The title quote is from the late, great, Yogi Berra, with my sincerest apologies.
From the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON and the “doom is the only outcome” department comes this “stunning” paper that you can’t read yet. (well, you can now).
Long-term picture offers little solace on climate change
MADISON, Wis. — Climate change projections that look ahead one or two centuries show a rapid rise in temperature and sea level, but say little about the longer picture. Today (Feb. 8, 2016), a study published in Nature Climate Change looks at the next 10,000 years, and finds that the catastrophic impact of another three centuries of carbon pollution will persist millennia after the carbon dioxide releases cease.
The picture is disturbing, says co-author Shaun Marcott, an assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a nearly inevitable elevation of sea level for thousands of years into the future.
Most climate projections now end at 2300 at the latest, “because that’s the time period most people are interested in,” says Marcott, a expert in glaciers and ancient climate. “Our idea was that this did not encapsulate the entire effect of adding one to five trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere over the next three centuries. Whereas most studies look to the last 150 years of instrumental data and compare it to projections for the next few centuries, we looked back 20,000 years using recently collected carbon dioxide, global temperature and sea level data spanning the last ice age. Then we compared past data to modeling results that extend 10,000 years into the future.”
Climate — the interplay among land, ocean and atmosphere — has a long memory, Marcott says. “I think most people would tell you that temperature and sea level will spike as we continue burning fossil fuels, but once we stop burning, they will go back down. In fact, it will take many thousands of years for the excess carbon dioxide to completely leave the atmosphere and be stored in the ocean, and the effect on temperature and sea level will last equally long.”
The study looked at the impact of four possible levels of carbon pollution that would start in 2000 and end in 2300. The complex modeling effort was organized by Michael Eby of the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University.
“Carbon is going up, and even if we stop what we are doing in the relatively near future, the system will continue to respond because it hasn’t reached an equilibrium,” Marcott explains. “If you boil water and turn off the burner, the water will stay warm because heat remains in it.”
A similar but indescribably more complex and momentous phenomenon happens in the climate system.
New data on the relationship among carbon dioxide, sea level and temperature over the last 20,000 years was the basis for looking forward 10,000 years. “Now that we know how these factors changed from the ice age to today,” Marcott says, “we thought, if we really want to put the future in perspective, we can’t look out just 300 years. That does not make sense as a unit of geological time.”
Current releases of the carbon contained in carbon dioxide total about 10 billion tons per year. The number is growing 2.5 percent annually, more than twice as fast as in the 1990s.
People have already put about 580 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The researchers looked at the effect of releasing another 1,280 to 5,120 billion tons between 2000 and 2300. “In our model, the carbon dioxide input ended in 300 years, but the impact persisted for 10,000 years,” Marcott says.
By 2300, the carbon dioxide level had soared from almost 400 parts per million to as much as 2,000 parts per million. The most extreme temperature rise — about 7 degrees Celsius by the year 2300 or so — would taper off only slightly, to about 6 degrees Celsius, after 10,000 years.
Perhaps the most ominous finding concerns “commitment,” Marcott says. “Most people probably expect that temperature and carbon dioxide will rise together and then temperature will come down when the carbon dioxide input is shut off, but carbon dioxide has such a long life in the atmosphere that the effects really depend on how much you put in. We are already committed to substantial rises in temperature. The only question is how much more is in the pipe.”
The warming ocean and atmosphere that are already melting glaciers and ice sheets produce a catastrophic rise in the ocean. “Sea level will go up due to melting, and because warming expands the ocean. We have to decide in the next 100 years whether we want to commit ourselves and our descendants to these larger and more sustained changes,” Marcott says.
First author Peter Clark and co-authors calculated that ocean encroachment from just the lowest level of total carbon pollution would affect land that in 2010 housed 19 percent of the planet’s population. However, due to climate’s momentum, that effect will be stretched out over thousands of years.
“This is a stunning paper,” says Jack Williams, a professor of geography and expert on past climates at UW-Madison. “At one level, it just reinforces a point that we already knew: that the effects of climate change and sea level rise are irreversible and going to be with us for thousands of years,” says Williams, who did not work on the study. “But this paper shows just how devastating sea level rise will be, once we look out beyond 2100 A.D.”
The melting in Greenland and Antarctica from the highest level of carbon pollution “translates into a sea level rise of 80 to 170 feet,” Williams says. “That’s enough to drown nearly all of Florida and most of the Eastern Seaboard.”
For simplicity, the study omitted discussing other major drivers and effects of climate change, including ocean acidification, other greenhouse gases, and mechanisms that cause warming to accelerate further.
“It’s worrisome, for sure,” says Marcott. “I don’t see any good thing in this, but my hope is that you could show these graphs to anyone and they could see exactly what is going on.”
Marcott says a recent slogan of climate campaigners, “Keep it in the ground,” is apt. “In the ideal situation, that is what would happen, but I can’t say if it is economically or politically viable.”
“The paper emphasizes that we need to move to net-zero or net-negative carbon emissions and have only a few more decades to do so,” says Williams. “But the real punch in the gut is the modeled sea level rise and its implications.” ###
###
From the PR:
“This is a stunning paper,” says Jack Williams, a professor of geography and expert on past climates at UW-Madison.
Gosh. Really? It’s so “stunning” they don’t bother to give the title of the paper in the press release, nor do they link to it or give a DOI. It’s like they’d just prefer journalists to take the press release at it’s word without reading the paper. I’m sure some will, because you know, deadlines and all that, and digging up the paper might be work. So, I tried at Nature Climate Change, and it seems the paper doesn’t exist online yet as of this writing Monday 10AM PST. I searched for “Marcott” and browsed the current edition with no luck. If somebody can find it, please leave a link.
So it looks like “science by press release” again, where you can’t actually look at the science.
(UPDATE: About 45 minutes after I first looked for it, WUWT reader Frank found it online. It may have been a sync problem between PR and the journal.
Link: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2923.html )
Another telling omission is the link they gave in the PR to photos. From the PR there was this quote:
“It’s worrisome, for sure,” says Marcott. “I don’t see any good thing in this, but my hope is that you could show these graphs to anyone and they could see exactly what is going on.”
They give this link to supporting imagery in the PR, and I was expecting to find those graphs…sadly no, it’s just a collection of Greenpeace style collateral images that say nothing about science at all:
And in the captions document, there is this:
REFINERY Chrisangel Nieto, age 3, rode his tricycle in front of the Valero refinery in Houston. This refinery processes almost 7 million tons of carbon per year, most of which will end up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.Credit: Earthjustice
A staged photo with a little kid riding in front of a refinery? Where they can’t even say “petroleum” but instead incorrectly, carbon, From “Earth Justice”, in a press release about a scientific paper? Oh, please.
This looks far more like tabloid climatology than it does science. It will be interesting to watch which reporters regurgitate this one, and which one of the typical suspects comes to the defense of this”scientific paper” posed as activist fodder.
UPDATE 2: Now that the paper is online, here is the title and abstract:
Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change
Abstract:
Most of the policy debate surrounding the actions needed to mitigate and adapt to anthropogenic climate change has been framed by observations of the past 150 years as well as climate and sea-level projections for the twenty-first century. The focus on this 250-year window, however, obscures some of the most profound problems associated with climate change. Here, we argue that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a period during which the overwhelming majority of human-caused carbon emissions are likely to occur, need to be placed into a long-term context that includes the past 20 millennia, when the last Ice Age ended and human civilization developed, and the next ten millennia, over which time the projected impacts of anthropogenic climate change will grow and persist. This long-term perspective illustrates that policy decisions made in the next few years to decades will have profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems and human societies — not just for this century, but for the next ten millennia and beyond.
And here are those figures from their model.
This is a not so stunning paper when readers recall Solomon’s paper in PNAS in 2008-
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1704.full
Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions
excerpt-
“…up to peak concentrations of 450, 550, 650, 750, 850, or 1,200 ppmv;… This is not intended to be a realistic scenario but rather to represent a test case whose purpose is to probe physical climate system changes.”
Oh, ok. But the current paper assumes- “By 2300, the carbon dioxide level had soared from almost 400 parts per million to as much as 2,000 parts per million.”
So, this paper is in need of the caveat that “this is not intended to be a realistic scenario.”
2,000 parts per million…
And pray tell us where this CO2 is going to come from? Have they bothered to ‘estimate’ what Pluto of Coal will be towed here to provide it?
Or will we be digging up limestone to burn using nuclear power or giant solar cookers? Our main carbon resources are gone to the depths millions of years ago. We had better get nuclear power generation under control before too long because there are several billion people on this planet who have no intention to live like troglodytes.
Solomon and Weaver probably get along quite well. Andrew Weaver is an alumnus of the University of New South Wales and is currently sitting in the British Columbia Legislature as a member of (and leader of) the Green Party in BC.
Most of these folks have lots of credibility amongst their “peers”. This paper is written for an audience of true believers. Lots of “awards” in this crowd so they are clever, just not in my wheelhouse.
I wonder just how much arable, inhabitable land will be created when the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have disappeared? Without a doubt we’ll loose some of their costal areas to the rising seas but on the whole there must be a substantial net gain. And this new land will be more or less pristine. The perfect place for the resettlement of climate refugees. And just think all the mountains will be getting shorter with the compensation that altitude sickness will decrease. Will this push the upper limit of earth’s atmosphere higher thus giving us a few more feet of atmosphere in which to burn up incoming bits of space junk and meteors? That could be important – something thought to be a meteor fell out of the sky and killed a guy in India today. Would a few more nanoseconds of transit rendered it harmless? I say when the climate hands you lemons make lemonade especially when there’ll be lemon trees growing on the shore of Hudson Bay. Speaking of Hudson Bay It might expand to take in part of the Great Lakes thus creating new seaports in the upper mid west. Doom and gloom? Nay! Nay! Oh brave new world that hath such vistas in it!
…I’m thinking permanent, year round skiing in Greenland, with sea-level resorts at the ‘new’ coasts….
Or, not. It’s -47 C in southern Greenland, today, and even colder in central Antarctica. 10 degrees C is not going to melt that anytime soon.
I think we have ample evidence that the Greenland ice sheet is bounded by mountains and will not be easily returned to the sea.
And I have seen not a speck of evidence or explanation as to how a few degrees temperature rise will melt an Antarctic ice sheet that is mostly many tens of degrees Celsius below zero even in midsummer, and only ever gets above freezing for fleeting moments and only at the very periphery.
The demise of the ice sheets has been much exaggerated. Just ask the Eemian.
A lot of those old Minoan and Roman ports might actually be on the water again. Too bad we didn’t learn from the past.
“A similar but indescribably more complex and momentous phenomenon happens in the climate system.”
If it is indescribably more complex, then why should anyone believe the predictions in this paper?
It turned out to be describable after all.
The only thing I have seen recently that seems truly indescribable is the stupidity of warmista alarmists.
Well clearly they want to invent a bigger scenario of doom because we’re not frightened enough by the one they already wave around. We are not herding the way sheeple should. They don’t have control over us yet, not the way they would like. We’re not panicking. Worse, we’re doing our own thinking, our own research, and soon we’re not going to play nice at all.
Thank you for the clarification.
The doom story is not working, so now they hope to pick our pockets as we roll around helpless with laughter.
Yup the play nice bit is rapidly becoming”not an option” in my playbook.
People this mendacious or irresponsible need to face consequences.
My thoughts exactly. I hope a court deals with them because mobs are not so careful nor forgiving.
“This long-term perspective illustrates that policy decisions made in the next few years to decades will have profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems and human societies — not just for this century, but for the next ten millennia and beyond.”
My gawd! What’s that smell????
Fecal matter hitting the rotary oscillator?
From the south side of a north facing un-castrated male bovine
Plain old caca!
“They” could not see 40 years into the future in 1894. What has changed?
“In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows. “No Fracking Consensus”
So they got the time-scale a bit wrong , it took about a century but we are now up to our necks in this horse shit !
You’re right!
Stunningly bad paper.
Paywalled, but SI is not. Two GCMs set to ECS 3.5 ( high by 2X compared to observational energy budget studies e.g. Lewis and Curry 2014). Four level of emissions by 2300 expressed as PgC, from 1280 to 5160. For reference from AR5 SPM fig 5a and B, RCP8.5 to 2100 would produce about 950ppm from about 1800 PgC at AR5 carbon sink rates. I just checked. So this paper assumes up to 2850 ppm by 2300. . So the high end amounts to running RCP8.5 to 2300. Impossible–there isn’t that much fossil fuel extractable, even for RCP8.5 to 2100. Critiqued elsewhere.
This absurdity of course produces temps over 7C higher (direct from SI). These last for 10000 years because there is no ongoing carbon sinking in their analysis, either biological or via henry’s law. Which of course melts Greenland and Antarctica enough to raise sealevels 50+ meters (direct from SI). Even the ‘low’ 1280PgC produces 20meter SLR.
Alice in Wonderland stuff from the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
Ristvan,
I agree. I don’t have access to the paper here, but it sounds daft.
First, RCP8.5 assumes a substantial slowing of tech development. This assumes a halt, unlike anything seen for 300 years. That is quite mad, as a new industrial revolution appears to be starting.
Second, as you note, Earth has nowhere like the recoverable carbon reserves to burn to meet their assumptions.
Perhaps these problems are addressed in the paper. Otherwise I cannot imagine how this got thru peer-review. Or even thru pal-review.
Ristvan
Your brief analysis is better than the paper. It’s as if they were not familiar with the extant literature. How did it pass peer review?
I suspect that the purported peer review process these guys subject each other too is nothing but a fancy word for a cursory spell check.
I will bet dollars to donuts that Obama quotes this paper before he leaves office.
Wait, he also said that his election was when to 2mm per year SL rise would begin to slow down. Nope, I am certain he will quote it anyway, contradictions never made a politician hesitate.
Science is diffcult, uncertain so people has to justify their jobs.
“Science is difficult…”
Sow iz speelin’ an grameer.
😉
Stunning? More like, cunning.
Another cunning publicity stunt.
Cunning stunts, such as this, never fail to grab everyone’s attention.
Oh-oh.
Let us just thank our lucky stars they are not linguists.
Looking at the cast list for this swansong I instantly thought of this;
“Extendedly to the west, there were 1,500 British Foot Guards under Maitland lying down to protect themselves from the French artillery. As two battalions of Chasseurs approached, the second spike of the Imperial Guard’s attack, Maitland’s guards emerge and overwhelmed them with point-blank volleys. The Chasseurs organized to answer the fire, but began to tremble. A bayonet charge by the Foot Guards then destroyed them. The third spike was a fresh Chasseur battalion, now came up in support. The British guardsmen left with these Chasseurs in search, but the latter were arrested as the 52nd Light Infantry controlled in line on their border and poured an overwhelming fire into them and then rushed. Under this assault they too broke.
The last of the Guard retreated headlong. A wave of panic passed through the French lines as the astounding news spread: “La Garde recule. Sauve qui peut!” which means “The Guard refuges. Save yourself if you can!”. Wellington now stood up in Copenhagen’s commotions, and waved his hat in the air to signal a general progress. His army rushed forward from the lines and threw themselves upon the retreating French army.”
or , as this is an American site, this;
http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/gettysburg/gettysburg-history-articles/picketts-charge.html
Surely this is the last, desperate, attempt at resuscitation of a dead parrot. The climate catastrophe is postponed 200 years. Well my first reference is 200 years past – did any then conceive of the world as it is now?
Projections for 10,000 years! Nostradamus eat my shorts!
They know it is over and are about to run for the hills. This is the last hurrah.
This entire narrative depends on estimating a temperature response to an increase in the CO2 concentration. If they go back 20,000 years (which I think is a good idea) then it is reasonable to estimate the sensitivity to CO2 over the same period. As we all know, there is a poor correlation between temperature change and CO2. There is a really lousy correlation between sea level and CO2.
That Florida should disappear under water ten thousand years from now can hardly be a surprise. I fully expect it if the holocene is not terminated by a plunge into a new ice age.
We have nothing in our experience or measurements or proxies that suggests Greenland will not melt completely and have a temperate climate, as most of it has had many times before.
There is nothing in the available data or proxies that suggests such a small change in CO2 will produce 6 or 7 degrees of warming of the entire globe. Our best hope will be that in a warmer world the Saharan and Gobi rains will be reestablished opening many millions of hectares of farmland to go back into production.
Yes, but think of the childrens’, childrens’, childrens’, childrens’, childrens’, childrens’, childrens’, …………….ad infinitum.
I think it is about time we started worrying what kind of world we are going to leave for Keith Richards.
http://www.ncscooper.com/keith-richards-found-not-dead-in-san-francisco-hotel/
“I don’t see any good thing in this”
I do. It means I’m going to live past 2300 so I can give a ****.
“If you boil water and turn off the burner, the water will stay warm because heat remains in it.”
““This is a stunning paper,” says Jack Williams, a professor of geography and expert on past climates at UW-Madison.”
Yes, it is. Stunningly idiotic.
If you boil water and turn off the burner, the water will stay warm because heat remains in it.
A Nobel Prize to the man who just redefined the laws of thermodynamics.
Mjw February 8, 2016 at 12:37 pm
“If you boil water and turn off the burner, the water will stay warm because heat remains in it.”
Next put the tea bag in it. 🙂
michael
I just cannot stop laughing! Every damn time I go in my kitchen from now on, I’ll burst into fits of hysterical giggling! I mean….think of the horror…..if everyone in the United States boils water at the exact same time, even if we turn off all those burners…that water “will stay warm because heat remains in it”…indefinitely, forever…until the entire rest of the planet reaches equilibrium with our boiled water!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
How does a man who says things like that…out loud….find people to co-author papers with in the first place?
I’m going to drop this little piece of excrement in Mark Steyn’s tip box and see what delicious confection he creates with it…
It will stay warm even longer still if you drink it after placing the tea bag.
For goodness sake, Aphan, stop boiling that kettle, we’re all going to die!
/sarc.
“For goodness sake, Aphan, stop boiling that kettle, we’re all going to die! /sarc.”
No. If I ever meet one of these morons, I want the water hot when I shove his head in it…..:)
Scout Motto-Be Prepared…or something like that…yeah…yeah
Ah, good thinking, Aphan. I’ve often thought they ought to go boil their heads. Good-o, I’ve got my kettle on now. 🙂
“A similar but indescribably more complex and momentous phenomenon happens in the climate system.”
If you can’t describe it does that mean you can’t program it in a model?
In the middle ages, it was calculated using maths, logic and the available information at the time, that the earth was 6000 years old!!
Does 1/22² ~ 0.002 , ring a bell ?
“At one level, it just reinforces a point that we already knew: that the effects of climate change and sea level rise are irreversible and going to be with us for thousands of years,” says Williams.
So, this means that the pause is here to stay?
If the effects are irreversible then what’s all the shouting about? Adapt, dangit!
Co-author Shaun Marcott, an assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Assistant professor? Someone not deemed worthy of being hired as a full professor predicts the Holocene period will never end while at the same time dismissing the 600 to 800 year time gap between rising temperatures and CO2 levels.
Come on, no one under 50 gets to be full professor! (only exaggerating a little bit). The tenure and promotion process means that at a minimum it takes 10 years to get to Professor, less if the committee takes into account previous teaching and research time at another institution, but as it is the highest rank of academic, they tend to be very circumspect in handing those ranks out. Some people retire after teaching for 40 years as Associate Professor. Exceptions are for someone who can bring in big bucks in research grants as money talks in academia as elsewhere.
Mjw February 8, 2016 at 12:29 pm
Co-author Shaun Marcott, an assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Assistant professor? Someone not deemed worthy of being hired as a full professor
No it means he hasn’t been there long enough to be considered for tenure. Not sure why that’s relevant since he’s only one among ~20 authors and isn’t the corresponding author (who’s a full professor at Oregon).
When you look at the way we have been heading for the past five million years or so, a bit of warmth might be appreciated in the next ten thousand years, particularly considering that space is at about -270C and there is an awful lot of it out there.
Perhaps a link to the original image: http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2015/02/12/toward-a-new-theory-of-ice-ages-x-5million-years-of-cycles/
And the article: Toward a new theory of ice-ages X (5million years of cycles)
http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ISeeNoCaterpillar.png
What are the errors bars he puts on extrapolating 10,000 years based on 50 years of data. That’s “unprecedented”.
Is this the beginng of the end of the AGW crowd, all watermelons cracking, spewing out red slime in all directions? This must be the second numscullery report in a few days now.
Leaning back, bringing out the popcorn, watching.
I guess the “Peak Oil” theory has been officially abandoned by the environmentalists since we’ll be burning it for the next 300 years or so…
having stacked up one failed prognostication after another one would think the CAGW community would abandon the prediction business but as long as their is a community of faith based believers a vacuum is created that must, as nature abhors them, be filled by false prophets.
Their predictions are in reality prophesies of a distant future that cannot be proved or disproved.
This year – with the end of the El Nino, the downward slope of the 60year AMO and reducing sunspots, we are more than likely going to see global cooling.
And there is another prediction that has very good odds – the idiot climate academics who keep telling us that global warming is inevitable will be trawling about in the garbage to find another set of “pause” like excuses.
No they won’t; they’ll be busy adjusting GISTEMP and HADCRUT 5, 6 and 7* to look like moonshots, all the while telling the sheeple that it’s hotter than ever before.
* a new series is always produced when some serious ‘adjustment’ is necessary