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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“” JimB (10:19:44) :
“George,
George E. Smith (09:50:56) :
Excuse my hiccup; that is one UNEMPLOYED climate modeler, that Spencer says doesn’t exist.” “”
Well he’s employed; and likely more productively than doing climate modeling. Notice how much easier it is to get a job in climate modeling, if you don’t find anything wrong with the official doctrine.
Fair is fair. They can make claims, and I get to beat them with my wiffle ball bat for every failed prediction. Right now I am leaning towards a simple five wacks but I am willing to entertain proportionality. Suggestions?
ps. this solution should be open to every one worldwide. For the sake of time and space considerations, and also to provide Solomon and friends a further opportunity to make more predictions I am willing to let someone stand in for me. But they ought to be made to come to some public place at least once a year….
Well, it’s great all that money for modeling. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Administration could spare just a fraction of this to sort out all the surface stations which Anthony has worked so hard on – even add a few more around the world. We might then get some useful observations to check on how well this modeling money is spent!
Removing carbon dioxide from the air to slow or reverse global warming is as ridiculous as removing oxygen from the air to minimize corrosion of metals.
I regard this as good news. Normal means ice ages and glaciers a mile thick over my house. I am now safe for a thousand years. Praise the LORD!
Moderately OT:
I assume this is the same Susan Solomon who wrote “The Coldest March”, an attempt to show that Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s party was done in by freakishly cold weather on the way back from the South Pole. Solomon’s name caught my eye because I’m currently re-reading Roland Huntford’s earlier “The Last Place on Earth”, which takes a somewhat different view.
I was thinking over this climate modeling, as it relates to evaporation/water vapor/precipitation.
I mentioned two pivotal papers (IMHO) the Jan 1 2001 Geophysical Research Letters paper by John Christy et al from UAH and also Hadley Centre; the crux of which was that oceanic near surface water and air temperatures are not correlated, and that for the regions and times of the study the air temp warming was measured at about 60% of the water temp warming. That in itself is interesting, but remember they aren’t correlated swo you cannot recover one set of data from the other. Specifically, you cannot reconstruct oceanic (and therefore global) lower troposphere temperatures, which weren’t measured form random depth water temperatures which historically were measured; so prior to about 1997/80 the global temperature record is essentially flying blind, and worthless to compare against recent history.
The second paper was the Wentz et al form SCIENCE July 2007, that measured evaporation, atmospheric water, and precipitation all increased at a rate of 7% per deg C of surface temp warming ( they didn’t have a whole degree of warming during the study). The GCMs agree with the 7%K^-1 for total atmospheric water, but claim only 1-3%K^-1 for evaporation and precipitation; which yes they do say match.
Now if you think back to the classroom demonstration of evaporation placing some water under a glass (beaker). The more energetic molecules of the molecular energy distribution, escape from the surface into the air, increasing the humidity. then some water molecules fromt he air shoot back into the water, until a dynamic equilibrium is established with the same number of molecules exiting, and entering the water. There are essentially no current in the vessel,a nd the air and water temperatures eventually reach equilibrium, and you have saturated water vapor pressure 1005 relative humidity, and in fact since you have the glass wall surfaces for water to condense on, you aslow get a constant precipitation of water which forms droplets on the surface.
Now that in general does not occur out in the wild. I have never been in a tropical Rain Forest; but I have been in the Washington State Olympic National Forest which is a rain forest, and basicvally got rained on from forest generated moisture (not external rain); and I have been in some hot tropical high humidity regions, like the Florida Keys.
But mostly during daylight hours, it isn’t always 100% relative humidity, and it isn’t usually recondensing since there aren’t a lot of cold surfaces to condense on.
So we have in the oceans, water warmed by the sun and the atmosphere which creates evaporation purely as a function of water surface temperature exactly as happens under glass.. but without the glass, the humidity isn’t 100%, so the evaporation rate is not limited by the water content of the atmosphere nor by its temperature away from the surface. The air is capable of holding more moisture, and it moves moisture away from the surface by convection so saturation doesn’t occur (generally).
So it seems to me, that under these conditions, the rate limitation of evaporation is set by water temperature, and not by air temperature.
The warm air rises, and moves off elsewhere, and eventually, it does reach 100% relative humidity at some cooler temperature at higher altitude, and if nucleation sites are available then droplets, and clouds can form, and eventually the water in the clouds gets dense enough for precipitation to occur. And the total water in the atmosphere rises till the precipitation equals the evaporation; but the total water level is a function of the atmospheric temperatures; at least the atmopsheric water capacity is; and it doesn’t depend on the water temperatures. All the water temperature decides is how fast the atmospheric total water can be raised to the stable level.
If water temperatures and air temperatures aren’t correlated,a nd they aren’t, the total water in the atmosphere would seem to be limited by the evaporation rate which depends on only the water temperature.
All that the air temperatures dictate, is what the average relative humidity is going to be in the atmosphere. The warmer the atmosphere is, for a given water temperature, the lower the relative humidity is going to be; but the toal water content of the atmopshere would not change with atmospheric temperature; only the humidity changes.
Now I admit, this is a lot of hand waving; scribbling with a stick in the sands on a desert island; sans Google to get data.
But the upshot of my armchair “modeling” is that total evaporation, total atmospheric water content, and total global precipitation ought to al increase and decrease in lockstep; ata rate determined only by water surface temperatures, and independent of atmospheric air temperatures.
And basically, this is what Wentz et al claimed from their actual satellite measurements; although they don’t give my rationale for why it must be so.
So I don’t understand what could possibly be the assumptions of the GCMs that can lead to the atmopsheric total water content increasing at seven times the rate of evaporation/precipitation increase.
It would seem that they must be assuming that just because the warmer air is CAPABLE of holding more water, that it must do so; essentially arguing that the humidity either doesn’t change, or it changes in such a way that the total water content increases 2.3 to 7 times faster than the warmer waters can supply it.
Well my model must be limited by what I can scribe in the beach sands; but maybe somebody out there can explain the error of my ways; well they wouold also have to prove Wentz et al are wrong since my seat of the pants thesis agrees with their results.
George
The penguins are not gonna take this globaloney any more: click
Re:
Don Shaw (05:56:04)
Ken Hall (08:07:06)
NASA has decided that some of the ARGO floats reported faulty data that requires “adjustment”. As it turns out, the ocean is warming after all, maybe. Don, you were right.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/
George E Smith, I’d like that job as a climate modeler. Does it come with cameras or do you have to own them? Also, do you have to stick with climate modeling or can you do runways too?
George E. Smith (09:50:56) :
“So anybody lacking a job who wants to do some climate modeling; now’s your chance.”
Hey, I could use some extra money. Where do I report for the lobotomy?
‘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.’
My interpretation is if it’s irreversible, it means it is a NATURAL cycle and MANKIND HAS NO IMPACT, so why are we giving China our hard earned dollars. They already own over 30% of the US debt.
Garacka wrote: “Is there a law against Government employees publishing propaganda?”
It should be but considering the proposed Carbon Tax diverts US tax money to foreign countries like China for the building of factories etc in direct competition to the USA perhaps this is more appropriate.
THE LOGAN ACT
The act is short and reads as follows:
Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.
http://law.jrank.org/pages/8357/Logan-Act.html
Seems to me a person taking USA tax funds and using said funds to create lies in the interest of diverting US taxpayer funds to a foreign Nation based is a traitor to the USA.
Also of interest to those of us against the further bankrupting of the USA.
“This [Supreme] Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty.” – Reid v. Covert, October 1956, 354 U.S. 1, at pg 17. A treaty can be nullified by a statute passed by the U.S. Congress (or by a sovereign State or States if Congress refuses to do so), when the State deems the performance of a treaty is self-destructive. The law of self-preservation overrules the law of obligation in others.
The Constitution authorizes the United States to enter into treaties with other Nations. The UN and the WTO are NOT nations. However a quick fix apparently took place in the U.S. Senate on March 19, 1970. According to the Anaheim (Cal) Bulletin, 4-20-1970, the Senate ratified a resolution recognizing the United Nations Organization as a sovereign nation.
Here is the reason behind all the propaganda.
“…There is no indication that American public opinion, for example, would approve the establishment of a super state, or permit American membership in it. In other words, time – a long time – will be needed before world government is politically feasible… This time element might seemingly be shortened so far as American opinion is concerned by an active propaganda campaign in this country…”
Allen W. Dulles (cfr) from a UN booklet, Headline Series #59 (New York: The Foreign Policy Association., Sept.-Oct., 1946) pg 46.
<a href="www.sweetliberty.org/issues/staterights/treaties.htm"sweet libertyt
lawful gov
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/statesrights/treaties.htm
“” Gary Hladik (12:25:48) :
Moderately OT:
I assume this is the same Susan Solomon who wrote “The Coldest March”, an attempt to show that Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s party was done in by freakishly cold weather on the way back from the South Pole. Solomon’s name caught my eye because I’m currently re-reading Roland Huntford’s earlier “The Last Place on Earth”, which takes a somewhat different view. “”
Well there was some very cold weather to be sure; it can get down to -90C on the Antarctic plateau; there were also a lot of storms; which hap[pen all the time on that continent.
Then there were some major errors like taking horses instead of sled dogs, as Roald Amundsen did. In the end it was sheer bad luck that stranded them in a storm close to One Ton Depot, and likely safety. Truly one of the great sagas with an unfortunate ending; but which inspired generations of british and Colonial people (including me).
“To strive, to seek, to find; and not to yield . ” RFS
Didn’t Mann use tree ring proxies for reconstructing past climate? In his research, Mann used growth to indicate warming, and slower tree growth for cooler temperatures? Does this mean Mann got everything backwards?
Alert the IPCC!
Apologies if I missed this somewhere in the thread but this interview may be worth listening to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903
“
”
My wife likes it when I take her to Mensa meetings. It makes her feel that I am much more normal. (I’ve been a Mensa member for 25 years.)
High IQ is certainly no guarantee of horse sense or financial sense. Nor does it improve the “smell test” sense. Highly intelligent people are no better than anybody else when it comes to evaluating their closely-held beliefs with reality. Many suffer from the “Smart Guy Syndrome” — if only everybody did what they told them to, the world would be perfect. SGS suffers tend to have a lot of anger, too.
These children playing with their computer video game climate models are insane. They forget to think for themselves. The bottomline is that they did not include into their false scheme, all the deforestation of years past, excessive mining, land defromation via suburban sprawl and many other variables. They did not create models that include solutions that can reverse the situation.
This is all propaganda to create an environmental 9/11. Just another excuse to clamp down control, and the gov feeds these bananas more money as a reward for producing ambiguously fearful results. Everything in the world is treated as a worst case scenario. The idea that the climate changes cannot be reversed in ludicrous. There are so many ways that this can be done and I alone know of several more than viable solutions, that could reverse the situation in as much time as it took to get here.
These loopey scientists, paid to propagandize the science of climate change, have not modeled the natural methane and CO2 emissions of the planet to see that no matter what we do the heavy gases will always be there. They did not calculate that geological activity in the next 1000 years that could very suddenly reverse the whole thing.
The motives of science and government are highly suspicious. More of the gloom and doom type story coming for apparently apparently increasingly nearsighted supposed professionals. These computer models are terribly misleading as they will never be as dynamic as actual nature is. This planet has gone through volcanic activity in our recorded history that caused mini-ice ages and after only a few years, the effect was gone and the climate stabilized again on it’s own.
What comes after such horrifying news? New laws criminalizing water usage, oversized carbon footprints, and the likes. People, open thine eyes and see what’s going on. Hydrogen as a fuel, from water has been known about for over 100 years, perfected in 1996. Why is it not the norm today? because of politics, science and oil working together to create the conditions that would, justify absurd laws and control tactics.
The blame will be put on you, the choke-chain will be put on the average person. You are not the reason for the climate problems. It’s the jokers in the government, science and oil who have painted this false picture and create the climate problems, by shunning away for decades, the solutions that have been there and are still here.
They are justifying a horrid future that they continue to manipulate because you just don’t know any better. I do, by doing my homework, my own research. All the works of Tesla, Einstein, Meyers and so many others, has proven we have clean options and yet, these idiots at the top, have discarded the studies of those “scientists”, who were far more legitimate and qualified then todays pompous, self-righteous and near-sighted clowns.
It’s a ruse. The fact is if we disappeared today, in 20 years the climate would be fine again. Since we can’t calculate what we don’t know, that is, all the other variables the stupid computer models don’t take into account, the word of these scientists is perverse and misleading. Nice to see misinformation coming from the top shelf, they themselves even admitting their models are not the word of God.
Do your own research, learn what has been done by the greats, learn what is out there, educate yourself and you cannot be dupped, over and over and over again. Bush taught us nothing apparently. What we should have come away with from his ‘regime’ is the no one can fool the educated and aware.
Nuff said.
Caveman Dan
The Raging Caveman Show
I think that the planet is able to withstand more than we imagine, which will make it very difficult to forecast anything.
With that being said, nothing has changed the face of the earth more than man.
James Miller
http://www.realestategozone.wordpress.com
George E. Smith (09:27:02) :
Climate modeling is old hat; so now they are going to make up the data as well.
LMFAO too true George, but I’m afraid to say they’ve been doing that already!
On top of that, I have a question.
Could our current CO2 rise just be the MWP coming to visit?
DaveE.
“Removing carbon dioxide from the air to slow or reverse global warming is as ridiculous as removing oxygen from the air to minimize corrosion of metals.”
Heh.
I say we get us a gigantic sponge, and soak up some of that water vapor–voila, problem solved!
“Wah Wah Wah”
All you eggheads and losers that don’t believe in global warming should stop crying and get a life. The earth is warming up you idiots it is freakin’ hot where I live.
“Oh but 2 ‘scientists’ is Podonk Kansas has just debunked global warming so it must not be real and there’s no consensus whether it is actually happening.” Shenanigans! I tend to believe the other half a billion other scientists who say it is than a couple of Appalachians who got their degrees in community college.
Stop your bitchin’ and embrace reality.
REPLY: “redemption” I suggest that you embrace this reality, just posted
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/27/james-hansens-former-nasa-supervisor-declares-himself-a-skeptic-says-hansen-embarrassed-nasa-was-never-muzzled/
And while you are at it, learn manners.
– Anthony Watts
Redemption
Go to “Projects” and read my post (the last one). There is a very omnious chill in the air coming out the north west that I have never experienced in the last 35 years. There is monster coming out of the North Pacific Ocean that is going to put a cold spell on NA that will rival the Little Ice Age. Start stocking up on earmuffs and wool socks because it is going to get damn cold.
Ah, come on people, its not CO2 … its Nitrous Oxide!
Nitrous Oxide From Ocean Microbes Could Be Adding To Global Warming
ragingcaveman (15:20:20) :
These children playing with their computer video game climate models are insane. They forget to think for themselves.
I originally thought near these lines. Some time spent looking at the GISStemp code has lead me to think otherwise.
You can tell a lot about how someone thinks by how they write computer code. Are they messy or neat? Scrupulously thorough or ‘close enough gotta go’? Are they cryptic (implied deceitful) or strive for clarity? Yes, you can read those ‘mind prints’ in the code someone writes. So what do I see in GISStemp?
The style varies from major part to major part (many hands in the pot). Some contractors or interns on small bits? Some parts neatly done.
The style is sometimes quite good: many comments (clarity and openness) with tests for conditions that ‘cannot happen’ and print error messages if they are reached (careful and detailed thinker willing to take care of any problem, even the impossible ones that sometimes do happen – a compiler error caused one of my ‘impossible case’ traps to print error messages…), nicely spaced and printed for easy reading (cares about work quality and the opinion or needs of others) etc.
In most of the code the style shows few or none of these traits. But it does not show cryptic deceit either. It shows someone knocking out a bit of code on a government job good enough to work as the spec describes, or a person who has a day job as a researcher but learned to program and thinks that makes them a professional programmer too (and since they understand what the code does why put in any comments or document the file layouts?).
But what I see as the basic ‘style fault’ is not in the coding. The programs I have gone through so far work as advertised. They do what they claim to do in broad scope (though some details broken, some that matter). So where is the problem? The problem is in the choices of what to do. The basic idea that is being converted to computer code. That is not deceit (other than self deception) and it is not insane, it is far worse: it is someone who truly believes they ‘have it right’ and didn’t bother to check the idea around to see where the made a major mistake.
Now it’s buried in the code and no one will be going back to dig it up again and examine it. The basic premise is simply accepted as valid, since that decision was made long long ago.
Example:
GISStemp does a zonal based ‘correction’. On another thread I gave this more detail, so I’ll give a short form here. Everything from 30 to 60 degrees North Latitude is considered fungible for correcting temperature slopes. San Francisco is a very flat temp curve in summer (fog) while inland is very hot and varies. The hot air rises and pull fog over SF until the central valley cools some. Then the wind slows or stops, and things start over. SF is inversely correlated with the inland valley for temperatures. Hot valley cools SF. Yet to ‘correct’ the UHI of SF, inland sites are used (there isn’t much ‘rural’ out to sea..).
Basically, the notion that a zone of fungibility exists is broken. It sounded good to someone long long ago, and now is in the code, and no one will be going back to revisit it unless pushed kicking and screaming. Nobody wants to do maintenance on old ‘established’ code if they can avoid it and the person who made the decision that this was the right way to do things has no interest in revisiting it; physically or mentally they have ‘moved on’. The new guy has what he is interested in and doesn’t want to spend his time reviewing ‘old stuff’ when he could be ‘making his bones’ on his ideas. There is no audit process for research computer code. So the problem just stays. Part of the detritus of ‘established science’.
It is the collection of many similar errors of this sort, accumulated over decades, and no longer revisited, that makes the GISS data useless.
BTW, I generally look for ‘edge effects’ when doing a code review. “Off by one” errors is a specific example of edge effects. It’s not the middle, it’s the start or the end that folks ‘flub’. In the case of GISStemp, I think it is a literal edge that is there error here.
Most people live on coasts, ergo most city UHI problems will be in big cities on coasts. Up and down the coast will be people. Where is it rural? Inland. So where does the ‘rural reference station method’ used by GISStemp end up looking for corrections? In exactly the place that is guaranteed to be a different kind of climate. Coasts are ‘moderated’ by the water, inland is not. Adjusting out the moderation is an error. Period. I believe this is why the Pisa GISS graph under the Italy thread is so dismal.
So I think it is more correct to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” and refrain from attributions to malice …
Adolfo Giurfa (06:43:56) :
Fortunately, in the long run, real science has been made always by intelligent individuals like you, not by any government institution. Real progress is made by individuals not by herds of well fed employees.
Adolfo, If I’m ever down your way I’m buying you a night in your local pub! You deserve it.