From NOAA News, Susan Solomon predicts the future with certainty. In other news, on the same day Caterpillar, Sprint, Texas Instruments, and Home Depot announce massive layoff plans to the tune of 50,000 people, unemployed climate modelers get a government bailout today courtesy of our new president to the tune of 140 million dollars. That should be just enough to pay the electric power bill for the new supercomputer I’m sure NOAA will just “have to have” now to keep up with the new toy for the Brits at Hadley. (h/t to Ed Scott for the NOAA pr)
New Study Shows Climate Change Largely Irreversible
January 26, 2009
A new scientific study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reaches a powerful conclusion about the climate change caused by future increases of carbon dioxide: to a large extent, there’s no going back.
The pioneering study, led by NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon, shows how changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are completely stopped. The findings appear during the week of January 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Our study convinced us that current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly change the planet,” said Solomon, who is based at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said. “But the new study advances the understanding of how this affects the climate system.”
The study examines the consequences of allowing CO2 to build up to several different peak levels beyond present-day concentrations of 385 parts per million and then completely halting the emissions after the peak. The authors found that the scientific evidence is strong enough to quantify some irreversible climate impacts, including rainfall changes in certain key regions, and global sea level rise.
If CO2 is allowed to peak at 450-600 parts per million, the results would include persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall that are comparable to the 1930s North American Dust Bowl in zones including southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern North America, southern Africa and western Australia.
The study notes that decreases in rainfall that last not just for a few decades but over centuries are expected to have a range of impacts that differ by region. Such regional impacts include decreasing human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts. Dry-season wheat and maize agriculture in regions of rain-fed farming, such as Africa, would also be affected.
Climate impacts were less severe at lower peak levels. But at all levels added carbon dioxide and its climate effects linger because of the ocean.
“In the long run, both carbon dioxide loss and heat transfer depend on the same physics of deep-ocean mixing. The two work against each other to keep temperatures almost constant for more than a thousand years, and that makes carbon dioxide unique among the major climate gases,” said Solomon.
The scientists emphasize that increases in CO2 that occur in this century “lock in” sea level rise that would slowly follow in the next 1,000 years. Considering just the expansion of warming ocean waters—without melting glaciers and polar ice sheets—the authors find that the irreversible global average sea level rise by the year 3000 would be at least 1.3–3.2 feet (0.4–1.0 meter) if CO2 peaks at 600 parts per million, and double that amount if CO2 peaks at 1,000 parts per million.
“Additional contributions to sea level rise from the melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets are too uncertain to quantify in the same way,” said Solomon. “They could be even larger but we just don’t have the same level of knowledge about those terms. We presented the minimum sea level rise that we can expect from well-understood physics, and we were surprised that it was so large.”
Rising sea levels would cause “…irreversible commitments to future changes in the geography of the Earth, since many coastal and island features would ultimately become submerged,” the authors write.
Geoengineering to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was not considered in the study. “Ideas about taking the carbon dioxide away after the world puts it in have been proposed, but right now those are very speculative,” said Solomon.
The authors relied on measurements as well as many different models to support the understanding of their results. They focused on drying of particular regions and on thermal expansion of the ocean because observations suggest that humans are contributing to changes that have already been measured.
Besides Solomon, the study’s authors are Gian-Kasper Plattner and Reto Knutti of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and Pierre Friedlingstein of Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Gif-Sur-Yvette, France.
NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.
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Damn! I knew it, we are all going to die. I hate those modelers!!
So why the carbon and farming taxes if there is no turning back and warming in inevitable? Makes no sense to me, and I don’t buy AGW, I buy AGC solar forced by multiple back door mechanisms.
On account of we ain’t go no solar activity to force heat into the system.
The stop loss is broken 1 AU away.
Attempts a sequestration so far have resulting in CO2 bubbling out of the ground.
And if Archibald is right, pulling CO2 out of the system will plunge us back to the Ice Age. It’s Antifreeze, not greenhouse gas.
Go run experiments on somebody else’s planet.
Leave the Earth alone.
Prof. Freeman Dyson shows that the persistence of atmospheric CO2 is only about 12+/- years. Susan Solomon claims it’s persistence is a millennium — for the human produced fraction of CO2. Hmm-m-m. Who to believe?
This article shows how the system works, and what’s going on: click
REPLY: The key question is: how much at the millenium? It has been said that we drink a few of the same water molecules as did Julius Caesar, and breathe a few of the same oxygen molecules once inhaled by Thomas Jefferson. So sure, it is plausible that few CO2 molecules emitted by Al Gore’s private jet or swimming pool heater might still be around in the atmosphere 1000 years from now.
Is it relevant to the climate 1000 years hence? No. What is relevant is the period when we see a majority of it get recyled or absorbed by biological processes. Dyson’s 12 year lifetime seems more relevant than Solomon’s for the purpose of the “CO2 drives climate”. -Anthony
That $140 million would certainly buy a lot of shore line protection to cope with what appear to be fairly modest sea level rises even with 2x current levels of CO2. It would also employ a hell of a lot more people.
Sorry to see your taxes being misappropriated in such an appalling way!
Bad science, if continued at the present rate of production, is going to have an irreversible long-term impact not only on human understanding of climate but upon the human condition. The climate, however, will ignore all academic follies and will continue to function in the same mysterious way that it always has.
Hmm… Deep Ocean Mixing. Sounds like the Global Warming course curriculum re-engineered. 1000 yrs?
If the cold oceans suck C02 out, and we suck C02 out, when there’s none left then what? According to the geologic record, when the Earth decides to come out of the Ice Age, it will be 200-800 yrs before the C02 replenishes the antifreeze to return to Interglacial warm periods.
Get back in your spaceships and tell your Ice Planet leader Earth isn’t buying.
Noooo!!! H*** C***!!
A prior study that confirms the conclusions of this NOAA paper was made into a TV short. I recommend the scenes where Al Gore explains Global Warming, and Professor Farnsworth’s sun shade malfunctions, creating a heat beam that sweeps across the Earth’s surface.
FUTURAMA – Crimes of the Hot
Written by Aaron Ehasz
Directed by Peter Avanzino
Originally aired 11/10/02 as episode number 01 in season 05
As Earth is unable to counter its rising temperature through the usual
method (the dropping of a giant ice cube into the ocean), Gore leads an
emergency conference in Kyoto, Japan, where Professor Farnsworth claims
responsibility for the crisis. It seems love detoured him from
observing proper emission standards on his prototype robot, and that
could necessitate the destruction of all its “descendants.” That
includes Bender, who resigns himself to having a farewell blowout
before being blown up.
The final solution involves robots creating enough impulsive force to increase Earth’s distance from the sun. A simple Geo-engineering exercise!
On a positive note, the centennial doomsdays are now passe. It appears the alarmists now need to look a millennium into the future to conjure up climate catastrophes.
“…“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said…”
Could someone link an authoritative report that explains how CO2 remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years — while specifically considering each phenomena that tends to remove it — and offers conclusive evidence that the proposed explanations are more than opinion or as yet unsubstantiated hypotheses.
I’m serious. I’ll read it. Until I do, its hard to believe.
‘Ocean mixing’ ‘heat expansion’
The ocean is their last stab at countering the current cooling. Where did all the heating go after 2000? Into the ocean of course, or thats what the models say. And since we won’t know for not a decade, not fifty years, not a century, but not for a thousand years, they don’t have to prove it!
As we outside the darkened halls of modeldom say…
Give me a break!
This article is satire, right? right?
REPLY: Afraid not, it is your tax dollars at work. – Anthony
Oh the wisdom of Solomon! How does she know ““. . . that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,”? Did they happen to discover a carbon dioxide molecule floating around that had been emitted by a human activity 2000 years ago? I seem to have missed that paper.
When making a statement like “sea level rise by the year 3000 would be at least 1.3–3.2 feet (0.4–1.0 meter) if CO2 peaks at 600 parts per million” does she and her colleagues know that the sea level has fluctuated over 4 feet since 1000 prior to the Industrial Revolution? How do government employees with such ignorance regarding the historical record of their own chosen field get permission to make such absurd statements?
“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said.
It has also long been known that *some* (i.e. one molecule) of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for billions of years. And some of King Tut’s exhaled breath yet lingers in our lungs today. So what?
Amazing what passes as science these days…
“But despite this grim prognosis, Solomon says this is not time to declare the problem hopeless and give up.
‘I guess if it’s irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do something about it,” she says. “Because committing to something that you can’t back out of seems to me like a step that you’d want to take even more carefully than something you thought you could reverse.'”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903
Somewhere there is a master-form with appropriate blank spaces to be filled to meet a current reqirement…
After reading the story above I began thinking “Ozone Hole”.
Thinking further my mind turned to The Silent Spring.
But isn’t there a disclaimer attached to this sory, Anthong? Something along the lines of: Only the names have been changed to protect…?
Well as long as this new study was “peer reviewed”,,,,,,,
“Beam Me Up Scotty, There is no intelligent life down here!.”
On this planet, it’s inhabitants are allowing “Politics, Money and Computer Models” to determine and define the Laws of Science.
$140,000,000 for climate modelers? If that were applied to actual data instead of models pretending to be data it would provide $114,660 for every US surface station.
REPLY: Gosh, just think, gold plated Stevenson Screens! On a more serious note, as I read the line items seen here, the bill DID have money to upgrade the surface network with automated stations like this one I blogged about last spring:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/04/29/what-the-modernized-ushcn-will-look-like/
At about $20-30k each, they are quite a bargain for the value they produce.
here is the text of the bill on that section
“accelerating satellite development and acquisition, acquiring climate sensors and climate modeling capacity, and establishing climate data records” to the tune of $600 million, with $140 million going to climate modeling.
– Anthony
Well, as we are already past the tipping point, why not ignore the whole thing and see how bad it gets? It will not make things any worse and it will be a lot cheaper.
I can’t wait to read this one. Its got to have doozy written all over it.
Hmmmm. Let’s see. $140,000,000 for climate forecasting of a naturally chaotic system or $2,333.33 of extended unemployment benefits and job retraining for each of the 60,000+ formerly employed peopled who found themselves looking for jobs today…
Oh…wait…I guess the plan is to retrain them to work on modeling the climate…
You can tell Al Gore is about to magically appear. All of the loony “scientists” are coming out of the woodwork with ever more cockamamie conclusions. Fortunately these latest stories are proving almost effortlessly easy to discredit, as if there is some sort of negative feedback with frequency of publication. Next up for your perusal, a CO2 lifetime of 1000 years! I don’t even have a comeback for that one, I’m speechless! I mean, what do you say to that? Far out, man???
We are finally witnessing the last gasps of a dying theory. I hope it snows like hell in Washington on Wednesday…
So, when all of this is proven to be a fraud, will there be criminal prosecutions? I would enjoy watching the proceedings
Let them keep going.. these articles ect eventually will bury them… I think they have forgotten the power of the internet.. the proof (re previous statements in concrete “antartcic cooling proves global warming” ect) will come to haunt them and their professional careers….You would have thought that they would realize this by now…
They also don’t consider the effect of a set of pole-to-pole reflecting satellites (“mylar-in-space”, etc.).
Idiots.
It takes a high IQ to be that stupid and blind. I have often felt that so-called “superior” intelligence leads many (if not most) of those who have it right off the intellectual cliff.
I shudder to imagine a world where 160+ IQ types made all the decisions. Arrogance and lack of (and contempt for) common sense is a disastrous combination.