Climate change to continue to year 3000 in best case scenarios
New paper in Nature Geoscience examines inertia of carbon dioxide emissions
New research indicates the impact of rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere will cause unstoppable effects to the climate for at least the next 1000 years, causing researchers to estimate a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet by the year 3000, and an eventual rise in the global sea level of at least four metres.
The study, to be published in the Jan. 9 Advanced Online Publication of the journal Nature Geoscience, is the first full climate model simulation to make predictions out to 1000 years from now. It is based on best-case, ‘zero-emissions’ scenarios constructed by a team of researchers from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (an Environment Canada research lab at the University of Victoria) and the University of Calgary.
“We created ‘what if’ scenarios,” says Dr. Shawn Marshall, Canada Research Chair in Climate Change and University of Calgary geography professor. “What if we completely stopped using fossil fuels and put no more CO2 in the atmosphere? How long would it then take to reverse current climate change trends and will things first become worse?” The research team explored zero-emissions scenarios beginning in 2010 and in 2100.
The Northern Hemisphere fares better than the south in the computer simulations, with patterns of climate change reversing within the 1000-year timeframe in places like Canada. At the same time parts of North Africa experience desertification as land dries out by up to 30 percent, and ocean warming of up to 5°C off of Antarctica is likely to trigger widespread collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, a region the size of the Canadian prairies.
Researchers hypothesize that one reason for the variability between the North and South is the slow movement of ocean water from the North Atlantic into the South Atlantic. “The global ocean and parts of the Southern Hemisphere have much more inertia, such that change occurs more slowly,” says Marshall. “The inertia in intermediate and deep ocean currents driving into the Southern Atlantic means those oceans are only now beginning to warm as a result of CO2 emissions from the last century. The simulation showed that warming will continue rather than stop or reverse on the 1000-year time scale.”
Wind currents in the Southern Hemisphere may also have an impact. Marshall says that winds in the global south tend to strengthen and stay strong without reversing. “This increases the mixing in the ocean, bringing more heat from the atmosphere down and warming the ocean.”
Researchers will next begin to investigate more deeply the impact of atmosphere temperature on ocean temperature to help determine the rate at which West Antarctica could destabilize and how long it may take to fully collapse into the water.
The paper “Ongoing climate change following a complete cessation of carbon dioxide emissions” by Nathan P. Gillett, Vivek K. Arora, Kirsten Zickfeld, Shawn J. Marshall and William J. Merryfield will be available online at http://www.nature.com/ngeo/index.html
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I really had to laugh at the headline provided with the press release:
Climate change to continue to year 3000 in best case scenarios
Let’s see, did the climate change at all during the last 1000 years?
It depends on who you ask.
The Hockey Team says no:
Others who are not members of the Hockey Teamsters Union of Concerned Scientists say yes:
History tells us the second graph is the more likely truth.
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ok. These nutters have officially lost their marbles. C’mon, Mmaaaannn. Are you serious? Year 3000?
They’re really just trying to justify grants for the next 1000 years.
This is bloody funny now.
I welcome the publication of papers like this.
They are destroying what few vestiges of credibility that might remain, even in the eyes of the gullible.
Literally too daft to laugh at.
Hypotheses. Models. I think Canada has found an area it can reduce expenditure if it wants to.
Fine then! Let’s put an immediate halt to anymore climate conferences, disband the IPCC and stop funding climate scientists who study Co2 warming related fields.
I thought there wa a study recently that said if we reduced our co2 output then the polar bears stood a chance. This new study now seems to say no chance. Too many computer simulations me thinks. ;O)
Oh, I forgot. THE END IS NIGH. Ahhhhhhh! Now, where is my sandwich board?
Can I ask that WUWT archive this item and ‘capture’ the article it derives from?
If Co2 levels start dropping OR/AND temperatures also drop consistently, I have a feeling the establishment will claim it was due to their efforts and such claims as you highlight here will be conveniently forgotten in the same manner as the Met Office prediction of a warm winter.
tonyb
So, climate will just suddenly stop changing in 1000 years time when climate has been changing for the last 4.5 billion years? Yeah right!
The real problem is that there are far too many people who will fall for this drivel. Along with the media coverage in Aus of the Victorian bush fires and now flooding in Queensland, New South Wales and Western Aus. Any such events like icebound ships don’t get the slightest mention.
Anyway, that is a classic early British sci-fi movie.
This is just laughable. The Met Office tried to make global temperature predictions just a mere year ahead for nine years and failed abysmally to predict the pause in temperatures and instead constantly predicted rising temperatures …
Climatic noise is a pink noise which means it is 1/f and that the uncertainty increases with longer time scales. That means predicting one year ahead is a hell of a lot easier than predicting 10 years which is a hell of a lot easier than 100 which is a hell of a lot easier than 1000.
Which means unless they can show they can very accurately predict the temperature changes one year in advance then they aren’t worth listening to for longer periods.
Well as long as we can’t reverse climate change for a thousand years we might as well stop trying, right?
So they can`t tell the weather tommorow yet they can tell what it`ll be like in a hundred years? I wonder whom in one hundred years will point out they were wrong 🙂
Let’s see, AD 3000, 4 meters, about 13 feet.
I’m at 90 ft above sea level.
Good.
I won’t have to move.
Whoever provided the grant for this should ask for their money back.
They can get their models to say anything they want.
On the bright side if they are right why bother if we are doomed already !!!!!
I just love it when scientists push their models that far into the future. There is one historical lesson in the dangers of predicting into the future. The horse manure crisis that emerged in the Victorian era.
From http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/
“Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.”
Of course, this never happened. The invention of the automobile meant that horses were no longer required for transportation.
Predictions and models. These need to come with very large warning labels.
Haven’t they read that there is no “heat in the pipeline” from the oceans at all? Even a simple literature search is asked to much from these “researchers”.
And with “zero emissions” we will be back to near pre-industrial CO2 levels in somewhat over 100 years, reversing any temperature/climate effect, as far as there was an effect…
This is REALLY funny — because we all know that there is NO inertia to the climate system and that it’s physically impossible that the CO2, methane and other multi-atom radiation-absorbing gas molecules that man is releasing/accelerating release of, and the soot release and other albedo-changing activities of man, will have any physical effect whatsoever, much less one that might be felt for a millenia or so, right?
Pielke, Sr., Christy, Michaels & Lindzen all agree that there is no greenhouse effect, that soot has no effect, and that paleorecords of other long-felt climate influences are the sheerest nonsense, right?
Thanks so much for the fun and reassurance, Tony!
1000 years into the future? This modelled group-think projection is beyond parody. What an incredible waste of money diverted from hard-pressed taxpayers.
How can they do model projection for such a huge time scale. They can’t even get it right over a 10 year period. Which has also already been proved historically.
Look – at the risk of being offensive to the average reader – it is quite clear that the perpetrators of such BS are simply complete, total and utter Di*kheads who need to be hounded at every opportunity!
The simulation shows…..? FFS! They couldn’t simulate their next excrement evacuation with any certainty!!
Sorry for the rant – but it’s just too much!
This from a NASA (Hathaway, Dec 2006) press release predicting that Solar Cycle 24 will “peak” in 2010 with a 160 sunspot count….
Reference: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2006/12/23/scientists-predict-large-solar-cycle-coming/
In the plot, above, black curves are solar cycles; the amplitude is the sunspot number. Red curves are geomagnetic indices, specifically the Inter-hour Variability Index or IHV. “These indices are derived from magnetometer data recorded at two points on opposite sides of Earth: one in England and another in Australia. IHV data have been taken every day since 1868,” says Hathaway.
Cross correlating sunspot number vs. IHV, they found that the IHV predicts the amplitude of the solar cycle 6-plus years in advance with a 94% correlation coefficient.
“We don’t know why this works” says Hathaway. “The underlying physics is a mystery. But it does work.”
see caption
According to their analysis, the next Solar Maximum should peak around 2010 with a sunspot number of 160 plus or minus 25. This would make it one of the strongest solar cycles of the past fifty years—which is to say, one of the strongest in recorded history
Left: Hathaway and Wilson’s prediction for the amplitude of Solar Cycle 24. [More]
Astronomers have been counting sunspots since the days of Galileo, watching solar activity rise
and fall every 11 years. Curiously, four of the five biggest cycles on record have come in the past 50 years. “Cycle 24 should fit right into that pattern,”says Hathaway.
These results are just the latest signs pointing to a big Cycle 24. Most compelling of all, believes Hathaway, is the work of Mausumi Dikpati and colleagues at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. “They have combined observations of the sun’s ‘Great Conveyor Belt’ with a sophisticated computer
model of the sun’s inner dynamo to produce a physics-based prediction of the next solar cycle.” In short, it’s going to be intense.
Note that NASA has deleted the graphs and plots that the original WUWT thread used, but the original “computer modeled predictions” remain (as invalid) as they originally were (also apparently invalid).
This is really good news. If they are getting desperate enough to start trying to get people to believe that the next 1,000 years are already doomed, then they know they are losing the fight. The greater their hysteria the more people will see through the bull$hit.
That means science is slowly winning the fight.
John Kehr
The Inconvenient Skeptic
Remind me: just how many million mistakes per second is the Met Off supercomputer capable of when running a model out to 900 years ahead?
Wow… these guys really don’t have anything else better to do with their time, do they ?
I wonder if they also have time to produce a computer model for the year 3000 that will tell us which stocks to buy, where the housing boom will be happening, and who will win the world cup… I want to leave a note of advice for my great great great great great great great grandchildren.
@ur momisugly Martin Brumby: “They are destroying what few vestiges of credibility that might remain, even in the eyes of the gullible.”
You know that there is no credibility in this paper. I know that. Most people who visit this blog know that. But actually, “the gullible” (I fear) do not know that. And those are the people that the world governments are playing to, by funding crap like this. I know too many people who swallow every AGW scare story whole, to think that “the gullible” won’t fall for this as well. They’ll lap it up, my friend. And one of the scary things: most Warmists that I know are actually quite intelligent! Example: My Uncle and Aunt (an oncologist and social worker, respectively – yes I know, say no more about the latter) are both outspoken Greenies who display Gore’s film and books proudly on the bookshelves, and believe that Climategate was just about a few hot-headed emails taken out of context and exploited by deniers funded by Big Oil. Similarly with a professional couple that I know, who are both signed-up members of the Green party. And when you think about it: Liberals/socialists by definition are incredibly gullible. I mean, if you’re gullible enough to be a socialist after everything history has taught us about politics, economics and human nature, then of course you’re going to be gullible enough to swallow this crap. But the hold that such self-importance and moral superiority has on a person is blindingly strong.
THAT is what we are dealing with here, my friend.
Isn’t it weird the way warmists, when faced with the current reality that the planet just isn’t warming, push the future timeline of thermageddon even further into the future in a desperate attempt to peddle their lies?
This is science fiction writing, not science.