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.
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.
David Blake the heat freed in the stratosphere in the phase particle formation of ozone. In order for that to happen must be broken O2 molecule. O3 particle is then broken down. When accessing UV radiation is a continuous process. When the UV decreases, what happens?
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_TEMP_MEAN_ALL_NH_2014.gif
Can we declare a moratorium on the word “stunning”? It’s overused and overhypes everything to which it is attached. For alternatives, consider “bold”; “unsupported”; “extreme.” Take a pick. Just stop with the “stunning” already. It sounds unprofessional and unscientific.
Perhaps they have stunned themselves once too often.
But the stunning was even worse than we thought!
More from Moore.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/put-the-acid-on-great-barrier-reef-doomsayers/story-e6frg6zo-1227300731557
regards
“Subscriber-only article” Not a very meaningful link.
Here is Patrick Moore’s conclusion.
‘Many climate activists are telling us ocean acidification is decimating coral reefs and shellfish. Have they read the story of remote Scott Reef off Western Australia? The ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies reports that in a brief 15 years this huge reef recovered completely from massive bleaching in 1998. Reefs go through cycles of death and recovery like all ecosystems.
‘We are told CO2 is too high and we will suffer for it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
‘We should celebrate CO2 as the giver of life it is.’