From Simon Fraser University, a new paper says that the Canucks may as well just give up, because its going to warm up no matter what they do. Using powerful new geographic mapping tools on a big screen Mac and a #2 pencil, geographer Kirsten Zickfeld has it all figured out. This is apparently what will cause an end to outdoor ice hockey in Canada.
Warming of 2 degrees inevitable over Canada
Even if zero emissions of greenhouse gases were to be achieved, the world’s temperature would continue to rise by about a quarter of a degree over a decade. That’s a best-case scenario, according to a paper co-written by a Simon Fraser University researcher.
New climate change research – Climate response to zeroed emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols — published in Nature’s online journal, urges the public, governments and industries to wake up to a harsh new reality.
“Let’s be honest, it’s totally unrealistic to believe that we can stop all emissions now,” says Zickfeld, an assistant professor of geography at SFU. “Even with aggressive greenhouse gas mitigation, it will be a challenge to keep the projected global rise in temperature under 2 degrees Celsius,” emphasizes Zickfeld.
The geographer wrote the paper with Damon Matthews, a University of Concordia associate professor at the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment.
The duo used an earth system climate model developed by the University of Victoria to study the impact of greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions on the world’s climate. The study was based on emission levels that are consistent with data from the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The removal of aerosols from the atmosphere would cause additional global warming in the short term, if all of those emissions were removed now. “The widespread presence of aerosols in the Earth’s atmosphere is effectively acting like a solar radiation blocking blanket right now,” explains Zickfeld.
“It’s preventing the Earth’s temperature from responding to the real effects of global warming. But once that aerosol-based blanket is removed the temperature will rise.”
Due to the emission of greenhouse gases, the world’s temperature has warmed by almost 1 ° C since the beginning of the industrial era. The study finds that elimination of all emissions would lead to an additional short-term warming by 0.25 to 0.5 degrees.
“One to 1.5 degrees of global warming may not seem like a great deal,” says Zickfeld. “But we need to realize that the warming would not be distributed equally over the globe, with mid to high latitude regions such as Canada, Alaska, northeastern Europe, Russia and northern China being most strongly affected.
“Our research shows that as a result of past emissions, a warming of at least 2 ° C will be unavoidable in those regions.”
Backgrounder: Study a first on many levels
This study is the first to find that if all greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions were halted now the Earth’s temperature would actually continue to rise by a few tenths of a degree over the next 10 years. Then it would begin to cool by a few tenths of a degree, coming down to its current level after about a century.
During the warming period the Earth’s temperature would rise to roughly 1.3-Celsius degrees higher than it was at the beginning of the industrial era.
In the northern hemisphere that peak temperature would be closer to 2 degrees higher. The reason is that the warming is not distributed equally over the globe, and is amplified at high latitudes.
“Two degrees is pretty significant,” notes Zickfeld, “when you consider the global temperature was only five degrees colder than today’s during the ice age.”
A decrease in greenhouse gases with short atmospheric lifetimes, such as methane and nitrous oxide, will cause the planet to gradually cool off after the warming phase.
The atmospheric concentration of long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide determines the world’s long-term temperature.
This study is also the first to quantify the extent to which past greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions will warm oceans, causing them to rise. Zickfeld and Matthews found emissions to date will lead to about a 25 centimeters sea level rise in 2200, and the sea level will continue to rise for several centuries after that date.
The study doesn’t analyse the impact of other factors, such as melting glaciers and ice sheets, on sea levels. These factors are expected to accelerate sea level rise further.
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Contact:
Kirsten Zickfeld, 778.782.9047 (w), 604.354.6214 (cell), kzickfel@sfu.ca; Vancouver resident, originally from Germany
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
Note: Please contact the researcher directly for interviews and copy of paper
If the warming caused by CO2 is so hideously dangerous but yet it can be easily negated by just a small addition of relatively harmless aerosols, why don’t these catastrophic warmists simply propose that we increase the aerosol production just a little more if temperatures start going back up to much? It would be a simple, inexpensive and very quick fix. We all know the answer to that question but still couldn’t help but pointing it out.
And just as the constipated mathematician did, she worked it out with a pencil.
Some academicians need to publish in order to qualify for their tenure. Ergo, another crap paper.
To the silly Canadian Warmista geography people, we don’t expect much from you, but at least TAKE a frickin’ GEOLOGY course! It might give you a tad bit of perspective. You might learn that only a few short millenia ago, your entire nation was covered in ice a mile thick! Gigantic continental glaciers roared down from the north and swallowed up all the wooly mammoths. You’ve already gained a huge amount due to existing warming, and have the most to gain from future warming, not to mention the most to lose from future cooling. You ought to be praying for warming.
Kirsten had me really ‘petri-fried’ there for a minute until I worked out she wasn’t a climatologist(slams forehead and promises to concentrate harder in science lessons in future)
“Achievements: In her doctoral thesis on the impact of human activities for
the climate system, they found that the additional
Increase in air pollution with suspended particles –
GPMT by fire, the consumption of fossil fuels and
Deforestation that the summer monsoon, India
precipitation supplies could fail. Also the global warming causes the
North Atlantic circulation, the mild climate in Western Europe and
causes weaker or even dried up and
Northwest Europe has a relatively sudden drop in temperature
experiences.”
Achievements = various claims of catastrophe! How sad that ‘chicken little’ism is
praised. I hope in another 15 years that we (and they) will clearly see how wrong
and silly they were. The Boy who Cried wolf, paid for his sins by being eaten alive.
Perhaps we can get these people to retract their silly papers in the future.
According to the graphs in the supplementary information, available here the 2.0C rise only occurs if just the emissions of aerosols are reduced to zero. If non-CO2 greenhouse gasses are eliminated then the temperature drops by between 1.5 and 2.0C. Finally if just CO2 is eliminated then the temperature increase by 0.5C uniformly over the entire world except for Antarctica.
A red flag for anyone who is tempted to believe in CAGW should be that according to CAGW orthodoxy, nowhere on earth is better with warming. Not northern Canada. Not Siberia. Nowhere.
If there were significant warming in Canada, that country would not suffer. It would likely become a super power with habitable land area similar to the US.
The duo used an earth system climate model developed by the University of Victoria to study the impact of greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions on the world’s climate. The study was based on emission levels that are consistent with data from the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
…
This study is the first to find that if all greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions were halted now the Earth’s temperature would actually continue to rise by a few tenths of a degree over the next 10 years. Then it would begin to cool by a few tenths of a degree, coming down to its current level after about a century.
Well obviously they were using the model wrong. Just look at what came out of the U of Victoria just last year:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/10/abandon-all-hope-ye-who-read-this/
Last year, based on climate modeling at the U of Victoria, we shut down all emissions and there’s still enough “climate change” in the pipe to affect the globe for a thousand years.
This year, based on climate modeling at the U of Victoria, we shut down all emissions and get a blip of a rise, which won’t be evenly spread across the globe, and goes away in a century.
Over one year, they go from “We are screwed for a thousand years!” to a Canadian “Eh.”
Is this progress?
It is nice to know, that when it comes to climate science… Women can get just as naked as men. It truly is an equal opportunity phenomenon.
Yes Canada warmed more than other locales and when cooling manifests, it will cool faster than most locales. Who ever said it was easy living in Canada?
Since warming brings real tangible benefits to our northern friends and cold takes these benefits away just as fast… Surly warming is preferred? Even now, Canada is one big skating rink, and does not lack ice. GK
This has to be the result of a rogue gene from the British gene pool. The same madness has over-run Oz as well. Climate guilt is epidemic in the English speaking world almost exclusively.
I think it is a bit unfortunate in the way this women has been referred to as a “geographer”, as if she is somehow unqualified to speak on matters of science. Yes geography on the whole is the softest of all Earth Sciences, tending to be less embedded in the core sciences than say geology or meteorology, but it does add to our understanding of the Earth. What’s more, a visit to her web page reveals that Kirsten Zickfeld’s background is in physics and not geography – not that that should matter.
My problem is that she uses a model to make statements about the future. Firstly, a model is nothing but a hypothesis that needs testing and given that most models do pretty badly beyond their training sets I wouldn’t place too much confidence in this one either. Then there is reference to IPCC data? What data? Are these outputs from models, then they’re not data (in the empirical sense) they are results from simulations.
There is something fundamentally wrong in this field of science; models are accepted as evidence. I think the post makes too much of the article when it refers to the paper using definites such “…2 degrees would…”.
There’s this joke in Canada that we only have two seasons(unless you live in southern BC), winter and construction. I fully support a warmer Canada, and this thing called “summer” that Americans and the rest of the world talks about.
Apparently, the education bubble is world-wide, and encompasses much more than cost. As these programs proliferate, standards decrease, the number of degrees granted increases, and the overall quality of education drops, and the quality of research is diluted. That must be why we get studies done with unverified models, based on other unverified models, with no recognizable science involved.
Is there some sort of geographical map showing the average temperate of North America over the last 30 years? I don’t mean the average of the whole continent, but region by region, something like the daily highly temperature map that appears in the USA today.
Take your map, and for anyplace in Canada, just move southwards to a location that is two degrees warmer in average. Does civilization flourish there? Is abundant native flora and fauna there, or is it a desert wasteland?
Zickfeld and Matthews found emissions to date will lead to about a 25 centimeters sea level rise in 2200….
That’s if there were no further emissions.
If emissions continue, “The Impacts of Sea Level Rise on the California Coast” published May, 2009, by the California Climate Change Center, with generous taxpayer support, prepared by Matthew Heberger, Heather Cooley, Pablo Herrera, Peter H. Gleick, and Eli Moore of the Pacific Institute, informs us:
Under medium to medium-high greenhouse-gas emission scenarios, mean sea level along the California coast is projected to rise from 1.0 to 1.4 meters (m) by the year 2100.
http://pacinst.org/reports/sea_level_rise/report.pdf
If Dr. Gleick’s scenario were credible, Zickfeld and Matthews’ 200 year figure would be completely negligible. Of course, there seems to be some question of the Pacific Institute’s reliability….
The amazing thing about these people who write dramatic and apocalyptic accounts of what will happen with quite minor temperature changes is that they probably watch the same weather reports for Vancouver that I do. Every morning one forecaster shows the record highs and lows for that date. They are usually 20 to 30 degrees (C) different. Although sometimes the dates are decades apart, surprisingly often (twice in the past month) the dates are only one year apart. If nature can accommodate a 25 degree change in one year, why would 2 degrees over a century cause such havoc? Political indoctrination trumps simple observation.
Maybe we won’t have to evacuate the far North then? That’s been the only sensible solution to the intense winter cold for the last hundred years.
SFU? usually excellent advice in any circumstances. Pity they didn’t follow it.
In the northern hemisphere that peak temperature would be closer to 2 degrees higher. The reason is that the warming is not distributed equally over the globe, and is amplified at high latitudes.
According to today’s Edmonton Journal, the lows in the following three places way up in northern Canada: Iqaluit, Inuvik,and Yellowknife are respectively: -35 C, -29 C, and -33 C. With these temperatures on March 7, are they supposed to be worried about an extra degree or two?
“will warm 0.25 degrees per decade” Um not the last decade it didn’t!
Amen.
The estimate I get, and most others
including Roy Spencer,
is 0.14 degree C warming per decade
but it is natural warming.
You can all stand on your heads,
but it is not going to change the facts.
More CO2 is not going to make it any warmer
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
What’s this woman going on about? My late mother in law lived in Miami just north of Miami Beach. In the winter the place was so full of people from Quebec I had to learn how to say ‘Ay’ in French.
They must have us confused with another Canada somewhere warm. They know that trying to scare Canucks about rising sea levels and warming temps won’t work but “an end to outdoor hockey?” oh no we must do something. What a crock. The FACT that is hasn’t warmed in the last decade seems to be missing from their models. What will they do when/if the PDO/AMO stay negative and some real cold (ie 1960s & 70s) hits?
Wait a few months or years and you’ll see that their claims are BS. I hope everyone gives them a heart-warming message.