Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There’s an old con game that has been played on the suckers for hundreds and hundreds of years. It is done in various forms, with various objects, under various names—three card monty, the shell game, Thimblerig, bottle caps, cups and ball, the game is the same in every one. The essence is, the con man puts a pea under a shell, then switches the shells around and asks which shell is hiding the pea.
Figure 1. The Conjuror, by Hieronymus Bosch, painted 1475-1480. The type of tricks the conjuror is doing are thought to be among the origins of the shell game.
I bring this up because our favorite conjuror, James Hansen, is up to his old tricks again. He has a new paper out, Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change, And as always, you have to figure out which shell is hiding the pea.
Here is his money graph, the one that is getting lots of play around the blogosphere. The main observation I’ve seen people making is that having been bitten by previous failed prognostications, Hansen is taking the well-tested Nostradamus route now, and is predicting sea level rise for when he’ll be 137 years old or so …
Figure 2. Hansen’s Figure 7: ORIGINAL CAPTION: “Five-meter sea level change in 21st century under assumption of linear change and exponential change (Hansen, 2007), the latter with a 10-year doubling time.”
Folks are saying that the bad news is, it looks like we won’t be able to tell until 2040 or so if Hansen’s claim is true. But that’s not the case at all. Those folks are not keeping close enough watch on the pea.
In the paper Hansen says:
Sea level change estimates for 21st century.
IPCC (2007) projected sea level rise by the end of this century of about 29 cm (midrange 20-43 cm, full range 18-59 cm). These projections did not include contributions from ice sheet dynamics, on the grounds that ice sheet physics is not understood well enough.
Rahmstorf (2007) made an important contribution to the sea level discussion by pointing out that even a linear relation between global temperature and the rate of sea level rise, calibrated with 20th century data, implies a 21st [century] sea level rise of about a meter, given expected global warming for BAU greenhouse gas emissions. …
… Hansen (2005, 2007) argues that amplifying feedbacks make ice sheet disintegration necessarily highly non-linear, and that IPCC’s BAU forcing is so huge that it is difficult to see how ice shelves would survive. As warming increases, the number of ice streams contributing to mass loss will increase, contributing to a nonlinear response that should be approximated better by an exponential than by a linear fit. Hansen (2007) suggested that a 10-year doubling time was plausible, and pointed out that such a doubling time, from a 1 mm per year ice sheet contribution to sea level in the decade 2005-2015, would lead to a cumulative 5 m sea level rise by 2095.
The short version of that is:
• The IPCC predicts sea level rise of about a foot (30 cm), but they don’t take ice into account.
• Rahmstorf says a linear projection gives about a metre (3.3 feet) of sea level rise.
• Hansen 2007 says there’s a missing exponential term in Rahmstorf’s work, because the ice will be melting faster and faster every year.
OK, so Hansen 2011 rests on the claims made in Hansen (2007), which turns out to be Scientific reticence and sea level rise. At the end of Section 4 Hansen says that Rahmstorf estimates a 1-metre sea level rise, but that a non-linear ice melting term should be added to the Rahmstorf rise.
Under BAU [“Business As Usual”] forcing in the 21st century, the sea level rise surely will be dominated by a third term: (3) ice sheet disintegration. This third term was small until the past few years, but it is has at least doubled in the past decade and is now close to 1 mm/year, based on the gravity satellite measurements discussed above. … As a quantitative example, let us say that the ice sheet contribution is 1 cm for the decade 2005–15 and that it doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. That time constant yields a sea level rise of the order of 5 m this century.
So to get the final Hansen projection, we need to see what is happening in Rahmstorf, A Semi-Empirical Approach to Projecting Future Sea-Level Rise, paywalled, where we find the following graph of projected sea level rise.
Figure 3. The Rahmstorf estimate of sea level rise, to which Hansen says an exponentially growing ice term should be added.
ORIGINAL CAPTION: Past sea level and sea-level projections from 1990 to 2100 based on global mean temperature projections of the IPCC TAR. The gray uncertainty range spans the range of temperature rise of 1.4° to 5.8° C, having been combined with the best statistical fit shown in Fig. 2. The dashed gray lines show the added uncertainty due to the statistical error of the fit of Fig. 2. Colored dashed lines are the individual scenarios as shown in (1) [Ref. 1 is the IPCC TAR Bible, no page given]; the light blue line is the A1FI scenario, and the yellow line is the B1 scenario.
(In passing, let me again protest the use of the entire IPCC Third Annual Report, thousands of pages, as a reference without giving us chapter and verse in the way of page numbers. My high school science teacher would have slapped my hand for that, it’s a joke.)
The upper blue line is the one that gives us about a meter of sea level rise. So I took that as Rahmstorf’s 1 metre rise. To that I added, as Hansen claims we should, an amount that starts at 0.5 cm in 2000 and doubles every ten years. This is following Hansen’s claim that the non-linear ice disintegration is a separate term that starts small but will “come to dominate” the sea level rise over the century. The result is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Rahmstorfs predicted rise (blue), Hansen’s projected additional rise from “non-linear ice disintegration” (dark red), and total sea level rise (green) predicted in H2011. I have included the last century’s rise of 16 cm, as calculated by Rahmstorf, in the lower right corner for comparison purposes. IMAGE SOURCE
OK, so what Hansen is actually predicting is the green line. However, his real forecast is actually much worse than that. Hansen again, emphasis mine:
The eventual sea level rise due to expected global warming under BAU GHG [greenhouse gas] scenarios is several tens of meters, as discussed at the beginning of this section.
I’m going with “several tens” to mean more than two, so he’s predicting a 30 metre sea level rise!!! … I guess he figured nobody paid any attention when Al Gore threatened us with a 20 metre sea level rise, so he’d better pull out all the stops and give us a real scare, something to make us shake in our panties.
There is a bit of good news, however. Both the Rahmstorf and the Hansen projections are already way above the reality. Since 1993, when the satellites started measuring sea level, we’ve gone up about 4.6 cm (1993-2011). Rahmstorf’s projection is 6.4 cm for that time period, about 40% too high already. Hansen’s larger projection is 7.2 centimetres rise over that time, or 55% too high.
The annual rise is also entertaining. According to the satellites, the trend 1993-2011 was 3.2 mm/yr, and has been declining recently. The change 2009-2010 was under a mm, at 0.9 mm/yr. And 2010-2011 was just about flat.
In 2010-2011, Rahmstorf’s projected rise is already 4.5 mm/yr, about fifty percent larger than the actual rate of the last 18 years. And Hansen’s annual rise is even worse, at 5.3 mm per year.
So both in terms of 1993-2011 rise, as well as current annual rise, both Rahmstorf and Hansen are already way above observations. But wait, there’s more.
Hansen’s rate of sea level rise is supposed to be accelerating, as is Rahmstorf’s rate. By 2020 Hansen says it should be rising at 6.3 mm per year, and everlastingly upwards after that. But in fact we’re already way under their supposed rates of annual increase, and the observed rate of rise is declining …
How does Hansen get these nonsensical numbers? Well, he noticed something in the observations.
This third term [melting ice] was small until the past few years, but it is has at least doubled in the past decade …
My high school science teacher, Mrs. Henniger, bless her, thought extending a linear trend into the future was a crime against nature, and I would hesitate to express her opinion on Hansen blithely extending a ~ 7% annual increase for a hundred years. That kind of compound interest turns a centimeter (3/8″) into 5 metres (16 feet). If Dr. Hansen had submitted this nonsense to her, you would not have been able to read it when it came back for the red pencil scribbles.
You can’t do that, folks. You can’t just observe that something has doubled in the last decade, and then extend that exponential growth out for a century. That’s beyond wishful thinking. That’s magical thinking.
Two final points. First, the pea under the walnut shells. Note carefully what Hansen has done. He has claimed that the sea level rise will be “several tens of metres”. This is at least thirty metres, or a hundred feet, of sea level rise.
He seems to be at least somewhat supporting this claim with his Figure 7 (my figure 2). But if you look at the caption, this is not a forecast, a projection, or a scenario of any kind. Instead, this is merely an “approximation” of what a linear sea level rise might look like and what an exponential rise might look like. You know, in case you didn’t understand “linear” and “exponential”. His actual forecast is under another walnut shell somewhere. We know his “Approximation” can’t be a real projection because it shows almost no rise occurring currently, or for some years.
Second, even this doesn’t begin to unravel the errors, deceptions, alarmism, and con games in Hansen’s work. Do you see the guy in the dark vest and the white pants and shirt at the left of Hieronymus’s painting at the top? See what he has in his hand while he’s looking all innocent at the sky? See who it’s chained to? Hansen’s not really the shell game conjurer, that guy’s a piker, he’s not making much money on the game.
Hansen’s the guy in the dark vest with his hand on your pocketbook …
w.
[UPDATE]
Joel Shore observed correctly that Hansen was basing his estimate of a huge sea level rise on paleoclimate date. Joel is right that Hansen claimed the paleoclimate data shows a rise of 20 metres for every 1°C temperature rise. Because of this, Hansen says that a 2°C future temperature rise will give a 40 metre sea level rise.
Let’s take a bit calmer look at what we know. We know that when there is an ice age, a lot of the water in the ocean behaves badly. It goes up on the land as mainly northern hemisphere ice and snow and glaciers. As a result, the sea level drops by a hundred metres or so. The glaciers stay there until the ice age ends, at which point they melt, and the sea level rises again. Since we’re in an interglacial, right now the glaciers are mostly melted.
So I would certainly not expect further warming to have much effect on melting or sea level. The easy ice is all melted, the giant miles-thick Northern Hemisphere glaciers are almost all melted back into the ocean. The rest are hiding mostly on north slopes in northern climes. So where is the meltwater going to come from?
And curiously, what I found out from Joel’s question is that if you know where to look, we can see that the graphs in Hansen’s own paper bear me out. They say the oceans won’t rise. I don’t particularly believe Hansen’s results, but presuming that they are correct for the sake of discussion, then let’s look at his graphs.
Look first at the sea level during the past four interglacial periods. I stuck a ruler on it so you can see what I mean.
As you can see, at the level of detail of their graph the sea level has never been higher than it than it is now.
Now look at their temperature observations and reconstruction:
According to Hansen, temperatures have been as much as 2.5°C higher than at present … but the sea level hasn’t ever been higher than at present.
If Hansen’s claim were true, that a 1°C temperature rise leads to a 20 m sea level rise, we should see sea levels forty metres or more above present levels in Hansen’s graph (b). Look at the scale on the left of graph (b), that’s off the top of the chart.
Instead, we see nothing of the sort. We see much warmer periods in the past, but the sea levels are indistinguishable from present levels. Hansen’s own graphs show that he is wrong. So it appears that Hansen is doing the same thing, he’s extrapolating a linear trend out well beyond the end.
He’s noticed that when warming temperatures were melting the huge glaciers over Chicago, the sea level rose quickly. Unfortunately, he has then extended that trend well past the time when there are no glaciers in Chicago left to melt …
w.
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A physicist says:
January 30, 2012 at 5:42
==============================
You comments are inane. The 1940s were well known for their warmth. The world pop. was about 1/3 of today’s. The weather forecasting we have now days is far superior to the 40s. Todays understanding or weather, satelite observations, present day ships etc, allow for far greater passage unders similar conditions. You have no evidence that 1940 arctic conditions were not similar to todays, yet there is substanial anecdotal evidence that this is true.
Here’s How NASA sees it:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/earth/antarctica/antarctica20110818-640.swf
Perhaps Hansen’s prediction of accelerating mass-loss and sea-level rise isn’t cuckoo?
We are one third of a century after Hansen’s prediction of an accelerated rise and reality does not show the rise. How long do we have to wait?
Nature abhors a straight line.
Ah! The fabled Northwest Passage.
Climate change in the North gets an assist in the discovery because Mercy Bay was routinely clogged in year-round ice until recently. The first recorded time the bay was ice-free was the summer of 2007
http://www.archaeologydaily.com/news/201007284636/Doomed-ship-found-in-watery-Arctic-grave.html
HMS Investigator discovered climate change?
http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&ie=UTF8&t=h&msa=0&msid=102406754890023327747.00048c739ea37a9342b5d&ll=69.037142,-107.929687&spn=22.778739,102.65625&z=3
Well as sea level rises, the surface area of the oceans goes down, and the land area goes up, so naturally the rate of ocean water depth increase would accelerate, leading to an increasing; some might even say “exponential” sea level rise.
So the question is :- I f the global mean lower troposphere Temperature goes up strictly as the logarithm of the CO2 abundance, and sea level rise goes up exponentially with Temperature, does that mean that sea level rise is strictly linear with CO2 ??
Somehow, I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this thesis; I’ll have to rethink it to see where I may have maid a misteak.
Sorry, map is within this link
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2010/07/28/hms-investigator-arctic.html?ref=rss
Marc77 tomorrow , given that tomorrow never arrives but is always coming .
Speaking of the shell-and-pea game reminds me of an episode of (I think) Paladin. After the gamester had shuffled the shells around he put the barrel of his revolver on one shell, said that that was his choice, and then flipped over the other two shells. The gamester did not look happy…..
IanM
@KnR says:
January 30, 2012 at 12:16 pm
“So would these dramatic sea level increases come with or without his ‘boiling oceans’ idea
Lets be honest Hansen reverts to the same approach when ever things don’t go his way , make even more dramatic claims and scream louder . The very idea that the initial claims my be wrong never enters his head .”
Don’t you understand nuthing?
IT works like this:
First there was mann.
Then there was warming.
Then melting ice.
The melt water was so cold it froze the oceans, well, or made it colder.
When cold, water contracts.
Then the water gets to be warmer.
Warm water expands.
Rising sea levels times absurdum.
Then 50 million invisible CAGW refugees was relocated in la la land in 2010.
Now it is cold and the water is contracted.
Tomorrow, it might get warmer… Dam dam daaam, now we quickly extrapolate that in a straight linear line regretting no sound regression to the boiling point or until all green muppets scream in absolute terror, of what could happen in a hundred years if the above assumptions turned out to be correct in the make belief of linear reality modeled by ancient communist hippies. :p
George E. Smith; says:
January 30, 2012 at 2:19 pm
“Well as sea level rises, the surface area of the oceans goes down, and the land area goes up…”
“Somehow, I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this thesis; I’ll have to rethink it to see where I may have maid a misteak.”
That first line might be a good place to start your error search.
The anonymous internet troll referring to itself as a physicist seems to believe every failed Hansen Embellishment is a success for him.
Apparently the character doesn’t ask himself why Hansen didn’t know Mike Mann’s math spit hockey sticks when even Mann’s OWN COLLEAGUES were commenting on it.
He didn’t know a tree can’t be a T.R.E.E.M.O.M.E.T.E.R. with all that “light, heat, CO2-canopy/OXYGEN-roots, parasites, WATER, S.I.X.T.E.E.N. different MINERALS i.n. p.r.o.p.e.r. r.a.t.i.o. no less: all that means NOTHING to the internet character proclaiming itself a physicist.
Apparently the utter lack of any tropospheric hotspot which insta-nulls CO2 gas-driven climate hysterical religion has gone completely over his head.
The LOWERING infrared down-welling of the past fifteen years, as manmade gases have multiplied, which is IMPOSSIBLE in warmer religion – that’s not happening to any warmer’s world.
It’s simply a matter of ‘La-La-La-La I can’t read a thermometer without James Hansen’s/Government help.’
It’s another case of someone who thinks Marx is an economist,
thinking Mann is a statistician, and that Jones used his math to cyfer doomsday,
all this having been brought to light by Al Gore who determined that their math was SO GOOD that we had to INSTALL his POLICIES in SPITE of the ELECTION or
we would all die.
He didn’t of course mention the world ending, during his run for president, except obliquely.
At this point in time you can take all of the available satellite sea level data, split it in two groups, and plot the trend for the first half and the second half. I did this. The second half of the data had a considerably lower trend thant the first half. The first half trend is about 14 incher per century. The second half trend is about 8 inches per century. If anything, the rate of sea level rise is decelerating. By doubling down on his past failures, Hansen now has the credibility of a street corner drunk with drool running down his chin.
Joel Shore: “melting/disintegrating essentially all of Greenland’s ice and some percentage (say, 10-20% ??), of Antarctica’s does seem conceivable.”
If you look at the rate of melt and the fact that, if anything, sea level rise is decelerating, what you propose is absurd for at least the next four to five hundred years. Greenland’s ice is 2 kilometers thick. The pressure that it exerts on the land suface means that it is sitting in a concave dish. It cannot go bobsleding into the ocean. Sea ice around Antarctica is stable if not increasing. This is a good indication that it is not warming down there. Your scenario is as conceivable as the beginning of the next ice age.
Willis Eschenbach says:
Not really…You need to read the discussion that Hansen has about the ice core data vs the deep ocean data. Hansen does not believe that the ice core data gives as reliable an indication of global temperatures as the deep ocean data, which suggests that the global temperature was in fact not that much higher than today in previous interglacials. (And, by the way, as I understand it, while the oceans were not 40 m higher in previous interglacials, they were several [on the order of 5 m] higher.) He discusses this a bit at the bottom of p. 8 and then more in Section 4.
He also explains the empirical evidence for believing that the 20 m per degree of warming continues to warmer climates. I’m not saying that Hansen is right on all of this, but I do think you need to read his paper carefully so that you are responding to the arguments that he is actually making and not making points that he has addressed.
I can understand your reasons for believing that the 20 m per degree C of warming doesn’t continue unabated to warmer climates, but even if it slows down to 10 m or 5 m per degree C of warming, that is still a concern. You seem to be banking on the idea that it slows down to almost nothing. Yet, we know that there are still considerable land ice sheets, and while much of it on Antarctica may be safe from warming enough to disintegrate, it does not seem so true for Greenland (and for parts of Antarctica like the peninsula).
And, Hansen points to past climates going further back when sea levels were much higher…I am cautiously hopeful that there may be enough hysteresis in regards to the ice sheets on Antarctica (and maybe Greenland) that we won’t be able to melt them now that they are here. (Also, as you go further back, other issues like different continental configurations and the like become important.) So, I am not saying that I am convinced that Hansen is correct…But I also don’t think you can dismiss his arguments are quickly as you seem to think you can.
Joel Shore says:
January 30, 2012 at 5:04 pm “”So, I am not saying that I am convinced that Hansen is correct…But I also don’t think you can dismiss his arguments are quickly as you seem to think you can.””
Haven’t I got some news for you.
Markus Fitzhenry.
A physicist says:
January 30, 2012 at 1:41 pm
Here’s How NASA sees it:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/earth/antarctica/antarctica20110818-640.swf
Perhaps Hansen’s prediction of accelerating mass-loss and sea-level rise isn’t cuckoo?
=============================
Sea ice is increasing around Antarctica over the recent 30 year record. There have been 5-6 all time records broken in increased sea ice mass since 2007 when compared with prior observations.
The IPCC also suggests that snow and ice cover will increase in Antarctica due to it’s extreme cold temperatures combined with increased atmospheric water vapour projections.
So I suspect Antarctica is not a good place to look for that sea level rise. In fact, if this aspect of AGW theory is correct, Antarctica will most likely offset sea level rise, not contribute to it. Currently this speculation is also consistent with empirical observations.
Totally pedantic footnote re: “several.”
There is much debate, but casual usage has applied “few” to 2-4 or a minimal number, “several” to imply 5-9 or more.
I personally would never use the word “several” top describe three things, as the *implication* of “several” is “more than a few, less than many.”
A lot of people think “several” derives from “seven,” which may be where the “hovering around seven” definition of 5-9 comes from.
As far as a scientific prediction, however, the words are *hopelessly* imprecise.
Joel wrote,
“Not really…You need to read the discussion that Hansen has about the ice core data vs the deep ocean data. Hansen does not believe that the ice core data gives as reliable an indication of global temperatures as the deep ocean data, which suggests that the global temperature was in fact not that much higher than today in previous interglacials.”
The paper he is considering as unreliable (in preference to data taken from Zechos et al., 200 (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/metadata/noaa-ocean-8674.html) and his own analysis is here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/jouzel2007/jouzel2007.html
Which reads:
“A high-resolution deuterium profile is now available along the entire European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica Dome C ice core, extending this climate record back to marine isotope stage 20.2, ~800,000 years ago. Experiments performed with an atmospheric general circulation model including water isotopes support its temperature interpretation. We assessed the general correspondence between Dansgaard-Oeschger events and their smoothed Antarctic counterparts for this Dome C record, which reveals the presence of such features with similar amplitudes during previous glacial periods. We suggest that the interplay between obliquity and precession accounts for the variable intensity of interglacial periods in ice core records.”
Is there an explanation offered as to why the deuterium profile is less reliable for measuring atmospheric temperature as opposed to a deep ocean profile? Since J. Jouzel et al., would refute his argument, he should have a good reason for why he rejects that paper and it’s data…
Joel Shore says:
January 30, 2012 at 5:04 pm
Thanks for the reply, Joel. Your claim sounds like Mann’s quest to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period … for years everything that I have read (including the ice core data in Hansen’s graph (d) above) have indicated that the Eemian (last interglacial) was warmer than this interglacial. Now that that is inconvenient for future alarmism, suddenly you are arguing it wasn’t warmer in the Eemian??? I’d need a bunch of citations for that claim, not just one.
And as to whether the oceans were 5 metres higher in the Eemian, my point is simple—Hansen’s historical sea level reconstruction, the one giving him the 20 metres per degree, doesn’t show a 5 metre sea level rise. Look again at his graph (b). A five metre rise would easily be visible at that scale. We see no such thing So you can take it up with Hansen.
That’s the beauty of my disproof of his theory using his own data, Joel … sure, you can argue that the sea level was higher and the temperature was lower, but that’s not what his own graphs say.
All the best,
w.
CAGW is on the way down, and some of the folks who have been pushing it must realize that they might be held culpable for their actions.
It would appear that Hansen is laying the groundwork for an insanity defense.
Will Nitscke writes.
“Sea ice is increasing around Antarctica over the recent 30 year record. There have been 5-6 all time records broken in increased sea ice mass since 2007”
Will, what’s your source for these 5-6 sea ice mass records since 2007?
“So I suspect Antarctica is not a good place to look for that sea level rise. In fact, if this aspect of AGW theory is correct, Antarctica will most likely offset sea level rise, not contribute to it. Currently this speculation is also consistent with empirical observations.”
No, it’s not. For example, Rignot et al. (2011) found good agreement between two methods of estimating Greenland and Antarctic mass balance. They conclude:
“Using the two-decade long MBM observation record, we determine that ice sheet loss is accelerating by 36.3 ± 2 Gt/yr2, or 3 times larger than from mountain glaciers and ice caps (GIC). The magnitude of the acceleration suggests that ice sheets will be the dominant contributors to sea level rise in forthcoming decades, and will likely exceed the IPCC projections for the contribution of ice sheets to sea level rise in the 21st century”
“”””” Dave Wendt says:
January 30, 2012 at 3:17 pm
George E. Smith; says:
January 30, 2012 at 2:19 pm
“Well as sea level rises, the surface area of the oceans goes down, and the land area goes up…”
“Somehow, I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this thesis; I’ll have to rethink it to see where I may have maid a misteak.”
That first line might be a good place to start your error search. “””””
No Dave; it turned out to be something entirely different; to whit, an absence of any sense of humor at WUWT !
But did YOU get the point ANYWAY.
Rising sea levels should lead to INCREASED oceanic surface are, as in Florida and Bungladish going submarine (Maldives too), so for a constant melt rate (of land ice) the sea level rise rate should slow down. The likelihood of it accelerating at EXPONENTIAL rates is about nil
Acorollary to the above; as land ice melts, the ice surface diminishes, so the melt rate itself, would diminish with diminishing surface area.
A Sorta Physicist is a typical alarmist. What he does is tantamount to proclaiming a global flood because it’s raining harder now than it was 10 minutes ago. These tiny snapshots in time we’re dealing with tell us nothing.