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.
— 30 —
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
Jeff says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/07/give-up-canada-youre-toast/#comment-915170
Henry@Jeff
Jeff, independent studies of the pattern of wearming show that the reason of warming is due to
1) more intense heat from the sun
and/or
2) less clouds
and/or
3) less ozone shielding, especially in the SH
and/or
4) more greening of the earth
and/or
…..
But clearly not an increase in GHG’s!!!!
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
It’s the Zickfeld’s follies!!!!
But seriously SFU is spewing AGW rhetorics, from Jaccard (Carbon Tax in British Columbia) chastisising fellow warmist Weaver in a pathetic op-ed in the Globe & Mail, to Clague (sea level rise) and now to Zickfeld. SFU links to all good eco funding partners such as ACT http://act-adapt.org/partners/ … All the roads lead to Romm… or so.
Last week we had the Concordia garbage study about outdoor hockey rinks, and now, with the help of complicit media, we’ll suffer Rhamstorf’s clone and her model…
It is all very funny..and sad. We’ve had a glorious winter here in southern Alberta…and most of western Canada. I’ve not spoken to one single person all winter who is not enjoying this mild winter, especially after last year’s spate of ice age. Warm is good…we all love it. The polar bears will be fine, as always.
The doomsayers keep telling us we are going to hell in a handbasket, and the local left-wing rag, The Leftbridge Herald, keeps telling us just how bad it is. The miserable greenies and leftist media want us to suffer in some way like some plebes in a religious compound. Suffer and repent! They want us to be punished for having comfortable life styles, good health care, safe and inexpensive food and good education. Canadians live longer than ever (and longer than in most countries…in the top ten), we have decent standards of living and enjoy many amenities in our lives all because of developments in industry, food production, medicine and health care and leisure products. Much of which is energy and fossil fuel based.
What is with “these” people who want us to suffer in the cold? ☺
What I do not get is how anyone can think of all the studies like this as real science.
What happened to science?
Here we have yet another person from ANOTHER field telling us about our future climate and this is not challenged by every climate expert out there, but God Forbid a climate sceptic come out and say that AGW is not happening….it really is a double standard. Whenever Mr. Watts comes out and says something about the climate, its “that wacky weatherman” as my uncle always says about him. But here we have a non-climate expert talking about AGW and its perfectly OK because as long as you toe the party line you are an expert.
Talk about your double standards, double speak and above all your hypocrisy. I for one can’t wait until this entire house of cards falls down. Maybe it sounds like I am ranting, but I see studies like this and the usage of computers and other resources that are literally being wasted on garbage models that are not only wrong but are being used to tell our politicians what to do.
So we are wasting even more money on even more waste. Its an endless cycle of just waste. And it starts with hypocrisy and ends with it. It all starts with studies like this which start with this:
If we warm by X, then Y.
But the problem with these models is that they ignore the fact that we stopped warming 10 years ago. Its almost like they think they can rewrite history and I know why they do it of course, and I think most sceptics likewise do as well.
They are thinking that if the warming trend continues they will just rewrite history to show a gentle warming trend forever. They will rewrite history as many times as possible because they read 1984 like it was a how-to manual instead of a warning. These people see Orwell as a visionary.
/end rant
The X-files shot their FBI building scenes at SFU. The troof is out there.
Hey, wait a minute, we didn’t stop CO2 emissions 15 years ago, and temperature rise has stopped. Are these climateresarchers some kind of totally idi***ts.
reason says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/07/give-up-canada-youre-toast/#comment-915161
Henry says
that was really funny
Johnny L said on March 7, 2012 at 9:04 am:
Secure Fresh Underwear?
Seriously, this ain’t a tenth as bad as some of the dreck we’ve seen, it’s actually a noticeable quieting down from the expected alarmist shrillness. At the rate things are going, ten years from now she may quietly keep leaving this off her list of publications and pretend it never happened.
So do as your momma should have taught you, and stay classy when talking about a lady. Okay?
Sorry, I work in a business we models are validated by testing, the rocket business. I can tell you none of the climate models come close to being validated. In our case, we would cancel the launch.
Food grows much better in warmer climates with more CO2. Climate disasters usually are caused by drought and/or cold. Lower food production is followed by disease and/or war. AGW fanatics are worried more about beach houses or perhaps grants and political control of the population. More people have have already died in the name the “green” causes, such as elimination of pesticides, and the resultant reduction of food crops and spread of insect born diseases such as malaria than CO2 “pollution” will ever cause.
Woohoo!!!!
Time to start cornering the market of palm trees in Calgary.
I knew there was an upside to this whole CAGW BS.
If any of you are thinking about reneging on producing your quota of CO2. Please think of the poor Canadian children playing hockey outdoors in -30, or having to walk to school(uphill both ways).
As a Canadian we should be suing the IPCC for breach of contract.
benfrommo (March 7, 2012 at 9:29 am), let me explain. A climate scientist is anyone who gets a nod from the UN-IPCC, its approved NGOs and associated reps in academia. Ultimately, the buck stops at Pachauri’s desk…and many a buck has stopped there, we hear. Furthermore, unlikely the lowly weatherman, who has trouble forecasting even a week ahead, the climate scientist can see hundreds of years into the murky future and can “project,” with awesome accuracy and deadly certainty, future temps to the tenth of a degree. But wait, there is more. Climate scientists can tell us with deadly certainty that for the first time in humanlind’s history, if not Earth’s history, this projected warming will be bad for everyone. And don’t go away yet; as a free gift for you and your family, they can tell you whether you’ll be drowned by rising seas, parched by spreading deserts, blown cross-country by a super-tornado or exsanguinated by mosquitos the size of dachshunds. Be impressed.
Because their failed energy policies will make it prohibitive, refrigeration costs will escalate in short order. What they meant was that indoor ice hockey will be a thing of the past.
@ur momisugly Tom in Florida —
“Probably the same models that said Tampa Bay could never win a Cup. Perhaps ya’ll up there should follow Vinny, Marty, Stammer & Guy and come on down.here. Another Cup coming soon to this area!”
I am a Lightning season ticket holder! And I too wish for that two degrees of warming, so my oranges and Mangos don’t freeze every fifth year.
This is the most amazing thing about the wamristas to me ….not that they cling to their pseudo-science but that they don’t see that for the majority of the globe inhabited by humans, a couple of degrees of warming would have more positive than negative impacts.
I hope her model is right.
During the last period of glaciation, the Laurentide ice sheet covered virtually all of Canada to thousands of feet thick. http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/01_1.shtml
From what I understand about this cycle, time’s up.
Apple Ad “monkey see monkey do”
This whole thing is just a sublte Apple advert
As Dr. Pierre Latour, PhD and PE in chemical engineering and PE in process control engineering, notes:
“CO2 only absorbs and emits specific spectral wavelengths (14.77 microns) that constitute a tiny fraction of solar radiation energy in Earth’s atmosphere. The first 50 ppm of CO2 absorbs about half of this tiny energy, each additional 50 ppm absorbs half of the remaining tiny fraction, so at the current 380 ppm there are almost no absorbable photons left. CO2 could triple to 1000 ppm with no additional discernable absorption-emission.”
Also, noteworthy is the fact that CO2 levels were relatively stable, while global temperatures went up during the Roman Warming and Medieval WarmPeriod. Then temperatures fell during the Little Ice Age, again while CO2 levels remained stable. During the 20th century, from 1900 to 1940, the planet warmed while CO2 levels remained relatively flat or increased slightly. Then temperatures cooled from from 1940 to 1970 as CO2 levels rose. Recently, over the past 15 years, global temperatures have nearly flat-lined, despite a rise in CO2.
Antarctic ice core data shows rising and falling temperatures, at the same level of CO2 in the atmosphere. These up-and-down fluctuations occurred consistently over four consecutive ice ages and inter-glacial warm periods.
There is simply no discernable link between rising CO2 and global temperature.
A picture of her pointing to a Mercator (!!) Projection tells me all I need to know about this Canadian Geographer.
To further compound the offence, she is pointing to a computer monitor for Pete’s sake! The Equirectangular projection is becoming the standard computer display because lat and lon easily convert to x,y on the map. The Equirectangular maps distort area by making objects at high latitudes (like Canada and Greenland) bigger than they should be, but it doesn’t commit the egregious sins of the Mercator.
Compare Mercator to a Cylindrical Equal-Area projection. In the Equal area projection, as in the real world, Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland. In the Mercator this geographer is pointing to, Greenland is bigger than Africa! The Equirectangular projection might get neither area nor shape right, but makes reasonable compromise at both for a computer screen.
Maybe my reaction is over the top. Maybe the photographer talked her into putting a big map on the monitor. But using a Mercator in any connection with climate just makes you look foolish.
O Canada!
Our cold, but warming land
Rising CO2 will make our winters grand
As temperatures will soar and rise
The True North turns ice free
From far and wide
O Canada, our lands becomes ice-free
God keep our land, warming and snow free
O Canada, our land becomes ice-free
O Canada, our land becomes ice-free
Kidding aside, though, it’s worth pondering about whether Ms Zickfeld’s paper is an early indicator of a change in direction among outlying apartchiks and a handful of the brighter rent-seekers; a growing pattern of qualifying, hedging and positioning for the inevitable and messy collapse of the CAGW theorem. The paper contradicts the familiar alarmist claims, but claims to be on board. We saw a similar curiosity in the waning days of communism as scholars presented some very non-communist positions, but always ended with a pro forma declaration of undying loyalty to Marxism. CAGW is dead; long live CAGW!”
Clive says:
“What is with ‘these’ people who want us to suffer in the cold?”
That’s a question with a complex question, but staying with an (overly) simple answer in the next paragraph (the other paragraphs are a more detailed extrapolation of the first):
Since its modern inception in the 1960s, the Environmental Movement has been developed, implemented and maintained by ideologues. And an ideologue is, “an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of… integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program,” or says Webster.com. The Environmental Movement has little to do with Nature (although it is a useful tool) but does advance the means by which humanity must interface with Nature (i.e., it dictates the acceptable format of the sociopolitical program needed to “preserve” Nature, as is which the best of all possible outcomes).
This is a fine if the ideologues confine such a program to their lifestyle, but a distinct line is crossed when they mandate that humanity solely accept their sociopolitical program, which is ostensibly for the “good” of humanity. And herein resides the logical fallacy of the assertions of the Environmental Movement (CAGW being one – albeit vocal – component). While “the Movement” (more commonly termed “the Cause” by CAGW apologists and sympathetic scientists) is infamous for fallacious reasoning in the forms of Appeals to Belief, Emotion, Fear and Ridicule, the Questionable Cause is the logic upon which the mandate for humanity is constructed.
Questionable Cause asserts that it is illogical to conclude that one thing causes another because the two are often associated or observed together. Humanity exists within Nature and Nature is destroyed by humanity; humanity, then, is destroying itself, which is bad. Therefore, it is “good” that humanity adopts a sociopolitical program that prevents Nature’s destruction. The problem here is that Nature readily, poignantly and dramatically destroys itself without any assistance from humanity, but ideologues are either unable or unwilling to accept this truth. However, ideologues are steadfastly able and willing to ensure that you “accept” (voluntarily or not is irrelevant) their sociopolitical program because they know what’s best or good for humanity – more so than even you.
In the end, it is impossible to reason (logically debate) with an ideologue. Accepting them for this intractability is far more useful when formulating responses. The frustration comes from wasting time, effort and sometimes money in determining whether or not a person (or scientist) actually is an ideologue. Unfortunately, the iDetector has yet to be marketed by Apple.
How clever of them to create a climate model on the results of someone elses climate model.
UAH for 2011 was about 0.15°C. Do I understand correctly that this lady forcasts UAH for 2020 to be between 0.4 and 0.65°C (actually even higher since CO2 will continue to rise)?
That is something that we wil be able to observe ourselves. And comment upon, should anybody still be interested in AGW in 2020.
“rilfeld says: March 7, 2012 at 5:51 am
It’s OK. They play hockey indoors nowadays. Of course, the same computer model probably shows Toronto winning the cup.”
Ha ha, ya made me laugh. The “Toronto Make Believes” should be in the finals any decade now.
What do Houston, Texas and Toronto, Ontario have in common?
Neither one has a PROFESSIONAL hockey team!