By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: Here are three stories about environmental destruction, all featuring “five trillion” as the horrific number. Scary stories. Are they accurate?
To understand a trillion, look at it in cash (an example of giving context)
(1) Five trillion tons of ice has melted!
“5 Trillion Tons of Ice Lost Since 2002” by climate propagandist Phil Plait at Slate.
“…land ice loss is perhaps most important as a political trigger; the sheer amount of land ice being lost every year is immediate, here, now. And the numbers are staggering … From 2002 to mid-November 2014 — less than 13 years — the combined land ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland is more than 5 trillion tons. Five. Trillion. Tons. That’s beyond staggering; that’s almost incomprehensible. It’s a volume of about 5,700 cubic kilometers, a cube of ice nearly 18 kilometers — more than 11 miles — on a side.”
This is vintage propaganda, giving big numbers with no context. Much as the Right does with the Federal deficit (which if converted into pennies could build a bridge to Mars!).
The total mass of Earth’s ice is roughly 33 thousand trillion metric tons (per table 2 of 2013 USGS; other estimates differ). Five trillion metric tons over 13 years is 0.112% per year. At that rate the Earth’s ice will melt in 6,600 86,000 years. What level of technology will we have in a thousand years? Children in the year 3,000 will probably consider conflate burning oil and cow dung, both things done by primitive people in the dark ages.
Also, estimates of Antarctica’s ice loss differ widely. A December 2015 NASA study found that Antarctica gained ice mass from 1992-2008 (see the press release).
(2) Five trillion pieces of plastic choke the oceans
“The Ocean Contains Over Five Trillion Pieces of Plastic Weighing More than 250,000 Tons” by Rachel Nuwer at the Smithsonian — “These frightening figures represent the most robust estimate of marine plastic pollution calculated to date.” Based on a paper by Marcus Eriksen et al in PLOS One, 10 December 2014. Lots of scary articles misrepresenting this useful study.
Again, five trillion — this time it is pieces of plastic. Of course 92% of those are smaller than 4.75mm (0.18″); only 0.17% are larger than 8″. The 250 thousand tons is spread among 1.4 billion tons of water on Earth.
Are we “choking the ocean with plastic”? No. See the origin of this myth. It’s a problem, but a minor one compared to the things we’re doing to wreck the oceans.
(3) We will burn five trillion tons of carbon and scorch the world
“The climate response to five trillion tonnes of carbon” by Katarzyna B. Tokarska et al, Nature Climate Change, in press. This produced the usual hysteria. It would “scorch” the Earth. It paints the “Bleakest Picture of Our Future to Date“.
“Burning all known reserves of oil, gas and coal would inject about five trillion tonnes of heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere … This number — about ten times the 540 billion tonnes of carbon emitted since the start of industrialisation — would be reached near the end of the 22nd century if fossil fuel trends go unchanged, it added. Most of the UN climate science panel’s projections for greenhouse gas emissions do not forecast beyond two trillion tonnes of carbon …” {From Phys.org.}
This study is based on RCP8.5 (worst of the four scenarios in the IPCC’s AR5), like almost all climate nightmare forecasts. It extrapolates the RCP8.5 scenario through 2300. Like most climate nightmare forecasts, it describes RCP8.5 as a “business as usual scenario… in the absence of any climate change mitigation policy”.
This misrepresents the papers creating RCPC8.5 and its use in the IPCC’s AR5. It does not mention RCP8.5’s unlikely assumption that technological progress stagnates (through 2300!). Nor does it mention the likely population crash starting in the late 21st century as the current decline in fertility eventually has effect. See this for more information about RCP8.5.
Conclusions
We are ignorant because we read the news, which overflows with propaganda. Journalists pay for their love of politically appropriate narratives with the loss of their profession’s credibility — contributing to their industry’s loss of revenue — and layoffs (US newsroom jobs down 40% since 2006-2014).
The exaggerated reporting of environmental problems — many of which range from serious to existential — has similarly eroded away the public’s concern about these risks (Gallup’s poll ranking most important concerns, and concerns about specific environmental risks). We pay a high price for the journalists’ lust for clicks.
Also note that scientists are in effect complicit in these misreported stories by their silence.
For More Information
To see the data and forecasts for the various RCP’s go to the RCP Database. See historical data about atmospheric CO2 at the DoE’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.
For more information see The keys to understanding climate change, My posts about climate change, and especially these about the rumored coal-driven climate apocalypse…
- Is our certain fate a coal-burning climate apocalypse? No!
- Manufacturing climate nightmares: misusing science to create horrific predictions.
- Good news! Coal bankruptcies point to a better future for our climate.
- Good news from China about climate change!
- Britain joins the shift from coal, taking us away from the climate nightmare.
- Good news from America about climate change, leading the way to success.
5 trillion tons is about 5 thousand cubic kilometers. The ocean is 1,338,000,000 cubic kilometers. So that is 0.000373692078% of the ocean’s volume. NEXT!
The 2000 ppm CO2 in RCP8.5 is wishful thinking. It can’t reach 2000 ppm with fossil fuel proven reserves less than 3 trillion MT. It will only reach 1050 ppm in 300 years. They wish to burn the uneconomic reserves to make it look bad. Or maybe it’s good. Hopefully burning fossil fuels will prevent the next glacial period. A recent paper published in Nature says we averted the glacial period and we have to put 5.5 trillion MT more CO2 in the air to keep the warm climate for 100,000 years.
Unfortunately, CO2 is completely ineffectual as a cause of warming; its level TRAILS temperature (900 yrs or so).
It seems to me that the IPCC, through its apologists, is slowly trying to distance itself from the ‘business as usual’ scenario in AR5.
For instance “… the IPCC AR5 WGI report does not describe RCP8.5 as a ‘business as usual scenario’ …” (Larry Kummer) and life is too short to confirm that or otherwise but during its press conference a spokesman certainly referred to RCP8.5 as “business as usual” at ~18 min mark …
… also in this press release:
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ar5/pr_wg3/20140413_pr_pc_wg3_en.pdf
I dealt with a similar ridiculous scare concerning a finding that plastic water bottles stored for a year (IIRC) were found to contain 3 parts per trillion antimony which is used in catalysts to make the plastic. I used the fact that the distance to the sun from earth is approx. 150 trillion mm. On a journey to the sun, 3 parts per trillion is 450mm or about a foot and a half!!
Rush Limbaugh is fond of pointing out how numerous media outlets will “spontaneously” and simultaneously break into the use of a specific phrase as if they had all attended the same meeting and been urged to use it as a ‘talking point.’
I smell something very similar here.
5,700 cubic kilometers, spread over the 361 million square kilometers of the earth’s oceans, would make a layer 1.58 MILLIMETERS thick.
Phil Plait is toxic. He’s mean, sarcastic, and not even that intelligent. He gained fame for his Bad Astronomy blog where he pointed out how Hollywood Magic didn’t sync up with actual science. It was entertaining, but somewhere along the line he became an activist, and now he’s worse than Bill Nye. He talks about things without actually understanding them, now an ironic parody of his former self.
His name is more fitting to hosting culinary radio shows reviewing top restaurants.
Perhaps “Phil Plait & Edith Allgon”?
Ha! It took me a few seconds…
(Too much 3 Stooges as a kid)
Pop Piasa
“Too much 3 Stooges as a kid”
No such thing!
Bindidon June 1, 2016 at 4:25 am
If you’d said “No time to write” I’d have believed you were busy. When you start gilding the lily with a whole list of things designed to impress us … not so much.
And it would be much more believable if you hadn’t made a total of nine other postings between my comment and your response …
However, I’m more than happy to wait to find out what you were talking about. Please note that I’m not the only one confused by your claims.
w.
Willis
“However, I’m more than happy to wait to find out what you were talking about”
Don’t hold your breath, for you to figure out what Bindidon is talking about would require you to have a deep understanding of psychoanalysis, if all the incomprehensible gibberish he has written until now tells us anything it is that he is seriously unbalanced.
Please let us come back to the origin of my comment (Bindidon on May 31, 2016 at 2:09 pm)
which is this sentence in the guest post:
Also, estimates of Antarctica’s ice loss differ widely. A December 2015 NASA study found that Antarctica gained ice mass from 1992-2008 (see the press release).
Willis, maybe such a reference is OK for you; for me it isn’t.
Jay Zwally and colleagues indeed told about a reanalysis of satellite observations (ERS-1 and ERS-2, 1992-2001; ICESat, 2003-2008), indicating mainly for EA and parts of WA a mass gain actually bypassing the losses in WA and PA.
But that is what everybody will keep in mind! And certainly not the collateral facts, namely that
– EA’s mass gains are by far more due to snowfall up to 10,000 years old than to that of recent periods;
– EA’s mass gains in fact were decreasing during the two reanalysed periods.
You will argue: “Jesus Bindidon! How can you insist on such microscopic changes?”.
In 1999 I read by accident a report published by two NOAA oceanographs. They had discovered a loss of salinity in the Atlantic Ocean near Greenland if I well remember, which in their mind was due to an increase of iceberg melting and calving in the region.
Upon an analysis of ice cores they discovered a strong similarity between the actual salinity deltas and those having occured during the Younger Dryas, and possibly were the origin of a following abrupt climate change at that time.
They warned us about a possible replication of the phenomenon, with harsh siberian winters here in Southern Europe, even down to North Africa.
Even if that possibly will never happen: from their report I learned that the system we live in is not very stable, and that it might react much stronger to these microscopic changes than we actually are ready to imagine.
Maybe you think different. I obviously accept these differences.
“from their report I learned that the system we live in is not very stable”
Seems to me the temperature fluctuates between two attractors, and it is currently very close to the bottom of the lower of the two, and there is little or no clear correlation with atmospheric CO2 concentration.
http://geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif
http://geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
So it seems like a pretty stable system to me.
Lol, another post about how calving is destroying the world glaciers. Only an ignoramus would claim such a thing.
Repeat after me: melting glaciers melt. Growing glaciers fall into the ocean. You are a fool if you believe this is proof of warming. It might be proof of more snowy precipitation or it might be proof for cooling, but the true idiots believe it means the glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate
From the Slate guy:
From Dave Burton’s Common conversion factors for water, ice, sea-level & air page:
Bindidon June 1, 2016 at 3:03 pm
Regarding the first, whether the gains are due to snowfalls 10,00 years old, clearly the recent gains have nothing to do with 10,000 year old snow. They are due wholly and entirely to current snowfall rates.
Regarding the second, you are correct that the “gains are decreasing” … but that overlooks the obvious fact that according to Zwally, Antarctica is still gaining ice mass. From the article (emphasis mine):
This is what Zwally says is happening today. It’s not Antarctic meltdown as hypothesized by the alarmists. Instead, the ice mass is increasing. Now, is it true as you claim that the “mass gains were decreasing”? Yes, it is true. Lately it has been increasing less. But it is still increasing.
Does this mean anything about the future? Nope. It could change tomorrow. The rate of gain may indeed keep dropping year after year … or it may increase. Or it may drop quickly for a decade and then bounce back the next decade. All we can say is that according to Zwally, the ice mass is increasing now.
You also say:
While that is a lovely anecdote, I fear that without the necessary citation it is not a scientific observation. I would also disagree that the climate system is unstable. Despite all kinds of catastrophes and changes in forcings and physical constraints, the temperature has stayed within a narrow range (e.g. within ± 0.3 °C over the entire 20th century). This is unusual stability, not instability.
Regards,
w.
Willis, I agree to your comments concerning the higher priority you give to the mass increase.
Maybe I’m a bit too influenced by a few decades of delta engineering where smallest increment management becomes over the long term more important than their whole context.
But Zwally’s warning I’ll keep in mind.
Now, as concerns the lovely anecdote (thanks for your humor, I appreciate), I couldn’t manage to find the original source. But in the kernel message this seems to be quite similar to this:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data4.html
I miss some arguments, charts and pictures present within the original info, but grosso modo that’s it.
What I read completely relaxed today made me quite a bit more impressed 16 years ago. Probably because of a hint on the Gulf Stream, which might well be pushed back from Europe down to Africa, due to huge and rapid changes in the THC.
But far more impressive was the fact that, following ice core analysis at that time, the melting of ridiculous amounts of land ice might have, through a change of salinity a sea surface, such consequences in such a short period of time (the NOAA oceanographers mentioned „within a decade“).
And that is what I wanted to express with an unstable system, whose behavior very well might depend on very small chages.
Hints on stability suggerated by a small increase of the global temperature over a century (even that 1.7 °C computed by Berkeley Earth is small) are here not so very helpful I guess; and catweezel’s chart above your comment is even totally redundant.
So you won’t wonder about me hoping that Greenland’s inlandsis melting soon might stop: I would appreciate neither siberian winters in Germany nor harsh ones in Andalucia 🙂