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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A thousand year forecast reference, pfft. Childs play. See your thousand and raise you a hundred thousand:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090125142118.htm
“Whereas some coastal dead zones could be recovered by control of fertilizer usage, expanded low-oxygen areas caused by global warming will remain for thousands of years to come, adversely affecting fisheries and ocean ecosystems far into the future.”
[…]
“Together with senior scientists Steffen Olsen oceanographer at Danish Meteorological Institute and Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, physicist at National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Professor Shaffer has performed projections with the newly-developed DCESS Earth System Model, projections that extend 100,000 years into the future.”
Joe – read Garacka (21:09:14). That should answer your question. [snip]
Tabloid News and now Tabloid Science.
I see the whole problem with all this climate speculation was that the sun is a mathematical constant in their calculations. I am an idiot in math.
The government has no money to give anyone, no, not the UN abortion programs, not the food programs in the world, not the unemployed climate modelers. The government has NO MONEY for anything. So why don’t they shut up and get to work cutting funds to these sycophantic idiots?
Thank God for this blog.
According to the BBC at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7852628.stm :
“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 year – that’s not true,” said researcher Susan Solomon, the lead author of the report, quoted by AP news agency.
What is normal climate? An ice age according to some? Looks more amd more like carbon dioxide is preventing an ice age! Hurrah for carbon dioxide.
Hopefully with this extra money it will allow unemployed financial modelers to find a new career. We all know what a fine job they did until it was tested by a little unimportant thing called reality.
hey – give the lady a break – her job is obviously up for review and she needed to publish something.
Michael D. Smith
If you’ll read the actual bill passed in the House of Representatives here
http://readthestimulus.org/hr1_text.pdf
You’ll see this text:
Provided further, That not less than $140,000,000 shall be available for climate data modeling.
That is on page 52 of the 647 page pdf document.
But wait there’s more!
On page 53
For an additional amount for ‘‘Science’’, $400,000,000, of which not less than $250,000,000 shall be solely for accelerating the development of the tier 1 set of Earth science climate research missions recommended by the National Academies Decadal Survey.
The quotes around the word science, are part of the bill itself, not my editing. Odd they would have to delineate it that way.
If you read through the bill, many examples of porkus maximus are evident.
RJ Hendrickson (22:26:20) :
“It’s the old, ‘we’re ruining the future for our children’ argument in the guise of a scientific study by experts. Chosen for this work undoubtedly because they volunteered to work without pay, just to save the planet for their progeny. Right?
Surely nobody would accept money in pursuit such a noble cause.”
What future? We are all doomed!
——————————————-
Neither the notion of lifefime of “an individual molecule” or of “a certain concentration” exist. That’s junk science !
In physics & chemistry, only the notion of half-lifetime exists.
Dyson is an eminent physicist. He would certainly not use the junk-science notion of “molecule lifetime” or “concentration lifetime”.
Joe (21:45:14) :
I think the studies mentioned earlier mean 5-12 years at meaningful levels. In any reservoir with sources and sinks, you will be dealing with an e^-x relationship for the amount of the original fluid present over time. For example, Lake Erie refills every 2.5 years, a simple source and sink with a tank. Assume for the sake of discussion that it mixes well. After N years, the amount of original water left from T=0 will be e^-(N/2.5), or at 2.5 years e^-1 or 36.8%. At 5 years 13.5%, 10 years 1.8%, 100 years, 4.2E-16%, 1000 years 1.9E-174% , Now, anyone could argue that there are still water molecules left from 1000 years earlier, and they might be right, even in my oversimplified example (but man that’s a lot of zeros)
So, no, I can’t argue with the fact that CO2 lasts thousands of years. It does. Some of it will be recycled hundreds of times by then, some of it not once, and some of it will end up in a subduction zone probably not to reappear before the sun swallows the earth. So, if you’re interested in LOTS of zeros after the decimal point, then, yep, thousands of years (or millions or billions if you like). All depends on what level you’re interested in… For practical matters however…
$140,000,000 for research and modeling but how much for due diligence to insure the data they are using are accurate? I suspect less than 1%.
This starts to look like a typical case of a State that has turned wicked on it’s own citizens.
Especially because it is not the first scary story: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/scare_watch_arctic_warming_is_1.html
And if you think 140.000.000 for modeling is much, look what ACORN is going to get!
It’s time to wake up and put an end to this BS before Obama has it’s planned Civil Army in place.
The longer you wait the bloodier the struggle will be.
Beside that, what have we got to loose, we’re all doomed!
Chris V. (22:19:38) :
Umm… aren’t you the guys who are always pointing out that CO2 lags temperatures by 800 years in the ice cores?
It seems to me that that’s how long it took for the carbon cycle to re-establish equilibrium. So that “1000 year” lifetime for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere looks pretty reasonable to me.
I think guys like Dyson who claim an atmospheric persistence of 12 years for CO2 are confusing the lifetime of an individual molecule of CO2 with the lifetime of a certain concentration of CO2- and they are definitely NOT the same thing!
There is also the short cycle seen in http://icecap.us/index.php/go/in-the-news/qualitative_thoughts_on_co2/
of a few months delay of CO2 changes, probably of biological origin,
So it is established that there is a long term sink/source ( 800 to 2000 years) and a short term sink/source ( five to nine months). I would expect that in our lifetimes the shorter one is important, because that is the one we affect, we are part of the biological cycle after all, emitting half a ton of CO2 per year each of us just by existing.
Models, which is all this study is about, are GIGO, par excellence, for such a long term prediction.
The total amount of CO2 exchange with the atmosphere is so great, any excess by biological inputs is a noise in the chaotic system IMO.
Where did I read this?… GIGO=Garbage In, God’s truth Out.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24934655-7583,00.html
Good story of historical cycle projection vs GCM predictive accuracy. Guess which approach wins? (big DUH)
I wonder how they can be ignorant about the definitive fact that the CO2 abosorbed/released by living things (mostly plants) amounts to 400 billion tons a year, which is as large as 1/7 of the total amount (2.75 trillion tons) in the atmosphere ?
Taking the sea-atmosphere CO2 exchange into account, the average lifetime of atmospheric CO2 should be as short as 5 years!
As a chemist studying photosynthesis for over 40 years, I am definitely convinced of this.
“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.”
A warmer world is surely a wetter world, on average. All that water locked up in icecaps will circulate between the liquid and gaseous phases. Some places that are dry may get drier, but this cannot be the norm. In countless debates, I’ve never had an AGW believer rebut this point.
In Melbourne, Australia this morning our local ABC (government funded radio) broadcaster Jon Faine who tries to promote AGW at every opportunity questioned the weather bureau senior forecaster regarding the forecast for the next 4 days temperature (in Celsius) of 38, 40, 41, 42 and 40 that this must be a record heatwave and is obviously linked to climate change, he was deflated by the forecaster’s reply that this also occured in 1908 and that last year was the coldest Sydney year for 100 years.
RE: 385 ppmv
Do any of you really know what that number means. Probably not. More importantly, the climatologists (i.e., the white-coated welfare kings and queens living and working in the academic and government research ghettoes) haven’t got a clue to what it means. (Note: The term “white-coated welfare queen” was coined by the irascible Prof Rutum Roy, a material scientist at the Univ. of Pennsylvania and constant critic of US goverment research funding policies, about 35 years ago).
The concentration of the various components in air taken at any site after analysis is computed and reported for a defined reference state known as “Standard Dry Air” (SDA), which is bone-dry air that is comprised only of nitrogen, oxygen, the inert gases and carbon dioxide (i.e, the so-called fixed gases) and is at standard temperature and pressure (STP, i.e., 273.2 K and 1 atm pressure). One cubic meter of SDA contains 385 ml or 17.2 millimoles of pure carbon dioxide. However, SDA exists at no place on the earth because “real air” is never at STP and always contains water vapor and clouds, the climatologists’ worst nightmares. The term “real air” is used by engineers for local air at the intake ports of air separation plants.
The _relative ratio_ of the fixed gases is, quite remarkably, constant thu out the atmosphere except for minor variations due to site. This is the origin of the term “well-mixed atmospheric gases”. The composition of real air is, however, always site specifc and depends mostly on elevation, temperature, pressure and absolute humidity.
The ideal gas law is usually given as: PV = nRT, which can be re-arranged to:
n/V = P/TR. What this equation means that _absolute amount_ of the fixed gases will fluctuate rapidily in the air and follow the weather. Thus, even in “dry real air” there is _no unifom temporal and spatial distribution of the atmospheric gases_ and hence it not possible to model climate with any useful skill and accuracy.
Enter the nightmares water vapor and clouds. The absolute amount of water vapor in air can range from 0 to about 5 % by volume. There are few places on the earth where the absolute humidity is absolutely O all the time. The Atacama Desert in the Andes is the most famous of these. As the absolute humidity increase, the absolute amount of the fixed gases decreases. Since absolute humidity is quite variable and fluctates rapidly, so will the absolute amount of the fixed gases. As above this limits the skill and accurracy of climate model projections.
Clouds are reservoirs of liquid water in the air and are in equilibrium with water vapor in local air, and they are constantly moving. If the clouds move in a region of lower humidity, they can rapidly release water vapor. If they move into region of higher humidity, the droplets can grow bigger and come down as rain.
Carbon dioxide is quite soluble in water (cf, soda water) and it can be rapidly absorbed or released from water droplets as function of local temperature, pressure, humidity. In fact, prolonged heavy rain can wash out a fair amount carbon dioxide which reduces the absolute amount in local air.
Based on the above, are you guys rapidly coming to the conclusion that the above white-coated welfare queens and kings are peddling scientific phony balony? Jimmy the Sandwich Man has been selling this stuff for public consumption from his deli in NYC for over two decades. Keep your eye Jimmy for he always has thumb on the scale!
You could do a lot more to stimulate the economy by simply sending 1,400 random Americans a check for $100,000.
That this is buried in an “economic stimulus” package says the entire thing is just a scam to use an “emergency” to shovel money to cronies and pet projects. Rather despicable in my opinion.
The earth warmed and the people cried, “The Gods are angry! What must we sacrifice to appease them?”
The voodoo priests replied, “A lump of coal, a dash of oil, and a methane belching cow.”
Then the people noticed the earth was cooling and asked the same question. The voodoo priests replied, “Same deal, except now you gotta’ double down.”
CH
El Nino’s coming!!
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/climo&hot.html
So, 2009 may be a warm year after all.
Much of the info in my previous post is from a technical bulletin which you can find at Universal Industrial Gases Inc.’s website as well a lot of interesting info on air separation plants. GO: http://ww.uigi.com/air.html.
You will also learn why carbon capture and storage is technically not feasible.
Re: AKD: Solomon says:
‘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.’
Is it just me, or is that last sentence nonsensical? If Global Warming was irreversible, taking steps to either help or hinder it would be 100% irrelevant. The logical thing to do would be to divert every last dollar that would have been spent on countering Global Warming into things we could actually do something about – preventing disease, for instance, or improving crop yields. Which sounds similar to the kind of thing that Bjorn Lomborg has been saying all along.
Logic and AGW really don’t go together, do they.
I was under impression that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere in the last 50 years was only roughly half of what we have poured there.
I don’t have access to PNAS, do they model the CO2 cycle or just assume it stays constant?
Joe (21:45:14)
On reading the Nature article, written by “Mason Inman is a freelance science writer currently based in Pakistan.” I saw a lot of half truths.
What people seem to be ignoring is the means of removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. As several have remarked the ocean both absorbs and emits CO2, so in the long term it is neutral. CO2 is “permanently” removed by weathering rocks and being deposited in sediments. So, there is a natural annual flux of about 20 times the human emissions wherein CO2 is emitted and then absorbed. Since CO2 molecules do not come stamped with a little “Proudly Man-made” label, they are all treated the same. I know of no natural system which is not capable of coping with fluctuations of that sort of magnitude. Le Chatelier’s Principle is strictly only applicable to chemical systems, but since a) it seems also to apply to all other dynamic systems and b) CO2 balance is essentially a chemical system we should bear it in mind. As Chris V pointed out above, it looks as if the extra availability of CO2 accelerates weathering such that it takes about 800 years (in current temperature regimes) to reduce the levels again.
My thought is that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is dependent on temperatures. There is obviously a small feedback warming effect, as the modellers say, but the historical record shows essentially no causative effect of any significant magnitude. The mechanism is fairly simple: Earth heats up, oceans release CO2, permafrost melts and releases methane, which is oxidised, atmospheric CO2 rises, slight greenhouse warming and acid weathering of rocks increases, soon overcoming the greenhouse effect of CO2. Earth starts to cool, oceans absorb CO2, high latitudes freeze, locking up plant material in permafrost, rock weathering continues in lower latitudes and atmospheric CO2 concentration falls.
Anything wrong with that?
All I see from Dr. Solomon is undue reliance on computer models that have yet to make a verified prediction.