Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Associate Professor in Organic Chemistry Maurie Trewhella, of Victoria University (Australia), has just made a stunning claim about global warming, in a letter to the editor.
According to Trewhella;
Ian Dunlop’s warning (Comment, 7/4) is especially sobering. The slowing of atmospheric temperature rise over the past 15 years or so, used by climate change sceptics to debunk the work of the IPCC, is, on the contrary, evidence that the solar energy delivered to the Earth is being absorbed by the oceans. The Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are acting as giant dampers to contain temperature rise in the oceans. When both of these ice sheets melt away in the next decade or so, the rise in both ocean and atmospheric temperatures will accelerate rapidly and demonstrate that the passing of the tipping points that Dunlop expresses concern about has, indeed, occurred. …
I’m not certain which article by Ian Dunlop Professor Trewhella was responding to, but this article, full of alarmist claims about tipping points and the “dangers” of economic growth, seems fairly typical of Dunlop’s writing.
Professor Trewhella is a person of substance within Australian academia. The press release Ephedrine’s green dream details advanced work being performed by Associate Professor Trewhella and colleagues on yeast, to economically produce important medicines (interestingly their innovation, in this case, involved large quantities of CO2).
To obtain a Chemistry qualification in Australia, you have to study Thermodynamics at an advanced level. Part of being a qualified Chemist in Australia, is knowing how much heat it takes to melt a block of ice.
Does Professor Trewhella really believe that the Antarctic and Arctic ice sheets will “melt away in the next decade”? I hope not. But whatever led to this letter being published, it seems careless to say the least, for the reputation of a man of science, to be associated with such a ridiculous claim.
For that to be true, this graph has to start to show a positive second derivative.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
It must be worse then we thought, the Antarctic graph has just shown another uptick. It will now start melting faster.
For that Colorado graph to be true, it has also to show a positive first derivative. This requires that (a) the splices between three datasets be valid (and not just done in order to keep a straight line going through all three) (b) the adjustments to the slopes of the graph are valid. The adjustments are predicated on a sufficiently accurate knowledge of the confounding factors in the measurement, such as but no limited to, the rate of change of optical path length caused by variation in water vapour along the measurement path. I don’t see the same three millimetres per year in the Envisat data, but I doubt if they used the same model for adjustments to the raw data. http://i39.tinypic.com/243pvv7.jpg
Yes, that, and a equally positive 3rd, 4’th, 5’th, ….. and so on
Or even a positive 3rd derivative which is called jerk. A very appropriate term in the field of CAGW.
Right, satellites can accurately measure a dynamic surface through dynamic optical conditions within a tenth of a mm but when it comes to estimating an average temperature for the entire lower atmosphere we’d better stick to a few ground based measurements. What a joke.
I wonder if there is a “land level” satellite data collection?
Let me be more specific. When temperature rises, there are two obvious ways this raises sea level – sea water expansion and ice melting. But these two have different functional relationships to increasing temperature.
As temp rises, the ocean expands (all else being equal …). Thus, the first derivative of sea level and the first derivative of temperature should be related.
Also, as temp rises, the rate of ice melting rises (all else …) Thus, the first derivative of the rate of ice melting and the first derivative of temp should be related. But the rate of ice melting relates to the first derivative of sea level. Thus, the second derivative of sea level and the first derivative of temperature should be related.
Of course, there are plenty of compounding influences. But if sea level rise was primarily driven by the increasing rate of melt from increasing temp, the colorado.edu graph would be parabolic. It’s apparent lack of ANY parabolic component is strong evidence that ice melting is not contributing AT ALL to the rise in sea level. It’s all expansion.
All those predicted tipping points are now long overdue and the whole tipping point alarmism is turning into an epic fail. The sea level data is the most solid evidence against CAGW alarmism.
Then there is Stefan Rahmstorf, who found that the first derivative of the sea level was INVERSELY related to the first derivative of the temperature. But don’t worry: he was still able to extract scary disaster from this bogus relationship. See…
https://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/rahmstorf-2009-off-the-mark-again-part-1/
I think earth will definitely leave this interglacial within the next week or 10,000 years or so.
LOL nice one
Initially I misread the title as “meet” not “melt”. I thought it was ridiculous, as the global cooling that some predict would surely not act that fast. Corrected, it seems even less plausible.
give or take a millenium or two.
“give or take a millenium or two.”… a millenium isn’t needed. Just long enough to collect a few more research grants.
Halt !! They all forget the GOD factor, he has almost finished his trip around the universe and its earths turn for miracles !,
I salute you sir.
Precisely!
Just flew over Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. It’s frozen good and solid from Scandinavia to northern Lake Michigan. Even the ocean between Greenland and Canada is covered in solid ice pack. Looks like an ice age.
Except in an Ice Age, the ice would be a mile closer to your plane.
BS baffles brains. Another academic trashes their reputation. Very sad to see.
Reputation with whom? Seeing that the UK’s Royal Society has quite thoroughly joined the dark side. And that the general population are not perturbed by an image of a Polar Bear alongside a news article discussing the Antartic (and yes I have personally seen that).
So, if a society is converted to alarmism, then such claims are the route to reputation.
Just look at Lewandowsky. His career is heading for the stratosphere, as far as I can see.
And all that money can’t hurt.
“an image of a Polar Bear alongside a news article discussing the Antarctic ” The first climate change refugees?
The professor is an organic chemist, working in a government organisation, whose claim to fame is that he helped invent a new way of making cough investment.
A good candidate for Cook’s “97% of all climate scientists”……………………..
Meanwhile, back on planet earth…
Not sad at all, simply another academic baying with the ranks of the absurd. The only “sad” part of this is that people let these fellows teach their children.
The sad part is that society lets these people teach YOUR children.
Oh good, another prediction we can [laugh] at in 10 or so years.
Sorry, “laugh”, stupid auto correct got me again!
We’re laughing at it now.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of professors who are so full of their own intelligence that they just have to share their stupendous wisdom with others, and in the process show their blinding ignorance to anyone not already blind.
Amen to that!!
Interpretation: head where the sun does not shine…
There are also untold numbers of politicians who fall in this category. Especially here in California!
I’ve seen this referred to as “Disabled by education”
I’ve heard “Educated beyond their intelligence.”
“Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.”
Stephen Vizinczey, An Innocent Millionaire
Or as Boilleau put it back in the 17th ceantury:
“Education can make an unlearned man learned, but not a stupid man wise”
One more academic who hasn’t yet learned the scientific method
Victoria University is a bit of a new-kid-on-the-block uni. Surely, their academics would be especially cautious about making rash statements that will undermine the institution’s quest to establish a reputation for excellence.
Or is it just another case of follow the money?
Seems a little non-obvious for an o-chem prof to be chasing AGW funding, but not impossible — sub-specialities do happen.
Entering in Warmist – sorry Climate Change – bandwagon is the faster way to “Reputation”.
The “Reputation” that matters is if Journalists-Political complex likes you or not.
I like warmist better than alarmist, which does make me bridle. My view also is that science tends to converge on reality, i.e., not all bandwagons are necessarily fallacious. Doesn’t mean one should take their eye off the ball … I’m not one for blind trust.
I guess its pointless to even suggest as no one ever takes me up. But Id be willing to put a few thousand against that prediction. I might send Maurie an email and see if hes game.
I’d start first by asking him to clarify what he meas by “ice sheet”.
I think he means ice block, as in the ones that are in your whisky glass. The more whisky you poor on it the faster they melt
Should have pour, but then if the alarmist have their way it will make us poor
it depends on the temperature of the whisky
Le Chatelier’s Principle, besides applying to chemistry, also applies to climate. Nature is full of negative feedbacks. If this were not so, we would not be here to discuss this. For an excellent article on Le Chatelier’s Principle and climate, see:
http://motls.blogspot.ca/2007/11/le-chateliers-principle-and-natures.html
Yoikes, Werner Brozek, I’ve been pushing LCPrinciple as my climate model and thought I was all alone on this one!!
Eric,
Looks to me like he does believe what he’s saying. He could only plausibly be talking about sea ice, but his statement is too ambiguous to be sure. Barring some extraordinary and unforseen cosmic event, or acts of god(s) should there be any, there’s no way that Arctic and Antarcic landed will be gone in a decade or two.
He could only plausibly be talking about sea ice, but his statement is too ambiguous to be sure.
In the quoted text, he uses the word “sheets” not once, but twice. So, either:
a) He meant land based ice sheets or;
b) He doesn’t know that ice sheets are different from sea ice
So nice attempt to give him a pass on what he plausibly meant, but he comes off as incompetent either way.
davidmhoffer,
He wrote: The Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are acting as giant dampers to contain temperature rise in the oceans.
My vote is (b). His terminology is ambiguous if not strictly wrong, and he should have taken the time to write a more technically correct statement. One of my concerns is that asserting a total loss of Antarctic sea ice within one or two decades is not something I’ve seen in literature. As I’ve said elswhere on this thread already, I would take such a claim very dubiously indeed given that the multi-decadal trend is increasing, not decreasing, and literature is presently quite divided about why.
I think he stuffed it. Please kindly take your teeth out of my hindquarters.
Please kindly take your teeth out of my hindquarters.
I do from time to time misplace them, but if that is indeed where they currently are, I can assure you that I do not want them back.
I will dispose of them safely. I take it there are no other sharp and pointy things aimed at me from your quarter?
Sometimes I see exchanges on here which make me smile.
Sometimes I see posts in here which make me smile … and which partially restore my faint in humanity, giving me hope we can all communicate with each-other more easily.
Thanks for that moment, Brandon and David.
Dang it! “…which partially restore my faith in humanity…”
I’m glad you appreciated it, I certainly did.
Just what is he basing this claim on.?
ls he expecting there will be tropical heatwaves at both the poles for the next 10 years.
LSD
Well….. he is a ” mann of substance ” within Australian academia……..
He is an Associate Professor in Organic Chemistry. Maybe he got his rye mixed up with his yeast. That moldy rye is a source of LSD. Bet he’s laughing hysterically now.
Maurie T needs Al Gore with the flame-thrower making it so.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/03/great-moments-in-snow-removal/
’cause, otherwise, it ain’t gonna happen.
Or so I think.
This boils down to a complete inability to comprehend scale.
As I understand it, it would require hundreds of years to melt Antarctica, even if the temperature there was suddenly averaging 40C.
CodeTech,
I worked it out as thousands and confirmed that with literature. I discussed it here within a month or so ago. I can dig up the cite if you wish. I have trouble believing he’s talking about Antarctic landed ice. And I’d be dubious of any claim about Antarctic sea ice going away within two decades.
No need, I don’t doubt it. Again, people just don’t get the SCALE of this planet. And honestly, believing that sea ice will “go away” on any time scale demonstrates a profound logic error.
CodeTech,
Sea ice, Artic and Antarctic both, are different animals from landed ice — there are wide seasonal variations, it melts and reforms. Being gone totally year-round is not on my radar AT ALL. Let’s be sure we’re talking about the same things here please.
Seems to me the only way “ice sheet” can “buffer” temperature rise is he’s talking about floating ice directly in contact with the oceans. I get the idea; its the same as ice cubes in a glass of water (or whiskey as some her mention). It will hold the temperature near the “triple point” (0 C) until the ice is gone.
However, the volume of ice during this process will decline at a rate proportional to the rate of heat energy being injected into the system. If, as seems to be the case, the volume of ice is relatively stable then the heat budget is more or less also stable.
The north pole, when covered in ice, is also very cold and thus does not radiate much heat energy. Should it melt, it will then be at or near 0 C and be radiating into space rather a lot of energy appropriate for that temperature. Of course its albedo will change but at that latitude there’s not much sunlight to be absorbed anyway.
So I see it as, overall, a negative feedback. Lose the ice, increase radiation, lose heat, gain ice.
I think you’re right. He’s definitely talking about sea ice, since the context is about the oceans absorbing the heat, and the loss of the ice being a tipping point. That would make sense, because the melting of the sea ice absorbs a lot of heat due to the heat of fusion, and if it were to all melt, this “damper” wouldn’t be there anymore. He’s just saying ice sheets when he means sea ice.
Predicting arctic sea ice being gone within about 10 years is also an outlandish claim in my opinion, just not as completely crazy as it would be if he meant the land ice.
Michael 2,
Basicially yes. My understanding is that it’s an albedo feedback. Ice over water reflects sunlight back out better than open ocean, which will tend to absorb. OTOH, and as you touch on in your own comment, open water is a better emitter in the IR. Annoyingly I can’t lay hands on one reference which nets those out and discusses them in plain Engrish. There’s got to be one, I’ll stumble on it eventually.
I’m dubious, critical even, of the way Trewhella talks about “and then warming will resume”. I don’t see ice albedo as an explanation for The Pause. I’m not even sure its plausible. A guy who’d know is Andy Lacis, radiative physics is his bag AND he knows a bunch about the rest of the system as well. The other day at Judith Curry’s place, he wrote a response to Steve Koonin, part of which I’ll quote here: http://judithcurry.com/2015/04/08/are-human-influences-on-the-climate-really-small/#comment-691948
Of greater interest is the “unforced” variability of the climate system on decadal time scales that arises from changes in ocean circulation patterns that are effectively un-influenced by changes in atmospheric radiative forcing. The deep ocean is a very large cold storage reservoir. An upwelling blob of cold ocean water can put a “pause” in the ongoing global warming, temporarily diverting the greenhouse “heat” to warming the ocean. But once that cold blob of ocean water has been warmed up to its equilibrium temperature, it is back to the business of continued global warming. And also note that the ocean cannot cause a decadal warming spurt – the deep ocean is colder than the surface biosphere, so it cannot be a source of heat.
That has been the primary mechanism invoked for the The Pause since I can recall. Yes, solar output has been falling, and yes China has been kicking up more aerosols and yes there’s been some talk about an increase in small volcanic eruptions doing the same — but the main story, and the one my money is on, is that it’s the oceans in general, not just the ice covered bits, and their internal dynamics responsible for the quasi-periodic 40-ish year cycles, the “down” part within which we find ourselves roughly 50% in the middle of.
The larger argument between Lacis and Koonin is about whether internal variability better explains longer term trends … such as the observed mid-20th century temperature rise. Andy essentially told Steve, “no, and as a fellow physicist you should know better”.
As a chemist, he very well may have been thinking that way. It’s annoying we don’t know … I really wish Worrall would have just shot the guy an email and asked him.
PS: (OT) did you finish reading Altemeyer?
Was he looking at a ice cube in his scotch and extrapolated from that perhaps in the “scientific” way? (must have been his fourth one at least!)
And I can’t wait for the 200 meter rise in the sea levels.
Maybe he’s a fan of Peter Wadhams and got Antarctica confused with the Arctic Ocean. But we can speculate all day and believe from that whatever we ant. If had written this article, I’d have sent him a note to ask him for clarification. It’s both the proper sceptical and journalistic thing to do according to how I look at things.
It matter not one wit what we speculate as here. The press will report it as and 97% CAGW story, and it will have the intended affect.
David A,
It’s already been published as a letter to the editor. I’m telling you that he’s wrong. He spoke out of his area of expertise without doing due diligence on what’s published in literature, which is sloppy. What do you want from me here, a pound of flesh too?
maybe he needs to use this ice:-) and scotch
http://twistedsifter.com/2015/04/suntory-whisky-cnc-mills-coolest-ice-cubes-ever/
Brandon
I applaud you for being objective.
Bob, noted with thanks. I agree with you guys an awful lot more than I let on. I’ll make an effort to let on more often and see how that goes.
The average temperature of Antarctica is well below zero, You would have to raise global average temperature about 50C to melt away Antactica in a couple of million years.
For Antarctica to “melt away in the next decade or so”, the oceans of the earth would need to be raised to the boiling point of water. Given that the average temperature of the oceans is about 4C, with only the top few hundred meters much warmer than this, where is such a fantastic amount of energy going to come from?
ferdberple,
Note he says “ice sheets” not “ice caps”.
Is not ice on a “cap” a sheet of ice?
Patrick,
There’s lay English and technical English and it looks like I myself have flubbed it:
http://ete.cet.edu/gcc/?/icecaps_icesheets
Those are all terms for landed ice. So technically he’s said Antarctic land ice is going to melt in one or two decades. I’m saying he can’t possibly have meant that and should have done a better job writing his letter to the editor. As well, calling the ball on Antarctic sea ice within two decades is completely beyond the pale of anything I’ve read in literature, so he should be dinged for that as well.
Save the weasel words. A sheet on a bed caps the bed. Antarctica has a sheet of ice capping a bed of rock. The ice cap doesn’t sheet the bed.
From wikipedia. Notice “polar ice sheets” and “Laurentide Ice Sheet”. Sheets are things, caps are actions. Cap is slang derived term for a type of hat, because the hat caps the head.
Ice age
An ice age is a period of long-term reduction in the temperature of Earth’s surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.
Laurentide ice sheet
The Laurentide Ice Sheet was a massive sheet of ice that covered millions of square miles, including most of Canada and a large portion of the northern United States, multiple times during Quaternary glacial epochs.
Cap
A cap is a form of headgear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_ice_sheet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap
So technically he’s said Antarctic land ice is going to melt in one or two decades. I’m saying he can’t possibly have meant that
=======================
so our good professor, supposedly an expert, doesn’t even know the technical terms for polar ice?
A Drip Under Pressure
the word “expert” comes from a combination of the two Latin words “ex” meaning “a has-been”, and “spurt” meaning “a drip under pressure”.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alexhomer/archive/2009/08/16/a-drip-under-pressure.aspx
ferdberple,
An expert in organic chemistry by appearances, certainly not the cryosphere. No excuse for getting it wrong. I deem his comment sloppy and ill-informed — I know of no indications in literature calling for sea ice to be completely absent from the Arctic or Antarctic year-round within the next one to two decades. Certainly not in Antarctica, where the multi-decadal sea ice trend is increase in extent, not decrease; causes for which are still very much debated and disputed in literature.
I don’t know how much more clear I can be: he muffed it.
Brandon,
You’re no fun!
Please call Switzerland and get Daniel over here. Sir Harry, traffy, the sled-dog from Siberia, the idiot from the village.
They could muster a rationale for this dude’s delusion.
“He muffed it” is a bit mild, viewed from either side.
A bunch of cap, a lot of sheet, eaither way.
“Screwed the pooch” was next on my list, but you beat me to it.
oop, prev. comment addressed to mebbe
The Arctic has an ‘ice cap’ because it is on the ‘top’ of the Earth.
The Antarctic is on the ‘bottom’ so it should be an ‘ice diaper’.
Guys, give Brandon a break. He is making major effort/progress.
I give Brandon as much grief as anyone, but there is no arguing here he has been objective and honest. Something he has displayed more and more recently. I for one appreciate it.
Bob,
Mostly I’ve been working at modulating tone … return to form from when I first started participating here. It’s been an uphill climb, not unexpectedly or undeservedly. Your positive feedback here has encouraged me to keep it going.
Side note: I don’t mind being given a tough time so much as when that gets in the way of an interesting discussion. The one time I really got pissed off with you was the CO2 bubble conversation. I thought it would have been interesting to discuss from first principles, but we were already so locked in the “you prove it, no you prove it” cycle that it didn’t happen. I’d be glad if you filed that for future reference. Cheers.
Why, from CO_2 of course! There ain’t nuffin the Magic Gas can’t do!
Babsy, another True Believer!CO2 does EVERYTHING
ferdberple
April 11, 2015 at 6:43 pm
Save the weasel words. A sheet on a bed caps the bed. Antarctica has a sheet of ice capping a bed of rock. The ice cap doesn’t sheet the bed.
Ferd,
The ice cap doesn’t ‘sheet’ the bed….. but I do believe our good Associate Professor in Organic Chemistry Maurie Trewhella did! How will Maurie prevent another such mess? Depends….
Mac
Brandon, a “sheet” of ice is considered to be 50,000km squared. But anyway…AGW causes more snow and ice, right? Right?
Patrick,
At least, yes.
Depends on what you mean by “more”. Where is awful important. So is when.
At the moment, Antarctic sea ice extent is increasing, during the SH spring/winter. Little appreciable trend in summer/fall when most of it melts. Lotsa ice melting and reforming in terms of area. How much in volume, I’m not sure that’s been well-constrained.
In the meantime, Antarctic and Greenland land ice masses are losing volume at an accelerating rate despite The Pause in atmospheric surface temps.
So you tell me. Is it pixies wot diddit, or is something somewhere warmer than it has been in the past?
Atmospheric moisture content has been in declining trend since the 40’s, so that could mean that less snow falls on the Antarctic continent, thus not replacing any snow/ice loss due to sublimation. Recent discoveries have shown far more active under- ice volcanic activity than previously known. Those two factors might account for any continental ice mass loss, if there really is any loss. The conjecture is controversial, relying almost entire upon the uncalibrated GRACE satellite scans to show loss. In any case, for most of the continent, air temps never get warm enough to cause Antarctic ice melt, so no need to even go there.
Alan Robertson,
I don’t recall if it was you I discussed this with previously, but in the past I have poo-poohed the snow sublimation hypothesis to explain … not mass loss but … slower rate of mass replacement. Further readings suggest to me that it’s a viable hypothesis.
My default response, without even looking, is to ask whether that means an actual increase in undersea volcanic activity, or if it has been there all along at some relatively constant base rate — just not previously known as you say. In an equilibrium system, I see that as an essential question to ask — and attempt to confirm — before drawing conclusions.
Clearly yes, but now you’ve got three unresolved ifs which may all need to break your way for your hunch to be correct. As your opposing debate partner, AND fellow skeptical truth-seeker, I’m looking to you to answer them. You would, and will, demand the same of me, yes?
Summing up. The first thing I directly dispute is your leading statement about atmospheric moisture trends. Here are some plots:
http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/SH400mb.jpg
http://www.climate4you.com/images/NOAA%20ESRL%20AtmospericSpecificHumidity%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1948%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/2/0/7/6/2/8/5/tpwv-110358445704.jpeg
Mixed bag, yes? Conflicting information? At first glance, yes. On closer examination, not so much. But they do raise some interesting questions about what’s really going on here. I don’t know the answers. The one I’ll lead with is: can we estimate Antarctic snowfall by direct observation rather than trying to infer it from moisture content? And obviously, have we?
The next thing, and main thing I dispute, is that Antarctic landed ice mass loss is a controversial conjecture. I accept that you see it that way. My reading of literature is that it’s anything but. There is high confidence across the board from multiple lines of evidence that rate of loss is negative and accelerating. Please don’t take that as a call to alarm — I’m not alarmed and I don’t intend to incite panic, that won’t do anyone any good.
Off the top of my head, the observations in support of the broad literature conclusion are:
1) Rate of movement of the ice sheets has been directly observed.
2) Rate of calving ice into the southern ocean has been directly observed.
3) The upper layer of the southern ocean has been directly observed to be freshening.
4) Subsurface layers of the southern ocean have been directly observed to be warming.
GRACE is the thing which has allowed them to put better constraints on the mass loss they had already been estimating from in situ measurements. I don’t consider it the primary evidence. Neither do I understand it to be the best place to look for causality, the main mechanism as I understand it being: basal melt of the glaciers where the warmer subsurface waters upwell near the coast. That increases the calving rate, thereby increasing the flow rate of the entire glacier backed up behind it.
What’s far less clear in literature is what to expect. I think it’s somewhat fair to say that nobody’s really figured out yet what in the heck is going on with Antarctic sea ice — it’s still at the “we’ve got lots of ideas” stage, not always in agreement with each other.
Hiroshima Atomic bombs of course silly !
Seems I recall there was a nuclear depth charge in the works at one point …
Devil worship.
What exactly are these tipping points? Are these scientific or found at the end of magic wands?
Leslie,
My favorite tipping point is a pub a couple of miles up the road. Or my front deck, when it’s not raining!
Mac
“Does Professor Trewhella really believe that the Antarctic and Arctic ice sheets will “melt away in the next decade”? I hope not. But whatever led to this letter being published, it seems careless to say the least, for the reputation of a man of science, to be associated with such a ridiculous claim.”
A ridiculous claim?
No it is pure WORLD CLASS STUPIDITY!
I doubt that DR. Trewhelia believes it.
Recently an “intergenerational” report was released in Australia about being and thinking “smart” for the future because the mining boom is behind us! (Mining boom and busts are part of Australian history) *sigh* I gasp at this nonsense! Australia, once the smart and lucky country, now seems to be the stoopid country! Derrrrrrrrr…..
Ian Dunlop was formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is a Member of the Club of Rome.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/time-for-stateswomen-to-step-forward-on-climate-change-20150406-1mdgil.html
I was just about to put that in but had the wit to search/check first.
It’s a long windbag/rhetorical article and I think that Prof Trewhella has more chance of being right than the Club of Rome has.
clipe, thanks for the link to the Dunlop article. I’d just found it myself and was about to post it … glad I checked before doubling up on your research.
What research?
I’m not certain which article by Ian Dunlop Professor Trewhella was responding to, but this article, full of alarmist claims about tipping points and the “dangers” of economic growth, seems fairly typical of Dunlop’s writing.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/11/claim-arctic-and-antarctic-will-melt-in-the-next-decade/
Ah. I didn’t even look at the embedded link. It was pretty darn clear to me that what I dug up on my lonesies was the correct article.
Well, the good perfesser is a waxy, white solid carbon chemist. One doesn’t have to know such pesky little things like basic thermodynamics, I suppose. Besides, q=mc(delta)T was something we covered in High School.
Had something like that been mentioned in a seminar at the chem department I was in, the guffaws would have lasted for the better part of an hour.
Was good professor’s letter to the editor peer reviewed?
NOT!
Do you think peer/pal review would have changed his statement?
No…of course not. They just need to push it harder.
It’s as good a lie as any of their others…right?
To Venus or the next Glaciation?
The British Antarctic Survey summarizes:
Increasing 40 C within a decade will indeed be a remarkable testable prediction!
Especially when we are already some 8,000 years AFTER the Holocene Climatic Optimum.
Will we be able to avoid the plunge into the next glaciation?
Odd, this claim by a member of warrenlb’s much-admired academic team of peer-reviewing writers in the professional journals.
See, the Antarctic sea ice last June set an all-time record high value for excess sea ice – the anomaly for Antarctic sea ice last June as 2.06 million square kilometers – an area of “extra” sea ice the size of the entire Greenland ice cap! Today, the “excess” Antarctic sea ice is “only” the size of Hudson’s Bay. At 33% ABOVE normal for the date, Antarctic sea ice not only shows no sign of melting (whether sea ice or land ice) but if today’s rate continue as they have for the last 4 years, the Cape Horn sea routes will be blocked by sea ice within 12-16 years. (Not likely, to be sure, but more likely than they all melting.)
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
The Arctic sea ice? Only 7% below normal for today’s date. Right at – but slightly below the 2 std deviation for the average area on this date.
This is what we should expect to see in the final desperation of the “Alarmist/Warmists”. They only way they can be heard is to shout about “denial” and make outrageously bizarre claims.
The end must be getting near……
Well here in Australia we apparently have yet another record to add to all those other records Australians have always managed to acquire.
When we look at the Proffessors Flannery, Steffen, Jones and Karoly of the BOM, Cook of Queensland Uni, Lewendowsky, Parcutt of Graz Uni of the “Skeptics should be executed” fame, Chris Turney of the melting Antarctica, “Ship of Fools” fame plus many, many others including the latest addition to that long list, that of Maurie Trewhella, Australian academics have shown that when it comes to global warming / climate change or whatever it will be tomorrow, our academics here in Australia can more than hold their own in the rabidly imbecilic stupidity stakes against some very, very stiff and very well qualified competition from the academic denizens of dozens of other National Institutes of Higher Learning across the globe.
It really does take a unique arrogance which only certain academics at the university level master, an arrogance based on a performance that a goodly percentage of Australian academics now appear to be well qualified in to be able to master to the extent that they have and using all the prestige of the title of “scientist”, they can so confidently step out into a field completely foreign to their own field of expertise and which they don’t have a clue about to provide such deep insights and such firmly enunciated predictions so as to appear almost unchallengeable.
Predictions in fact that are not even matched for their confidence levels even by those actual scientists working within the field of expertise they are so insistent on stupidly blundering into.
We Australians really have something that is close to unique in the very high levels and abilities of our academics from some of the most prestigious seats of learning in our nation to make utter idiots of themselves by so blatantly advertising their ultimate stupidity, ignorance and imbecilic arrogance in such a blatant and open fashion.
If anybody wants them I’m sure a lot of Australians would be happy for somebody to take them off our hands.
And it would help our national budget quite substantially as well not to have to support these long snouted academic “troughers” in the style they so arrogantly continue to demand.
It took me a few minutes to read and absorb your post Rom, but that is a brilliant summation.
Perhaps he meant to write “ice shelves” rather than “ice sheets”. It is still a stretch though.
Ice shelve info:
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/iceshelves.html
Ice sheet info:
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/icesheets.html
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/833/264/1ed.gif
Max, is that you with the sunglasses?
Max is short for Maxine.
Max,
You may be short for Maxine but some girls dig short guys.
Blonde on the right then
Actually, I’m 6’1″ (185cm), so I can’t help but notice the cute tall gal on the left.
(Now if I could only find my Way Way Back Machine.)
Oh this is so me when I say something at parties! My wife now asks me in advance to keep my mouth shut.
What nasty has been dropped on the floor??
Reblogged this on john namnik and commented:
Reblogging this post as this is first evidence i have seen of Ian Dunlop’s contribution to AGW. Dunlop is the OZ main man for the CLUB OF ROME. Does any reader have further evidence of the CLUB’S involvement in AGW?
Hello Professor Trewhella.
Yes, who is this?
London calling!
Who?
London.
Oh, yes, right.
Well, you’ve been claiming that the Arctic and Antarctic Ice sheets have been absorbing all the global warming!
Well, yes, right.
Are you barking mad?
What?
Mad, as in stupid, imbecilic.
Me?
Yes, you.
Oh, well Ian said it was true.
Forget Ian, what do you think?
Me?
Yes, you.
Well, I guess whatever Ian says is OK.
Really?
Yes.
Alright then, Ok.
Do you mean, ‘London Calling’ as in The Clash:
‘The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growin’ thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
‘Cause London is drowning, and I, I live by the river’
Oh, I’m going o be singing that all day now, thanks!
According to learned professor, this is map of the South-East in a decade or so
http://vrstudio.buffalo.edu/~depape/warming/europeCloseup.jpg
I live in SW London, but do own a peace of ground on the N. Downs (Charing hill), so moving from a big island to a much smaller one isn’t going to be too distressing, I hope.
typo – piece.
however, if it does happen the ‘peace’ would turn into chaos.
London calling was the very early wireless introduction for station 2LO
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/onlinestuff/stories/2lo.aspx
http://markpadfield.com/marconicalling/museum/html/objects/sounds/objects-i=1010.024-t=5-n=0.html
From my childhood years in an ‘expired’ country, I sort of remember Kate Boyle’s : ‘Hello …. this is London calling, can we have your votes please”
Yes, I’m old enough to remember that we called Katie, ‘posh totty’…
From the French judges (if they gave us anything at all, but usually didn’t)… “And finally, Royaume-Uni, deux points.”
“Thank you, Paris.” she used to say, “And goodnight.”
Everyone else had given us at least six points, but not the Irish or the French, even if would have been written by Lennon & McCartney!
so this “missing heat” that was supposed to have warmed the atmosphere somehow went into the ocean (but was not predicted by their camp). If the amount of missing heat would have contributed 0.2C in the atmosphere over 10 years, went instead into the ocean (by some unexplained mechanism of heat transfer) then that would translate to perhaps 0.0002C in water temp (I am assuming 1000X heat capacity/C for the oceans versus air). and this would melt the ice?
Trewhella Is simply lying to the public.
The public is stoopid and will believe it.
We think we are so much better than the Salem witch trials in the 1690’s but in truth must of the population is still as gullible and will believe, without question, whatever authority figures tell them.
Most people don’t know the difference between sea ice and an ice cap. They have no concept of the thermal heat capacity of millions of cubic miles of ice. Most people don’t know the difference between the Arctic and Antarctic. They are figuratively still in the Stone Age.
Correction. They are literally in the Stoned Age.
Really good Max. Good explanation for some of their opinions too.
Just to confirm your analysis. See if you can spot the schoolboy error in this article.
“Case in point: A ship full of global warmists heads off on an expedition to Antarctica to prove that the ice shelf there is melting so fast that every beachfront house in the world will soon be swept away by a massive tsunami.
But instead of finding a sad polar bear stuck on a tiny ice sheet, the adventurers found their ship stuck — in ice.”
Yes, no polar bears in the Antartic!!! That’s a shocker. Where have they all gone?
From: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/5/curl-irony-alert-global-warmists-get-stuck-in-ice/?page=all
correction — they are educationally still in the stone age
Eugene WR Gallun
And Professor Trewhella, since it rarely gets above freezing on Antarctic land ice (except around the edges in summer) how exactly is this melting suppose to happen?
“Because science!
Hater!”
😉
Rarely? How about never in the interior..
J. Philip Peterson sez:
Well, it’s those tipping points. If the world tips too much, the Antarctic land ice just falls off into space.
He needs to keep the anti-CO2 eco-green scam alive so he can get more acceptance of his supercritical CO2 process for extracting the precursor chemical (PAC) that is used in making to ephedrine. Ephedrine is the popular decongestant, it is also the key precursor chemical used by Methamphetamine (speed) producers.
Maybe he should disclose his COI??
So a Green way to make Meth. What will the Ecoterrorist’s think of next??
..You guys remember this when you’re out in public………..
Is he a Climate Scientist?
Who is?
Whoever it is we are supposed to believe. So even though his field of expertise seems to be pharmacology, I suppose he is a Climate Scientist. Sceptical meteorologists, geologists, etc., can be ignored because they aren’t Climate Scientists.
Who isn’t?
RoHa.
Everyone’s a Climate Scientist these days.
Eamon
Hmmm… According to Levitus et al, the top 2000 meters of oceans have only risen by about 0.09C from 1955~2010, which is enough to raise atmospheric temps by 0.09C…(deltaT=mass*specific heat*Joules of energy).
Just where do they think all this energy to melt the ice caps is going to come from?
Moreover, the Arctic’s Ice Extent has been recovering since 2007, and should continue to recover as the AMO slowly moves to its 30-yr cool cycle around 2020. The Antartic Ice Extent has been growing for the past 35 years and set the largest Ice Extent ever recorded last year…
BTW, I love that for the past 3 years, the warmunists keep referring to The Pause as being “about 15 years”…. They should now be expressing the duration as “about 20 years”…
Years ago yours truly marched in the Chicago Gay Pride Parade. Some time prior to that I had volunteered to be an activist for a feminist organization. I figured volunteering for a feminist organization might be a good way to meet an interesting young woman. Since I ultimately discovered myself marching in a gay pride parade it goes without saying that my strategy did not achieve its intended purpose (although I guess I said it anyway).
Different feminist organizations in Chicago, while independent, or answering to their national chapters, were also loosely bound under the umbrella of a larger, single feminist organization. The gay community was always very supportive of women’s rights issues. To return the favor this umbrella organization showed support in kind by being present at the gay pride parade and inviting the other feminist groups. That is how I found myself there.
As the parade was being assembled one of the young women from the umbrella organization approached me, and without so much as batting an eye or exhibiting a hint of irony, she asked me (although it really wasn’t a request), since I was the only man present amongst the feminist groups, if I could walk behind all of them.
Got that? Here was somebody who would have condemned the Jim Crow laws of the South doing the exact same damn thing. Over the years I have discovered to my amazement (and later, amusement) that racism, bigotry, sexism, and all those other similar noxious tendencies were certainly not the exclusive features of the right. They’re present across the entire range of human beliefs. And deserve to be recognized as a feature of the human condition and called out wherever and whenever they’re seen.
And, that brings me to a quote by Ian Dunlop copied from the link provided in the above post: ‘These changes will require unprecedented co-operation, and statesmanship of the highest order. It is too much to expect the male-dominated, eminence-grise of the incumbency to rise to the occasion, but women might. There is a precedent.’
Oh, I’m certain there’s a precedent there; a precedent behind Ian’s vulgar statement that’s much older than all of us; and will remain a part of the human condition until it’s genuinely recognized by its self righteous practitioners. Perhaps a start might come from Professor Trewhella. But I think not.
There once was a fellow, Bob, who was forever striking out with the ladies. But he had a friend who was a babe magnet. So one day Bob asked his friend for advice. His friend, happy to lend a helping hand, offered the following:
“Put on a speedo. Put a potato in the speedo. Go to the Huntington Beach Pier on a sunny weekend and strut to and fro with confidence. You can’t lose.”
Bob gave it a go, but alas … nothing.
Later that evening, Bob, dejected, asked his friend why the plan didn’t work. After reviewing Bob’s steps, his friend suggested, “The potato goes in the front.”
Thanks Max. You don’t have to rub it in. Aw, what the hell, go ahead and rub it in.
BTW: Potato in front or back is irrelevant. I can assure you, nobody wants to see me in a speedo.
Ha ha like it!!!
That was the joke going around when Algore ran for pres. Supposedly Naomi Wolfe gave him the potato advice.
as a true blue Australian these reports are making all of us sick to death of these so called scientists predictions
I for one am looking forward to the Prof Trewhella countdown clock widget on the sidebar of WUWT.
Yes? Mr. Watts?
Trewhella has had his 15 minutes of fame here on WUWT. Let’s not stretch it. Let him be forgotten.
Statement already de-bunked by his own side press:
While Arctic sea ice continues to decline, Antarctic levels are confounding the world’s most trusted climate models with record highs for the third year running…The past three winters have all produced record levels of ice.
The Guardian, Australian edition, 10 Oct 2014
Thank you to: http://climatechangepredictions.org/
Count your blessing, mates… and the ready supply of demonstrably silly AGW acolytes like Professor Trewhella! They serve as laughable poster children for the comic AGW catechism.
Right!!!! This will happen the day after Hell freezes over.
Brandon Gates April 11, 2015 at 7:14 pm
I don’t know how much more clear I can be: he muffed it.
I watched a schlocky crime drama the other night in which the murder weapon was repeatedly referred to as a shovel, despite it being obviously a spade. You might say they muffed it.
This guy made a statement that as written is (absent an act of g_d per your comment upthread) physically impossible, even allowing for enormous latitude in terms of his intent, the claim is preposterous, would require that the supposed heat going into the ocean be mitigated by melting ice which is instead increasing, and all this by a scientist with the clear credentials to know the facts. So did he “muff” it? Or knowingly make false statement?
Great that you make clear in your comments how wrong he is, but you continue to downplay the gravity of his comment. This isn’t some stupid crime drama we’re discussing here. The welfare and lives of billions rest on the outcome of this debate. He should be excoriated.
davidmhoffer,
In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think it’s as grievous as you make it out to be — he’s not a major player in AGW research. I think I’m entitled to a reasoned opinion based on putting things into perspective, don’t you?
Something you may be missing in my arguments here and about: If it were my byline at the top of this post I would have rang him up and asked him for a statement of clarification and asked him a few hard questions about things I know to be inconsistent with what’s been published about the cryosphere. If he’d fed me the same errors or stonewalled me, yeah, then I’d have a story and I’d make some hay of it — especially if he were a consensus AGW heavy.
On that much we agree.
Come now, don’t hold back. For being at odds with published literature about ice melt, or something else?
davidmhoffer,
I accidentally skipped that. How in the hell should I know, I can’t read the man’s mind! See again: I think the proper thing to do is to ask those questions of the person who made the statement, THEN go to press.
Brandon Gates April 11, 2015 at 9:52 pm says;
“I think the proper thing to do is to ask those questions of the person who made the statement, THEN go to press.”
Novel concept.
The other thing I learned in that class was, “If you have something you want to say, find someone to say it for you.”
But you did not learn that. You blather on and on, post after post, talking and talking but never really tying any of it together. Like a savant who is extremely capable, but has no understanding of the meaning or place.
This bloke sounds like he’s just trying to get the attention of the press by name-dropping and using the sensationalist tactics of Obamascience (or high pressure sales) to create urgency. Now days even bad press will make you a bigshot, so get it any way you can. Perhaps it will get him a place of honor in the new world order, to have helped in keeping the masses spellbound while the power and wealth were reallocated.
If you want your moment in the limelight, make a prediction. They will have forgotten who made it by the time it never happens…
If you wish to be immortalized for your hubris, make a prediction and then keep insisting that current events were predicted by your original theory, and there are just missing parts or delays involved in the fulfillment of your prophecy.
“The slowing of atmospheric temperature rise over the past 15 years or so, used by climate change sceptics to debunk the work of the IPCC, is, on the contrary, evidence that the solar energy delivered to the Earth is being absorbed by the oceans”
No it isn’t. The only way he can claim such a presumptuous thing is to accept, without any science whatsoever, that the IPCC’s CO2 caused warming is being absorbed by the oceans.
What he claims is “evidence” is no more that a baseless notion being misrepresented as scientific evidence.
I believe there is a North American saying ” Professor in the class, dumb on the bus”.
The head of the math dept. at the Univ. which I retired from told me that he thought his new (1985) car’s A/C was not functioning. When he took it to the dealer, they checked it out and then showed him that the heat slider was still on the “red” side (he bought the car in cold weather) and should be on the “blue” side to cool. I can’t believe the guy told me he was so mechanically inept but I guess he thought it was related to my job of maintaining the temperatures of the campus buildings.
In Australia we are blessed with professors – Trewhella, Gillard, Flannery,
Palmer, etc.
What a bloody bunch of jokes!!
So he just met his publish or perish requirement, gets at least another two years, and didn’t have to even break a sweat. Stupid?
mods, I keep getting note, WUWT wants to track your physical location. I decline, and X out the box. Then my screen is repeatedly pulled to your video ad a the bottom of the post. WUWT
Mods, I keep getting a note, “WUWT wants to track your physical location”. I decline, and X out the box. Then my screen is repeatedly pulled to your video add at the bottom of the post. WUWT?
(There, fixed the typos, but it took me three times to the bottom of the main post while typing this.)
I got that once also, figured it was some kind of malware, and besides who needs Anthony or any of his cohorts tracking me down 🙂
yes, though it odd, but since it acts like it is connected to the add, I thought WUWT should know.
I’ve been getting it too, quite annoying. It’s settled down the past hour or so.
I’ve got Norton anti-virus running in real-time, it keeps the teenagers at bay.
The NSA uses your location so that when the time comes, the EPA can activate the Tantalus Field device on Climate blasphemers and apostates.
Tried these folks (text yourself and let them know how you feel):
Sounds like a PUP that spoofs as the website you’re on to get location info and tie it to your buying or surfing habits. I’d try Malwarebytes free if you haven’t yet.
Calculate the volume of Artic ice. Calculate the volume of the atmosphere and heat it by the outside range of IPCC temps. Wouldn’t be enough energy to ever melt all the artic ice, even not allowing for any resultant cooling.
Let’s see. Rodham is probably already trying to decide on her cabinet and high level positions such as ostp head to replace Holdren. No need to be a US citizen, so maybe Trewhella is just throwing the hat in the ring.
Need to read this CLOSELY:
“evidence that the solar energy delivered to the Earth is being absorbed by the oceans. The Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are acting as giant dampers to contain temperature rise in the oceans. When both of these ice sheets melt away in the next decade or so,”
Get it. All that heat being hidden by the oceans is going to melt both the Antarctic and Arctic ice sheets FROM BENEATH (I guess the stuff on the rock at the South Pole is exempted until the air temps go up), then there will be no more ice sheet temperature DAMPING of the ocean temps and temperatures will soar because well, without the damping the oceans will have to boil from the hidden heat and it’s going to get mighty hot and humid (a combination I hate).
The Melbourne Age (the newspaper in which this letter was published) only publishes pro climate change articles. Many of them verge on hysterical. Articles that depart from the ‘concensus’ will not get mentioned (let alone published) for the simple reason that the people at the Age apparently believe readers need to be ‘educated’ to think correctly (rather than be informed). A quick read of the paper will reveal the same policy applies to many of the other pet progressive causes upheld by the paper.
Given where it’s been published this is a meaningless letter.
Yes Andrew but as we know those in the inner city of Melbourne that read that rag tend to vote ‘Green’ as a consequence.
Many of them verge on hysterical …
===================
Hysterical in both senses of the word.
“When both of these ice sheets melt away in the next decade or so, the rise in both ocean and atmospheric temperatures will accelerate rapidly and demonstrate that the passing of the tipping points that Dunlop expresses concern about has, indeed, occurred.”
Hilarious comment, where do these people get their common sense?
accelerate rapidly. (future prediction)
demonstrate (future prediction)
passing of the tipping points (future prediction)
….has indeed occurred (past tense).
Kindergarten kids know not to mix future tense with past tense.
His idiosyncratic claim makes me wonder why Professor Trewhella has bothered to patent an “environmentally-friendly” drug treatment for colds and flu.
Stratospheric observations during the IPY The first part of winter 2008-2009 has been characterized
by a stable and cold polar vortex which allowed the persistent formation of PSC particles. In
mid-January of 2009, however, the most intense sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) ever observed occurred [Manney et al. 2009, Di Biagio et al. 2010]. SSWs strongly affect the dynamics and thermal structure of the Arctic stratosphere causing the breakdown of the eastward winter circulation, the build up of a westward circulation, and the reversal of the latitudinal temperature gradient. As the 2009 SSW developed, the stratopause lowered, the mean zonal circulation reversed, and ultimately
the polar vortex in the lower stratosphere split in two (see Figure 12).
http://www.annalsofgeophysics.eu/index.php/annals/article/view/6382/6368
Extremely high level of GCR from the beginning of January 2009.
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startday=03&startmonth=01&startyear=2009&starttime=00%3A00&endday=01&endmonth=01&endyear=2010&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=Automatic+choice&picture=on
Pressure spikes above the polar circle north and south in the winter, 2009.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_HGT_ANOM_ALL_NH_2009.gif
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_HGT_ANOM_ALL_SH_2009.gif
For comparison, the pressure in winter 2015 in the Northern Hemisphere (February strong solar wind, a decrease GCR).
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startday=01&startmonth=10&startyear=2014&starttime=00%3A00&endday=01&endmonth=04&endyear=2015&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=Automatic+choice&picture=on
It can be seen that the effect of solar activity on the polar vortex is extremely complex. If solar activity will fall scientists finally wake up.
It can be seen as weakening the polar vortex (velocity is highest in winter) allows the flow of ozone over the Arctic Circle. In the south of the vortex is gathering speed.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/temp50anim.gif
the polar vortex in the lower stratosphere split in two
==============
demonstrating the influence of the earth’s magnetic field on climate, as the magnetic field influences the distribution of paramagnetic oxygen.
the north magnetic pole is on the move, as the magnetic field splits between canada and siberia, the polar vortex is split in two. the cold that used to be isolate to the arctic ocean is now split over north america and siberia. will the ice follow?
Fred/ren,
“demonstrating the influence of the earth’s magnetic field on climate”
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Rm8_geu4VNo/VCXWUP1UA1I/AAAAAAAAAJw/bCAYU-dVcyQ/s1600/HadC_Tim.png
The correlation is very good. IMHO part of the picture is
a) Auroral oval changes,
b) GCRs enter changing clouds & snow/ice,
c) PDO and AMO heat (as in rens’ image) can i) melt ice from below and ii) when melted the arctic can radiate 14 billion sq metres x tens of W/m^2 energy to space
That’s a lot of energy.
The arctic ice is the Earth’s thermostat.
David Blake April 12, 2015 at 11:37 am says;
The arctic ice is the Earth’s thermostat.
There are two hemispheres.
@David Ball,
“There are two hemispheres.”
The things I learn at WUWT!
1) It’s the Northern hemisphere temperature signal, like the AMO and PDO, that correlates best with *global* (NH&SH) sea and atmospheric temperatures. e.g.
2) Antarctica is a continent. The arctic isn’t. Sea ice insulates the warmer ocean from the colder atmosphere, when the arctic melts more warm sea is exposed to cold air (increasing albedo, but also allowing the sea surface to radiate and evaporate)
3) Ocean currents draw warm waters to the arctic. The ice cap is the thermostat that traps or releases that heat.
Don’t worry everybody, because…
“Australian scientists are developing wind turbines that are one-third the price and 1,000 times more efficient than anything currently on the market to install along the country’s windy and abundant coast.”
According to an earlier Wollongong Uni. notice. Now removed.
So, it seems that almost everything in the future will defy the laws of thermodynamics.
Even the wind turbines. (which are currently up to 50% efficient at optimal performance.)
Time to “dream the impossible”, and build a turbine that extracts 500 times more energy from the wind, than is in the wind in the first place.
Australians scientists are now just making up any old shit, to grab attention.
And it’s working.
http://www.sciencealert.com/new-superconductor-powered-wind-turbines-could-hit-australian-shores-in-five-years
‘When both of these ice sheets melt away in the next decade or so, ‘
The trick hear is he did not claim to would ‘disappear’ merely they would ‘melt’ which can made a wide range of things .
But at least he has given a realistic time line so he can be reminding of his claims of ‘climate doom’ while he is still around , clearly he did not get the note to tell me that ‘predicts’ should be made a ‘safe time line ‘ of say 100 years .
Well, yes. Here is global vertical mean temperature anomaly of the upper 2000 m of oceans for the last 60 years as calculated by the United States Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Oceanographic Data Center, Ocean Climate Laboratory.
From this it can clearly be seen that long term rate of warming is 0.0135 K/decade. Now, if an additional 14 mK would be enough to melt away polar ice sheets completely or even partially, is doubtful.
Associate Professor Maurie Trewhella could have saved himself from abject embarrassment, should he had remained silent on a topic apparently way beyond his field of expertise, but well within the capabilities of any BSC student passing an exam on an introductory thermodynamics course.
Hahaha!
I do hope that someone from Victoria University takes the trouble to alert Professor Trewhella to the existence of WUWT. I’m sure he would find the site, this post and its comment thread most enlightening.
Haven’t they been saying this about every year now? And they’ve also said this decades prior.
Still have yet to become true..
Nothing had worsened for quite a while. That is the unchallengeable proof that things are worsening. Gravy train, here I come…
That man does not seem to be a professor but a brain contortionist. Or a professor of brain contortionism.
It’s a bit sad that a professor of chemistry is prepared to put his name to this crap, but it is, after all, only what we’ve come to expect from a certain quarter of society – those with a Green tinge. Treading lightly upon the earth is a decent-enough principle, but when someone trained in the hard sciences is prepared to discard their numeracy and reason for the sake of making an activist’s point, we can only despair at their willingness to disgrace the good name of authentic science in the process.
True, he’s an organic chemist rather than a physical chemist, but I’m pretty certain that Ass Prof Trewhella knows the freezing point of water, and that the Antarctic is ‘king cold, and even knows that the land ice is several km thick. If he was smart enough to get a doctorate, he probably wouldn’t even need a beer mat to do the quick calculations of scale that would confirm that his mention of ‘decades’ was wrong by several orders of magnitude, even if the most dire predictions of global temperature rise were to come to pass.
But no, for the purpose of saving the earth, he is willing to parrot the untruths of other lesser minds like any witless drongo, while parading his qualifications for the sake of authority and credibility.
This is the crying shame of the ongoing saga. Many real scientists – that is, the ones with curious minds who are always asking the question “Is that really so?” about almost any subject – have been far too ready to accept the outgushings of the catastrophist branch of climate science and their sh*tty models, believing that they are doing real science like themselves and giving them the benefit of the doubt without further enquiry.
For the AGW meme to proceed, things have to keep getting worse.
They are not getting worse in reality. But that’s not important. Because so long as they keep getting worse IN YOUR MIND, then the money will keep rolling in….
The good professor just contributed to that…..
‘When both of these ice sheets melt away in the next decade or so, ‘ ~ Professor Trewhella
Over 150 comments have been made so far concerning the stupidity of the good professor’s alarmist claptrap that was published in The Age. Paraphrasing what I have read: some have said he was outside of his field of competency and just plain wrong, others have said that he knows better but just plain lied, while others have said his words were poorly written and he did not mean what he plainly wrote.
I think the good professor meant what he wrote. He thinks all the ice is going to melt and it is going to melt very soon. How could an informed, reasonable man think something that stupid? Religious or cult belief can be very irrational. Some people believe in a Santa Claus god who loves everyone with infinite love but will torture people for all of eternity if they don’t believe in him — never seeing any contradiction there. The “Devil CO2 Cult” is powerful these days and true believers can not be swayed with mere facts and observations.
Science is about making our theories compatible with our observations of reality. The CO2 cult is not about observations and reality. This is the reason the fool from Australia believes that temperatures that have been flat for 20 years will somehow manage to melt the ice at the poles in 10 years or so.
Here is my alarmism. I think that modern science is dying from the avalanche of government funding. Real science does not start at the conclusion you want and then work backwards. How hard is that to see?
It’s a TRUE HELL out there that Australian academia is infested with types like Trewhella!
I’ve dealt with Victoria University at a senior corporate level. They are an amalgam of two higher education vehicles in Victoria. A university a TAFE college (technical school in the old days). TAFE has had funding slashed at a significant scale here over the past few years. The institution is administratively and financially disfunctional in the extreme, separately to those conditions. It has little prestige in the field of this topic. I smell a rat.
Such claims run counter to the real world evidence that shows global sea ice to have the same extent as it did in the early 80’s. After a period of slight decline from about 2005 -2012 , over ghe last 2-3 years it is pretty much back to where it was when satellite measurements started. Bizarre claim.
How does he expect Arctic sea ice to have any effect on sea level?
The level of higher education in Australia is a real worry. I would never send my children to study there
I suspect that may be true not just in Australia
Remember that guy who said he was going to live on an iceberg for a year? Shouldn’t Trewhella get in contact with him and warn him? Perhaps Trewhella could talk some sense into him.
Eugene WR Gallun
“Perhaps Trewhella could talk some sense into him.”
The idea of Trewhella talking sense into anyone brought a very big grin to my face. Thanks. 🙂
It was a misprint.
“Decade” should be “Millennia” and the whole shooting match was intended to be prefixed with >maybe”.
Anything short of the sun turning into a red giant overnight, a Millennia is not enough.
If Antarctica was suddenly moved to the equator it might melt in a million years. And temperatures elsewhere around the world would plummet as the ice melted.
It is strange (or perhaps it isn’t) that well regarded academics seem to get carried away with their own self importance and make predictions which are, to put it mildly, flawed. Politicians and the media are in awe of these people and rather than put their own brains in gear, follow/report their pronouncements as though they are from infallible Gods.
It is saddening that when Peter Wadham said that Arctic summer sea ice would be gone by about now, Bernard Lovell said ten years befor the first moon landing that travel to the moon is a fantasy, and others like this chap make stupid pronouncements, their careers, rather than being destroyed, continue to flourish!
We cannot know Trewhella’s motives since we cant’t read each others mind (or people that can are not telling us they can) but for a skilled scientist to make such a ridiculous, ignorant and dire warning indicates:
a.) Confirmation bias has infected the scientific community,
b.) AGW is a religion and claims supporting AGW are faith based claims, and do not require the rigors of science.
c.) AGW is a political position and claims supporting AGW are ideological, and do not require the rigors of science.
d.) All of the above
Note I did not include honest mistake as a possibility since the letter was too charged and certain. Also I did not include stupid mistake since that is implied in all of the options above.
You left out ‘barking mad’ aka, ‘insane’.
Yes, they are all going insane as reality bites. The last bastion of their faith lies in the oceans. The oceans cool slower than air so some parts of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are still sort of warm but not for long.
The idea that the sun is heating up ONLY the oceans is crazy. And anyone looking at the Antarctic oceans can see this is pretty cold water just like the land is very cold. There is no way the Antarctic is going to melt any time soon.
Ice fields acting as “heat dampers” heat from the atmosphere disappearing into the oceans, millions of cubic miles of ice melting in ten years! Where do these idiots get their qualifications from, a Christmas cracker? If professional organisations and government departments had any sense, they would be stripped of their membership and jobs for causing alarm and panic in the uneducated.
Totally off the wall question
While this question may be off the wall, and off topic; there is really no better place to ask it than this thread. (in my opinion at least)
As the IPCC and other “experts” on climate make their predictions and pronouncements, I wonder how much of reality goes into their theories. How much do our models take into account what is happening on the planet right now?
For example, I wonder how the current climate models take into account the winds. We all know about winds blowing horizontally and my local weather people talk about those winds all the time. But I have been told by people who fly small planes and hang glide that updrafts (thermals) are amazingly strong and that they are plentiful. These vertical winds that blow air straight up must have some effect on our weather system. How well are they accounted for in the IPCC climate models?
Just wondering.
The ‘reality’ they use is rigged data that they change all the time, for instance, they will make the past colder and colder and exaggerate the present to make it warmer.
Data tampering is running rampant now and these ‘experts’ spend a lot of their time and energy trashing climate history, for example, they openly plotted via emails with each other to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period.
There is not one honest soul in the global warmist gang.
markstoval,
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/cesm1.0/cam/docs/description/cam5_desc.pdf
Long and dense, but it’s got every answer to any question I’ve ever thought of asking and 10x some, so long as I was willing to chase down some of the references and google the jargon I didn’t understand. I’m far and away from having absorbed even a few percent of it.
the claims don’t have to be true, they just have to be trotted out at regular intervals to keep the troops happy, keep the hype in peoples minds and maybe convert some of them though this now seems unlikely judging by the polls.
The weasel climate hypesters will claim his prediction was true if even one ice cube melts over the next decade. That his prediction is actually so far removed from reality that it is evidence of mental illness is unimportant to the faithful His prediction is no more meaningful regarding reality than a televangelist predicting that the rapture will take place in the next ten years.
I always wonder why our sleazy anti-science media trot out kooks like this and allow them to make their pathetic yet hilarious and always call them “sobering”, when a cursory review would show them to be the result of the opposite of “sober”.
I believe in the next ten years the pants of all AGW advocates will spontaneously combust. The heat that will cause this to happen is currently hiding in their over-heated little brains.
“… energy delivered to the Earth is being absorbed by the oceans. The Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are acting as giant dampers to contain temperature rise in the oceans.”
This appears to be convincing for many of the warmists. But what is really happening is that most of the energy that CO2/GHGs is supposed to holding in is simply missing.
The oceans are absorbing what is equivalent to 0.6 W/m2/year (or 0.0022C/year) and ice-melt/landsurface/atmosphere is absorbing an even smaller amount of just 0.035 W/m2/year. Yes, there is some ice-melt if you believe the ice mass balance estimates but it is a tiny, tiny amount that is so smal, it can almost be ignored.
There is supposed to be 2.300 W/m2/year of forcing from CO2/GHG showing up and the feedbacks crucial for catastrophic warming are supposed to be adding another 1.700 W/m2/year but only 0.635 W/m2/year is showing up.
http://s17.postimg.org/4ts1blb4v/2013_Missing_Energy.png
submit this to WUWT as an article with supporting data
I found his letter to the editor. It is just one of many gems published in that paper. Just google this kook’s name and take a stroll through the looking glass.
I am struck with a logical flaw in the “damper” argument. If the ice sheets (whatever was meant by the term sheet) are acting as a damper against global temperature increases, by what magic did this damping effect start 15 -20 years ago? Why was this damping effect not holding the earth’s temperature flat before this particular “pause”? If the ice sheets have the effect of damping temperature rise in recent years, how could we have observed AGW before that except by looking at ice extent. If this were a logical theory, it would have to fit more than today’s facts.
These pronouncements remind me of the claims made by bonafide crackpots about aliens constructing the Pyramids and similar fantasies. Apparently he is talking about sea ice, not ice on land (as how could that be a “giant damper” on the ocean?). But polar sea ice covers only a small part of the Earth’s oceans, so how could it be a “damper” on the rest of it? Has the Cult of Global Warming finally degenerated to the point where any pretenses to science are gleefully abandoned in favor of wild-eyed ravings designed to stimulate the imaginations of an ignorant public?
What’s the next step? A “mother ship” hovering behind Saturn and melting the poles with a giant ray gun?
/Mr Lynn
“Has the Cult of Global Warming finally degenerated to the point where any pretenses to science are gleefully abandoned in favor of wild-eyed ravings designed to stimulate the imaginations of an ignorant public?”
We passed that point years ago.
Did you not get the memo? 🙂
In general there has usually been at least an attempt to cloak Alarmist claims in the trappings of academic science. This fellow has apparently leapt into the land of utter lunacy.
/Mr Lynn
Well, I surely can agree on melting if : the Iranians, Rooskies and Chi-coms go all out on a nuclear war since Obama has left the USA almost defenseless. But,otherwise; these GW and climate alarmist scientists seem more like voodoo princesses than scientists. Always wrong but the Left keeps believing these nut cases. But then liberalism is a form of insanity.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7139797.stm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/8877491/Arctic-sea-ice-to-melt-by-2015.html
So why is this late delivery to be believed any more than the previous claim?
An associate prof of organic chemist?? I guess this is a shortcut to tenure in OZ’s totally corrupted higher education system. This is NOT going to happen, I’m 100% certain. It’s easy to invoke the wisdom: ‘Don’t attribute to malice what is most commonly incompetence’. I haven’t read much of the thread. I suppose there were the usual large number of CAGW proponents writing in to distance themselves from this ridiculous prognostication. His students should ask for their money back.
Thank you for bringing this newsworthy and, dare I say, game changing item to the attention of us Villagers, Brother Eric :-))
Eric Worrall,
I don’t think your ad hominem against Professor Maurie Trewhella is justified.
The arctic and Antarctic ice sheet DO melt away each year, just not completely. What the professor meant exactly is not clear. So making assumptions on what he meant, then criticising him for it is a straw man argument.
“The arctic and Antarctic ice sheet DO melt away each year, just not completely.”
Indeed. The technical term for this is “summer”. However for the Antarctic ice sheet (=sea ice) this melting has been unprecedentedly incomplete the last few years.
Yes, I did assume the Professor made a typo, he meant sea ice not ice sheet in the context of what he was talking about.
But Eric Worrall’s criticism is a straw man, nevertheless.
harrytwinotter
Then the “professor” (1) did not know what he was talking about
(2) did know the terms he was using (about sea ice, shelf ice, and continental land ice)
(3) did not know either or long-term trends in ANY of the three ice areas
(4) did not know he was ignorant.
in other words, he was a typical Big Government “climate scientist”.
harrytwinotter April 12, 2015 at 9:57 am says;
What the professor meant exactly is not clear.
Really? You and Village are defending this guy?
I don’t think
Sums it up, wouldn’t you say?
The professor is full of it, and his thoughts are just more AGW nonsense.
The real danger is the debt-ridden, ratcheting-up bureaucratic state that’s right in our face.
According to a very good meteorology textbook of mine, two ice sheets currently exist on Earth, Greenland and Antarctica. They have an ice cap climate, with no monthly mean above zero Celsius. The average temperature of all months is below freezing, and the landscape is one of permanent ice and snow. This climate covers about 9% of Earth’s land area. Average annual temperatures are extremely low. For example, the annual mean at Eismitte, Greenland is -29C, at Byrd Station Antarctica -21C, and at Vostok (a Russian Antarctic station) it’s -57C. Vostok experienced the lowest temperature ever recorded (-88.3C) on August 24th, 1960.
Eismitte is at 10,000 feet(almost 3000 metres)above sea level, and much of Antarctica even higher. Near surface temperatures can be as much as 30C colder than the air just a few hundred metres higher.
How could anyone with any grasp of reality imagine that all this will ‘melt away in the next decade or two’?
I’m reminded of a comment I saw in National Geographic magazine by a Russian scientist working in these environments.
He said that manmade global warming was something made up by people who worked in offices, and who really should get out more. I can see his point.
It’s a sad day for Organic Chemists.
How many times has it been predicted (projected) that one pole or the other will melt? Then when the time comes the ice is still there. Not long after, a new projection is made.
Again I’m reminded of the sign I saw painted on the side of a seafood restaurant, “Free Crabs Tomorrow!”
Yeah, I went out with her, too.
http://notrickszone.com/2015/04/11/clear-and-gathering-evidence-of-cooling-three-year-mean-antarctic-sea-ice-highest-on-satellite-record/#sthash.c6bbONKs.dpbs
Here is the data in contrast to AGW claims with no data as usual to back it up with.
AGW theory is the only theory I have ever come across that lives on, with out any data to back up anything that it says or claims from the various atmospheric processes it has predicted which have all failed to materialize, to the global temperature trend which is being proven more incorrect as each month passes, to not be able to reconcile this theory in any way ,shape or form, that shows a correlation between CO2 concentrations being the driver of the past climate when contrasted with the historical temperature record, to not being able to establish that the temperature change over the last 150 years is somehow some kind of a first time occurrence, when the reality is the climate over the past 150 years is quite stable when contrasted with earlier periods of time when looking at the historical temperature record.
This theory have nothing to back up any of the claims it keeps making and yet it lives on, and on.
I appreciate the clear not too distant prediction. If the ice does not melt in 10 years then we can finally declare that the debate is I over : climate science is a junk science so that we move on to real problems
In a normal world Maurie would have just put a 10 year time bomb under his career.
The world however is not normal
Statements of the absurdity as is below should not see the time of day in my opinion. This is one of the most absurd among all of the absurdities AGW theory has put forth or claimed.
A fool. Read below.
Ian Dunlop’s warning (Comment, 7/4) is especially sobering. The slowing of atmospheric temperature rise over the past 15 years or so, used by climate change sceptics to debunk the work of the IPCC, is, on the contrary, evidence that the solar energy delivered to the Earth is being absorbed by the oceans. The Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are acting as giant dampers to contain temperature rise in the oceans. When both of these ice sheets melt away in the next decade or so, the rise in both ocean and atmospheric temperatures will accelerate rapidly and demonstrate that the passing of the tipping points that Dunlop expresses concern about has, indeed, occurred.
While this claim is utter nonsense. l do believe the idea about the “Arctic Paradox” should be taken seriously. Because if it is shown to be the case, then it blows a hole in the AGW claim that any warming of the Arctic must mean there is global warming.
Yes, but holes have been blown before. How about the tropical hot spot? How about the stratosphere cooling? Both these have come and gone. Warmists won’t even talk about them now. I remember not too long ago arguing (on a forum) about the stratospheric cooling being an absolute sure sign of man-made global warming. I pasted a graph showing quite clearly that the stratosphere DID cool, but it stopped cooling years ago. The warmists wouldn’t argue the point! They just kept pointing to the fact that it did cool. No one would mention that it had ceased cooling. It’s even worse now, there is even a slight uptick in stratospheric temps! This ALONE blows a great hole in the hypothesis. Then there’s the tropical hot spot…then there’s RECORD growth in Antarctic sea ice…then there’s no increased warming for 13 years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/trend
Jim
The reason why the “Arctic Paradox” interests me is because l think that there is a real possibility that this maybe when to it is linked to what happens with the weather patterns over North America. Could be key to understanding how ice ages form in the NH. Now if am right then the warmists are going to have a hard time claiming that this is linked
(a) To been man made
(b) warming
Hey (The late) Big Jim,
“How about the stratosphere cooling? Both these have come and gone. ”
I’ve noticed not much is being said about these things recently. I think you’ll find though that the stratosphere is cooling but at higher and higher levels. Compare:
The tropical lower stratosphere (cooling has flatlined):
http://data.remss.com/msu/graphics/TLS/plots/RSS_TS_channel_TLS_Global_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.png
..with the mid stratosphere (cooling):
http://data.remss.com/msu/graphics/C12/plots/RSS_TS_channel_C12_Global_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.png
..with the upper stratosphere (coooooling):
http://data.remss.com/msu/graphics/C14/plots/RSS_TS_channel_C14_Global_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.png
Have a play here
IMHO this seems as expected and is not a problem.. In the drier upper atmosphere the more radiative gasses you have, the more heat can be radiated to space. This results in vertical mixing which *cools* the lower atmosphere through convection to upper levels (Hey, who knew? Heat rises). As the atmosphere is now expanding more CO2 is higher in the atmosphere where it can now increase radiative efficiency. We can see the result quite clearly in the graphs.