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.
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“my hope is that you could show these graphs to anyone and they could see exactly what is going on”
Yes. Four legs good, two legs bad. Extreme, catastrophic, irreversible, devastating.
” says Marcott, a expert in glaciers and ancient climate”
Ummmmm…an expert in BS and robbing the gravy train maybe. My friends 4 year old could write a better paper without the stink of these so called “scientists” !!!
““It’s worrisome, for sure,” says Marcott. “I don’t see any good thing in this”
One assumes he was looking at the paper when he said that. !!
Oops, he accidently told the truth!
Thanks, Anthony.
“a nearly inevitable elevation of sea level for thousands of years into the future.”?
When the Earth is the coldest it has been since the Holocene Warm Period 6,000 years ago?
No way this looks possible to me.
I just don’t understand all these ‘Climate Models’
Do they use Weejee Boards,Tarot Cards, Astrology,Roulette Wheels, or a secret combination of the lot?
D. I. It is a combination of digital entrails, inspiration and vain imaginings.
Astrology, in particular, recognises that things happen in cycles, something ‘tipping points’ cannot endure. Tarot cards don’t have big enough numbers. Roulette wheels also move in cycles and have a small choice of numbers, though they can, with difficulty, be fixed like a model. Results can be alarming but limited. Definitely not global. Ouija Boards fall into the ‘inspiration and vain imaginings’ category.
So you are 25% ±75% right. Good enough for government work.
Let’s see, in the next 10,000 years the probabilities are pretty certain that the following
2 asteroids strikes > 400M diameter
10 VEI-7 volcanic eruptions (super collossal)
1 Worldwide thermonuclear war
+ whatever Armageddon you favor
Its like the scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid “the fall will probably kill you”
“…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.”
Once again, scientifically speaking, predictions are not “findings,” and preditions are not certainties. This is not science. Anyone who claims it is, is a fool.
Two labs
They filled the box and closed it. Then opened the box and exclaimed, ‘Oooh what have we here?’
Did you see that ECS number??
Shaun Marcott’s work already got one embarrassing and very public, scientific beat down with Marcott et al, 2013. Any publicity beats no publicity, is that it- Wisconsin grads?
He got his job on “Marcott 2013”. The paper is still the paper to quote by anyone that writes anything on Paleoclimate or that knows anything about Paleoclimate.
And it’s “scientific beat down” was actually not scientific; it was on the internet penned by morons.
traffy,
Anyone who does a chart like this…
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
…is a lying propagandist.
That chart is made for only one reason: to try and alarm the public. It has no other purpose, and it has no connection with the real world.
So is it the shape of the curve that scares you or its accuracy?
If that spliced, fake graph was accurate it would be scary. But it’s only alarmist propaganda, so…
…Pff-t-t-t-t-t.
” Marcott explains. “If you boil water and turn off the burner, the water will stay warm because heat remains in it.””
Doh!
Is this the time to point out to Marcott that once you turn off the burner, the water will begin to cool?
Bluto: “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”
Boone: “Germans?”
Otter: “Forget it. He’s on a roll.”
They are going tot these temps to get a nudge on (no Gavin, that’s not an instruction)
USCRN and full UAH are now in.
Of the various USA data sets, All now show an essentially zero anomaly for January.
http://s19.postimg.org/8lgilst2r/USA_January.png
Sorry for my typing. rewriting first line.
If they are going to [get] these massive predicted temps, they need to get a nudge on (no Gavin, that’s not an instruction)
Note, all trends since 2005 are essentially ZERO.
Marcott and his associates are just a bunch of climate science hooligans.
Just another one of those “if we put CO2 in the atmosphere, it will stay there for thousands of years” scare-story.
Sorry that is just not factually correct and these scientists know fully well what they are saying is incorrect. Some might call that being deliberately dishonest.
Half of what we have emitted so far has been taken back out of the atmosphere is just a short few decades.
If we stop emitting some day, it will only take about 150 years for the vast majority of that CO2 to get sequestered back into the ocean, ocean sediments, soils and plants.
It came from the Earth, in essence, and it will go right back in within 150 years or so.
The article notes that last year, humans emitted about 10 billion tons of Carbon. Well, oceans plants and soils absorbed more than 5 billion tons of that right back into its sinks.
“Some might call that being deliberately dishonest.”
Some might call it things that would get them banned for violating this site’s profanity guidelines.
The issue is one cannot get published in “Nature” talking about the Carbon Cycle without understanding that there are sources and sinks in the Carbon Cycle.
They WILL know these numbers.
The fact that they just completely ignored that and then play up the 10,000 years angle is deliberate and willful lack of honesty.
We should be able to call IT what it is.
Well, I’m just a layman in the field of “Climate Change”, but it seems to me that if “The Climate” ever stops changing, THEN we have something to worry about.
+1
I for one am horrified by the uncertainty in not knowing man’s impact on the planet 10,000 years from now.
It’s vital that we expend the resources necessary to have our top people look into what may he ahead in the distant future.
Only when we have additional research assessments and forecasts will we know how to behave as we move forward.
Suppose we learn from our experts that we’ll all be dead within 10,000 years?
Wouldn’t it behoove us to rid the planet of several billion people in order to postpone our demise?
Of course I’d like to be a decider on who has to go.
I choose you first to go, Steve.
If we want to know what is likely to be happening in 10,000 years, I might suggest we stop paying attention to the ranting of puddinheads and idjuts, and ask some people who know a thing or two.
I bet we still don’t have flying cars. Where’s my flying car, you 1950’s scientist bastards!
“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.” For simplicity they also left out any mechanisms that might mitigate the effect of increasing carbon dioxide, like the next ice age.
Wow, think of the ore deposits that may be discovered when two giant chunks of land are removed of their ice. Oh to be an exploration geologist then! What a crock; the people of Wisconsin actually pay for this crap.
Wow, I’m ashamed to have
been[earned] a BS in geography. What was supposed to have been an integrative discipline (that I loved), has become a worthless propaganda arm of the alarmist cult.Hey, Dr. Williams, too bad there isn’t any way to rid the atmosphere of that awful CO2, you know, like massive amounts of organisms that will use it for food or anything.
[The mods doubt you were actually a BS in geography, but wanted to map out your background more clearly. .mod]
witty 🙂
mods: BS, Florida State University, 1992 – Geography;
Admittedly, I’ve had too much to drink tonight, but I have the diploma, for whatever it’s worth. If you want to know where Ouagadougou is, I can tell you. If you’d care to discuss the various soils groups of the US Great Plains, I can join in. If you want to know about the ethnic / religious mix of Southeast Asia, I can contribute.
If not, fine, there are other places to go.
Further: I worked for a short time as a cartographer, back when cloropleth maps weren’t done by digitization, but by photographic processes. If you wanted to show an area as a high crime zone or a high income zone, you had to specify it by manually lightening or darkening it against a photographic backdrop. You’d cut out different levels of filters to use against photo backdrops of geographic areas, and you’d get your map, as a photo. Today, Google makes this look insane.
“Choropleth map”
There’s a fine list of rentseekers,to be sure. My question is, do they play dungeons and dragons as a group, while tossing about ideas for the next paper, or are mushrooms the standard fare?
Hey now…D&D is a great game! Don’t besmirch honest fantasy with this CAGW drivel.
A statement in the ‘study’ says that if you turn off the heat, the water is hot…as if it doesn’t immediately begin cooling down! Water doesn’t get hotter when the heat is removed.
The problem here is very serious: we are nearing the typical end of any interglacial of the last million years in particular when no interglacial lasted much longer than the present one. Pretending we need not worry about this while no one knows for certain WHY we have repeated Ice Ages is frightful.
That is, if the scientists understand that the sun is doing all this, we are at the mercy of a sun that isn’t in a steady state for the last 2 million years. This information frightens many people at the top so they have decreed that the sun isn’t the author of our ice ages. Anything else can be touted as the cause but not the sun. It is verboten.
This makes us totally helpless unless the release of CO2 can put off this probable inevitable event.
Can you imagine Marcott in the senate debating with Aristotle or Plato, or any number of ancient philosophers. He’d bring the house down with laughter.
If this intrepid band of catastrophist adventurers (Marcott, Shakun, Santer, Solomon and other usual suspects) are daringly probing the past and future, maybe they should try their models on the end-Ordovician glaciation which occurred with atmospheric CO2 at 16x the present level? Or the earlier (7-800 mya) Cryogenian with CO2 levels an order of magnitude higher again?
And no, it was not the dim sun, since the world then was not continually glaciated – for most of the time it was warmer than today.
Of course it wasn’t the dim sum. Who would blame a pastry?
It was a Chinese conspiracy! 🙂
In 10,000 years time there will be well established deep glaciation. There will be no Madison. There will be no Wisconsin. They will call it (since at least sarcasm will still be alive and well) the “Marcott-Shakun Glaciation”. It will actually rival the previous – also aptly named – Wisconsin Glaciation.
Why is it everyone, I mean everyone, thinks they’re going to live longer than me? Does that make me clinically depressed?
The truly funny think is these loons don’t have a clue about what happened 10,000 years ago.
The flood of money into climate science virtually assured that incompetents cannot be winnowed from academia. No matter how ridiculous the claims might, so long as the political message is correct, the money will flow.
Out of Christian charity, I do not accuse the researcher of fraud, something I have never done, even in regard to You-Know-Who. Nor until now have I ever made an ad hominem attack.
But enough is enough. This study reveals a profound ignorance of how Earth systems work. If it were not for climate slush funds for academics, this professor would have to look for other work.