Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A study published in AAAS “Science Advances” has attempted to resurrect discredited claims of a dangerously high climate sensitivity, by suggesting that climate sensitivity increases as the world warms.
Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be ‘game over’, scientists warn
New research suggests the Earth’s climate could be more sensitive to greenhouse gases than thought, raising the spectre of an ‘apocalyptic side of bad’ temperature rise of more than 7C within a lifetime.
It is a vision of a future so apocalyptic that it is hard to even imagine.
But, if leading scientists writing in one of the most respected academic journals are right, planet Earth could be on course for global warming of more than seven degrees Celsius within a lifetime.
And that, according to one of the world’s most renowned climatologists, could be “game over” – particularly given the imminent presence of climate change denier Donald Trump in the White House.
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In a paper in the journal Science Advances, they said the actual range could be between 4.78C to 7.36C by 2100, based on one set of calculations.
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The abstract of the study;
Nonlinear climate sensitivity and its implications for future greenhouse warming
Global mean surface temperatures are rising in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The magnitude of this warming at equilibrium for a given radiative forcing—referred to as specific equilibrium climate sensitivity (S)—is still subject to uncertainties. We estimate global mean temperature variations and S using a 784,000-year-long field reconstruction of sea surface temperatures and a transient paleoclimate model simulation. Our results reveal that S is strongly dependent on the climate background state, with significantly larger values attained during warm phases. Using the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 for future greenhouse radiative forcing, we find that the range of paleo-based estimates of Earth’s future warming by 2100 CE overlaps with the upper range of climate simulations conducted as part of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). Furthermore, we find that within the 21st century, global mean temperatures will very likely exceed maximum levels reconstructed for the last 784,000 years. On the basis of temperature data from eight glacial cycles, our results provide an independent validation of the magnitude of current CMIP5 warming projections.
Read more: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/11/e1501923
The money quote from the study full text;
… This paleodata-based TCRP is now applied to the RCP8.5 forcing scenario until year 2100 CE, following the equation above for deriving an estimated global mean SAT response. The anthropogenic forcing results in a global mean SAT anomaly of 5.86 K by year 2100 with respect to PI values. The uncertainties in S and the ocean’s heat uptake efficiency as discussed above result in a likely range of 4.78 to 7.36 K for the global mean SAT anomaly. Comparing our paleo-based estimate of future warming to the multimodel ensemble mean projections of the CMIP5 (52), we found that our projection results in a slightly higher global mean SAT anomaly. The current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)/CMIP5 projection under the RCP8.5 scenario results in a global mean SAT increase of 4.84 K for the year 2100 (with respect to PI values). The corresponding multimodel ensemble values range from 3.42 to 6.40 K. …
Read more: Same as above
My question – if a warmer world is more sensitive to CO2, why was the Cretaceous, which ended 66 million years ago, only 4C warmer than today, despite a CO2 level more than 4x higher than today’s CO2 level? If we apply the conclusions of the paper, temperatures in the warm Cretaceous should have been 14c higher than today’s temperatures – an absurdity which should excuse this paper from further serious consideration.
…based on ONE set of calculations. GIGO.
Transparent apocalyptic anti-scientific fear mongering clap trap. That this faux study was published is an indictment of the peer review process.
This “news” came out just in time to inflame the “warming” zealots to action going into
Election Day 2016.
The AAAS certainly tried to do their part to arouse the Americans that didn’t go to
Marrakesh for the COP meeting.
I suppose that the climate would be sensitive to an extra galactic gamma ray burst, or a planetoid collision with earth, or a Yellowstone volcano and they each have a 1:1 billion chance of happening within the next 100 years. So… better start laying ground work to prove that climate science can take credit for it. …yawn.
Yet we can’t get sea levels high enough to float a canoe where the ancients and medievals could park entire fleets. These days you’ve still got quite a trudge to Ephesus, Ostia, Deal, the Claudian Invasion landing…even the Pass at Thermopylae.
By the by, was it “climate scientists” moonlighting at the Huffington Post who gave such a resounding victory to Hillary?
Don’t be too hard on him, it’s really hard to think clearly when you have just crapped your pants.
Hey, the “scientific” polling community, with the best and brightest political “scientists,” all the data in the world and the biggest and best computer models, utterly failed to predict an election even one day in advance. What secret sauce are these climate “scientists” using that guarantees their predictions to 2100?
Coupled, non-linear semi-chaotic systems are a bitch, regardless of the time scale or method of operation.
Well that’s it then. Nothing more to do but live for the moment and party. Who’s going to tell the kiddies they can stay up late and don’t have to eat their greens?
Now the crazy terror campaign begins. All the wilder claims about GW will be resurrected and presented to the media so the public pressurises governments and NGO’s to maintain the mad pursuit of AGW.
Another climate study that disregards the negative feedback from increased humidity. This is what you get when you think the response is exponential and cannot see the clouds appear at their appointed times and conditions to keep the climate stable.
Of course, the utter stupidity of this claim that a “climate denier” will have a large influence on future carbon emissions is a claim that is absurd and stupid. Molten salt nuclear reactors are more carbon free than either solar or wind and economically and functionally so far superior to solar/wind and all forms of fossil fuels, that they will prevail, and it won’t be long in coming. More gross ignorance of energy technologies from the climate alarmists. They foolishly think that their efforts are required to
bring forth a low carbon energy world. What arrogant morons.
I wonder if this article was in the pipeline to be published before the election or if it is a result of the election.
The panic has set in. Take a look at any of the enviro-loon web sites from the last 48 hours. The fear mongering will grow exponentially. My only hope is that it becomes so crazy that they all become severely marginalized.
I predict imminent end of climate scientists
It’s our old friend RCP8.5 again.
In a sane world these charlatans would be walking around with sandwich boards and selling pencils from a.cup.
Every interglacial is different and we don’t know why. I fail to see how comparing a model to something we don’t understand proves anything. link
Hyper sensitivity to polyatomic gases is straight from young earth creationist dogma. With a dash of agnostic myrth.
All fossil carbon was in the atmosphere prior to the oxygen catastrophe. Life forms like stromatalites changed that and turned the oceans blue. Since these life forms still exist, there is no return function.
My question – if a warmer world is more sensitive to CO2, why was the Cretaceous, which ended 66 million years ago, only 4C warmer than today, despite a CO2 level more than 4x higher than today’s CO2 level? The answer is simple, none of that CO2 came from burning COAL!
Unrealistic RCP8.5 scenario: check
Unrealistic positive feedback: check
Loony theory that climate is sensitive to white house occupant: check
Climate apocalypse headline: check
This message was approved by the loony green left (LGL)
Like all simulations from the alarmists using the ice ages as a model, they purposely under-estimate how much Albedo increased as a result of all that ice. So, then one gets to ascribe all the temperature changes in the ice ages to the drop in CO2.
So, if the ice age temperature changes were driven by CO2, then increased CO2 in the future will cause large increases in temperature over the next century.
The ice-sheet Albedo forcing at the LGM in this study is only -1.0 W/m2; ridiculously low. Nobody has ever used an estimate this low. I mean nobody, not even James Hansen. An objective number would around -11.0 W/m2. Then all the estimates would change by up to 11 times smaller.
http://d3a5ak6v9sb99l.cloudfront.net/content/advances/2/11/e1501923/F2.large.jpg
As best I can figure, the climate system is drawing its current “heat” from the stored heat in the ocean and the stored heat in the mantle, as it is not coming from the Sun, which has slipped into a quiet mode. Therefore the system is using up its stored energy at a prodigious rate as it maintains the climate. As the stored energy diminishes, the planet will slide back into an ice age until the sun decides to output greater energy. We can only hope that it will bottom in a “mini ice age,” and not the real thing.
So if one uses RCP 8.5 and cuts and pastes a Mann hockey stick onto the assumption, and mix in unicorn farts. . . Computer games again.
Watermelons are pitiable creatures.
What are all these self-proclaimed scientists going to do when the US cuts climate research/spending by $22 BILLION annually on January 20th?
I think with the coming huge reductions in grant money being doled out to these people, Anthony will have to dig further to find “studies” like these.
I’m looking forward to a thorough housecleaning throughout the government, but it’s going to be very hard. Civil servant laws preclude large scale purges. Maybe the only way will be for department reorganizations where you can RIF people by requiring a lower headcount after the changes.
The real issue on this front though is the leadership. If you take the politics out and return climate science to science, maybe it will be enough.