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.
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Hmph. If the Arctic and Antarctic ice “melted away”, a bump in temp trends would be the least of our worries.
You think maybe he was talking about sea ice and albedo effect? At least that is a better than a one in a million shot. (Maybe.) Maybe we should give him a shadow of benefit of a shadow of doubt?
Besides, I feel a bit of a kinship with anyone who makes a prediction in the short run. They make their damn bet and flip their damn coin and let the results rule. I can respect that. So maybe he’s a complete scoundrel and has outrageous beliefs. But so are a lot of my friends.
And, oh, yeah, anyone who makes a bet like that actually believes what they believe, or they wouldn’t’ve made the bet in the first place. I can respect the sort of honesty that implies. If (when) he’s wrong we just add it to the list. That a bet I’ll take anytime. So roll them bones.
How about the stratosphere cooling?
So far as I know the trend is cooling. At least according to the last graph I saw. Is there some more recent paper on this? I’ve been too busy to even check.
That prediction was for tenure – he’s an assoc. prof. It may make him a Climate Science Centre of Excrement laureate like the leader of the Ship of Fools expedition- I think its at U of NSW(?)
There is no desire greater a than an associate professor’s desire to slip in the odd letter-to-editor. I eat what I eat. That’s what they eat. So what? Let him have it. In twenty years, he’ll be alarming us all about something else. I’ve lived through so many false alarms, my ears are still ringing. But I have to say, this-here AGW thing is going to take a lot of spit to beat.
EMJones,
So, we roll over then?
In his case, there is nothing to roll over to.
The annual high temperature of the Antarctic is -49 degrees F and the annual low is -56 degrees F. It’s unlikely global temperatures will rise the 81 degrees necessary for the Antarctic melt as predicted by this obvious hack named Eric Worrall……….How long are these government funded charlatans going to be allowed to preach their crap? Better yet, when are these clowns going to be run out of town and publicly humiliated as they should be?
He made that statement believing there’ll be no adverse consequences for being so absurdly and foolishly wrong. And he’s probably correct about the no-consequences part.
What do you think all this is?
Really? You and Village are defending this guy?
Okay, so maybe I am just a little. He isn’t hiding behind some software blocker appended to an enemies list like what I’ve just witnessed. He stands up on his hind legs and brays out. If he gives half a hoot in hell about it, he’ll clarify. Probably post facto, in which case it’s obvious. Or not.
And if not, who cares? Anyone he convinces is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ anyway if they encounter anyone of any weight. They’ll know that (even as they vehemently deny it). Cheat on peer review? Let ’em! What do you think happens to those papers when they hit the real world? When your teach told you that cheating was only cheating yourself he wasn’t blowing smoke — that one was for real.
Diddling review is cutting your own throat. What papers basically stand after five years or only fall to breakthroughs? Not those. We have seen a whole slew of these papers fall headlong and flat upon their faces within a week of publication. Maybe their reviewers done let ’em down, huh?
As for this professorial item, either one of us could eat the poor old son for lunch and wonder where the main course was. His own side gets embarrassed by stuff like this, and that’s why they don’t utter a peep, not the real ones. And the ones that cite him are sorry they did. They’ll be making jokes about it down the line.
Need I bother to point out that our side isn’t exactly innocent of this either? And it’s all devolving into a damn brannegan over who threw the first punch. This little thing? He’s just a wriggler. Toss ‘im back, I say. We got bigger fish to fry.
Heck, the lukewarmers are riding high, and it’s high time we started acting like winners. It’s more fun than I’ve had in years. Instead of getting all riled up about it, we ought to be out there building bridges and oozing with noblesse oblige.
Remember Lincoln’s second inaugural? (Yeah, I was there, for the free chicken. But so were we all.) And then how it actually turned out? A failed occupation, a humiliating retreat involving a dark barter for a stolen presidency, that’s how. Not to mention a terrorist takeover, and Jim Crow for the upwards of eighty years. And we still haven’t shaken it all off. My father grew up in Greensboro, so I asked him about it. He said it was all very friendly and the subject never came up. Because it didn’t have to. It took me twenty years to take that one in.
Win or lose — we want to look good. We need to look good. And the only way to pull that one off convincingly is to be real sneaky about it and actually be good. Besides, good is the best weapon ever crafted, if only you know how to use it. “Meek” isn’t “good”. Meek is what sheep do. Good isn’t like that, and what a powerful and terrible weapon it is.
Why respond to insult with an insult? It’s a loser’s game. Why not just oh-so-seriously address the issue adduced? Tricky, huh? The object in question may not change his mind, but at least he knows there’s another side, and it’s long odds he didn’t, in which case it isn’t even rightly his fault, poor devil. And others take note. And who knows, just maybe the guy has some aspect you hadn’t considered. Something to enhance your knowledge or steer you down the right dark alley.
Look, we all know how important civil communications are with the other side. And those ain’t just words. For crying out loud, how are we going to speak to the people we need to speak to if we’re not on speaking terms?
When I wanted to hammer out homogenization, I went online with Dr. Venema and we burned through an entire forum and then some. This was about a year back. We both got what we were after, too.
I got to find out about what can make homogenization go awry. I smelled it out from the outside — I could deconstruct it already — but I needed to know how to construct it, too. Before I knew it, he had me doing crude versions of it myself. (Recurse You, Red Baron! I will never be clean again.)
And now I know how and why homogenization bombed. And on top of that, I also know in advance what the refutations will be. It was like peer review, only better. Have you any idea how valuable that was to me? I would have glazed over if I had tried to pry it out of a book (which I wouldn’t have, anyway). But I got to hash it all out with the top expert in the field. That’s what feeds me.
He got what he wanted, too. He found out we were for real. That was his objective. Worth a lot to him. That was the price I paid. And I wasn’t coy about all this, I said it right out.
I installed a lot of the safeguards as a result of a couple of (lengthy) exchanges on Stoat. These guys know stuff I need to know. It’s a de facto I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you’ll-show-me-yours kind of a deal, and it’s a good one for all involved, and it benefits science. Besides, I’m going to have to duke it out in enemy territory to defend this stuff, and when they hit me with the snappy questions, I’d just as soon have some snappy answers.
I don’t want to circle warily. I don’t want to fight in no chemical war, either. I want to get in the mud and have at it. I need these guys, and going into fainting fits when some pipsqueak professor does what they always do is not the best strategy to engender a favorable environment for the exchange of ideas.
Know your battlefield.
I tip my cap to you.
You are quoting me, Evan, but it is not clear who you are talking to. You are also being very cryptic. Sort of all over the place. Speak clearly, man,
David Ball,
I was tipping my cap to Evan Jones for his very straight talking, pragmatic comments about focusing on the big issues and players in the debate and not carping about small-fry. I’ve read him elsewhere and found him to be as he advertizes here: no-nonsense about his aims, very up front about his opposition with specifics, on point, and genteel about it. He’s a worthy adversary in terms of where he stands on the issues (I’ve not personally ever debated him) and deserves my respect and due credit for it. By all appearances, he’s the kind of person with whom I could strike a compromise or make a deal which was mutually agreeable after a good hard stand up fight. I like that in an opponent.
David Ball: well scratch that, we’re all confused about who is talking to whom. Go figure ….
Speak clearly, man
1.) This poor guy is trivial. And he says what he actually believes, forthrightly. I can respect that. Besides, what do we want to do, anyway? Wreck his career? Cause him humiliation? What’s to be gained from that? Such a result would be needless cruelty. Nothing we need comes from that.
2.) Beating up on him harms our position and makes it materially harder for both sides to communicate civilly with the ones they need to.
3.) Failure to reconcile leads to hostility and ongoing damage to process.
4.) Civil communication helps both sides and advances the science. I have gained greatly from such communication.
By all appearances, he’s the kind of person with whom I could strike a compromise or make a deal which was mutually agreeable after a good hard stand up fight. I like that in an opponent.
Thanks. We can call each other as character witnesses if it comes to that. Be seeing you on Planet Nuremberg. Or Planet-21. Wherever those guys come from.
Compromise applies in terms of policy and demeanor. I can do that. But science doesn’t.
I will listen to arguments and test them in my own head. I will discuss them and indicate why I support something and how it fits into the overall. I see the word “context” all the time. But I don’t often see a whole lot of context. Same goes for bottom lines. And all that Big Talk about uncertainties sure doesn’t seem to make anyone particularly uncertain — myself included on a number of regrettable occasions.
So I am not sure we can compromise on the science. But we can do this much. Find out where we agree, trace it to where we disagree, and learn each other’s arguments on both sides at the points of disagreement. No one has to or is expected to change his mind. Win-win only. Will that pass for a scientific compromise?
Is Professor Trewhella taking bets? To make public statements like this he must be fairly certain, so he should accept bets of 10 or 20 to 1.
Seems more likely it will start snowing dry ice flakes than that all the ice will melt in a place that has a warmest ever temperature reading of about ten degrees Fahrenheit. (South pole)
McMurdo is near the coast, but still has a monthly mean well below freezing (26 F) during the warmest month (January) of the year.
Average temps over the whole year in the interior portions is about -70 F.
Ice a mile and a half thick with a volume over 26 million cubic kilometers seems unlikely to melt when the temperature is 70 degrees below zero, or colder, during over half of the year.
Even if some locations were keep warming by nearly a tenth of a degree a year.
Antarctic trends are interesting. The western shelf is toast. It’s been in a state of inevitable (and continuing) geological collapse since the Holocene Optimum. AGW speeds up the melt just a little. It will probably be shedding ice until the next ice age catches it. Eastern shelf is higher, much larger, and putting on ice.
So the alarmists think increasing ocean heat explains the missing heat/temperature pause/hiatus their models didn’t recognize. There is another place that heat could go – into making clouds. Humidity changes can absorb/release heat with no change in dry bulb. And IPCC AR5 TS.6 admits uncertainty about the water vapor cycle.
Alternatively, increased heat at the surface could enhance convective thunderstorms, which transfer huge amounts of heat around the atmosphere and are not taken into account by climate models.
How much heat?
Here in Florida (and many other locations around the world and at various times of the year), during the summertime we have an almost daily cycle of widespread thunderstorms. While not a scientific analysis, it is evident to everyone who lives here that these storms have a tremendous influence on the thermal balance of the surface. Nearly every day starts off with clear skies. As the sun heats the ground, convective cells of cumulus clouds begin to form, and soon spread across the sky from horizon to horizon. Each of these clouds represent the lifting condensation level of parcels of air which are pinching off from the surface layer and transporting heat and moisture to various altitudes. As the heat increases and the upper layers become more unstable and humid, the cumulus continue to grow, passing the towering stage and transporting heat to ever greater heights.
At the surface, the temperature rises and evapotranspiration continues to pump water vapor into the surface layers. The heat becomes palpable and oppressive. At some point a critical pint is passed, often triggered by sea breezes on one coast or the other, and sometimes when two sea breezes meet in the center of the state (This often gives rise to the most explosive thunderstorm growth I have ever witnessed, as converging wind flows have nowhere to go but straight up). Huge amounts of rain can fall in short amounts of time, and quite often these convective cells rain themselves out in place, or move on, within an hour so. In the wake of the dissipating storms, the temperature across entire counties has typically fallen to the lowest values of the diurnal cycle, and for at least a little while it is pleasant and relatively mild.
Heat that has built up over an entire day at semitropical latitudes can be transported away in very short spans of time over an entire large state. This is taking place within a single air mass with little advection overall.
I know of few other mechanisms which have such a large, rapid and widespread effect on the surface temperature of the earth as convective thunderstorms, and yet these are not (as far as I have ever been able to gather) accounted for in GCMs whatsoever.
There is a recent mainstream paper (in Nature, IIRC) that has assessed the “missing heat” issue and suggests that it cannot be hiding in the deep oceans because the other oceanic factors don’t add up. It could be convected up and out through various means. Or maybe some of the data is flawed. Perhaps the infamous “Iris Effect” is at least partially in play. But we just don’t know. We do know dense oceans take up a lot of joules and produce relatively little warming compared with atmosphere.
Note:
Not only “critical pints but “critical points” may be reached.
-Nick
The current upward trend in the last 3 years of Arctic ice volume and the seemingly annual record breaking high extent around Antarctica are at odds with this statement.
In the year 2000, “the poles will be ice free in 2013”. Again in 2015, “the poles will be ice free in 2025” . Let’s do the math they base that on. Both poles should be ice free NOW, not another 10 years from now. What are they basing that statement on? Failed math from the past? Do they have some secret formula they are not sharing with us?
I believe it is the same formula gamblers use when doubling down on losing bets at a casino.
Sigh, why does it take an engineer to debunk nonsense like this? Introductory Physical Science: How many BTUs does it take to raise 1 pound of water one degree Fahrenheit? 1 BTU. How many BTUs does it take to melt one pound of ice from 32 F to 32F liquid? Come on you morons, kids in high school and 8th grade learn this… 144 BTUs (Heat of Fusion). Hence does it take more heat raise the polar oceans one degree Fahrenheit OR melt the ice caps (fresh water).
IF the polar oceans being salt water (freezes at 0 F) are typically less than 32 F most of the year, how in blazes can the Antarctic ice cap melt? We know the Arctic cap ice is subject to wind patterns.
Idiots!!!!!!
how in blazes can the Antarctic ice cap melt?
In blazes. (Not forthcoming, as I assess it.)
A spiritual from a poor agnostic sinner:
We know the Arctic cap ice is subject to wind patterns.
Etc. But it has declined from 1980 by ~12% (although 1980 was a relatively high point, just after a negative PDO bounce ending in 1976). Winds and tides caused the bounceback of the last two years, but that was only to 2009 levels (neither horrible nor great). It does look to me as if we have shifted lower.
Idiots!!!!!!
These are not the mistakes of idiots.
evanmjones
Are they not the mistakes of blinded fools – who refuse to actually do the math they claim they invoke? Their “math” predicting an Arctic sea ice “death spiral” requires icebergs floating on the equator under 24 hours of sunlight every day.
Artctic sea ice (today, almost all of last year) is actually only 7% below the long-term satellite-era average, and has remained with 2 std deviations of that normal for most of the days of the past two years. The last 12 years, Arctic sea ice has oscillated over a wideer range than it did between 1980 and 2002, but it has been oscillating about a anomaly only -1.0 million sq kilometers. It is NOT getting worse, but has been stable at below-average values. However, I agree. IF you linearly extrapolate the past trends far into the future, you will actually find that we will have negative Arctic sea ice in September in only a few years. /sarcasm
But, from today’s sea ice extents, the Arctic Ocean LOSES more heat (from increased radiation, convection, and conduction losses) than it gains
(from solar energy absorption) 8 months of the year when Arctic sea ice is “lost” .. True, April, May, June, and July see hours of increased solar radiation absorption. But the continuous “extra” losses the rest of the time over evry 24 hour of the day mean a net loss over the year.
And, the “excess” Antarctic sea ice in 2014 reflected 168% of what the Arctic sea ice absorbed.
Net effect?
Melt Arctic sea ice up between 72 north and 90 north, the world cools.
Gain Antarctic sea ice between 67 south and 58 south, the world cools.
Lord Monckton challenges Maurie to have a bet.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/i-challenge-climate-fascists-with-500000-bet/#HgiAXbB4ZmdJgsqV.99
The disgraceful things about Trewhella’s ridiculous letter was that (a) that the Age published it prominently at the top of the Letters page and (b) the Age refuses to publish two rebuttal letters which I wrote in which I took him at his word that he said and meant “ice sheets”
Accordingly my second letter pointed out the impossibility of his prediction given that Antarctica is nearly twice the size of Australia and is covered by ice sheets estimated at 30 million cubic km Given that melting which is occurring largely at the edges amounts to 200 cubic km pa- at that rate it would take 150,000 years for the Antarctic ice sheets to melt– a little more than Trewhella’s decade or so I suggest
Now I know that it somewhat simplistic but even if I am out by a factor of ten the result is still a heck of a lot longer than a decade
Where Trewhella did inadvertently get some thing right was his statement about solar energy warming the oceans, because the amount of so- called long wave back radiation from atmospheric CO2, as others have pointed out earlier, is far too little to achieve much noticeable ocean warming, and certainly not in the timescale of a decade sufficient to melt 30 million cubic kms of ice – given that the oceans have 1000 times the mass of the atmosphere and have about 3000 times its heat absorption capacity
What readers of this page may not know is what I have been reliably told is that the Editor of the Age, in responding to a complaint from a former Federal Politician (who knows him) that the Age had gone all “soft and Green” replied indignantly to the effect that – Not at all -its a straight commercial decision;-our main readers are inner city green lefties and if we don’t give them that sort of stuff they wont read or buy the paper:
In short there is an appetite for these doom and gloom climate scenarios and the Age is happy to make a dollar (or more realistically reduce its losses ) by feeding this sort of sensational crap to the true believer inner city folk, notwithstanding such nonsense is totally at odds with the Age’s (diminishing) reputation as a “quality newspaper”
He’s from Victoria University – hardly the first rank on anything – so that explains it all