Manmade Climate Change Discussion

[BornFromTheVoid]

How long is the record for newly formed first year ice? from that data set

 

As long a we continue to lose summer sea ice faster than winter sea ice, we will set records for more first year ice (because to reach back to normal winter coverage after record low summer coverage, extra new sea ice must be formed), and records for sea ice coverage growth in Autumn and Winter. No data sets, other than the sea ice coverage data, is needed to explain this. 

 

Hope that makes sense 

[SomeLikeItHot]

Tbh, I really can't imagine an entire species of mega fauna evolving, into something new, within the space of, say, 30 years? It's camouflage is hardly conducive to its learning to sneak up on prey in anything other than an ice-dominated environment. So, I guess the day, when the entire population of polar bears is confined to zoos, is coming - sooner or later.

 

Unless, of course, natural drivers can offset the human contribution?

 

Not evolving but adapting habitats - it happens. Off the top of my head I think of the white Ibis in Australia (not exactly mega fauna I admit), which faced with drought/water overuse of their usual wetlands have successfully become a city scavenger and seen everywhere seagulls and pigeons are in the East coast Aus cities putting their long beaks to use digging through rubbish bins. Its possible that a change in their behaviour can mean that the population doesn't decrease.

 

I'm not suggesting this either will happen nor is a desirable outcome, just that its possible for species to survive habit destruction so population numbers of polar bears (or any single species) isn't a great indicator of climate change.

[Gray-Wolf]

You have to remember crikey that we have 'flip flopped from a pack that used to be predominantly older ice at winters end to one with predominantly FY ice? Not that long ago we only melted out the edges of the pack over summer ( and occasionally some regions would have more severe melt back due to local freakish warmth) so there was very little 'regrowth' of ice within the basin come winter ( certain areas like hudson Bay and Bering sea would be 'seasonal' so form the backbone of the FY ice total).

 

We have even lost an ice type from the basin ( in 2010?) with the Paleocryistic ice no longer measured in the basin at all ( this was ice over 10yrs old but possibly thousands of years if it came from ice shelf calving?).

 

With the loss of ice cover comes the loss of the unique nature of the Arctic Ocean ( compared to other world oceans) in that it will lose it's deep halocline layer as 'normal' oceanic processes mix out this layering and allow more typical stratification of the upper 200m.

[knocker]

  The Economist Screws Up on the Draft IPCC AR5 Report and Climate Sensitivity

 

Earlier today, The Economist published a piece of irresponsible journalism regarding information in the draft Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5).  The Economist saved us some effort by explaining the problems with their own article:

“There are several caveats. The table comes from a draft version of the report, and could thus change. It was put together by the IPCC working group on mitigating climate change, rather than the group looking at physical sciences. It derives from a relatively simple model of the climate, rather than the big complex ones usually used by the IPCC. And the literature to back it up has not yet been published.â€

So folks at The Economist, please explain to us, why are you reporting on climate sensitivity information in this draft report about climate mitigation that uses a simple climate model and is based on unpublished literature?

 

http://www.skepticalscience.com/economist-screws-up-draft-ipcc-ar5-sensitivity.html#.UekdIJuvPZU.facebook

Edited July 21, 2013 by knocker

[knocker]

Stunning Photos of Glaciers in Retreat

Seventeen years.

 

That's about how long the glaciers that give Montana's Glacier National Park its name have before they disappear completely, scientists who study the park's snow and ice say.

 

By 2030 or even sooner -- perhaps even by the end of this decade -- most or all of the park's remaining 25 or so glaciers will be gone forever, according to Dan Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist and glacial expert.

 

http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/stunning-photos-glaciers-retreating-alaska-20130717

[Crepuscular Ray]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/has-global-warming-stopped-no--its-just-on-pause-insist-scientists-8726893.html

 

Apparently the slowdown in warming (not a reversal!!!) is due to heat absorbtion by the oceans being greater than predicted.

[knocker]

Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers has become one of our most valuable players on the communication side of climate science.

 

I’m happy to see she had a chance to testify last week before the  Environment and Public Works Committee chaired by Senator Boxer. A worthy way to spend 5 minutes. Good for her, for calling out those she diplomatically refers to as “climate misleadersâ€.

 

I have not had the chance to review the whole hearing yet, but as I find other gems, will post here.

PDF of testimony here.

 

http://climatecrocks.com/2013/07/22/the-top-5-things-that-keep-me-awake-at-night-jennifer-francis-testimony-july-18-2013/

Edited July 22, 2013 by knocker

[Gray-Wolf]

Climate misleaders....... I like that a lot! Tell it how it is Jen and don't pull any punches!

 

Alarmist? , Doomsayer?? What do you call a person that merely reports on the science they do when they find 'alarming, doomladen' events beginning to occur and know that we are travelling in a direction that will only make the situation worse???

 

Eventually all those 'ditherers' will begin mumbling their excuses as to why they could not , at the time, agree with the likes of myself and helped generate the level of public support needed for the necessary changes to become a political 'Must'.

 

I have always maintained that delay will cost lives down the line , millions of lives, yet the ditherers ( clever deniers? ) have helped place us on that path as 'we did not know enough at that time......' Yeah , right and I'm just a visionary.......

[Gray-Wolf]

Posted Yesterday, 13:19

Gray-Wolf, on 23 Jul 2013 - 00:03, said:

What do you call a person that merely reports on the science they do when they find 'alarming, doomladen' events beginning to occur and know that we are travelling in a direction that will only make the situation worse??

 

That's precisely the problem, GW.

 

As you said you are reporting on events that are (at least) alarming.

 

This sort of thing is one of the primary reasons why the scientific consensus has not been more widely accepted by the general public. Leave for one side who is right, who is wrong, who is this, or who is that, you are trying to attribute events to climate. This sort of muddle-headed-thinking, vocally, and vociferously, across the political and scientific establishments has done more to damage climatology than any other area of discourse. Certainly more than ClimageGate (of which all of the alleged activities were found to be completely untrue)

 

I applaud you for standing on top of the hill and pointing out 'unusual' events. But you are attributing them to changing climate which, crucially, all of the peer-review evidence summarily dismisses such attribution as impossible. You seem to have forgotten to read those papers, didn't know they exist, or, worse, you are deliberately misleading your readers.

 

Of course, and much much much worse your sin is, attributing events to climate means it works the other way around; and now interested third parties can now join you on top of the hill and point to other event extremes such as cold winters, excessive snow, all indicative of a cooling climate. Don't worry, you are not alone: Greenpeace, at least - probably the most guilty organisation of the proliferation of CO₂ output due to their opposition of nuclear power stations - attributed Katrina directly to human-induced climate change saying that it is a 'wake-up call about the dangers of continued global fossil fuel dependency' Al Gore suggested that the warmer Caribbean Waters (a weather event) because of climate change made the storm stronger, and thus the damage greater contrary to all scientific evidence to the contrary. The list is endless .... you are not alone: you are in the company of Nobel Prize winners amongst other accolades.

 

This sort of faulty attribution has done more to increase CO₂ emmissions by inaction than other kind of reasoning throughout the whole debate. After all, who really wants to pump out human emmissions if we can possibly help it?

 

If you continue to feed the 'other side' such inaction will be capable of going on well past my lifetime. And I, for one, am sick and tired of reading why one foot of snow in Bedfordshire last January means that the climate isn't warming.

 

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

But that is where it gets riduculous (IMHO) as , until we have such a complex understanding of the climate issues as to say we 'know' then we can only make statements based upon what we 'know' , what we 'expect' and what we see linking those two things?

 

In reality we cannot 'know' that the Sun will rise tomorrow and so by most climatye misleaders standards this would mean awiting it's rising each and every day! As it is the odds that the sun will rise, and continue doing so for over 4 billion years more are good enough to take it as read that the sun will rise.

 

We are at a similar point with areas of climate forcings that we 'expect' to occur. hen we see such events occuring we need look at the 'odds' of it being 'natural' and of it being human influenced to see that the odds are becoming very stacked toward such extreme events ( like a 1 in a hundred years downpour) being driven by the changes man has made to the climate system and not just a random expression of the syastem?

 

Folk can't suddenly decide to be 'purist' in their understandings of their life experience just because it now suits them. We each 'take for granted' many events each day as to do otherwise would be to render us inactive due to the immensity of calculating such at each and every instance. Why do folk 'take for granted' one set of 'unknowns' as 'truths' and yet demand proof for others??

 

It all appear disjointed and opportunistic to me.

[BornFromTheVoid]

But you are attributing them to changing climate which, crucially, all of the peer-review evidence summarily dismisses such attribution as impossible.

 

This isn't true.

 

Also, pointing to snow outside and saying "global warming can't be real, 'cause it's snowing" is not the equivalent of of studying the dynamics involved in extreme weather events and determining the there's is, say, 99% likelihood that a particular event would not have occurred without climate change, or the pattern on warming we've experienced is encouraging jet stream patterns favourable for extreme weather. or that a storm was more damaging due to sea level rise, etc.

 

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n7/full/nclimate1452.html

 

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/37/E2415

 

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/02/28/1222000110

 

[be cause]

How are we to guess where and in what context 'Sparkickle said ...

[knocker]

Did the Clean Air Act unleash Atlantic hurricanes?

Emerging research theorizes the decline of polluting sulfur-based particles in the atmosphere, which block sunlight and cool the Earth beneath, have allowed Atlantic hurricane activity to  increase in recent decades.  Could it be our efforts to clean the air have, paradoxically, made it more stormy?

 

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/07/24/did-the-clean-air-act-unleash-atlantic-hurricanes/

[knocker]

Michael Mann is a climate scientist who was flung into the spotlight when he and his colleagues published a graph several years ago showing the explosive growth of global warming over the past century or so. The original work has been updated and extended many times, by many different scientists, and each time the pattern of results has been supported and strengthened. Additional data going back 11,000 years show that we are experiencing an unprecedentedly rapid rise in temperatures.

 

This, of course, has made Mann a big target of climate change deniers. While most of them attack the graph—failing in their attempts, I’ll note—some have taken a more personal tack. Two groups, the far-right National Review Online and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, have made this personal indeed. In a frankly disgusting article by Mark Steyn, the NRO accused Mann of academic fraud. It even compares him to the ex-Penn State University coach Jerry Sandusky, a convicted serial child molester. Steyn got this comparison from an article by Rand Simberg in the CEI’s blog, who called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science … [who] molested and tortured data.â€

 

Nice, huh? So Mann sued for defamation.

 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/07/24/antiscience_defamation_climate_scientist_michael_mann_lawsuit_to_move_forward.html

[Methuselah]

They're desperate, knocker!

[UV-RAY]

 

Michael Mann is a climate scientist who was flung into the spotlight when he and his colleagues published a graph several years ago showing the explosive growth of global warming over the past century or so. The original work has been updated and extended many times, by many different scientists, and each time the pattern of results has been supported and strengthened. Additional data going back 11,000 years show that we are experiencing an unprecedentedly rapid rise in temperatures.

 

This, of course, has made Mann a big target of climate change deniers. While most of them attack the graph—failing in their attempts, I’ll note—some have taken a more personal tack. Two groups, the far-right National Review Online and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, have made this personal indeed. In a frankly disgusting article by Mark Steyn, the NRO accused Mann of academic fraud. It even compares him to the ex-Penn State University coach Jerry Sandusky, a convicted serial child molester. Steyn got this comparison from an article by Rand Simberg in the CEI’s blog, who called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science … [who] molested and tortured data.â€

 

Nice, huh? So Mann sued for defamation.

 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/07/24/antiscience_defamation_climate_scientist_michael_mann_lawsuit_to_move_forward.html

 

But it still remains questionable even amongst many climate scientists, you cannot reconstruct past and accurate temps with some seaweed, a tree and a couple of pinecones. Ok that was a joke but the whole reconstruction of past climatic conditions using proxies is open to abuse and contamination of evidence at hand. Maybe that explains the constant need to readjust past global temps in order to show we are warmer now than at any other time in the last zillion years.

[knocker]

Latest forcings.

 

 

[Methuselah]

But it still remains questionable even amongst many climate scientists, you cannot reconstruct past and accurate temps with some seaweed, a tree and a couple of pinecones. Ok that was a joke but the whole reconstruction of past climatic conditions using proxies is open to abuse and contamination of evidence at hand. Maybe that explains the constant need to readjust past global temps in order to show we are warmer now than at any other time in the last zillion years.

But among nowhere near as many as the deniers would have us believe...

[UV-RAY]

But among nowhere near as many as the deniers would have us believe...

Both points are valid then Pete.

[knocker]

But some points lose validity when you compare a respected scientist with a convicted serial child molester

[4wd]

What was the outcome of this?
 

 

 

Nice, huh? So Mann sued for defamation.

 

 

 

[Methuselah]

Both points are valid then Pete.

In the same way as the 40% of Americans who believe that the Sun orbits the Earth are 'right'; in that they confirm the lack of a 100% consensus?

Edited July 24, 2013 by A Boy Named Sue

[knocker]

As far as I'm aware it hasn't been heard yet.

 

But it still remains questionable even amongst many climate scientists, you cannot reconstruct past and accurate temps with some seaweed, a tree and a couple of pinecones. Ok that was a joke but the whole reconstruction of past climatic conditions using proxies is open to abuse and contamination of evidence at hand. Maybe that explains the constant need to readjust past global temps in order to show we are warmer now than at any other time in the last zillion years.

 

Regarding tree rings.

 

Absent growth rings are rare in Northern Hemisphere forests outside the American Southwest^†

Abstract[1] We present a synthesis of locally-absent (or " missing" ) growth rings across the Northern Hemisphere based on 2,359 publicly-available tree ring-width records. During the last millennium, widespread absent rings have been observed only in the southwestern United States and were associated with severe drought. Absent rings were uncommon during the growing seasons that followed major volcanic eruptions, including A.D. 1259 and 1816. Because these features have occurred so rarely in high-latitude and high-elevation tree ring-width records, the hypothesis that the Northern Hemisphere tree ring-width network is compromised by dating errors due to unrecognized absent rings would require that many temperature-limited forest stands in the network exhibited a reaction to cold temperatures that has essentially never been observed anywhere. If however absent-ring formation were to increase in forests outside of the American Southwest, that behavior would represent a unprecedented response to environmental stress

 

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50743/abstract

[knocker]

Are the causes manmade or natural? CIRES new “Science in Flight†video

 

[knocker]

Insurance Industry Sees Risk of Climate Fueled Extremes

At hearings before the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee on July 18, 2013, Mr. Frank Nutter, President of the ReInsurance Association of America repeated the longstanding concerns that the Insurance industry has about climate change.

 

The salient point is, that Insurance companies live and die by their ability to estimate risks. To that end, they hire the world’s smartest number crunchers to figure out how much exposure they have to things like extreme weather exacerbated by climate change.

 

 

http://climatecrocks.com/2013/07/24/insurance-industry-sees-risk-of-climate-fueled-extremes/

[Crepuscular Ray]

From NASA

 

It's been known for years that many tropical plants - in e.g. rainforests - reduce their activity and therefore their carbon dioxide intake as temperature rises. This appears to be the first major quantitative study of data from over half a century and seems to bear out the idea of a feedback effect.

 

RELEASE 13-230

Tropical Ecosystems Boost Carbon Dioxide as Temperature Rises

WASHINGTON -- NASA scientists and an international team of researchers have found tropical ecosystems can generate significant carbon dioxide when temperatures rise, unlike ecosystems in other parts of the world.

The researchers discovered a temperature increase of just 1 degree Celsius in near-surface air temperatures in the tropics leads to an average annual growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide equivalent to one-third of the annual global emissions from combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation combined. In tropical ecosystems carbon uptake is reduced at higher temperatures. This finding provides scientists with a key diagnostic tool to better understand the global carbon cycle.

"What we learned is that in spite of droughts, floods, volcano eruptions, El Niño and other events, the Earth system has been remarkably consistent in regulating the year-to-year variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels," said Weile Wang, a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of a paper published Wednesday, July 24, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study provides support for the "carbon-climate feedback" hypothesis proposed by many scientists. This hypothesis asserts a warming climate will lead to accelerated carbon dioxide growth in the atmosphere from vegetation and soils. Multiple Earth system processes, such as droughts and floods, also contribute to changes in the atmospheric carbon dioxide growth rate. The new finding demonstrates observed temperature changes are a more important factor than rainfall changes in the tropics.

The team used a state-of-the-art, high-performance computing and data access facility called NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) at Ames to investigate the mechanisms underlying the relationship between carbon dioxide levels and increased temperatures. The NEX facility allowed scientists to analyze widely available data of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global air temperatures between 1959 and 2011, while studying outputs from several global dynamic vegetation models.

"Climate warming is what we know with certainty will happen under climate change in the tropics," said Josep G. Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project in Canberra, Australia, and co-author on the paper. "This implies the release of carbon dioxide from the tropical ecosystems will very likely be accelerated with future warming."

Events that can temporarily influence climate, such as volcanic eruptions, may disturb the strength of the relationship between annual temperature and carbon dioxide growth for a few years, but the coupling always recovers after such events.

"The study really highlights the importance of long-term Earth observations for improving our understanding of the Earth system," said Rama Nemani, principal scientist at Ames for the NEX project. "Conclusions drawn from analysis of shorter records could be misleading."

Edited July 24, 2013 by Crepuscular Ray