh of course the fabled 80 year delay??????

Global Ocean temps have matched the rise in air temps in the 20th century so the talk of land warming quicker than sea goes out of the window, especially as we are measuring air temps. This is why sea ice is melting and ice on the 'ice continents' is thickening, Oceans are warming first not as a result of air temp increases otherwise how can sea temp rises possibly match air temp rises. Global airtemp increase of 0.6C will not increase sea temps by 0.6C...no way. Also whether folk agree or not or like it or not our climate is controlled 'overall' by external forces. We are in a cycle where the SH is currently cooling and the NH is warming....it will swap around 2012. By the way this coincides when we enter cosmic flux and the solar minima (Gleissberg) will start, peaking/bottoming initially around 2028/30.

Not long to go now.......watch those taxes

BFTP

[Mondy]

Wasn't a cold period always prefaced by a warm one? If so, isn't our current climate warming just a prelude to another "ice age?"

I've always regarded the solar cycle as connected in some way with climate change. However, if the facts are correct, it would seem that a solar maximum causes a peak in climate temperatures, while I had always thought the opposite was true. Low solar activity = higher temperatures and vice versa. We're currently at solar minimum. But, to reiterate, other sources i've read state solar minimum produces a peak in climate temperatures; the sun isn't full of sunspots therefore it has more energy at this moment.

The end of the current El Nino cycle seems to have affected the climate towards a generally-wetter disposition, and the end of that cycle also has led climatologists to believe that the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season will be more active. Wouldn't the Atlantic Multidecadal Cycle (AMO) have something to do with this? Past records seem to indicate that the AMO directly effects the number and intensity of hurricanes during a given season.

What about volcanoes? In past millennia, volcanic eruptions were frequent. This had the result of filling the atmosphere with tons and tons of toxic gases. These gas clouds would also tend to allow the atmosphere to cool as sunlight would be partially blocked by these clouds.

Today, volcanic activity has decreased significantly, thereby spewing fewer toxic clouds into the air and allowing more sunlight to penetrate the atmosphere to warm it. How does this factor into the whole equation?

I know there is always a concern about greenhouse gases and how man emits millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. How does this figure into the equation? Certainly we give off carbon dioxide, but so do animals, plants, in fact any living thing that is carbon-based gives off carbon dioxide. There is also a certain amount of CO2 that is absorbed by the world's oceans and inspirited by plants in the photosynthetic process. How much reduction can be attributed to that, and how much is left over to affect the climate?

And how about sulfur dioxide (SO2)? The volcanic eruptions that still occur on Earth emit tons of SO2 into the upper atmosphere, where it reflects a small amount of sunlight, thereby causing a slight cooling of the atmosphere. Then there's also chlorine and fluorine, which are also emitted by volcanoes. How do these figure into the equation?

Then there are the "heat islands" built by man to form cities, and certainly collect and store heat during the day and release it at night. How much effect does this have on global weather? On local weather? On a hot day there can be as much as a 15/20 degree difference in a heat island as opposed to the surrounding areas.

Just my tuppenceworth (again!) on a beautiful warm Sunday morning.

Edited April 15, 2007 by Mondy

[stormchaser1]

Found this if any one is interested

The Ice Ages are not over. We’re still feeling the effects of the one that receded 12,000 years ago. I grew up on a farm in central Ohio, right on the terminal moraine. I spent my formative years toting glacier-dumped rocks from newly plowed fields, to put on the piles of rocks from the efforts of the previous century’s farm boys. So I have been meditating on the evils of Global Cooling since I was six or seven years old.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Global Cooling was all the fashion. Newsweek warned of it. Popular books warned of the return of the ice. Aircraft contrails, dust and sulfates from coal power plants, volcanoes, desertification, solar variation, galactic dust clouds, fires from global nuclear war (has everyone really forgotten Nuclear Winter? Or is that meme still happily cohabitating with Global Warming in millions of muddled minds?), etc., would all combine to freeze the Earth. No political careers were built on fears of a milder Earth.

Fashions change. As Michael Crichton points out in State of Fear, one year it suddenly became unfashionable to look at cooling factors in the Earth’s climate. Today’s academic climatologists are forced to publish within the paradigm that the Earth is warming, that this trend will continue regardless of natural events, and that warming is bad. Major media is even more constrained; Newsweek is not running any stories on the cooling effects of aircraft contrails or the dust clouds from the nomads who yearly expand the Sahara Desert.

The Earth may well have warmed a tenth of a degree or two, if you pick the right starting and ending year; climate fluctuates for many reasons. But the other package-deal premises of the Global Warming meme are completely without scientific basis. There is no scientific reason to believe that the minuscule greenhouse effect from 20th century fossil fuel burning can overcome the sun-shrouding effects of a major volcano or asteroid hit. We know that either of these types of events is going to happen sometime; we just don’t know when (maybe 2036, if you’re the betting sort). And either one will pitch the Earth right back into an Ice Age.

Ice ages are not fun. Even minor cooling events are hard on agricultural civilizations. (You may think you’re living in a silicon civilization, but a few months with no sunlight will radically change your food vs. RAM preferences). Yes, if we were all living in concrete domes with home Mr. Fusion units, maybe Ice Ages would just be long periods of good skiing. But for now, we still depend on solar power for our food.

In the April of 1815, the Indonesian volcano Tambora erupted and spewed over a million tonnes of sun-darkening dust. 1816 was the "year without a summer"; the northern United States suffered crop failures and frost damage. The year 535 was even worse, bringing a literal Dark Age to Europe and freezing the crops of millions. These famines were caused by relatively tiny events, nothing like the Yellowstone eruptions or the Chicxulub asteroid impact. Major events would shut off outdoor agriculture for years. Of course we can always use growlights, right? Sure… if you use all the electricity on the planet for artificial lights, you should be able to grow about as much food as the farms of… Rhode Island. Everyone else will starve (well, except for the Mormons, of course). And maybe a few cannibals.

During major Ice Ages, most of the world’s ecosystems were displaced. There were no California redwood forests in the Ice Age; they are a recent development nurtured by the (natural) post-Ice Age global warming. 18,000 years ago, deserts and ice sheets covered most of the world. There is absolutely no scientific reason to think that it won’t happen again.

There is also no reason to think that there won’t be inconvenient short-term warming effects. But we can’t predict them; we can’t predict the weather ten days in advance, let alone predict all volcanoes, ocean currents, hydrates, asteroids, interstellar dust clouds, nuclear wars, solar cycles, etc. etc.

The Kyoto Treaty and other "anti-Global-Warming" efforts are not scientific guarantees of "better" (better for whom? I live in Minnesota!) climate. They are just sacrifices to the thunder gods, in the hopes that they will grant us an unchanging world. That ain’t gonna happen. The one sure climate prediction is that climate will fluctuate.

Ironically, so far government interference with the energy markets has increased Global Warming. The antinuclear movement in the US alone has caused the burning of 400 million tons more coal. Was this a good thing? We don’t really know, but the evidence is that the CO2 released from fossil fuel burning is wonderful for ecosystems.

During the last Ice Age, CO2 levels fell to less than half of the modern level. They had recovered to .028% by the late 1800s. All our fossil fuel burning has raised the CO2 to a whopping… .038%. But we still have a long way to go to get back to Jurassic levels. Back in the good ol’ days, when the ecosystem was really seething with life, the atmosphere was .3% CO2, about eight times greater than today.

These high CO2 levels made life very easy for plants with the original "C3" photosynthetic system. In addition to their direct CO2 fertilization effect, higher CO2 levels also help in droughts. With enough CO2, C3 plants can close their "stomata" (pores) more, and lose less water.

As CO2 levels fell during the Age of Mammals (and Ice Ages), "C4" plants (e.g., grasses) have tended to gain on older C3 species. Today, it is estimated that the optimum CO2 levels for agricultural productivity in C3 plants (which include wheat and other important crops) would be at least .070%. So we have to at least double the amount of fossil fuel that we have already burned… or more, if we increase the area of Earth that is hospitable to plant life.

Much of the world is desert even today. In fact, there is less total life in the sea than on the much smaller land area of our planet. Most of the ocean is "desert," in the sense of having very low densities of life. This is because most of the ocean suffers from a severe mineral deficiency. Iron is the limiting factor on ocean life over most of the world ocean. A tiny amount of iron will cause a huge increase in plankton growth. If the oceans were privatized, sea farmers would fertilize with iron…. And then we would really need to burn more fossil fuel to supply enough CO2. Fortunately, there is plenty left.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/walker/walker17.html

nigel

[Gray-Wolf]

The above article makes reference to CO2 levels in the Jurassic yet it was the percentage of free oxygen at that time that led to both the plant life but also heralded the big Dino's. Without oxygen enrichment you cannot grow big Dino's. So is the article trying to tell us about CO2 or is it trying to mislead us about free Oxygen?

[Admiral_Bobski]

The above article makes reference to CO2 levels in the Jurassic yet it was the percentage of free oxygen at that time that led to both the plant life but also heralded the big Dino's. Without oxygen enrichment you cannot grow big Dino's. So is the article trying to tell us about CO2 or is it trying to mislead us about free Oxygen?

Oxygen levels were actually relatively low when dinosaurs were around, the shortfall (against today's levels) being made up partially by CO₂.

Dinosaurs first appeared during a long period of low oxygen and therefore developed highly efficient breathing mechanisms that allowed them to thrive while many other species became extinct. Ward arrived at his theory by tying in what is known about the physiology of dinosaurs with recent geological evidence suggesting that from 275 million to 175 million years ago, oxygen levels stayed very low - comparable to levels found now at altitudes of 4,200 metres.

The above quote is taken from this article: http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2003/980837.htm

The idea seems to be that dinosaurs were able to grow so big precisely because there was such a relatively small amount of oxygen - they were adapted to those oxygen levels. I once read a complaint about the movie Jurassic Park which stated that the dinosaurs wouldn't have been able to survive in our oxygen-rich atmosphere!

CB

EDIT - changed "largely" to "partially"...my fingers racing ahead of my brain again!!

Edited April 15, 2007 by Captain_Bobski

[Zachary]

It is the start of a ICE AGE.

[Gray-Wolf]

Oxygen levels were actually relatively low when dinosaurs were around, the shortfall (against today's levels) being made up partially by CO₂.

The above quote is taken from this article: http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2003/980837.htm

The idea seems to be that dinosaurs were able to grow so big precisely because there was such a relatively small amount of oxygen - they were adapted to those oxygen levels. I once read a complaint about the movie Jurassic Park which stated that the dinosaurs wouldn't have been able to survive in our oxygen-rich atmosphere!

CB

EDIT - changed "largely" to "partially"...my fingers racing ahead of my brain again!!

The 'Jurrasic' started about 190my and was a transition away from the god awful world of the late Permian/Triassic. As we move deeper into the Jurrasic we encounter the evolution of the 'big' dino's (outside the time frame you are in) as the massive continental breakup begins changing deep desert to coastal margins.

In your time frame true dinosaurs were indeed becoming recognisably distinct from the reptiles/mammalian type reptiles but were 'clinging on' in a very harsh environment (in the main) as our own Triassic red sandstones will show you.

Edited April 15, 2007 by Gray-Wolf