UPDATE: The feckless gold digger weighs in here with a chorus of usual suspects. It is quite humorous to watch.
Guest post by Thomas Fuller
At the conclusion of the last ice age, there was a surplus of ice on many parts of the planet. Nature took care of most of that over the next few thousand years, melting most of it, and sometimes it got pretty dramatic. The resulting legends have become part of the mythology of many cultures, from Gilgamesh to Noah, as dramatic release of pent up ice and/or water flooded lands and drove people before it relentlessly.
Sea level rose 110 meters in 8,000 years. It’s risen a couple of meters in the 6,000 years since then. It is now rising at somewhere between 2 and 3 millimeters a year. (We think. It’s very tough to measure, because the earth is changing its levels and the sea gets pushed around by the wind, getting quite a bit higher in some places than others. And when the change is that small, it’s tough to be sure.)
It is the most effective way to get people’s attention about global warming, and it has been used, overused and abused since 1988. It’s one thing to worry about the cuddly cubs of polar bears, and we can watch with (very) detached sympathy as farmers struggle under drought, but show us a picture of a modern city with water above the window line and we will pay attention.
Wikipedia, which doesn’t always play fair when climate issues are discussed, has the chart everyone needs to see to provide perspective on sea level rise. Titled ‘Post Glacial Sea Level Rise, it shows a dramatic rise in sea levels that stopped dead 6,000 years ago and a very flat line since. You could balance a glass of water on the last 6,000 years of that graph.
This hasn’t stopped the marketing gurus from trying to play to our ancestral horror stories and modern fears of flooding. Because there’s still enough ice left in Antarctica and Greenland to cause dramatic sea level rises, all they have to do is say that global warming will melt that ice and we’re in trouble. And so they do.
Again, we are forced to separate the hype from the science. Remember that the IPCC projects sea level rise this century of 18-59 cm, unless dramatic loss of Greenland and/or Antarctic ice occurs. That’s from their AR4 report. They thus wash their hands and ask what is truth? From the minute that AR4 was published, a string of papers, conferences, publicity events (such as parliamentary cabinet meetings held underwater) have been screaming from the headlines and news reports, drumming into us the message that dramatic loss of Greenland and/or Antarctic ice will in fact occur.
But just as with other aspects of their publicity push, they have to contradict their own scientific findings and theories to make this case.
As the climate has warmed over the past 130 years or so, the margins at the ends of both Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice caps have melted a bit. Climate theory predicts that increased precipitation in the much larger middle of these ice caps will be in the form of snow, which will turn into ice and counterbalance some, most or all of the melt around the edges. It would take millenia to melt it all, and the IPCC thinks that even with the world continuing business as usual, that our emissions will peak around the end of this century, shortly after the population peaks. Emissions will then decline.
But, in a scenario that many will find sadly familiar, those with a political agenda have grabbed on to some straws, such as the GRACE studies we looked at yesterday, and are busy hyping possible mechanical changes to the ice sheets (which do happen) and are simultaneously trying to blame those mechanical changes on global warming. They hijacked the science and spun it. (It’s not the scientists–not in this case.)
The upshot is that spear carriers for the activist side of climate politics are still going on about dramatic sea level rise. They’ve responded grudgingly to criticism and are not as quick to say it will happen soon, but they’re afraid to acknowledge that what they fear would actually take millenia and would need continuous warming for the entire period for it to come to pass.
They can’t give up on the images that have the most visceral impact. They will dance around the details for days, using rhetorical tactics and resorting to whatever level of insults are necessary to change the subject–as I know from personal experience on dismal wailing sites such as Deltoid and Only In It For The Gold, which could make a fortune selling sackloth and ashes online.
The bulk of Greenland’s ice cap sits in a basin that the ice itself helped to create. It isn’t going anywhere. Nor is the vast majority of ice in Antarctica, although the thin peninsula that points to South America has been judged to be at grave risk in studies that date back to the 1930s–long before global warming was of much concern.
The need for exaggerated images such as those of flooded American cities has caused as much anti-scientific double talk as the Hockey Stick chart, which is really saying a lot. And with more of their symbols getting picked off one by one, thanks to the work of people like Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, they are holding on to this one for dear life.
When journals like Nature ponder what they call an anti-scientific backlash and aim it at the conservatives in the United States, they really should preface their remarks with a frank examination of how science has been abused in both practice and communication, and analyse how those trumpeting the modern call of Doom have started this reaction.
As a liberal Democrat who believes in moderate global warming, I feel a bit left out. But I think Nature is just looking for an easy target and throwing mud at it, hoping some of it will stick. I will be on the other side of the fence come election time, but not because of that.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
Sponsored IT training links:
If you want to get 70-685 certified then take advantage of latest SK0-003 dumps as well as NS0-502 test demos and pass real exam on first try.
Will someone please post the graphic of modern sea level rise?
Some are getting carried away with the figures, why I don’t know.
It’s 2-3 mm per year, which is roughly 8 – 12 years to rise a mere inch.
That’s millimeters, not centimeters, inches, feet, meters or whatever else gets flung at the wall.
1 inch = 25.4 millimeters.
The Fallacy of the Multitudes involves offering evidence for a vast generality where the quantity of evidence on both sides of the debate is beyond the grasp of a single mind.
Arguing that sand is mainly black and offering a black grain of sand as proof while your oponent argues that sand is mainly white while offering a white grain of sand as proof, is not rational debate, but merely a rhetorical contest between two fools pretending to know what they cannot know. They cannot know it because the multitude of evidence (all the sand) is too vast to be comprehended by the human mind. That is the Fallacy of the Multitudes.
Only fools think they know what the temperature of the earth is. Only greater fools think they know what the trend of the temperature of the earth is. Only colossal fools think they know what the cause of the trends of the temperature of the earth is. Only liars claim to know what to do about it. Only sociopaths claim the debate is over because one side won.
Not unlike the issue of temperature measurement locations and biases resulting from this, locations of tide gages present a bias as well. Most are located on the passive margins and very few are located at the active margins. The supposed rate of rise is well within tectonic rates of change. Take for example the subsidence rate along the East / Gulf coast of the US.
Another problem with SLR, today the Roman briton coastline at Richborough where Claudius landed in 43AD is kilometres inland from the present beach, how do you explain that I wonder?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1066712/Uncovered-lost-beach-Romans-got-toehold-Britain.html
To Tarpon,
About six thousand years ago, the Med Sea was re-flooded by the Atlantic as rain subsided off the area.
There is some evidence put out by the Libya government that demonstrates the Med Sea left its banks and flooded Libya down to Chad during the latter part of the last Ice Age.
They study stuff from ocean core samples and a couple of them are consistent in telling the story.
Paul
RE to : jcl says:
September 10, 2010 at 6:21 am
Ordinarily the work of MAD AVE really irks me, but I got a laugh out of the ad you shared. I think the fellow who wrote it had a real sense of humor, and understood that using the polar bear as a symbol would make a lot of people cringe, awaiting some bomb of depressing pessimism. To have the ad end “happily” is bound to end the cringing with a sigh of relief. Even people who loathe electric cars would be bound to feel better about electric cars, simply because the depressing pessimism we have been trained to expect didn’t happen.
Very effective public relations.
It may turn out, in the end, that what redeems America is our sense of humor.
Neville says:
September 10, 2010 at 3:41 pm
Leif are you saying you believe that part of that SLR is because of humans
No, not at all, just pointing that whatever the cause, the recent rise is 7 times larger than the average over the past 6000 years. It irks me a bit that people use different units [perhaps partly to obscure the truth or to make a point]. Fuller would have been intellectually honest if his post had started: ” It’s risen at an average rate of 0.3 millimeter over the 6,000 years since then. It is now rising at somewhere between 2 and 3 millimeters a year, almost 10 times as fast”. That would have struck quite a different tone right from the start, wouldn’t it?
Thanks, Lee Kington,
I would have to disagree for the reason that if we ignore solar energy, slight variations in our orbit, sunspot activity and the Earth’s axis and write them off as insignificant, then we just joined the other side of the argument and in doing so, we claim CO2, water vapor, Ozone and Methane as the leading causes in global warming and our Ice Ages.
My work shows that main cause in global warming at this time is a favorable elliptical orbit, the Earth’s axis tilt and a large number of sunspot activity from 1933 to 2007.
We just had another blank sun day today and thus, 30 years of cooling are upon us.
My work is posted at nationalforestlawblog.com Oct. Newsletter under my name.
The records of raised beaches worldwide do point to recent sea level falls in a great many places, and the largely stable, isolated continental margin of Western Australia is a very good place ot study these, away from the effects of active plate tectonics, coastal uplift and mountain building.
However, even on a stable, isolated continetal margin the effects of tectonic movements make sea level change studies problematical. For instance, the Rockingham-Becher coastal plain just south of Perth has a beautifully documented sequence of seaward-retreating beaches, which have been carbon-dated in detail using buried wood fragments. This shows a continuous, progressive drop in sea level of about 2.5m over the past 6,000 years, corresponding nicely to the cooling and regrowth of ice cover since the recently-mentioned Holocene Optimum that ended about 6,000 years ago. Unfortunately though, when you look elsewhere up and down the Western Australian coast, the sea-level changes recorded by the raised beaches and wave-cut platforms stranded above present sea level don’t correspond as neatly as they should, due to fault movements along the coastline, presumably in response to residual subsidence of offshore Perth Basin.
Nonetheless, the overall record is one of a couple of metre of sea-level fall over the past 6,000 years along one of the world’s more stable coastlines, and this does seem to be in response to a general global cooling, with a corresponding increase in polar ice cover and drop in sea level.
(A good starting reference for such studies is the Geological Survey of WA publication:
Geology and landforms of the Perth Region – J. R. Gozzard – 2007 , available through the GSWA website at: http://www.dmp.wa.gov.au/ebookshop/searchMain.asp )
The point being that, from a geological perspective, the more recent, questionably ‘global’, measured changes in sea level and temperature do seem to be well within the limits of natural variability over that past 6,000 years and also well below the absolute maxima reached just a few thousand years ago.
The picture becomes more complicated somewhere like the south of England, where you have Roman, Saxon and later ports and coastal settlements now several miles inland from the coast (Chichester, Bramber, Winchelsea, etc., etc.), as there may still be uplift occurring along this northernmost limit of the alpsine fold belt. But again, the record is of raised beaches and seaward-retreating coastlines during historic times and over the preceding few thousand years.
Sea level, ice cover and global temperature have always been naturally dynamic, even on the timescale of few thousand years. The only problem is that most people are completely unaware of this, and can therefore be sold the idea that any change is a new and terrifying thing that they ought to be desperately worried about.
Tom Fuller. You write well but assume much, a simple fact check method for the assumption that CO2 causes warming would be in order. Refer to a replicated work of science that supports each of your contention. As the belief now stands, I’m not buying any of it. Good public policy is seldom based upon unsubstantiated belief. Just the facts would be a fine start but you seem to be arguing for negotiation of belief, when ignoring the team hysteria and checking the science available has been all that any semi sapient individual has needed to make up their own mind.Of course being old enough to have been taught the scientific method has been a bonus.Seems the liberals think feelings are more important than facts, and I feel than to be true, thats why children were the first targets of the panic campaign. Your approach would be appropriate if climate science was not a science…Oh right; my appologises, you are correct, negotiate to your hearts content.
OK, the conversation has established a couple of important and germane facts.
1) that the last 6K years have been very stable (The excellent, if unsourced graph in the article)
2) that sea levels were much higher in the Eemian (the prior interglacial about 110 K ago)
I will gladly stipulate both of those facts. I urge readers to consider them as a pair of conditions in contemplating the real substantive question regarding ice sheets and climate in general.
The substantive question is this: what is the cause of the unusual recent stability, and how big a kick would it take to move the planet off it?
I think we have only guesses to either question as things stand, but we have plenty of indication that the edges of the ice sheet should be crumbling, and that they are. The fact that such decay is susceptible to sudden acceleration is demonstrated in the record Fuller points to, and as I tried to explain to deaf ears, the mechanism for such sudden accelerated melt is known and is considered likely.
To say that no such kick is possible is refuted by the fact that the prior interglacial sailed past this point to considerable melting in Greenland and the absence of anything resembling the West Antarctic ice sheet.
I remain quite disappointed that Fuller engaged in tedious hairsplitting in response to my attempt to outline the situation as it is understood by practitioners in the field, and then flounced over here to give you guys a polished and well written pile of feeble nonsense.
Further, the statement “Remember that the IPCC projects sea level rise this century of 18-59 cm, unless dramatic loss of Greenland and/or Antarctic ice occurs. That’s from their AR4 report.” cannot be treated as anything but spin. They said 18 – 59 “exclusive of” loss of Greenland or Antarctic ice. Think what you will of IPCC, but at least refrain from changing the import of what they said.
As for “It would take millenia to melt it all,” Fuller is just guessing.
And as for “and the IPCC thinks that even with the world continuing business as usual, that our emissions will peak around the end of this century, shortly after the population peaks. Emissions will then decline.” we see Fuller still not getting the idea that emissions accumulate and concentrations drive climate. I have made several patient attempts to explain this to him.
Anyway, I hope everyone will keep in mind the fact that the last few millenia have been a period of unusual stability, and that the prior interglacial was substantially warmer and did have substantially deeper oceans. Unlike the putative Medieval Warm Period and the similar tiny wiggles that y’all keep trying to make a federal case out of, these facts matter.
That would amount to some progress.
Michael Tobis,
You were doing OK until you said, ” Unlike the putative Medieval Warm Period and the similar tiny wiggles that y’all keep trying to make a federal case out of…”
Do you know what “putative” means? It means “supposed.” There was no “supposed” MWP; it clearly existed, as numerous peer reviewed studies show. There is plenty of evidence, such as rising tree lines, oxygen isotopes in stalagmites, and other proxies clearly showing the MWP. There is nothing “putative” about it.
Since the planet was significantly warmer a thousand years ago [and colder during the LIA], the Hokey Stick is broken along with the CO2=CAGW conjecture.
Michael Tobis says:
September 10, 2010 at 7:38 pm
The substantive question is this: what is the cause of the unusual recent stability, and how big a kick would it take to move the planet off it?
For 6000 years past the total rise has been 2000 mm or 0.3 mm/year and this is indeed very stable. The current rise is supposed to be 2-3 mm/year, so we have already moved off that stable plateau and are now rising 7 times as fast. It has already happened. We have, it seems, already had that ‘big kick’.
Leif Svalgaard says:
September 10, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Too short of a timeframe to compare 100-150 years @ur momisugly 2-3mm/yr to 6000 years @ur momisugly 0.3mm/yr.
If the next 150 years drops 1.7-2.7mm/yr then the 6000 year stability is retained.
It is reasonable to expect that the 6000 yr record had hiccups in it, like all climactic eras do.
Still, a few millimeters/year is not the stuff of big kicks, unless one is going to live 1,000 years.
Climate changes, get used to it, in the Eemian 135,000 to 115,000 years ago the temp was much higher than the Holocene and certainly higher than today.
Near Margaret river in West Australia coral grew and sea levels were 3 to 4 metres higher than today, perehaps 6 metres for a time and the sea temps were much warmer and all with a population of a few million human beings.
Laurence Kirk says:
September 10, 2010 at 7:22 pm
At many points along the Central California coast one can see the old sea shore terraces high & dry.
They either got there through at least 3 big uplifts (dramatic & fast) or the sea fell in abrupt steps.
To Leif and others, did sea level travel in a gentle rise of whatever for that 6,000 thousand years or does it rise and fall over that time?
For example how much did SLR during the LIA ?
rbateman says:
September 10, 2010 at 8:49 pm
Too short of a timeframe to compare 100-150 years @ur momisugly 2-3mm/yr to 6000 years @ur momisugly 0.3mm/yr.
We have to go by the data we have. Your argument also applies then to sunspots, global temperatures, anything you can think of. And that makes any debate moot.
Mr. Tobis has perhaps put up with me as long as he can stand. It’s pretty mutual, by now. As an example, I see little or no difference in our characterizations of what the IPCC said.
The edges of the ice caps have melted somewhat and if it continues to warm they will continue to melt. But the more stable and far larger interiors of both Greenland and Antarctica do not seem vulnerable at all on a scale of anything less than two or three millenia.
Unless of course you believe the GRACE story–in which case it might be one millenium. Of uninterrupted monotonic warming. But you didn’t show up on that thread, of course.
Michael, every time you try to tell me that it’s the concentrations, not the emissions, I always say I know that. Michael, I know that. But we’re measuring and talking about controlling emissions, not concentrations. And like many others, I have questions about concentrations.
Concentrations seem at the end of the day to be part of the sensitivity question. Oceans outgas CO2 when they warm. What happens when they cool? How long does CO2 really stay in the atmosphere? And what if other aspects of the equation change?
And given the length of time people have been talking about the demise of WAIS, why are you linking that to global warming? It may be hastening it along, but to a predetermined end, don’t you think?
So it comes down once again to robbing symbols. The edges may melt. Not the interiors. GRACE seems flawed–or at least a definite candidate for a do-over study. WAIS was always a goner.
But there is nothing remotely substantial that suggests the huge volumes of ice in the Greenland basin and the Antarctic high plains are at any risk for a thousand years.
Smokey, thanks for the backhanded compliment.
The historical global mean temperature hockey stick is not important and never has been.
The past 6000 years have been unusually stable. It’s refreshing to see that statement here. It is true and it is much more important than the hockey stick, whether it is true or false or in between.
There are other hockey sticks, though. The CO2 is clearly a hockey stick. How the system responds to the CO2 kick in the future is crucial.
Large systems take a long time to fall over after you start kicking them. As this article from today by Anthony Watts shows, we still might have time to keep the kick relatively modest. But not that much time.
Linear extrapolation works sometimes. Not other times. If you really want to extrapolate, you need to make a case that you’re not missing something; that you have reduced everything to a single variable.
Admittedly, if CO2 were the only important forcing and system response were instantaneous, we would be looking at a fairly low sensitivity and a longer time (but not an infinite time) to get a grip on the problem. But, as anyone who is actually acquainted with the science will attest, there is aerosol masking and latency due to ocean heat capacity (and there is the thermal inertia and latent heat of ice). So the simple linear extrapolation is not defensible at first blush, and you’ll have to make a more elaborate case if you have one, which frankly would surprise me.
Lawrence Kirk points to validity of measuring sea level decline over the Holocene in Western Australia where there is a stable craton compared to England where you need to separate tilting, rising coastline (fault blocks) from sea level. Tony B points to the lack of consistent sea level gauges (7) over the last hundred years and to the questionable merger of satellite data with tidal gauges since 2003. My own read on the current satellite data is that the 3 cm per year promoted by warmists with an error of +- 3 cm a year is that they are using the uncertainty to try to accommodate their belief in estimates of sea level rise from Greenland / Antarctic glacial melts and thermal expansion from increases in SST. The new data from Greenland and Antarctica suggests that the mass contribution as been exaggerated by 50%. The choice now to get to 3 cm a year is to adjust the SST temps to create more thermal expansion or admit that SLR is less than 3 cm a year. The missing heat neeeds to be found.
As a graduate (long time ago) in geophysics from Penn State I am very embarassed. My hat is off to UP.
Neville says:
September 10, 2010 at 9:04 pm
To Leif and others, did sea level travel in a gentle rise of whatever for that 6,000 thousand years or does it rise and fall over that time?
You miss my point, which is:
“No, not at all, just pointing that whatever the cause, the recent rise is 7 times larger than the average over the past 6000 years. It irks me a bit that people use different units [perhaps partly to obscure the truth or to make a point]. Fuller would have been intellectually honest if his post had started: ” It’s risen at an average rate of 0.3 millimeter over the 6,000 years since then. It is now rising at somewhere between 2 and 3 millimeters a year, almost 10 times as fast”. That would have struck quite a different tone right from the start, wouldn’t it?”.
Mr. Svalgaard, I didn’t make that point because I’m not particularly interested in a date 6,000 years from now. The point I was trying to illustrate in the graph is that the current rate of sea level rise does not appear threatening over the course of the relevant time frame–the century or so it will take us to get our energy solutions sorted out.
Tobis. What will sea level rise be by 2100?
A coincidence oft remarked by those
robust pickers of cherries: where’er goeth
the Fuller, there also goeth the Tobis.
Doth the Fuller thereby cause the Tobis
to frequent more often every orchard?
Or doth the presence of the Tobis
in sundry places signify myriad causes
of which the Fuller is but one,
mayhaps e’en a gnat’s worth?
‘Tis a matter of little import,
and not worth the loss of sleep o’er’t;
like as if a man tossed all night
wond’ring if a mouse’s breath could
unhinge the whole great globe and send it
spinning into Hades’ fiery grasp.