Global Sea Level Updated at UC – still flattening

There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when Dr. Roger Pielke mentioned a couple of weeks ago in a response to Real Climate that “Sea level has actually flattened since 2006”.

Today the University of Colorado updated their sea level graph after months of no updates. Note it says 2009_rel3 in lower left.

Source here. Here is the next oldest graph from UC that Pielke Sr. was looking at.

The newest one also looks “flat” to me since 2006, maybe even a slight downtrend since 2006. Let the wailing and gnashing begin anew.

Here is the text file of sea level data for anyone that wants to plot it themselves. In fact I did myself and my graph is below, with no smoothing or trend lines.

Here’s what UC says about the graph. They also provide an interactive wizard to look at specific areas.

Since August 1992 the satellite altimeters have been measuring sea level on a global basis with unprecedented accuracy. The TOPEX/POSEIDON (T/P) satellite mission provided observations of sea level change from 1992 until 2005. Jason-1, launched in late 2001 as the successor to T/P, continues this record by providing an estimate of global mean sea level every 10 days with an uncertainty of 3-4 mm. The latest mean sea level time series and maps of regional sea level change can be found on this site. Concurrent tide gauge calibrations are used to estimate altimeter drift. Sea level measurements for specific locations can be obtained from our Interactive Wizard.

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Leland Palmer

July 27, 2009 10:47 pm

Hi Willis-
I guess we’ve established that you have no power to enforce your demands, and I (and the moderator, of course) determine what I do and do not post.
Also, I think I have established that I am not afraid to admit error, nor am I intimidated by any sort of bullying behavior, nor do I care what some of the the very closed minded and heavily propagandized people on this site think.
I post here because what many of the people on this site say and think is factually wrong, IMO. I post here in the hope that there are a few people who visit this site who might not be totally closed minded on this subject. I post here because regardless of the pretensions to science or scientific behavior among many of the people that post on this site, many of the posts (and just about all of the articles) violate very basic scientific principles. I post here because I think that we are at a very critical time in history, when telling the truth and discovering the truth is absolutely essential to prevent a terrible catastrophe.
The heart of being scientific is the willingness to admit error, when experimental data shows that you are wrong.
So, having established that I respond to your questions out of courtesy, and out of sympathy for someone who is apparently “Google challenged” and unable to use a search engine himself, here are some surveys of climate scientists who think that runaway global warming is possible:
Note that this is an old survey, and the numbers today are likely higher:

MANY SCIENTISTS BELIEVE RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE POSSIBLE.
A Greenpeace poll shows that a worryingly high proportion of climate scientists believe it possible that continuing emissions of greenhouse gases can awaken synergistic feedbacks capable of generating a runaway greenhouse effect.
Bad though the best- estimate of the future, as portrayed by the IPCC would be, there is a worst-case view, which is that the IPCC estimates will prove to be underestimates, and that natural amplifications of warming (positive feedbacks) will be awakened, potentially even generating a point of no return beyond which might lie unstoppable heating of the planet, no matter how deeply anthropogenic emissions might ultimately be cut.
The results of an opinion survey on this subject, published by Greenpeace at the 1992 American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago, show that almost half of surveyed world climate scientists believe that a runaway greenhouse effect is possible if action is not taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions. More than one-in-ten of those polled believe this worst-case analysis – a point of no return beyond which lies unstoppable heating of the atmosphere – to be probable.
Greenpeace International polled 400 climate scientists during December 1991 and January ’92. The sample included all scientists involved in the 1990 study of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and others who have published on issues relevant to climate change in `Science’ or `Nature’ during 1991. Scientists were asked whether they thought there would be a point of no return at some time in the future, if emissions continued at their present rate. By the end of January 1992, 113 had replied, in the following way: probably – 15 (13%), possibly – 36 (32%), probably not – 53 (47%). In other words, 45% believe the runaway greenhouse effect to be possible.
(“Fear expressed of runaway greenhouse effect,” Boston Globe, 10 February 1992; and for further details see: J.K.Leggett, “Global warming: the worst- case,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, v. 85, p. 28-32, June 1992; and “Running down to Rio,” New Scientist, p. 38-41, 2 May 1992).
NOTES: This survey was misreported on a number of occasions in the US media as showing that only 13% of scientists thought global warming itself was probable. The Greenpeace press release was specific about what a runaway greenhouse effect was: it talked about “a point of no return beyond which lies unstoppable heating of the atmosphere,” and the risk of “unleashing global warming at a rate which threatens the future of the human species, and indeed most life forms.”

Here’s a more recent poll, from this year:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/14/global-warming-target-2c

Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed, a Guardian poll reveals today. An average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and political constraints.
Such a change would disrupt food and water supplies, exterminate thousands of species of plants and animals and trigger massive sea level rises that would swamp the homes of hundreds of millions of people.
The poll of those who follow global warming most closely exposes a widening gulf between political rhetoric and scientific opinions on climate change. While policymakers and campaigners focus on the 2C target, 86% of the experts told the survey they did not think it would be achieved. A continued focus on an unrealistic 2C rise, which the EU defines as dangerous, could even undermine essential efforts to adapt to inevitable higher temperature rises in the coming decades, they warned.
The survey follows a scientific conference last month in Copenhagen, where a series of studies were presented that suggested global warming could strike harder and faster than realised.
The Guardian contacted all 1,756 people who registered to attend the conference and asked for their opinions on the likely course of global warming. Of 261 experts who responded, 200 were researchers in climate science and related fields. The rest were drawn from industry or worked in areas such as economics and social and political science.
The 261 respondents represented 26 countries and included dozens of senior figures, including laboratory directors, heads of university departments and authors of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Really, Willis, don’t be so “Google challenged”. I’m sure I’ve barely scratched the surface.
Google it yourself 🙂

Leland Palmer

July 28, 2009 12:19 am

Hi Smokey-
Your “honest graph” with the scales modified so that the vertical axis represented CO2 in percent, with the values going from zero to one hundred thousand percent, was funny, for maybe a fraction of second. It was meant, no doubt, to illustrate a standard climate skeptic talking point, that CO2 has to be present in large percent concentrations to be important. No, it doesn’t. A few hundred years ago it was at about 280 ppm, and now its at something like 385 ppm. And yes, ppm means “parts per million”, and no, CO2 does not have to be present in large concentrations to have a large greenhouse effect. Methane has a much greater effect on warming on a molecule per molecule basis, and it is present in the atmosphere at approximately 1700 ppb, which means parts per billion. Although methane concentrations are currently only 1.7 ppm (1700 ppb) the real climate scientists say that it is responsible for about 30 percent of global warming.
Your “honest graph” is an example of a standard propaganda technique to try to invoke the scorn or ridicule response in the victim of the propaganda, to make the victim of the propaganda scornful of the truth. Many people apparently do not understand that empty ridicule or a scornful attitude are meaningless, and in fact get in the way of scientific analysis.
Science is just a quantitative extension of common sense. Scientists are ideally reasonable, logical, quantitative, experimental, and willing to admit error when error occurs. Scorn or ridicule are monkey responses, and have absolutely nothing to do with science.

Well, Leland, CO2 is not increasing in the biomass, as you incorrectly assert. Carbon is increasing in the biomass, as the O2 is stripped from the CO2 and emitted for us to breathe. And even if we doubled beneficial atmospheric carbon dioxide, there would be no ill effects because of the log response. The only downside to doubling CO2 would be that you’d be even more frightened.

Yep, I’m frightened, for future generations mostly, and not afraid to admit it. If the runaway positive feedback does make the climate accelerate out of control, I’m sure the maybe one or two future generations of human beings will congratulate you on your “courage”.
Yes, I misspoke about the CO2 in the biomass, sorry. Yes, of course it is carbon in biomass, not CO2. I’m an analytical chemist by profession, so I realy do understand this. Carbon in biomass, though, has increased, I seem to remember reading somewhere. This is a concern because much of that standing carbon is vulnerable to wildfires.
Regarding wildfires, we had 1.2 million acres of California burn last year, when a couple of hundred thousand acres is normal, except that we really have no normal years any more.
Here’s a study from Science in 2006, which shows that with only a one degree centigrade increase in temperature, wildfires in the Western U.S. increased by 600 percent. Most of those wildfires happened at high altitudes, in very isolated areas, and are not considered to be caused by humans.
http://secure.ntsg.umt.edu/publications/2006/Run06/SRunningScienceAug18.pdf
If a one degree C increase leads to a sixfold increase in wildfires, does this mean that a 3 degree C increase would lead to a 216 (6x6x6) fold increase?
If you won’t believe the scientists, how about listening to the firefighters?
Watch the video: 60 Minutes: The age of Megafires
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/18/60minutes/main3380176.shtml
You don’t really think that I would fall for the log response line, did you? This is based on a logarithmic curve fit approximation equation for radiative forcing, with a incorrect number used for C0:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing

For instance, the simplified first-order approximation expression for carbon dioxide is:
Incremental change in forcing (delta F) = 5.35 x ln [C/C0] (watts per square meter)
where C is the CO2 concentration in parts per million by volume and C0 is the reference concentration[1]. The relationship between carbon dioxide and radiative forcing is logarithmic so that increased concentrations have a progressively smaller warming effect.

The only way to get the sort of steep logarithmic decline your graph shows is if you use a value for the reference concentration (C0) which is close to zero. The correct reference concentration is approximately 280 ppm – roughly what CO2 levels were a few hundred years ago. If you pick a value for C0 of one, for example, it makes the logarithmic decline 280 times faster than it should be.
The graph claims to be from the University of Chicago. What was this? A student exercise? They picked a wrong, unrealistic number for C0. Plug in 280 ppm or so for the reference concentration of CO2, as the equation was designed to do, and you get a very slow decline in radiative forcing, not the sort of steep decline the graph shows.
Is their case so weak that the climate skeptics need to take a student mistake on his homework, and turn it into a major climate skeptic talking point?
Yes, I think climate skeptics are just about that desperate.

Willis Eschenbach

July 28, 2009 12:54 am

The Guardian contacted all 1,756 people who registered to attend the conference and asked for their opinions on the likely course of global warming. Of 261 experts who responded, 200 were researchers in climate science and related fields. The rest were drawn from industry or worked in areas such as economics and social and political science.

Since only AGW supporters attended the conference, and the response rate to the questionnaire was only 15%, the idea that this poll says anything about what “climate scientists” believe is a sad commentary on your understanding of polls.
To illustrate the idiocy of the Guardian’s idea of a poll, if I go to a meeting of the “Physicians Crusade Against Abortion” and take a poll of the doctors at the meeting regarding abortion, and only 15% of them feel strongly enough about the issue to respond to the poll … do you truly think the poll results would mean anything about how physicians in general feel about abortion? Really?
Even the Greenpeace poll (which is an oxymoron in this context) did not support your claim that “The majority of climate scientists believe that there is a significant probability of runaway global warming.”
“Google challenged”? Lovely term.
It’s a wonderful tool, I use it constantly … but unlike you, I actually think critically about what I find, rather than just blindly accept it as gospel truth. I would suggest you do the same. In particular, don’t accept polls from those who have axes to grind, like Greenpeace and the Grauniad. That’s why polling companies (Pew Trust, Gallup, etc.) exist … because everyone knows (except you, I guess) that a poll by a group with an agenda can’t be trusted. Here’s a headline about a recent example:

Fooling Americans: G.O.P. Cites Polling Company Owned By Health Insurance Company

I’m sure you see the problem …
w.

Leland Palmer

July 28, 2009 6:31 am

Hi Willis-
Yes, certainly it is difficult to poll scientists, because most of them fail to respond. This is a problem. Regardless of this, most climate scientists do indeed acknowledge the possibility of runaway global warming.
Why?
Because there is a real possibility of global warming.
One of the things you skeptics need to worry about is that the more scientists know about this problem, the more likely they are to be worried.
Possibly the foremost expert in the world on the climate as a self-regulating system is James Lovelock. Here’s what Lovelock has to say:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16956300/the_prophet_of_climate_change_james_lovelock

The Prophet of Climate Change: James Lovelock
One of the most eminent scientists of our time says that global warming is irreversible — and that more than 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century
At the age of eighty-eight, after four children and a long and respected career as one of the twentieth century’s most influential scientists, James Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed. “I wish I could be more hopeful,” he tells me one sunny morning as we walk through a park in Oslo, where he is giving a talk at a university. Lovelock is a small man, unfailingly polite, with white hair and round, owlish glasses. His step is jaunty, his mind lively, his manner anything but gloomy. In fact, the coming of the Four Horsemen — war, famine, pestilence and death — seems to perk him up. “It will be a dark time,” Lovelock admits. “But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting.”
In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. “The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia,” Lovelock says. “How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable.” With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes — Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.
By the end of the century, according to Lovelock, global warming will cause temperate zones like North America and Europe to heat up by fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sanctioned body that includes the world’s top scientists. “Our future,” Lovelock writes, “is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.” And switching to energy-efficient light bulbs won’t save us.
Until recently, Lovelock thought that global warming would be just like his half-assed forest — something the planet would correct for. Then, in 2004, Lovelock’s friend Richard Betts, a researcher at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change — England’s top climate institute — invited him to stop by and talk with the scientists there. Lovelock went from meeting to meeting, hearing the latest data about melting ice at the poles, shrinking rain forests, the carbon cycle in the oceans. “It was terrifying,” he recalls. “We were shown five separate scenes of positive feedback in regional climates — polar, glacial, boreal forest, tropical forest and oceans — but no one seemed to be working on whole-planet consequences.” Equally chilling, he says, was the tone in which the scientists talked about the changes they were witnessing, “as if they were discussing some distant planet or a model universe, instead of the place where we all live.”
As Lovelock was driving home that evening, it hit him. The resiliency of the system was gone. The forgiveness had been used up. “The whole system,” he decided, “is in failure mode.” A few weeks later, he began work on his latest and gloomiest book, The Revenge of Gaia, which was published in the U.S. in 2006.

And Lovelock is right about this, I am convinced. If we ignite a methane catastrophe, his predictions will actually turn out to be conservative, in my opinion.

dbstealey

July 28, 2009 10:11 am

Leland Palmer,
In the novel 1984, Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, wonders if the State might declare “two plus two equals five” as a fact; he ponders whether, if ~~everybody~~ Leland believes it, does that make it true?
Don’t worry, the space aliens will arrive in their flying saucers and save both you and James Lovelock [“Possibly the foremost expert in the world on the climate” *snicker*], whom you quote as saying:

The human race is doomed… the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north… the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million… global warming will cause temperate zones like North America and Europe to heat up by fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the IPCC.
Lovelock went from meeting to meeting, hearing the latest data about melting ice at the poles, shrinking rain forests, the carbon cycle in the oceans. “It was terrifying,” he recalls… As Lovelock was driving home that evening…

Leland the True Believer says: “Lovelock is right about this, I am convinced.”
So Jimmy Lovelock is afflicted with Cognitive Dissonance [CD] to the same extent as Leland Palmer. And they both belong to the same wacky AGW cult.
How does Lovelock explain away his driving a CO2-spewing car, when according to his own stated beliefs, by driving he is personally contributing to what he believes are these looming disasters? And his four kids? How does he justify contributing to over population?
Maybe Lovelock is buying carbon ~~indulgences~~ credits from Al Gore? Yeah, that would make driving and having lots of kids A-OK. Ri-i-i-i-i-ght.
CD arises when someone tries to reconcile two mutually contradictory ideas. No doubt Lovelock believes that his CO2-emitting driving can somehow be explained away without seeing himself as an ordinary hypocrite, or worse, as a traitor to the human race.
Lovelock and Leland should immediately stop driving or accepting the use of others’ vehicles. No electricity use, either, because the largest part of electric power is generated by coal. Bicycles, tricycles and horses, OK. But cars?? Since only those who are trying to destroy the human race drive cars, that’s where Cognitive Dissonance comes into play. It gives them an out; a free pass to emit all the CO2 they want.
So, Mr. Palmer, do you drive anything that uses fossil fuel? Do you heat your house with anything that emits CO2? And while you’re pondering a CD-based explanation, tell us how you arrived at your astonishing belief that human activity is putting hundreds to thousands of times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as natural emissions.
I eagerly await your response. Debunking the wacked out statements of CD afflicted gorons is just too much fun. The beliefs of Scientologists make the warmist contingent look absolutely rational by comparison.

Willis Eschenbach

July 28, 2009 6:43 pm

Leland, I personally don’t care about Lovelock’s fantasies any more than I care about yours. You say:

Yes, certainly it is difficult to poll scientists, because most of them fail to respond. This is a problem. Regardless of this, most climate scientists do indeed acknowledge the possibility of runaway global warming.

I sihope you are just pretending to be as thick as two short planks, because if not, you’re in bad trouble.
The problem is your carefully chosen poll takers are slanted, they are trying to prove something, they have an axe to grind. You have no evidence that “most climate scientists do indeed acknowledge the possibility of runaway global warming.” Do you truly think that repeating it one more time will make up for your total lack of evidence?
I understand you care passionately about the world. Curiously, so do I … but that’s not enough. You have to think about what you are saying.
Lovelock is a guru and a visionary, and it’s great that you respect him. But he is not the “foremost expert in the world on the climate as a self regulating system.” He’s published some books, and was co-author on one paper. Now he’s getting old and depressed, and he has become a doomsday proponent … OK, fine, but why should we believe him? He presents no new evidence that there will be a thermal meltdown. He says

In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace

Obviously, he hasn’t even noticed that there has been absolutely no increase in extreme weather events … hardly a recommendation for his use of the scientific method. He’s been taken in by the AGW stories of death and destruction.
I’m one of the people on this list who has actually written about the climate as a self regulating system. I have presented evidence to substantiate my view.
As far as we know, the self regulation is so good that in millions and millions of years, it has not failed once. There’s a name for thinking that we might break a million year old system based on the unchanging physics of wind, wave, and water.
Hubris.
Look it up.

Leland Palmer

July 28, 2009 7:36 pm

Yes, I drive a car. Yes, I own a house. Yes, I use electricity, and so does my family.
This is a very strange, irrelevant argument on your part, Smokey. That you would fall back on such an emotional “moral” argument seems to show that you have given up arguing your case on the facts.
Perhaps you should tell me about the logarithmic decline again, with the wrong value plugged in for C0, meaning that there is actually noting to worry about.
Nonetheless, since you asked, I do consume fossil fuels. I am working to minimize fossil fuel use, as much as possible.
My Japanese made small pickup truck gets almost 30 mpg, but I am looking around for a used Prius, to see if I can get higher mileage. I drive about 15 miles to work, and the approximately 45-50 mpg that a Prius gets should cut my gasoline use almost in half. I also drive 55, to cut energy use, and I suggest that we all start doing the same, just in case the thousands of climate scientists that collaborated on the IPCC report do happen to be right, and the skeptics are wrong.
Sonoma county, California, has a new program in which energy saving improvements can be done on a house, and these improvements mostly added onto a property tax bill. With interest rates as low as they are, we are attempting to refinance, and our plan is to add this money onto energy saving improvements on the house. So, the house is in for some double pane windows, weather stripping, and perhaps a solar thermal heating system. I’ve also crawled around under the house and have taped up the old ductwork, and am replacing the old ducts with new flexible insulated ducts. The windows should be professionally installed, but I will be doing the caulking and weatherstripping myself.
I also intend to add rock bed heat storage to the cooling system and experiment with chilling the rock bed with a swamp cooler at night to cut energy use from the air conditioner.
Really, though, individual action will not stop global warming. I invite you to download a database for Google Earth called CARMA (climate and resource monitoring for action) which contains a database of all the large power plants in the world. Take a look at the hundreds of coal fired power plants in the U.S., and the note how many of them put 20-30 million tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere. You can get the .kml file for Google Earth by following links from the CARMA website, and Google Earth is free.
Then come back here, and tell me my individual energy use, or Lovelock’s, will make a difference. Nonetheless, we all need to conserve, and reduce energy consumption as much as is practically possible.
The main thing we have to do is change the technology, IMO. We need massive polictical corrective action to deal with this problem, and force the coal fired power plants to go to Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
I believe it may be possible to increase the thermal efficiency of our current coal plants, for example, by adding oxyfuel combustion and an IFCC (Indirectly fired combined cycle) topping cycle to the plants. These are both ‘bolt on” retrofittable technologies. The increased thermal efficiency of the oxyfuel / IFCC conversion could pay for the parasitic energy costs of carbon capture and storage, IMO.
Take such a retrofitted coal plant, and burn biochar in it. If the CO2 is captured and deep injected into the earth, what results is a “carbon negative” power plant, capable of generating useful electricity and simultaneously taking carbon out of the biomass (and so ultimately the atmosphere) and storing it underground as supercritical CO2.
So, yes, I’m working on it, on a personal level as well as a mass political and technologial level.
Other than blocking the development of a social consensus and preventing the necessary technological change to deal with this problem, what are you doing to help?

dbstealey

July 28, 2009 7:46 pm

You are a wonderful person, a true protector of the Earth. Our mother earth. Gaia… *sniff*

Willis Eschenbach

July 28, 2009 7:54 pm

Leland, you ask:

Other than blocking the development of a social consensus and preventing the necessary technological change to deal with this problem, what are you doing to help?

Umm … that would be trying to keep clue-free folks from ruining the economy in pursuit of a failed solution to a non-existent problem.

Leland Palmer

July 28, 2009 8:39 pm

Hi Willis-
As far as James Lovelock goes, he really is the author of the standard model of climate science, these days. His Gaia hypothesis, at first ridiculed, has become the standard model, although it is called climate system science, or something equally bland, rather than “Gaia”. He really is one of the 20th century’s most influential scientists, and has a truly nasty habit of being both first and right.
I believe that the self-regulating properties of the climate system are good, but not infallible. In fact, I think that most of the major mass extinction events are due to runaway global heating during massive methane release events from the methane hydrates.
There are quite a few mainstream peer reviewed papers on this “clathrate gun” or “methane catastrophe” model of mass extinctions. There appears to be a telltale isotope signature left in the rocks when trillions of tons of isotopically light (C13 depleted) methane is dumped into the atmosphere – a sharp simultaneous drop in C12/C13 and O16/O18 isotope ratios deposited in the rocks laid down at those times.
Here is a list of links, from the Wikipedia article on the clathrate gun hypothesis, some of which I provided before:
Martin Kennedy, David Mrofka and Chris von der Borch (2008), Snowball Earth termination by destabilization of equatorial permafrost methane clathrate, Nature 453 (29 May), 642-645
http://earthscience.ucr.edu/gcec_pages/Kennedy%20et%20al%202008-Nature-Methane.pdf
Benton, Michael J.; Richard J. Twitchett (July 2003). “How to kill (almost) all life: the end-Permian extinction event” (PDF). TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution 18 (7): 358–365. doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(03)00093-4. http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Benton/reprints/2003TREEPTr.pdf. , cited by 21 other articles.
Thomas, Deborah J.; James C. Zachos, Timothy J. Bralower, Ellen Thomas and Steven Bohaty (December 2002). “Warming the fuel for the fire: Evidence for the thermal dissociation of methane hydrate during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum” (PDF). Geology 30 (12): 1067–1070. doi:10.1130/0091-7613(2002)0302.0.CO;2. http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~jzachos/pubs/TZBTB_02.pdf.
Notice that the peer reviewed scientific papers are talking about three different mass extinction events – the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum, the Permian/Triassic mass extinction (the greatest mass extinction of them all), and the Precambrian “Snowball Earth” termination . Each of these events has a similar isotope ratio signature, fully consistent with the release of a few trillion tons of C13 depleted methane from methane hydrates into the atmosphere, resulting in a methane catastrophe.
So, yes the self-regulation of the Earth’s climate is good. No, it does not appear to be perfect.
Our atmosphere is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, as Lovelock, in his work for NASA pointed out to them. Life has left its signature on our atmosphere, which is full of highly reactive oxygen which would have long since combined with carbon and metals to form CO2, carbonates, and metal oxides if there was no life. Our atmosphere is far from thermodynamic equilibrium, kept there by life itself, Lovelock pointed out to NASA in many years ago, a huge anomaly potentially detectable at astronomical distances.
What would happen if we return to thermodynamic equilibrium, the true lowest energy state of our Earth’s climate, and therefore the preferred state of the climate in the absence of life?
Think Venus.

Leland Palmer

July 28, 2009 8:40 pm

Additional links:
Archer, D. (2007). “Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change” (PDF). Biogeosciences 4 (4): 521–544. http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2007.hydrate_rev.pdf. See also blog summary.
Connor, Steve (September 23, 2008). “Exclusive: The methane time bomb”. The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-the-methane-time-bomb-938932.html. Retrieved on 2008-10-03.
Connor, Steve (September 25, 2008). “Hundreds of methane ‘plumes’ discovered”. The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hundreds-of-methane-plumes-discovered-941456.html. Retrieved on 2008-10-03.

Leland Palmer

July 28, 2009 9:01 pm

Hi Smokey-
Coming from you, Smokey, that really means a lot. Yes, I am wonderful, thank you for confirming it. Thanks a lot. 🙂
Hi Willis-

Umm … that would be trying to keep clue-free folks from ruining the economy in pursuit of a failed solution to a non-existent problem.

Considering the huge number of free goods and services that we receive from the biosphere, including clean air, clean water, sunlight for food and fuel production, a limitless supply of clean energy from sunlight, huge biomass production, and so on, the economic arguments against taking action on climate change have a touch of insanity to them, IMO.
Without the economically valuable goods and services we receive from the biosphere, we are paupers. Not to mention dead, if it gets bad enough, and it’s looking pretty grim at the moment, IMO.
A little reasonable caution is in order.
And no, it won’t ruin the economy.
General Motors did not go broke producing hybrid cars, for example.
The Prius really has economically ruined Toyota, hasn’t it?
You sound kind of like a scared child, cowering in a corner, afraid of space aliens, when you talk about the economic disaster that tapping into an almost limitless supply of clean energy would create, Willis.

Willis Eschenbach

July 28, 2009 9:56 pm

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Leland my friend.
I’ve been a practicing environmentalist since I read Rachel Carsons book … when she first published it, likely before you were born. You know nothing of my life or my motives, and your assumption that you do is puerile. You have a habit of ascribing motives to others that does not serve you well. I’m not a “scared child cowering in a corner”, that’s a projection of your own fear.
For example, you say “… the economic arguments against taking action on climate change have a touch of insanity to them, IMO.” But that’s your own fear talking. For a man who is not worried about say a meteor strike (which has happened many times in earth’s history), you seem terrified about the infinitesimal chance of a runaway temperature.
Next, you have this fantasy that I don’t think we should take action regarding the climate. That’s on you, bro’, I’ve never said that, nor do I believe it. I do think we should take action.
What action should we take? I prescribe “No Regrets” action, that is to say, action which will have beneficial effects whether or not the climate warms. The key is to understand that every single predicted disaster from a warming world is with us already. All of them.
We already have a surfeit of storms, and droughts, and floods. Sea level has been rising for a hundred years. We have insect borne disease, and tornados, and cyclones. We have late frosts and early winters, we have dry springtimes and wet harvest times. We have all the biblical plagues that climate brings, and they’ve been here as long as humans have been on the planet.
The action we should take is action to lessen the effects of those climate catastrophes. If they get worse we’re better prepared, and if they don’t … we’re better prepared.
Reducing carbon emissions, on the other hand, will not make any measurable difference even if the AGW supporters are right (which grows less and less likely as our understanding of the climate increases).
So no, I’m not afraid of an economic disaster, find one place that I’ve said that.
What I am concerned about is that every dollar spent on reducing CO2 is a dollar not available to spend on helping Africans fight drought or people along the Indus fight floods. As a man who has spent a large chunk of his life working on village level development in some of the world’s poorest countries, that’s a tragedy.
You can sit in your nice home with plenty of food, and gas to warm you when it gets cold, comfortably insulated from almost all climate disasters, and talk about how you want to spend billions on some infinitesimal chance of future disaster … but many, many people out there don’t have your layer of monetary fat to sustain them. They need the money to face the real daily threats to their kid’s lives, while you want to piss it away on imaginary threats that might happen in 50 years … and you have the balls to lecture us on your great compassion and economic brilliance?
In Africa they have a saying, “You have to be white to be green”, and it could have been invented for you. Your profligacy in a futile quest for an improved tomorrow is killing people today, and you want to lecture us on morality? Really?
Your arrogant and uncaring attitude about real problems today, masked in a cloak of purest shining green, turns my stomach. Go spend a half a year with the poorest of the poor if you have the balls. I guarantee you’ll come away with a much more realistic set of priorities regarding how we should spend money fighting the dangers that climate brings, the dangers that are with us today and every day.

Pamela Gray

July 29, 2009 6:33 am

I agree with Willis completely. I’m a life long democrat who regrettably voted for Obama. There is the thinking man and woman’s anti-establishment and pro-green stance and then there is what we have today for protesters. I have protested against unequal treatment and funding for women in sports, healthcare, insurance coverage, and university glass ceilings, and have protested loudly against uninformed selection of human study subjects before mandatory informed patient rights became the law. My votes against the moral majority stance on abortion and gay/lesbian rights has and will stand the test of time. I leave no footprint behind when I am out in the forest and tread lightly on the flora and fauna around my house. Given that stance of being someone who protested before most of these green wannabe’s were born, their current loud screams against CO2 are as hollow as a rotten stump and should be recycled by Earth worms, their screams devoured and removed from the land. For God’s sake man, Gandhi is rolling over in his ashes listening to this nonsense against CO2 while 16,000 babies still die every day from lack of food. You know, that stuff that requires CO2 in abundance in order to grow and fuel in order to distribute. Why are you not protesting against the tankers sitting off shore, loaded with fuel, and locked and idle store houses filled to the brim with food while these babies die?

Leland Palmer

July 29, 2009 8:08 am

Hi Willis-

Reducing carbon emissions, on the other hand, will not make any measurable difference even if the AGW supporters are right (which grows less and less likely as our understanding of the climate increases).

Not so, Kimosabe. Renewables will certainly help reduce the growth rate in carbon emissions, which I agree is not enough at this point. But the Waxman/Markey bill does take some preliminary steps in the right direction, IMO, and cap and trade was much more successful for reducing sulfur based pollution than was originally predicted.
Industries lie. Corporations have whole departments called public relations departments, that routinely lie about how good their products are and how minimal their environmental impact is. Institutionalized lying to Congress is a multimillion dollar lobbying industry. Part of the lies that corporations routinely tell Congress are encoded in biased studies that project huge costs for any substantive change. So, cap and trade is likely much more effective than its opponents claim.
While wind and solar are still small parts of our electricity production, the growth rate is tremendous. If I was working for a fossil fuel company, I would look at the growth rate of wind energy, for example, as a threat to my company profits.
So, Waxman/Markey will help, but is not the complete answer.
There are, however a group of “carbon negative” ideas that would take the technology of “clean coal” and combine it with biomass or biochar fuel, resulting in carbon negative power plants.
The problem with carbon emissions now is that they are all one way. Carbon negative energy ideas seek to put carbon back underground, and do so in a cost competitive way:
http://www.etsap.org/worksh_6_2003/2003P_read.pdf

Bio-Energy with Carbon Storage (BECS):
a Sequential Decision Approach to the threat of Abrupt Climate Change
Peter Read and Jonathan Lermit
Abstract
Abrupt Climate Change (ACC – NAS, 2001) is an issue that ‘haunts the climate change problem’ (IPCC, 2001) but has been neglected by policy makers up to now, maybe for want of practicable measures for effective response, save for risky geo-engineering. A portfolio of Bio-Energy with
Carbon Storage (BECS) technologies, yielding negative emissions energy, may be seen as benign, low risk, geo-engineering that is the key to being prepared for ACC. The nature of sequential decisions, taken in response to the evolution of currently unknown events, is discussed. The impact of such
decisions on land use change is related to a specific bio-energy conversion technology. The effects of a precautionary strategy, possibly leading to eventual land use change on a large scale, is modeled, using FLAMES. Under strong assumptions appropriate to imminent ACC, pre-industrial CO2
levels can be restored by mid-century using BECS.

The ability to put carbon back underground while generating electricity has a huge, synergistic effect on whole problem. Combining biomass, or biochar, with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), is an effective way to fight climate change.
What I advocate is converting existing coal plants to oxyfuel combustion and CCS, as has been done by the Jupiter Oxygen Corporation and Vattenfall, with their German oxyfuel/CCS pilot plant. I then propose burning biochar (charcoal) in the coal plants to make them carbon negative.
There is also a technology called HIPPS or IFCC (Indirectly Fired Combined Cycle) that has been developed by United Technologies and NETL (the National Energy Technology Laboratory). I propose adding a HIPPS or IFCC topping cycle onto these converted coal plants, to increase their efficiency enough to pay for the conversion and the parasitic efficiency losses due to the CCS. IFCC (aka HIPPS) alone can convert a 35 percent thermally efficient power plant into a 50 percent thermally efficient power plant, and it can be retrofitted onto existing power plants.
We have a lot to do, and we don’t have any choice, IMO. Business as usual is pointing us directly at a methane catastrophe, with a high probability, IMO.
We have coal fired power plant to convert into carbon negative power plants. We have solar thermal power plants with heat storage to build. We have wind turbines to build, biofuels to make, geothermal energy to develop.
Since we don’t really have any choice, commercially motivated propaganda sniveling aside, can’t we for Christ’s sake get on with it?

Willis Eschenbach

July 29, 2009 9:57 am

Pamela Gray, thanks for your thoughts. People like you and myself, who have actually seen the world’s misery up close, people who have spent a lifetime in the real environmental movement, often have a clear sense of what is important and what is not.
Leland, you still want to dick around with carbon and make energy even more expensive than it is, the following quote could have been written specifically for you.

The average African life span is lower than it was in the United States and Europe 100 years ago. But Africans are being told we shouldn’t develop, or have electricity or cars because, now that those countries are rich beyond anything Africans can imagine, they’re worried about global warming. Al Gore and UN climate boss Yvo de Boer tell us the world needs to go on an energy diet. Well, I have news for them.
Africans are already on an energy diet. We’re starving!
Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year. And those anti-electricity policies are keeping us impoverished. […] Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities. Hypothetical global warming a hundred years from now is worse than this? Telling Africans they can’t have electricity and economic development – except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels – is immoral. It is a crime against humanity.

Fiona Kobusingye, a coordinator of Congress of Racial Equality Uganda and the Kill Malarial Mosquitoes Now Brigade.
According to me, and Pamela, and the Africans themselves, you are condemning Africans and poor people around the world to death through your asinine policies.
Now, that’s your choice … but lecturing us while you are killing people, spouting platitudes about how moral your path is while spending billions on failed policies, accusing us of “commercially motivated propaganda sniveling” while your hero Al consumes a nation’s worth of energy, and telling us how we don’t care about the earth and you do, is pitiful, pathetic, and deeply offensive.
As you pointed out, I don’t make the rules here. I suspect it’s a good thing I don’t. So you have two choices here. 1) Keep your electronic pen capped and your ears open, and have people suspect that you’re a petulant, whining, unpleasant fool … or keep on writing and remove all doubts forever.

dbstealey

July 29, 2009 11:54 am

Leland Palmer,
You seem impatient to burn mountains of money for the very silliest of reasons: carbon sequestration.

Since we don’t really have any choice, commercially motivated propaganda sniveling aside, can’t we for Christ’s sake get on with it?

No. Carbon sequestration [except when used to economically extract more oil from the ground] is the most preposterously stupid idea to ever come along in the whole history of stupid AGW ideas.
It takes huge amounts of energy to strip CO2 from the air, then liquify it, then pump it underground under pressure — and the only efficient energy source [outside of nuclear] is the burning of even more very expensive fossil fuel. [Forget windmills and other ridiculous greenie power generation schemes; they produce far too little energy for such a monstrous undertaking.]
So we burn fossil fuel — which emits beneficial and completely harmless CO2 — then we burn lots more fossil fuel for the energy necessary to strip the CO2 out of the air, liquify it and pump it underground under pressure. Then, we burn even more fossil fuel to take that CO2 out of the air… and all the while, the BRIC countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China] are pouring several times as much CO2 into the air as the entire U.S. emits, laughing at us the whole time, knowing CO2 sequestration is a fool’s errand that will hobble us economically, for no benefit whatever.
Could there be a more stupid idea in creation than carbon dioxide sequestration??
Collecting necessary and beneficial carbon dioxide, and storing it underground at enormous financial and energy expense for no good reason, makes every bit as much sense as digging a 10X10X10 foot hole in your back yard, then moving it twenty feet away every six weeks. You feel like you’re accomplishing something, but normal people look at you like you’re completely nuts [but you and I know it’s just a manifestation of your crazy cognitive dissonance].
A couple of things would happen if we actually passed a law requiring the underground storage of CO2: we would end up sequestering for the most part CO2 produced by the BRIC countries, for no sane reason at all. And it would give true conservationists a good reason to visit the well heads at night to liberate that CO2 for the good of planet Earth — which you personally seem intent on sabotaging based on the deluded, completely unproven idea that more CO2 is harmful in trace amounts. It’s not. CO2 is entirely beneficial, no matter what your fevered imagination tells you.
Why not start digging those holes in your back yard? While you’re digging you won’t be driving your fossil fuel burning car, and you can feel just a little less like a hypocrite for badmouthing CO2 while you’re emitting it by burning fossil fuels. [One of the benefits of cognitive dissonance is that it lets you rationalize your glaring hypocrisy.]
For my part, I’ll be daydreaming about the best way to liberate that sequestered CO2. Because more CO2 is better; and a lot more CO2 is a lot better for life on a planet starved of beneficial and necessary carbon dioxide.

Leland Palmer

July 29, 2009 1:06 pm

Hi Willis-

It takes huge amounts of energy to strip CO2 from the air, then liquify it, then pump it underground under pressure — and the only efficient energy source [outside of nuclear] is the burning of even more very expensive fossil fuel. [Forget windmills and other ridiculous greenie power generation schemes; they produce far too little energy for such a monstrous undertaking.]

Simply untrue. By the way, my “fevered imagination” seems to be producing scientific papers and links to them, that back up my position, too. 🙂
Yes, if you want to strip CO2 from the air, this is difficult because CO2 is only present in very small amounts, in the 380 ppm range, right now.
But oxyfuel combustion of biomass or biochar produces a stream of exhaust gas that is 70 percent (700,000 ppm) CO2, and all it requires is cleanup, stripping out the water, and compression to be ready for deep injection.
Many other sources of CO2, including oil refineries and ethanol plants, produce almost pure streams of CO2, approaching 100 percent pure, certainly pure enough for deep injection.
Vattenfall, the Swedish owned utility that has a lot of coal fired power plants, plans to reduce their CO2 emissions by 50 percent by 2030. And they plan to do it mostly by using oxyfuel combustion and CCS. Here is a link to Vattenfall’s next step, following the construction of their oxyfuel pilot plant, they are planning a 250 MW demonstration oxyfuel/CCS power plant:
http://www.vattenfall.com/www/co2_en/co2_en/879177tbd/879231demon/879320demon/index.jsp

Demonstration plant in Jänschwalde
The first demonstration plant on Oxyfuel capture technology is investigated at Jänschwalde in Germany. The scale-up from the size of the 30 MW pilot plant at Schwarze Pumpe is the last development step before the technology could be commercially introduced. The new Oxyfuel boiler at Jänschwalde would be of 650 MW thermal (around 250 MW electric), which is about 20 times more than Vattenfall’s 30 MW pilot plant under construction and compares to today’s largest Oxyfuel test rigs of 0.5 MW. With this milestone, Vattenfall is taking another step towards development of commercial CCS concepts. Also Postcombustion capture technology will be demonstrated at Jänschwalde.
The existing lignite fired 3000 MWe power plant at Jänschwalde was taken into operation in the 1980-ies and was modernised in the 1990’s. At each of the six blocks two 250 MW boilers produce steam to one joint steam turbine. This makes the site excellent for conversion into a double CCS demonstration plant.

So, the Swedes and the Germans can do this, but we can’t.
By the way, I think that Vattenfall could do better, and increase the efficiency of their oxyfuel process, if they were willing to add the National Energy Technology Lab’s IFCC process to their new oxyfuel plants. Once the demonstration plants are open, they will need to do something with their 30 MW pilot plant. Why not add NETL’s IFCC process onto it, and increase its thermal efficiency from roughly 35 percent or less to 50% or more? This should be enough extra efficiency to compensate for the parasitic CCS energy loss, and give them essentially free CCS:

TESTING OF A VERY HIGH-TEMPERATURE HEAT EXCHANGER FOR IFCC
POWER SYSTEMS
John P. Hurley
University of North Dakota, Energy & Environmental Research Center
PO Box 9018, Grand Forks, ND 58202-9018
jhurley@undeerc.org
Nathan J. Kadrmas
University of North Dakota, Energy & Environmental Research Center
PO Box 9018, Grand Forks, ND 58202-9018
nkadrmas@undeerc.org
Fred Robson
kraftWorks Systems, Inc., PO Box 115, Amston, CT 06231
ABSTRACT
Laboratory and pilot-scale tests of a very high-temperature heat exchanger (HTHX) that could be used to produce pressurized air at up to 2000°F for an indirectly fired combined-cycle (IFCC) power plant were performed while three coal–biomass blends were fired. An IFCC using this type of heat exchanger has the potential to reach efficiencies of 45% when firing coal and over 50% when a duct burner is used to additionally heat the gas entering the turbine. Because of its high efficiency, an IFCC system is the most appropriate power concept for employing oxygen enriched combustion in order to make carbon dioxide removal more economical.
In this paper, we summarize economic analyses of IFCC systems operated under an oxygenblown near-zero-emission scenario. The calculations show that the cost of electricity is similar to that of an emissionless integrated gasification combined cycle, whereas the operation of an IFCC is much better understood since it is essentially the same as current pulverized coal (pc)-fired systems. In addition, we summarize the results from initial joining tests of MA956, an aluminascale-forming oxide dispersion-strengthened alloy that is a candidate for construction of an HTHX.

If we don’t hurry up, we will be buying this technology from the Swedes and Germans, and so will the rest of the world, even though we invented all of this stuff here in the U.S.

Leland Palmer

July 29, 2009 1:07 pm

Whoops, link to the above:
http://www.ms.ornl.gov/FEM19/Proceedings/papers/Session%20III/Hurley.pdf

Willis Eschenbach

July 29, 2009 2:09 pm

Leland, you say:

Leland Palmer (13:06:35) :
Hi Willis- …

and then go off about something I never said. Given how wrong you are about other things, I guess this is no surprise.
For example, you seem to think we don’t believe in your solutions, aluminascale-forming oxide and CCS and the like, so you think you need to send citations on those. That’s not the issue.
We don’t believe in your underlying claim, that CO2 is a problem.
w.

dbstealey

July 29, 2009 4:01 pm

Leland me boy, Willis is right. You go off on tangents. By sidetracking the issue and nitpicking the amount of [wasted] energy and expense needed for sequestration, you avoided answering the central question: why should we go through the make-work effort to sequester CO2, when the BRIC countries [and plenty of others] are ramping up their CO2 emissions, and have told us in no uncertain terms that they will not agree to any emission limits? Not to mention the fact that CO2 is completely harmless.
China alone is currently emitting 30% more CO2 than the U.S. They have made no secret of the fact that they are constructing an average of 1 – 2 new coal-fired power plants every week — and that they intend to continue building coal-fired power plants at that pace through at least 2024.
In only seven more years China will be emitting double the amount of CO2 than the entire U.S. emits. They won’t stop there, either, they will keep ramping up their CO2 emissions as they continue to industrialize.
India is doing exactly the same thing. As are Russia, Brazil, and most of the 100+ countries in the UN. Only the U.S., because of misguided people who believe the sky is falling, is seriously considering doing something so incredibly stupid.
Seriously hobbling our economy by the pointless and utterly stupid burying of a completely harmless, beneficial trace gas, while the rest of the world pours many times the U.S.’s total annual CO2 emissions into the atmosphere each year, is a fool’s errand. It will make no measurable difference whatever, and it will cost $Trillions. How stupid is that?
Why are you so insistent on the U.S. shooting ourselves in the foot? That makes you appear to hate the U.S. Why the hatred? I can not find one comment out of all your posts where you show the slightest bit of concern over the completely unchecked emissions by the rest of the world. That means you have an unstated agenda [or you really are nuts]. Otherwise, you would express concern about the global situation, and use your energy trying to convince China, India, and other countries to adopt your swell ideas. You probably don’t, because you know they would laugh in your face before walking away. Most international leaders don’t tolerate fools. Only the U.S. seems to put up with them.
The rest of the world knows that carbon sequestration [except when used to economically extract more oil from the ground] is the most preposterously stupid idea to ever come along in the whole history of stupid AGW ideas. That’s why none of them will do anything to bury their own CO2 emissions. Why should we commit economic suicide for no legitimate reason?
Nothing you have written changes the fact that our CO2 emissions are becoming an ever smaller part of the global total. Why should we go to the enormous expense and effort of burying a completely harmless, beneficial plant food? It’s insane. You might find a lower cost way to dig that 10X10X10 foot hole, but it’s still completely wasted effort, no matter what the cost.

Willis Eschenbach

July 29, 2009 5:47 pm

Leland, the Editor-in-Chief of the American Chemical Society recently wrote an article claiming the science was settled and global warming was real.
Many members of the ACS were outraged, and a large number of them wrote letters expressing their disgust at his actions.
In addition, the American Physical Society has decided to revisit their stance on global warming, after fifty-four of their members protested the statement.
The lessons from this are:
1) “Official” statements by a scientific organization often only reflect the views of a few of the members.
2) The “consensus” is not falling apart … it is simply being revealed that the “consensus” never existed.
3) Your claims that we need to act now, right now, to make a meaningless dent in CO2 production are not supported by the science. The truth is that, as in many young sciences, we don’t know the truth …
w.