[Zelandakh]

PassedOut, on 2012-November-29, 21:11, said:

In a peer-reviewed study, the experts said satellite data show sea levels rose by 3.2 millimeters (0.1 inch) a year from 1993 to 2011 — 60 percent faster than the 2 mm annual rise projected by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for that period.

Could you explain how this tallies please?

Quote

This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3 mm yr

Quote

Global sea level is projected to rise during the 21st century at a greater rate than during 1961 to 2003. Under the IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES) A1B scenario by the mid-2090s, for instance, global sea level reaches 0.22 to 0.44 m above 1990 levels, and is rising at about 4 mm yr–1.

Presumably they are comparing against some other estimate but without access to the paper itself it is difficult to know which one. Without knowing the basis for comparison we cannot judge which factors were not taken into account in the comparison - almost certainly factors which are already modelled though. It would also be interesting to read how much of the increase they are assigning to warming since the 2003 review.

[Daniel1960]

Zelandakh, on 2012-November-30, 07:14, said:

Could you explain how this tallies please?



Presumably they are comparing against some other estimate but without access to the paper itself it is difficult to know which one. Without knowing the basis for comparison we cannot judge which factors were not taken into account in the comparison - almost certainly factors which are already modelled though. It would also be interesting to read how much of the increase they are assigning to warming since the 2003 review.

That is Stefan's recent paper. The paper is comparing the last two decades to the early 20th century. There is nothing new in the paper, which does not incorporate the slowing of SLR observed in the most recent decade. We have been discussing his findings recently over at RC. He contends (and others also) that the slowing can be attributed to the recent La Nina. Conversely, the previous increase could be attributed to El Ninos. The satellite data is being compared to tidal gauge data, which may not be a fruitful exercise. The study also includes the Topex data, which is suspect. The most recent data, using the Jason satellites (2003-present), show a SLR of 2.3 mm/yr. There was a jump of 0.5mm between the satellite switch from Topex to Jason, which many are including in their sea level trends. Granted, all these calculations come from short-term observations, which may be biased high or low, and longer term measurements may shed additional light on the actual changes.

Regarding Antarctica, the following paper was published recently in Nature, and also discussed with author Matt King over at RC.

http://www.nature.co...ature11621.html

The results show that the only losses from Antarctica are occurring along Pine Island Glacier on the Amundsen coast, while the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is nearly in balance, and East Antarctica continues to gain mass. These results show much lower estimated losses when compared to other papers (i.e. Rignot)

[PassedOut]

Interesting little piece about the carbon tax: PAYING FOR IT

Quote

Perhaps because a carbon tax makes so much sense—researchers at M.I.T. recently described it as a possible “win-win-win” response to several of the country’s most pressing problems—economists on both ends of the political spectrum have championed it. Liberals like Robert Frank, of Cornell, and Paul Krugman, of Princeton, support the idea, as do conservatives like Gary Becker, at the University of Chicago, and Greg Mankiw, of Harvard. (Mankiw, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush and as an adviser to Mitt Romney, is the founding member of what he calls the Pigou Club.) A few weeks ago, more than a hundred major corporations, including Royal Dutch Shell and Unilever, issued a joint statement calling on lawmakers around the globe to impose a “clear, transparent and unambiguous price on carbon emissions,” which, while not an explicit endorsement of a carbon tax, certainly comes close. Even ExxonMobil, once a leading sponsor of climate-change denial, has expressed support for a carbon tax.

So not only is the carbon tax strongly favored by conservatives and business people, but it has significant support from liberals too. Too bad that President Obama hasn't gotten on board, but perhaps this remains a future objective for him.

Reminds me of something I read once about Lightner slam doubles (maybe by Morehead). It was along the lines of "because there are no reasonable arguments against it, Lightner slam doubles were eventually adopted."

[PassedOut]

I see that Antarctica has made the news again: Scientists Report Faster Warming in Antarctica

Quote

A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth.

There's no good place to put the water from the Antarctic ice sheets.

[blackshoe]

Well, on the good side, if the whole Antarctic ice cap melts, at least we'll get to see what's under it.

[dwar0123]

blackshoe, on 2012-December-24, 09:13, said:

Well, on the good side, if the whole Antarctic ice cap melts, at least we'll get to see what's under it.

As grim as the reality of that would be, I can't help but be intrigued.

[Al_U_Card]

Like anything else that you look under, you find what supports it...

From: More of the same


To try to get to the bottom of the question, David H. Bromwich of Ohio State University pulled together a team that focused on a single temperature record. At a lonely outpost called Byrd Station, in central West Antarctica, people and automated equipment have been keeping track of temperature and other weather variables since the late 1950s.

It is by far the longest weather record in that region, but it had intermittent gaps and other problems that had made many researchers wary of it. The Bromwich group decided to try to salvage the Byrd record.

They retrieved one of the sensors and recalibrated at the University of Wisconsin. They discovered a software error that had introduced mistakes into the record and then used computerized analyses of the atmosphere to fill the gaps.

…

Much of the warming discovered in the new paper happened in the 1980s, around the same time the planet was beginning to warm briskly.

Read More

They can’t find any recent warming, so they took a broken sensor with “intermittent gaps and other problems”, “recalibrated” it, “used computerized analyses of the atmosphere to fill the gaps” and “discovered” warming that “happened in the 1980s”. If you believe that this is science, then I strongly suggest you prep your telescope, lest you miss out on a spectacular sleigh sighting…

[billw55]

PassedOut, on 2012-December-23, 23:46, said:

There's no good place to put the water from the Antarctic ice sheets.

Sure there is. It goes into the continental ice pack. Warming --> more moisture in atmosphere --> more precip, which accumulates more or less indefinitely on the interior of the continent. After all, it is still perpetually below freezing there, warming notwithstanding.

As I understand, measurements confirm that the continent is gaining ice faster than the sea ice sheets are losing it.

blackshoe, on 2012-December-24, 09:13, said:

Well, on the good side, if the whole Antarctic ice cap melts, at least we'll get to see what's under it.

Atlantis obv

[Al_U_Card]

billw55, on 2012-December-27, 08:02, said:

Atlantis obv

OR Kevin Trenberth's "missing heat"?

[Daniel1960]

A recent report by NOAA pegs current SLR at ~1.5 mm/yr, with a majority of the rise coming from expansion due to oceanic heating. Very little contributions comes from glacial melting in Greenland and alpine regions. Virtually no contribution from Antarctica.

http://ibis.grdl.noa...Report_2012.pdf

[Al_U_Card]

Ho hum, more of the same....

European heads of state and government have agreed to commit at least 20 percent of the entire European Union budget over the next seven years to climate-related spending. The seven-year budget was agreed at 960 billion euros.

All-night negotiations in Brussels produced agreement among EU leaders on budget proposals for the rest of the decade, from 2014-2020.

All-night? Bureaucrats? Were they in Denmark, me wonders?

Meanwhile back at the settling science...

A new paper in PNAS entitled 'Using data to attribute episodes of warming and cooling in instrumental records' looks important. Ka-Kit Tung and Jiansong Zhou of the University of Washington report that anthropogenic global warming has been overcooked. A lot.

The observed global-warming rate has been nonuniform, and the cause of each episode of slowing in the expected warming rate is the subject of intense debate. To explain this, nonrecurrent events have commonly been invoked for each episode separately. After reviewing evidence in both the latest global data (HadCRUT4) and the longest instrumental record, Central England Temperature, a revised picture is emerging that gives a consistent attribution for each multidecadal episode of warming and cooling in recent history, and suggests that the anthropogenic global warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century. A recurrent multidecadal oscillation is found to extend to the preindustrial era in the 353-y Central England Temperature and is likely an internal variability related to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), possibly caused by the thermohaline circulation variability. The perspective of a long record helps in quantifying the contribution from internal variability, especially one with a period so long that it is often confused with secular trends in shorter records. Solar contribution is found to be minimal for the second half of the 20th century and less than 10% for the first half. The underlying net anthropogenic warming rate in the industrial era is found to have been steady since 1910 at 0.07–0.08 °C/decade, with superimposed AMO-related ups and downs that included the early 20th century warming, the cooling of the 1960s and 1970s, the accelerated warming of the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent slowing of the warming rates. Quantitatively, the recurrent multidecadal internal variability, often underestimated in attribution studies, accounts for 40% of the observed recent 50-y warming trend.

www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1212471110

[Daniel1960]

Al,

That warming rate was calculated from a cooler period. Reverting back to 1880 (the start of the industrial revolution), the trend falls to 0.06C / decade. Warming periods occur at roughly 60-year intervals, peaking at ~1880, 1940, and 2000, with troughs around 1910 (the time period mentioned) and 1970. Many have refused to acknowledge solar and oceanic influences on the past temperature record, but are coming to light in recent times.

[Al_U_Card]

It certainly appears that as the science continues to be better defined and less agendized, the important factors are being better evaluated.

A recent paper on various "consensus-oriented" issues raises lots of interesting aspects of the perception that was flogged to the public as being held by "97% of scientists" concerning anthropogenic global warming.

Nearly two-thirds of the 1,077 respondents (professional engineers and geoscientists) believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

[hrothgar]

Al_U_Card, on 2013-February-10, 15:20, said:

It certainly appears that as the science continues to be better defined and less agendized, the important factors are being better evaluated.

A recent paper on various "consensus-oriented" issues raises lots of interesting aspects of the perception that was flogged to the public as being held by "97% of scientists" concerning anthropogenic global warming.

Nearly two-thirds of the 1,077 respondents (professional engineers and geoscientists) believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

Al, you really should do more than just read the abstract of papers before posting them. Otherwise, you might end looking dumber than usual...

While the quote "(professional engineers and geoscientists) believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem." is accurate, you're failing to provide some necessary context. You see, this survey was drawn exclusively from engineers who work in "petroleum and related fields" which is hardly a random sample. Indeed, the whole purpose behind the paper was demonstrating institutional bias in this industry. That's why the body of the paper includes quotes like the following:

Quote

Our study demonstrates that the majority of ‘command posts’ (Zald & Lounsbury, 2010, p. 963) within organizations, especially in the petroleum industry, seem to be manned with opponents to the IPCC and anthropogenic climate science who are actively engaged in defensive institutional work. We point out that in order to overcome the defense, a potent discourse coalition and a more integrative frame, for example by emphasizing climate change as a risk – a common enemy to be managed (per Kahan et al., 2010; Hoffman, 2011b; Nagel, 2011), has to be found.

Thanks for the laugh, jackass...

[Al_U_Card]

No, thank-you

In the interest of fairness, it recently came to (mercury contaminated compact-flourescent) light that fully one-third of the engineers and geoscientists working for the evil and devious oil industry just happened to be believers in man-made climate change.

It is uncertain if these deviants are in danger for their contrarian beliefs or if their presence will jeopardize the billions in subsidies enjoyed by that most foul of employers for their (wilderness covering and inefficient) solar energy installations or their (ear-shattering and bird-battering) wind-farms.

And life, as well as the global climate, goes on and on and on

[Al_U_Card]

Start again...

oops we did it again...

A new data set of middle- and upper-stratospheric temperatures based on reprocessing of satellite radiances provides a view of stratospheric climate change during the period 1979–2005 that is strikingly different from that provided by earlier data sets. The new data call into question our understanding of observed stratospheric temperature trends and our ability to test simulations of the stratospheric response to emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances.

What once was settled is now, well as they say, a mystery....sheesh.

[mike777]

Al_U_Card, on 2013-February-12, 21:40, said:

Start again...

oops we did it again...

A new data set of middle- and upper-stratospheric temperatures based on reprocessing of satellite radiances provides a view of stratospheric climate change during the period 1979–2005 that is strikingly different from that provided by earlier data sets. The new data call into question our understanding of observed stratospheric temperature trends and our ability to test simulations of the stratospheric response to emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances.

What once was settled is now, well as they say, a mystery....sheesh.

Al none of this answers the main question that I think is the most important one...how urgent is the problem or what is the rate of change? I dont know.

I do understand we need to worry about iatrongenics but I also understand climate change/warming is a real agency problem.

Hopefully a solution will have optionality.

[Al_U_Card]

mike777, on 2013-February-12, 21:42, said:

Al none of this answers the main question that I think is the most important one...how urgent is the problem or what is the rate of change?

Mike, what it shows is that:

a) their results are all verkakta

b) their models, which proposed the crisis in the first place, are inaccurate

c) their agenda is more about getting you to pay for what they want to do.

So, natural variation covers the entire range of global climate change since forever. If you think that that is urgent then, you send them a cheque. I will keep my money for heating bills tyvm.

[mike777]

I think we all are starting to write that check..My local power company raising rates roughly 14%, more much more than inflation or the rate of energy growth.

btw I hope next time you address my entire post not just a portion.

[Al_U_Card]

mike777, on 2013-February-12, 21:56, said:

I think we all are starting to write that check..My local power company raising rates roughly 14%, more much more than inflation or the rate of energy growth.

btw I hope next time you address my entire post not just a portion.

Every time I looked at it, another line was added.... still, that the illness is a symptom of the treatment seems more than appropriate in this case.

My expertise in these areas is limited to what I can glean from various sources and also depends on what those sources will admit (the recent Science story about their refusal to publish the work on the lack of merit of mouse-studies on sepsis and other diseases is an indication). Filtering and weighing is not that easy considering the vast amounts of data being produced and tortured.

Your bills certainly have something to do with the subsidies accorded to inefficient and ineffective energy sources.

Imagine that the met office data massaging goes the other way and means that things are "worse than we thought"? (Registered trademark of the Church of climatology ) This means that the models are even poorer (worse than WE thought!) and that the earth will just have to buckle down and start producing more heat...

As far as options go, policy is driven by $$$ availability and direction. That is the politics part. As for the science, perhaps we might be better off with more and more efficient energy R&D? Fracking safely and the development of LFTRs would be a start.