Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [See Update At End]
Well, Dr. James Hansen, the man who invented the global warming scam and our favorite failed serial doomcaster, recently addressed the cratering of a 30-year prediction he made in 1988.
Back then, he said the globe would warm up by one full degree by 2018 under the “business as usual” rubric … not. Here’s the story as written up in “Spin” magazine in 1988.
Since then we’ve had a continued expansion of fossil fuel use, as in his most alarmist scenario. Given that amount of CO2 emissions, his prediction was that by now, temperatures would have gone up by 1°C (note that the Spin article, as pointed out by Mosh and Tamino among others, is in error).
Obviously, nothing like that has happened. Despite the fact that millions of folks believed his prediction in 1988 and continue to listen to him today, the UAH MSU satellite data says that since 1988 it’s warmed by … well … about a third of a degree. Not one degree. A third of a degree. He was wrong by a factor of 3. So obviously, he needs an excuse for this failure.
Here’s the back story to Hansen’s excuse, published last week under the headline “Climate Scientists Move Global Meltdown from 2018 to 2168” …
And just last week [Hansen] addressed the prospect of further temperature increases during an interview with New York magazine. Keep in mind that Hansen predicted in a greenhouse model that there would be “an increase of from two to five degrees Fahrenheit” in global temperatures by 2018, as quoted from December 1988 edition of Spin magazine.
“I don’t think we’re going to get four or five degrees this century, because we get a cooling effect from the melting ice,” he said last week. “But the biggest effect will be that melting ice. In my opinion that’s the big thing – sea-level rise – because we have such a large fraction of people on coastlines, more than half of the large cities in the world are on coastlines.” [Hansen]
Amazing. He’s kicked the old threat of global warming under the bus. Now, it’s morphed into “Global warming won’t cause increased temperature because it just melts the ice but then the sea levels will rise and WE’RE ALL STILL DOOMED!” Once an alarmist, always an alarmist, I guess.
Now, that claim about ice melting had my numeric legend detector ringing like a fire alarm in a cheap whorehouse. It didn’t make any sense that melting that amount of ice would cool us that much, the amount seemed far too small. So I decided to see if that made sense. Sea ice is basically unchanged, so how much land ice is melting? The analysis of GRACE satellite puts it at 500 billion (500e+9) tonnes of ice per year.
Let me go through the calculations, so y’all can identify any mistakes I’ve made. I’m working in the computer language “R”, don’t worry about that, it will all be explained. Things following a hashmark (#) are comments. Lines that start with [1] are the computer output from that instruction above it. A semicolon separates two different instructions on one line.
In the first line below, I’ve created a variable called “latent” and set it to the latent heat of melting for water at zero salinity and zero pressure:. As the comment notes, this is in units of “J/kg”, which is joules per kilogram. Note that the second instruction, the one after the semicolon, “latent” by itself, just prints out the value of the variable “latent”.
> latent = gsw_latentheat_melting(0,0) ; latent # J/kg
[1] 333427
Next, I also create a variable named “ice_mass” and set it to the 500 billion tonnes of ice melted per year.
> ice_mass = 500e9 ; ice_mass # tonnes/year
[1] 5e+11
Then I start the actual calculations. The variable “heat_required” is the calculated number of joules required to melt 500 billion tonnes of ice in one year. As the comment notes, a factor of 1000 is needed to go from J/kg in “latent” to J/tonne to match the ice_mass.
> heat_required = ice_mass * latent * 1e3 ; heat_required # J/yr. “1e3” is to convert kg to tonnes
[1] 1.67e+20
Then I calculate the total joules in one year from a constant flux of one watt per square metre. Since a watt is one joule per second, this is the same as the number of seconds in a year. I use this value a lot so I already have a variable set to this, called “secsperyear”. If I didn’t, it’s just 365.24 days * 24 hrs/day * 60 mins/hr * 60 secs/min
> onewattperm2=secsperyear ; onewattperm2 #joules/m2/year. “secsperyear” is seconds per year
[1] 31556952
Next, I’ve converted joules per square meter per year into total global joules per year by multiplying by 5.11e14, the number of square metres of the earth’s surface.
> onewattglob=surfaream*onewattperm2 ; onewattglob #joules/yr/W. “surfaream” is global surface in square metres
[1] 1.61e+22
And finally, I am able to calculate the number of watts per square metre needed to melt 500 billion tonnes of ice per year … which turns out to be a flux of about one hundredth of a watt per square metre.
> watts_needed=heat_required/onewattglob ; watts_needed #W/m2
[1] 0.0103
Now, bear in mind that as a 24/7 global average, there is about half a kilowatt of total downwelling radiation at the surface (500 W/m2, made up of about 170 W/m2 of solar radiation plus about 330 W/m2 of longwave infrared radiation).
So the 0.01 W/m2 from the melting of the ice is equivalent to a 0.002% change in downwelling radiation. TWO THOUSANDTH OF ONE PERCENT CHANGE!
So what James Hansen is saying to excuse his laughable prediction is that reducing the 500 W/m2 of downwelling radiation to 499.99 W/m2 has reduced the earth’s temperature by two thirds of degrees in thirty years …
Say what? That’s so far off it’s not even wrong!
And even if the GRACE satellite ice-melt estimate is out by a factor of ten, the result is the same. The amount of cooling from even ten times that amount of ice per year would only give us a cooling of a tenth of a W/m2, so instead of 500 W/m2 at the surface, we’d have 499.9 W/m2 … be still, my beating heart …
So as my bad number detector indicated, Jame Hansen is just running his usual con job on the unscientific public. Make a bold prediction for thirty years out, wait twenty-nine years, wave your hands and prevaricate to explain the fact that the prediction has totally cratered … and then make a new prediction, that it’s still gonna happen … but not for a hundred and fifty years.
Hanson has learned something about making predictions, though … he won’t ever have to explain the probable cratering of his new prediction, no worries about that.
By the time that prediction is testable … he’ll be dead.
Maybe that’s some of the dying that Bill Nye the Skeevy Science Guy has been saying is needed to move climate science forwards …
Sometimes I think there will come a time when Jim Hansen runs out of excuses for his plethora of piss-poor predictions … but then I consider the distance from here to the nearest star, and the size of my gorgeous ex-fiancee’s heart, and the number of grains of sand on the beach, and I realize that there is no reason to think that the source of his excuses is any less limitless than those things …
Best of life to each of you,
w.
NOTE: As ever, I request that when you comment you QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS you are discussing, so we can all be clear on your subject.
[Update] As a number of folks pointed out, the Spin article was 100% wrong. Hansen’s model didn’t predict 3° warming by now … it predicted one degree warming. I’ve changed the post to reflect this.
And I was also 100% wrong, to believe a contemporary article rather than go back to the original paper. Mea maxima culpa, my thanks to Mosh, Tamino, and others who pointed it out.
However, this makes no difference to my point. His claims about melting ice are a wild exaggeration. The amount of cooling from the melting of ice is far, far too small to have the effect, whether by now or by the end of the century.
[Update II]
I note that Tamino has a post over at his website responding to my post here, entitled “Does Willis Eschenbach Have Any Honor”.
The answer from my perspective is obviously “Yes” … however, the oh-so-honorable Tamino banned me from his website about a decade ago, which means that he is mounting a cowardly attack on me in a place where I have no way to respond.
Here at WUWT, I made a mistake, which was picked up by Tamino. I corrected the mistake, and thanked him. And obviously, Tamino is free to comment on that here.
In response, Tammy has published a pusillanimous attack on me in a place where he has censored my voice entirely and I am unable to defend myself in even the slightest manner.
I leave it to the reader to determine which of us is honorable.
w.
Math is only to be used to reinforce the green blob narrative, Willis. Bad boy!
Such as 2018 moved to 2168 is actually 150 years NOT 50 years.
But even that is in keeping with the standard fudge factor of three that applies to ALL climate prognostications.
But as usual, misteaks always lead to new questions, as to which of the fake news stories is the actual real fake news.
So please enlighten us Willis; which is the correct fake news, the 50 year number or the 2168 Date.
I’ve even been known to cast errata in concrete myself.
G & g
Fake like those “misteaks” … ? Georgie must have been hungry dreaming of steaks for dinner!
‘the 30,000 years of history since our species emerged’ – ummm I think we have been around a bit longer than that and that was well known in 1988. Just last week it was confirmed humans had been in Australia for some 65,000 years.
Then again, this sort of ‘error’ is par for the course for the Hansonite fringe dwellers. Maybe its only the last 30,000 years isnce they emerged and invented shamanism and monsters from the black lagoon and evil spirits in the sky etc. and all the ‘fringe benefits’ that proponents of such crap could extract.
Yeah KK,
Is it ironic that the 65,000 year date is from a dig almost within sight of the very large and important Jabiluka uranium deposit, whose discovery I witnessed on site. It started up and shut down again some 20 years ago.
Pressure from local original Australians was part of the reason, if not most. My then employer worked the Ranger mine a few km to the South and I pushed hard for our Board to take over Jabiluka pre-production, which they did. After I left, it changed hands as the employer was taken over.
It is possible that some more detailed work will be needed to date artefacts confidently to that 65,000 years, but that is a science matter, not a social one.
Geoff.
“this sort of ‘error’ is par for the course for the Hansonite fringe dwellers”
It’s “Spin” magazine talking. That’s Willis’ choice of source. Not much to do with Hansen.
History is written by man. How long has man been writing history?
The date remains to be confidently verified, but is surely possible.
Anatomically modern humans have been around for about 300,000 years, and left Africa at times in the past 100,000 years.
The above was a reply to Kuma re. Australia.
South River Independent July 23, 2017 at 12:17 pm
In the strict sense of written documents, human “history” is around 5000 years old. But in terms of archaeology, paleontology, geology and biology, our subspecies is, as noted, around 300,000 years old. Our genus, as currently classified, is some 2.7 million years old, but generic status is fairly arbitrary. If you combine the genera Homo and Australopithecus, then the human genus is more than five million years old.
It’s possible to speak of the history of the universe and of earth, so using the term in this sense is entirely justified. The science of geology is the history of the earth written in rocks.
I heard that Algebra is racist.
At least it is according to chancellor for the California Community Colleges, Eloy Ortiz Oakley.
Who knew ?
Lotsa stuff is racist.
Hosing feces off of sidewalks…racist.
Trying to keep terrorists from murdering your family…racist.
Wanting to be able to keep drug smugglers from waltzing across the border unchecked…racist.
Being white…racist.
And being a cis-gendered, hetero-normative, white male nationalist climageddon-denying free-market-loving job-having anti-delusionalist not-stoned-out-at-all-times Trump voter?
I think you oughta be able to guess…you are and always have been a responsible-for-every-single-bad-thing-ever-invented transhomoislamophobic RACIST!
I don’t know if the maths is right, but it misses the point.
This is a shift away from “extreme weather” because that didn’t really work out, and that was a shift from “it’s going to get really, really hot” because that didn’t work out very well either.
And sea-level scare stories are much, much better because who can tell whether they are true or not? We can all tell whether it’s much hotter much more often that it used to be and we call tell whether it keeps flooding or droughting (should be a word!), but how can I tell if the sea is rising ever so slightly? I can’t so I have to rely on the scientists to tell me.
Between “it’s going to get really, really hot” and “extreme weather”, didn’t we have the Polar Bear scam for a number of years and then we had asthma with the chill’un.
Don’t forget the bee scams. Must not forget the demise of the bees. No pollination, oh, oh, we all starve.
but how can I tell if the sea is rising ever so slightly?
======================
Sea levels are not rising, they are oscillating as can been seen from nautical charts 2-3 hundred years ago. Rocks awash at low tide are still awash 2-3 hundred years later. If seas were rising, these rocks would now be covered at low tide.
Get a British Admiralty chart for your area.($40 new). A rock awash can be recognized as a “:+:” symbol. It was probably last surveyed 200+ years ago. Check the rocks awash at the sea shore in your area at low, low tide (“0” tide). They will still be awash today. The change is so small as to be unnoticeable. If you don’t have a local sea shore to check, why are you even concerned?
Intergovernmental Manuals and Guides 14
Oceanographic
Commission
MANUAL ON SEA LEVEL
MEASUREMENT AND INTERPRETATION
Volume I – Basic Procedures
2.7 LONG-TERM TRENDS
The combination of sea level changes measured by different techniques shows a relatively
rapid rise of sea level from 20,000 years ago, gradually slowing down 8,000 years ago when levels were some 15 metres below those of today. The increase then proceeded more
gradually until present levels were reached some 4,000 years ago. Since that time the
changes have consisted of oscillations of small amplitude.
http://www.psmsl.org/train_and_info/training/manuals/ioc_14i.pdf
No one measures sea level to the millimeter. They take two numbers with an error of several inches 20 years apart, then get the difference and divide by 20. However, the error is still several inches, and thus, there is zero detectable sea level rise in the past 20 years. If you have a tide gauge, the latency response and float weight is dampening the signal, and as such is not sea level. Sea level has no actual meaning. There are tides, waves, chop, swell, and foam. Sea level is a concept that a probabilistic thing is an actual high precision thing. Light pointing to the position of an electron in orbit in an atom.
Donald Kasper July 22, 2017 at 12:50 pm
Thanks, Donald, but man, you couldn’t possibly be more wrong.
The modern SEAFRAME tidal measuring stations, in place in the South Pacific for over twenty years now, use a “stilling well” and an acoustic sounder to measure the actual sea level every six minutes to an accuracy of ± one mm.
Like I said … you’re not just wrong. You are on another planet.
Please do a google search before you post. It will save you much grief.
w.
if donald had said global sea level he would have been correct.
Willis, does a sea level measurement every six minutes consider tides?
OK, Willis, I’ll bite. How many such stations are in use around the world, and what percentage of global sea surface do they cover?
IIRC Willy Soon has a long youtube video pointing out the many difficulties in determining *global* sea level rise.
Should Donald Kasper’s “No one” be amended to “almost no one” or “not enough stations to be statistically significant”?
Are you comfortable with the claim that levels can be measured to the millimeter? If so, why?
That last line should read, “Are you comfortable with the claim that levels can be measured *globally* to the millimeter? If so, why?
Here’s a schematic of an (old-fashioned) tide gauge:
http://www.sealevel.info/tide_gauge_schematic.html
The stilling well averages out the waves, but not the tides. There are no waves, chop, swell or foam in a stilling well.
As long as you don’t let the pipe fill up with mud, or let the hole near the bottom get plugged, and as long as you keep the instrument running which measures the water level in the pipe, there’s not much that can go wrong. Tide gauges are simple, elegant, precise, and reliable.
19th century gauges used a tide stick, with a human observer reading it on a schedule. That actually worked quite well, because the exact time of high, low & mean tide can be worked out in advance. So we have 150-year-old and even 200-year-old .measurement records which are quite precise and perfectly reliable.
Note that even in the 19th century they had strong incentives to not botch or fudge their readings, because the measurement sites were usually near channels and harbors, and if they didn’t know the correct water levels and accurately predict the tides, ships might run aground!
I trust 19th century tide gauge measurements, done by hand with a tide stick, more than I trust 21st century satellite altimetry, for sea-level measurement.
In the early 20th century they got strip-chart recorders connected to floats, as shown in that diagram, so observers didn’t have to go out in the rain at oh-dark-thirty with a lantern, to read the tide gauges.
Modern gauges use better instrumentation, but the basic operating principle is the same: they just measure the water level in a stilling well.
It really doesn’t matter very much whether you have a human being reading a tide stick on a schedule synchronized with the tides, or a float attached to a stripchart recorder, or an acoustical sounder phoning home its readings 10x per hour. You get pretty much the same numbers for MSL, HWL, LWL, etc. It is very easy to tell that the system for reading the water level doesn’t bias the data: just keep an old-fashioned tide stick in the well, and check it against your stripchart recorder or acoustic sounder readings, for consistency.
One other detail is worth mentioning: The tide gauge locations — and, most importantly, their elevations — are precisely referenced via surveying techniques to nearby geodetic markers. So if your tide gauge gets blown away in a storm, or even if it has been gone for years, in most cases when a new gauge is installed you can still have confidence that its measurements are consistent with the old instrument.
The contrasts with temperature measurements and satellite altimetry are pretty obvious:
With temperatures you never know when the minimum and maximum will be reached, so even if you used a min-max thermometer your time-of-observation (“TOBS“) could introduce a bias (“correction” of which is an opportunity for introducing other biases). That’s not a problem for sea-level measurement with tide gauges.
With temperatures, the surroundings can greatly influence the readings. That’s generally not a problem for sea-level measurement with tide gauges (though channel silting and dredging can sometimes have an effect on some locations, especially on tidal range).
With temperature measurements, changes in instrumentation, or even in the paint used on the Stevenson Screen, can change your readings. Analogous issues affect satellite altimeters, too, as is obvious by the differences between the measurements from different satellites. But it’s not a significant problem for sea-level measurement with tide gauges.
Also, unlike tide gauges, which are referenced to stable benchmarks, there’s no trustworthy reference frame in space, to determine the locations of the satellites with precision. NASA is aware of this problem. In 2011 NASA proposed (and re-proposed in 2014 / 2015) a new mission called the Geodetic Reference Antenna in SPace (GRASP). The proposal is discussed here, and its implications for measuring sea-level are discussed here. But, so far, the mission has not flown.
Satellite measurements are affected/distorted by mid-ocean sea surface temperature changes, and consequent local steric changes, which don’t affect the coasts.
The longest tide-gauge measurement records are about 200 years long (with a few gaps)! The longest satellite measurement records are about ten years, and the combined record from all satellites is less than 25 years, and the measurements are often inconsistent from one satellite to another:
http://sealevel.info/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust_2016-05-24.png
With temperatures, researchers often go back and “homogenize” (revise) the old data, to “correct” biases that they believe might have distorted the readings. The same thing happens with satellite altimetry data. But it doesn’t happen with sea-level measurement by a tide gauge.
Unlike tide-gauge measurements (but very much like temperature indices), satellite altimetry measurements are subject to sometimes-drastic error and revision, in the post-processing of their data (h/t Steve Case):
http://www.sealevel.info/U_CO_SLR_rel2_vs_rel1p2_SteveCase.png
http://www.sealevel.info/2061wtl.jpg
Those are graphs of the same satellite altimetry data, processed differently. Do you see how much the changes in processing changed the reported trend? In the case of Envisat (the last graph), revisions/corrections which were made up to a decade later tripled the reported trend.
Oops, left out the image link, for the tide gauge “schematic” — sorry!
http://www.sealevel.info/tide_gauge_diagram_01.jpg
Curious George July 22, 2017 at 3:56 pm
It measures whatever the sea height is at that moment. The removal of the tidal components is essential for determining the underlying sea level, but it is done mathematically afterwards. This is why we need fifty years or so of data to get an accurate answer.
w.
Someone said there was sea level rise but that tectonic rebound was negating the effect. Sounds good to me. And the shore at the north end of Lake Michigan is rebounding at a rate of 1 inch per century. Rebound from glaciers. My head hurts!
effinayright July 22, 2017 at 4:55 pm
Thanks for biting, Effing. SEAFRAME stations are in place across the Pacific, in something like twenty sites. However, they are very important sites, as they have a co-located GPS. So they can give extremely accurate data.
Around the world, the accuracy is less … but still generally good.
Indeed, there are many.
Nope. He was clueless. These SEAFRAME stations have contributed greatly to our understanding of sea levels in the Pacific … which is a BIG part of the planet.
In addition, the newer NOAA stations use the same technology to take mm-accurate measurements every six minutes. There’s a good discussion of these issues here here.
Finally, remember, Donald’s claim was that to get mm accuracy “They take two numbers with an error of several inches 20 years apart, then get the difference and divide by 20.” … NOT.
That question is a bit more complex than it seems. Can we measure sea level from a satellite to the nearest mm? Yes, with repeated passes, but we are operating at the outer fringes of reliability. To start with, we have to measure the distance to one part per billion … and that is tough even on a good day with a following wind.
The problem, however, is generally not in the instantaneous measurements. As with the MSU satellite data, the problem is unknown slow drift of both the instruments and the satellite. This makes the trends suspect.
However, this doesn’t obviate the use of such data. For example, slow drift doesn’t affect say the comparison of how high the sea surface is at point X versus point Y today.
Regards,
w.
If sea level is global then one sea level gauge is enough.
Jimmy Haigh wrote, “If sea level is global then one sea level gauge is enough.”
Sea-level trends can be measured at various places. At at least 3/4 of those places, sea-level is rising. If you average those trends you get something which could be called something like, “globally averaged mean sea-level trend.”
Since the average is (slightly) rising, you could also call it “globally averaged mean sea-level rise.”
That’s kind of a mouthful, so it tends to get shortened to something like, “global sea-level rise,” or “GMSL rise,” or “GMSLR,” or “sea-level rise,” or even just “SLR.”
It doesn’t mean sea-level is global, it means the average is global.
It is nice to see Willis mostly agreeing with Donald Kasper.
We don’t live in a world of averages, it is a world of dynamic equilibrium.
Actual sea level measurement variation should look something like this:
If we can raise the sea level a little bit we will have a green Nile Valley again! Maybe?
We don’t have to raise sea-level for that, Steve. CO2 is especially beneficial to plants when water is in short supply, so the planet is greening, especially in arid regions:
1. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
2. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
3. https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/04/27/us-drought-record-low/100971018/
“We can all tell whether it’s much hotter much more often that it used to be ”
Er, no. You cannot tell if it is getting warmer this way because we have weather. Some of the hottest spells in my lifetime were in the late 1970s, which was the coldest of the cooling phase. Cold snaps can also occur during warm phases. It’s weather. A given summer might appear to have been hotter just because, that summer, you might have had a job that had you outside more than usual, or traveling more than usual, etc. Nope, the temperature changes of the last 70 years are not changes we can detect from overt experience.
higley7,
While I can readily agree that “the temperature changes of the last 70 years are not changes we can detect from overt experience”, I am extremely reluctant to agree that average global surface temperatures could rise something like 3C and “we” would not be able to detect it had occurred.
Willis and Phoenix44,
You’re both on to Phil. We all know that alarmists like to predict well out into the future (of course Phil screwed up in ’88 by calling out 2018). But I think Phil is going to count on another of nature’s phenomena to cover for what Phoenix44 postulates about sea level rise – Phil is going to count on subsidence to appear to be sea level rising as follows: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2616714/Forget-global-warming-groundwater-extraction-causing-megacities-SINK-beneath-sea-level.html#ixzz30SUGdrxy
– AND – http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27202192 (sorry about referencing the BBC…)
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Abraham Lincoln
Bottom line: you can fool a hell of a lot of people, especially when the MSM are so willing.
Clay Sanborn July 22, 2017 at 12:28 pm
Er … um … who is Phil?
In mystery,
w.
Well, there is the recently retired directer of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia U; Phil Jones, and one suspects a conflation of prominent names in the CAGW campaign may have occurred . . perhaps because I am myself very bad with names, so to speak . .
” “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” ”
And the usually unstated corollary
If you’re caught trying to fool people then everything you’ve said previously or will say in the future is subject to scepticism
Willis,
I had a 67 Year old brain fart; I was thinking Hansen’s first name was Phil. I was talking about James Hansen. So sorry. After following WUWT since early 2007, I am familiar with the names of many alarmists and many skeptics. As JohnKnight correctly deduced, my brain cross-wired on “Phil” of Jones fame. James, Phil, Mike…they’re all one dementianal to me.
BTW – I love reading all your entries Willis. I’ve met only a few true characters in my life, and while I have not met you, I am confident you are another. That’s a compliment BTW, in the vein of Hemmingway.
Clay S.
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Lincoln. Pogo’s corollary: “But if you can do it just once, it lasts for four years.” My corollary: “Or, in Obama’s case, if you can do it twice, it lasts for eight years.”
Shouldn’t that be: “If you fool enough of the people then it lasts for 4 years” for Pogo’s corollary?
This is the point in State of Fear where they start manufacturing disasters …
Thanks, great book, probably the best I ever read.
I remember the scenario you mentioned and thought it was an exaggeration at the time, boy was I wrong.
5×10^21 J/K is the heat capacity of the air of the atmosphere (“specific” is used for per unit of mass).
333 J/g is required to melt ice so the equivalent amount of ice melting is 1.5×10^19 g/K.
There is about 1.5×10^24 g of ocean so an extra 1.5×10^19 g more is an increase of 10^-5 of volume. Half the volume is above 3000 m so as a rough guess, we get 3000 m x 10^-5 as the sea level rise equivalent to land ice melting instead of the atmosphere warming 1 degree C, which equals 30 cm or 10 mm per year since 1988.
Hansen could claim 1/3 of a degree off because of it but how much of that 3 mm per year was thermal expansion (and how much of it was real)?
4.13 x 10^17 joules / KM^3. What does that number represent? That is the energy it takes to convert one cubic kilometer of continental ice from -30 °C to water at 4 °C. Willis seems to have missed that Continental Ice Sheets are quite cold.
Useful information:
heat of fusion of water = 334 J/g
heat of vaporization of water = 2257 J/g
specific heat of ice = 2.09 J/g•°C
specific heat of water = 4.18 J/g•°C
Step 1: Heat required to raise the temperature of ice from -30 °C to 0 °C (for temp see average profile temp Antarctica) http://www.pnas.org/content/99/12/7844.full
Use the formula q = mcΔT Per Kg 1000 x 2.09 x 30 = 62,700 Joules
Step 2: Heat required to convert 0 °C ice to 0 °C water
q = m•ΔHf Per Kg 1000 x 334 = 334,000 Joules
Step 3: Heat required to raise the temperature of 0 °C water to 4 °C water
q = mcΔT per Kg 1000 x 4.18 x 4 = 16,720 Joules
Total -30 oC ice to +4 oC water per Kg = 413,420 Joules / KG
Where
q = heat energy
m = mass
c = specific heat
ΔT = change in temperature
ΔHf = heat of fusion
One metric tonne of water has a volume of one cubic meter (1 tonne water(1,000 KG = 1 m³)
One gigatonne of water has a volume of one billion cubic meters, or one cubic kilometer.(1 Gt water = 1 km³) Of course, one gigatonne of ice has a greater volume than one gigatonne of water. But it will still have a volume of 1 km³ when it melts.
413420 Joules/KG x 1000 KG/t x 1,000,000,000 t/KM^3 = 4.1342E+17 Joules / KM^3
But you say ‘DD’ how does this compare to the well known ‘Hiroshima bomb’ measurement.
By today’s standards the two bombs dropped on a Japan were small — equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT in the case of the Hiroshima bomb and 20,000 tons in the case of the Nagasaki bomb. (Encyclopedia Americana. Danbury, CT: Grolier, 1995: 532.)
In international standard units (SI), one ton of TNT is equal to 4.184E+09 joule (J)
Hiroshima bomb TNT 15000 x TNT to Joules 4.18E+09 = Joules total 6.276E+13 =>
or 1 KM^3 of ice melt (4.1342E+17 / 6.276E+13) = # HiroBmb per Km^3 = 6587
That is correct. Place one Hiroshima bomb in a grid every 54 meters apart to melt the ice.
How compare to the old scare story about all that ‘Ocean Heat Content Hidden Heat’? Where Ocean heat content was increased by 2.60 X 10E23 Joules since 1970.
So 2.60 X 10E23 Joules / 4.1342 x 10E17 Joules/KM^3 = 628,930 KM^3
Well that sounds like a lot of ice, but Antarctica has between 26 and 30 million and Greenland has 2.5 million of those KM^3, so in reality it works out to 628,930 / 30,000,000 = 2.1% of the total. So did it melt the ice or heat the deep ocean?
DD More July 24, 2017 at 10:15 am
I do love how folks think they know what goes on in my mind … in fact, I left out the additional ice warming calculations deliberately and after some thought.
First, I had no information on the average temperature of the glaciers scattered around the world.
Second, while I can estimate the average temperature of the Greenland Ice Cap (about -30°C, it’s high altitude), the average temperature of the Ice Cap is NEVER above freezing any month of the year …
Third, Hansens claim was not that it was the warming and melting of the ice that would cool the planet. He said it was the melting of the ice that did it.
Fourth, it’s a difference that makes no difference. Consider: suppose somehow I could get the average temperature of the ice surface worldwide, glaciers, ice sheets, ice caps. Let’s say it’s -15°C. It’s not -30°C, only the high ice caps are that cold.
Now from above, without including ice warming, the equivalent change in downwelling radiation is 0.01 W/m2.
And if we include ice warming? It would be equivalent to a change in downwelling radiation of 0.011 W/m2 … be still my beating heart, what an enormous change you’ve made, DD …
DD, next time instead of making accusations about what I’ve missed, perhaps you might ASK ME IF I HAD CONSIDERED ICE WARMING.
Then I could have just answered that I had considered it, and discussed why I hadn’t included it, and you wouldn’t look like a jerk …
w.
I believe that most of the ice that has ‘melted’ wasn’t because of a warmer atmosphere. Rather, it was because the rate of accretion (from snow, etc) was less than the rate of ice loss through calving, followed by melting because sea water tends to be warmer than ice.
While the heat for water temperature also comes from the sun, I expect that’s a much slower process than heating the atmosphere..
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
It is unfair to introduce facts in a good story. 🙂
Everyone knows that ice cools a drink, and few can keep up with all those big numbers.
It is the same with the heat going in the oceans. If you convert it to Watt/m2 it is hardly detectable.
And since the heat to melt the floating ice comes out of that warmer ocean water (9/10 0r 10/11 underwater) the ocean water cools, and shrinks so the sea level will go down if it melts the floating ice.
How is the Greening of Greenland going these days Svend; or did they let you go back to some warmer place ?
In any case it’s good to see your shingle post here again.
George
Assimilate!! Assimilate!! Assimilate! Resistance is futile! Is it time for the Daleks to show up yet? Well, that was fun.
I think I told my mother when I was in high school (before most of you children were born) that we were heading for an ice age, after suffering through three prolonged, beastly central Midwestern winters that were so cold the car doors froze shut. Of course, that prediction by me was refuted the following winter by a warm Thanksgiving, a mild, if snowy Christmas, average snowfall in January, and a beautiful spring with lots of rain at just the right time. Bumper crops of corn, soybeans and wheat every year, too.
It’s just weather. We have to live with it. But I do like Thornton Wilder’s take on it in the first act of ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’. The mammoths are crossing the river! Break up the furniture and throw it on the fire!
I think a lot of men of science have a little bit of HG Wells in them – they love to speculate – often wild, dramatic science fiction scenarios – and most often in the not-quite distant future. This is where sci-fi pop culture comes from. But because this is coming from academia – or more properly, ‘science’ – it’s taken seriously by those who set policy.
All opportunistic agendas aside, I think this where all these repetitive, generational scares come from – or at least, this is the ‘why’ of the forms they take – the kernel of the idea that sprouts all the rest – scientists just spit-balling about the future.
Then the propaganda machine mutates that kernel into Godzilla and… well, you got AGW.
And after AGW eventually runs its course, there will be something else – it will start the same way, all the exploitive types will pick it up and run with it, and the pattern will repeat again. And every now and then, one of these cultural paranoias will metastasize to the point where acting on it actually threatens the larger society.
Every politician knows not to answer a journalist’s hypothetical question. For a good reason.
– Niels Bohr
Politicians know that. They don’t do it because as soon are your opponents can say how many wrong predictions you made, your political career is all but over. As nearly every prediction we make about the future is likely to be wrong.
Willis, thank you. I dare to predict Dr. Hansen’s reaction: What Mr. (not Dr.) Eschenbach wrote has not been peer-reviewed, and therefore it is a worthless drivel, even though factually correct.
When you realize that Hansen’s work was peer reviewed, what does that say about peer review?
That peer review if worse than drivel.
It (peer review) goes peer shaped …
This is what Phil Jones had to say about his peer reviews:
«I do many of my reviews on travel. I have a feel for whether something is wrong – call it intuition. If analyses don’t seem right, look right or feel right, I say so. Some of my reviews for CC [the Journal Climatic Change] could be called into question!» – UEA’s renowned Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Phil Jones
http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/2486.txt
Practically all of Hansen’s work was pal reviewed!
That the reviewers are his peers?
Willis’s work here is reviewed in two distinct ways. Firstly, thousands of visitors to this blog peer at it. And secondly, it’s reviewed by Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. This adds up to a truly peerless peer review system.
I’m always happy to be reviewed by Lord Monckton, come for the humor, stay for the divine madness. Toss Viscount Matt Ridley in with the reviewers, one of the world’s most insightful humans … but wouldn’t that make it a peerful peer review system?
w.
I think most people don’t understand latent heat, so Hansen’s on a safe bet here. Ask 100 people what happens to water when ice melts and most will say it gets warmer (maybe I’m wrong and my estimation of humanity is too low). Offer the same 100 a G&T with ice cubes each and they’ll get it I suppose…
Ice melts when SOMETHING ELSE gives up heat. Latent heat doesn’t warm up anything. The ice can’t melt before something else supplies that latent heat to cause a phase change.
G
This is incredible. He would have flunked my physics class. Well, at least the part about heat, no telling what would have happened when we got to levers. Did he have any chemistry?
Never mind, it is obvious, he keeps the freezer door open to cool his house.
“I’ve created a variable called “latent” and set it to the latent heat of melting for water at zero salinity and zero pressure:. ”
Do you mean zero pressure(absolute) or zero pressure(Gauge)?
Ocean pressure only, not ocean plus air.
w.
A separate and similar calculation is, to hold back all that warming (which Hansen claims is what has happened), will take ‘x’ tons of ice melt per year.
This calculation will give a similarly ridiculous figure. If indeed that amount of ice has been permanently melted, then the sea level rise to go with it is easily calculated. This will provide an independent path to proof: has the SLR been equal to the amount of water he claims has to be melted to ‘hold back’ the temperature that much for 30 years?
I keep a little crib sheet of that sort of conversion factors, here:
http://www.sealevel.info/conversion_factors.html
One of the factoids there is that the addition of 362 Gt (metric gigatonnes) of meltwater to the oceans would raise sea-level by one millimeter.
At the coasts, global sea-level rise is averaging just under +1.5 mm/year. So 500 Gt/yr is at least in the ballpark. My guess is that it’s probably a bit high, but not ridiculously so.
I agree with tty. Antarctica grounded ice accumulation and loss are very, very close to being in perfect balance. Whether Antarctica is actually gaining or losing ice mass is unknown.
This NASA study reported that the Antarctic ice sheets are gaining rather than losing, mass:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses
Based on CryoSat, McMillan (2014) found Antarctica is losing 79 to 241 Gt/yr of ice, though that was based on only 3 years of data.
Based on GRACE, Shepherd (2012) concluded that Antarctica ice mass change since 1992 has averaged -71 +/- 83 Gt/yr, which means they couldn’t tell whether it’s actually gaining or losing ice mass.
Based on ICESat, Zwally (2012) found that Antarctica is gaining ice mass: +27 to +59 Gt/yr (averaged over five years), or +70 to +170 Gt/yr (averaged over 19 years).
The range from those various studies, with error bars, is from +170 Gt/yr to -241 Gt/yr, which is equivalent to just -0.47 to +0.67 mm/yr sea-level change.
That’s less than 3 inches of sea-level change per century. In other words, although we don’t know whether Antarctica is gaining or losing ice, we do know the rate, either way, is so tiny that it’s currently having a negligible effect on sea-level and on Antarctica’s total ice sheet mass.
The IPCC’s AR4 report – Table 10.7
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-6-5.html#table-10-7
said Antarctica is contributing negatively to sea level rise for all six scenarios.
daveburton, thank you for your comments and the link to your analysis of costal SL tide guages.
So, 1.5 mm per year SL rise and ZERO acceleration and ZERO correlation with CO2. It is all very Shakspearian; ” Much ado about Nothing”.
One of the interesting things about the Zwally study article is that it exposes the desperate desire within the observers. They found ice mass gains Antarctica, yet they keep touting non representative exceptions. Clearly if you only measure increased flows of floating ice at the bottom of the glacier, without looking at the top of the glacier, you might conclude “OMG” Antarctica is losing ice. By measuring the most variable tip of the warmest, northernmost locations of the West Antarctica peninsula, as opposed to looking at the actual entirety of the glaciers and the rest of the huge continent, you might be able to make a better case for panic.
But physics (and logic) dictates that glaciers flow faster when more snow is falling on the land based glacier, therefore providing a bigger downhill push. But we almost never hear that in the more hysterical articles about sea level rise and melting ice. In this article, you can easily detect NASA’s editorial alarmist regret about their own conclusions, and some even from Zwally himself. Here are a few examples of verbiage showing that.
Zwally leads with a statement that runs exactly contrary to his ultimate conclusion: “We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” before stating what the study actually found: “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.”
Toward the end of the article, Zwally throws in several gratuitous alarmist speculations, nee predictions: But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years—I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.” It’s not turtles all the way down, it’s weasels. This reminds me of that very funny point in the movie Napoleon Dynamite where Uncle Rico, who’s now about 35 years old, living in his van and has been practicing his football passing skills for almost 20 additional years, laments “if only I could go back to 1985 AND the coach would put me in the game, I know I could have won the game and we could have taken state.” Not only does he want one impossible thing, he wants two. But I digress. Back to the article.
The photo of a glacier running out into what looks like an ice shelf has a caption desperately stating, (again, opposite to the headline and the actual study findings): “Still, areas of the continent, like the Antarctic Peninsula photographed above, have increased their mass loss in the last decades.”
In other words, we measured mass increases, but we want to sell you on the idea of eventual mass losses.
500 billion tonnes of ice melted per year….
but Greenland gained over 600 billion tons just this year
Not nearly that much. You also have to take calving into account you know. But it seems virtually certain that Greenland will have a net positive mass balance this year.
Yeah and presumably more icebergs in the North Atlantic, a sign of global cooling.
The very definition of innumerate.
Just because Hamson made a bad prediction 30 years ago
does not mean his new climate prediction for 30 years out is wrong.
The new prediction could be the best prediction in the history of the world.
Or the worst.
But it could only be right because it was a lucky guess.
Because no one knows exactly what controls the climate.
Even Hamson.
Make enough predictions, and eventually some will be right.
Every astrologist knows that.
Just because Hamson made a bad prediction 30 years ago
does not mean his new climate prediction for 30 years out is wrong.
==============
guesses are not like a coin toss, where each toss is independent of the other, with the same odds of landing heads of tails.
In the case of “guessing” the future, some people actually are worse than others. In large part these people are called “Experts”. When “Experts” have been found to be wrong in the past, their odds of being wrong in the future are substantially increased. That is what makes them “Experts”. You can rely upon the accuracy of their predictions to help shape your own predictions.
Correct Richard, on all counts.
What Hansen wants is misplaced concreteness attributed to his predictions on the basis of his high visibility and asserted authority.
His predictions may be spot on through the range of 0-100% correct. So far, his average is 0%. When his current and possible future predictions are also proven 0% correct, readers will (possibly) see a decades-long emerging pattern, clearer than a sunspot cycle, clearer than the Pears 100% soap with which we should metaphorically wash out his mouth.
Every astrologist knows that.
============
Astrological techniques are used to predict the ocean tides with great accuracy.
You cannot predict the tides using first principles as is done in climate models, because like climate the ocean tides are chaotic. Even the IPCC recognizes this, which is why climate models make projections not predictions. And projections have no predictive value.
Heck! Even their predictions have not predictive value!
Thanks for that insight ferd, I’ll follow it up.
By the way Kepler’s day job was weather astrologer, agricultural predictions had real value.
So do prognosticators.
Especially Hansen!
Just read his bio in Wikipedia. It explains a lot.
His degrees are in physics and astronomy. He did serious research on the atmosphere of Venus. Venus is the poster child for run-a-way greenhouse effect. He has tried to use his insights gained from the research to the question of Earth climate.
It is ludicrous to compare Venus and Earth climate systems. Venus does not have our weather system, receives much greater heat from the sun, has an entirely different atmosphere, and has no oceans. The latter have a profound impact on our climate, as he has just acknowledged to explain the failure of his simple climate model. That is to say, he seems to have ignored the ocean!
It is almost certain that such interplanetary comparisons, no matter how inappropriate, were done in attempts to drum up support for his Venus research years ago. I remember this meme well. We were going to get insight into Earth by studying the other planets, at great cost, of course.
How’s that working out for you?
What a joke.
“Hansen began his career studying Venus, which was once a very Earth-like planet with plenty of life-supporting water before runaway climate change rapidly transformed it into an arid and uninhabitable sphere enveloped in an unbreathable gas.” [From NY Mag Intelligencer]
He must be much older than I am. I don’t remember any of this.
Venus having been like Earth is 99.99% science fiction.
Sheri
Your wrong!
It’s round after all and circles the same sun we do.
Seems to me Hansen early in his career was studying global cooling scenarios in the early 1970s. Or at least the models he created were. Stephen Schneider involved in this glorious study…
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/05/flashback-hansens-climate-model-says.html
Venus doesn’t have too much ice, either. If he wants to talk about ice, perhaps he should study Mars. It has lots of CO2 as well, even CO2 ice!
Mars, on a numerical basis, has more molecules of CO2 than has Earth, by an order of magnitude.
Further, because of the smaller diameter of the planet, the molecules of CO2 are more closed packed such that the chances of a photon radiated by a molecule of CO2 on Mars being absorbed by another molecule of CO2 is greater on Mars than it is on Earth.
Despite that, there appears to be no measurable GHE on Mars.
richard verney July 22, 2017 at 5:45 pm
Huh … thanks, Richard, I never knew that. It may have to do with the lack of water (clouds, evaporation, etc). For those interested the NASA Mars datasheet is here.
w.
richard verney:
You say
which is true.
And you say
which is also true.
But then you add
which is mistaken.
Mars is so cold that its CO2 atmosphere freezes on its polar winter surface, Each polar region is in summer when the other is in winter. The solid CO2 sublimes to gas in Spring but then freezes to solid on the other polar region.
CO2 molecules do not behave as greenhouse gas molecules when they are part of a frozen solid mass, but they are “more closely packed” than the gaseous CO2 molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere. And the great bulk of the CO2 molecules which form most of the atmosphere of Mars exist as frozen solid CO2 at any time.
Richard
Richard Verney says: “Despite that, there appears to be no measurable GHE on Mars.”
That doesn’t seem right to me. Mars is warmer than our Moon.
The GHE also depends on the lapse rate, which is much smaller on Mars than on Earth, so it isn’t at all surprising that CO2 has a smaller effect on Mars than on Earth (if you understand how the GHE actually works)
which was once a very Earth-like planet
===============
Climate model speculation. Highly unlikely given the 90 atmosphere’s surface pressure and the resulting lapse rate.
Venus has the same pressure as earth at 50km altitude. The additional predicted surface warming due to lapse rate is thus given as:
predicted:
h*g(venus)/Cp(CO2@500K) = 50 km * (8.9 / 1.0) C/km = 445 C warmer than earth’s surface temp.
actual:
tempo earth = 15 C
temp venus = 462 C
actual diff = 447 C
Whoops. Formatting error. My comment should have read:
I am not sure about that, but Schneider was involved in a study assessing the impact of CO2 and the impacts of aerosols.
Schneider (of GISS) in 1971 published a paper in Science in which he calculated that increasing CO2 by a factor of 8 would result in less than 2 degC warming.
At the time NASA/GISS thought that Climate Sensitivity to CO2 was low. This was not surprising given that it was at that time accepted that the Northern Hemisphere had cooled by about 0.5 degC (some assessments were 0.7degc) from the highs of the 1940s.
Thus the background was that there had been significant increase in CO2 between 1940 to 1971 yet the temperatures had fallen by about 0,5degC such that Climate Sensitivity to CO2 must be low, whereas it was thought that Climate Sensitivity to aerosols (which were causing dimming) was high.
Those “500 billion tons” are definitely on the high side. It seems likely that the Greenland Ice cap is losing about 200 billion tons per year (though not this year), but the loss from Antarctica, if any, is extremely dubious.
The raw GRACE data isn’t significantly different from zero, so in practice the ice-loss from Antarctica is equal to the GIA adjustment used, which is exceedingly uncertain, but perhaps somewhere between 50 and 150 billion tons:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5111427/
The only non-GRACE measurement is from ICESAT which resulted in a positive mass balance. Radar measurements are only slightly affected byh GIA but suffers from other uncertainties, e. g. even slight inhomogenities in snow density can strongly affect the results.
Even the Greenland figure isn’t set in stone since the GIA for central Greenland can’t be checked by measurements (no exposed rocks) and the lithosphere under Greenland is known to be inhomogenous. And as I said, no ice loss this year:
If he is using Grace, he’s sunk. But we know that….
“2018-2168” ?
Just a little error?
Very good job, Willis.
Hansen doesn’t seem to bother with doing that sort of arithmetic.
I’m reminded of the caption for this article about an interview with Prof. Freeman Dyson, America’s most illustrious living scientist: “Climatologists are no Einsteins, says his successor”
http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2013/04/climatologists_are_no_einstein.html
The prediction that Climate Change will cause stronger and more frequent extreme weather events is a central Tenet Of The Climate Faith. In Hansen’s 2009 book, “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity” (how’s that for an alarmist title?), he claimed on p.250 that global warming would warm higher latitude oceans less than lower latitudes, because meltwater would keep the higher latitudes cool, and the increased temperature difference between high and low latitudes would cause stronger storms.
https://www.amazon.com/Storms-My-Grandchildren-Catastrophe-Humanity/dp/1608192008/
Page 250 is not part of the free preview on Amazon, but here’s Hansen on Letterman, plugging his book and making the same claim, starting at 7 minutes 25 seconds:
Hansen said that the “increasing temperature gradient [between high and low latitudes] is going to drive stronger storms” as lower latitudes warm faster than higher latitudes.
Now that just about everyone agrees that high latitudes will warm more than low latitudes (which the glass-half-empty crowd calls “polar amplification”), I’m waiting for Hansen to predict weaker storms.
And waiting. And waiting. How long do you think I’ll have to wait?
Traditionally, the brightest kids do mathematical physics, others do solid state physics or plasma physics, etc, and, finally, some do climatology.
“He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches. He who cannot teach, practices climatology”
“A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.”
I think if I was a bit brighter as a college student, I would have gone into solid state. There is just no money in theoretical cosmology, and what I am doing now is much more grounded.
“Traditionally, the brightest kids do mathematical physics, others do solid state physics or plasma physics, etc, and, finally, some do climatology.”
The ones who are not afraid to get their hands dirty do physical chemistry…and everything else.
That’s an awesome interview. Note, Will Happing is now the Presidential Science advisor. Maybe we will start to see some sanity.
Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, Prof. Will Happer is not the Presidential Science Advisor, at least not yet.
* * * CORRECTION * * *
I wrote, “… about everyone agrees that high latitudes will warm less than low latitudes…”
I meant exactly the opposite: “… about everyone agrees that high latitudes will warm more than low latitudes…”
Oh how I hate it when my typos invert my meaning! 🙁
Fixed, Dave. Like you, I hate typos, especially that kind.
w.
THANK YOU!
…and ” Still waiting for Greenhose”
In honor to John Daly.
I guess the predictions by Hansen in 1988 formed part of the basis for the early perspectives by IPCC as evident in this report of the second session of IPCC: Report of the second session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 28June1989.
“In welcoming the delegates to the UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program) Headquarters … The Executive Director of UNEP, hailed the fruitful alliance between WMO (World Meteorological Organization) and UNEP. The firm commitment of prof. Obasi, the Secretary-General of WMO, coupled with the determination of UNEP leadership, has resulted in a partnership which is helping to unify the scientific and policy-making communities of the world to lay the foundation for effective, realistic and equitable action on climate change.”
…
“The Executive director stated that the impacts of climate change and global warming would have serious consequences for humanity. In Egypt alone, global warming could flood much of the Nile Delta and Drown 70 centuries of civilization in less than one, and could inundate one fifth of the nations arable land.”
…
“It would be desirable for the Panel´s report to be ready by august 1990 for presentation to the Second World Climate Conference and to the United Nations General Assembly. It should be born in mind that both the governing council of UNEP and the executive Council of WMO expected the first report of IPCC to form the basis for international negotiations on a global convention on climate change. The report can also play a valuable guiding role for the large number of conferences, meetings and symposia on climate change being held all over the world. For all of these reasons, the report should be completed in good time.”
…
“The issuance of the report would only be the beginning of a far more arduous task. To tackle the problem of climate warming effectively, radical changes would be necessary in international relations, trade, technology transfer, and bilateral and multilateral strategies. The panel´s continued work would be the only guarantee of the concerted response to the global threat of climate change”
…
“In his opening remarks , Prof. Bolin said that the primary objective of IPCC, in making its first assessment, is to produce a document which could provide guidelines for the formulation of global policy and which would enable the nations of the world to contribute to this task”
…
“IPCC´s first report will contain the 20-page summaries for policy-makers to be produced by the working groups and an overall integrated summary of these placed in perspective. Professor Bolin suggested that the integrated summary be written by a drafting group consisting of the officers of IPCC and the chairmen of the Working Groups. He asked that this plan of his be enforced by the panel.”
…
“The panel invited interested UN organizations, regional or global intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations and private institutions that wish to to contribute in the matter, to collaborate with appropriate analyses. …. The panel invited the contribution from these organizations in order that its own work may be improved.”
…
We are now 1/3 into the century that was expected to drow 70 centuries of civilization in the Nile Deltain less than one. No doubt, IPCC was extremely biased from the very begining. Imagine the pressure to conform with the prejudice of the leaders. Imagine beeing the one saying: Hold on a moment, how do we know for sure that ….?
Willis,
You said, “Next, I’ve converted joules per square meter per year into total global joules per year by multiplying by 5.11e14, the number of square metres of the earth’s surface.”
Shouldn’t the area of Earth be divided by two, because at any instant only half of the surface is illuminated?
Clyde
Willis corrected for that by dividing the insolation by two.
Clyde, good question. Almost all insolation figures in climate science are given on a 24/7/365 average basis. So “1 W/m2” means a long-term average flux of one W/m2. As a result, there is no need to divide the values by 2. Sorry for the confusion.
w.
According to modern estimates, the surface area of the Earth is approximately 510 million square km (5.1 x 108 km2) or 196,900,000 square miles. Shouldnt the number of meters be 5.1 *10**11
Thanks, Ken. A square km contains 1e+6 square metres.
Your given surface area of 5.1e+8 sq km thus contains 5.1e+14 square metres …
w.
Warmed by a third of a degree. What is the margin of error for measuring the temperature of the earth? This is an important question. Never answered as far as I know.
Hansen vs GISTEMP…
Hansen’s scenarios…
Let us not forget, for many of those 29 years, Hansen himself was in charge of the group the calculated and serially adjusted that red line.
You get a similar result using HadCRU.
I turned off my freezer to see if the melting ice would cool it. Nope. Think Mr Hansen will pay for the spoiled food?
Nope. You did not prove him right.
Ever saw an ice cooler?
Where there is water or ice present on the surface (or in clouds) the surface temperature will always approach the dew point/frost point and the surface will radiate at that temperature. Water vapor (not CO2) delivered from the tropics is controlling the surface temperature of the ice covered Antarctic.
QUESTION: What happened to the catastrophic global warming that you predicted.
BETTER ANSWER: My dog ate it.
Hansen: “I don’t think we’re going to get four or five degrees this century, because we get a cooling effect from the melting ice,” he said last week. “But the biggest effect will be that melting ice.”
Humm, seems like it would have to get warmer to accelerate ice melt, but if ice melting cancels warming, it would slow melting and increase warming, which would accelerate melting which would… (head starting to hurt).
It’s hiding in the ocean depths, except for that part of the heat which is melting ice, therefore cooling the world, which I failed to include in my model, which nonetheless is correct.
CO2 heat is sneaky heat. Sometimes it warms the atmosphere, and other times it melts ice, cooling the atmosphere back down. It can even hide in the deep oceans, undetected, for years, lulling us into thinking it has “paused”. It causes both more powerful, and weaker storms, floods, droughts, and weird weather, giving weathermen fits.
It is Ninja Heat.
Not only the data are adjusted, the ‘predictions’ are too. I wonder when my date of birth is changed into something making me a bit younger.
The big ‘Scam’ by Hansen was when he changed the baseline global temperature from 15C to 14C. Link here.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/fourteen_is_the_new_fifteen.html#ixzz2DtU2RoaG
Even NASA admit that no one knows what the ‘Global Temperature’ actually is.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
If you add the Hansen 1C to the ‘Global Temperature’ it looks to be cooling.
So with nobody actually knowing ‘Global Temperature’ I wonder why so many people are alarmed at a mythical (tenths of a degree) rise or fall of an unknown quantity.
Hi Willis,
# J/yr. “1e3” is to convert kg to tonnes
Should that not be tonnes to kg?
Of course. But the answer is correct, regardless. The real question is, “Why write a computer program to do a simple back-of-envelope calculation?”
I have pal reviewed the calculations – seems right to me 🙂
Energy required to melt ice: J/kg 333427
Mass of ice to melt each year: Tonnes/year 5E+11
Mass of ice to melt each year: kg/year 5E+14
Energy required to melt the ice per year: J/year 1,67E+20
Seconds per year: s/year 31556736
Effect required to melt the ice (J/s=Watt): W 5,28E+12
Area of the earth: m2/earth 5,11E+14
Effect per square meter: W/m2 1,03E−02
Analysis of New Zealand’s tide gauges shows an average trend of 1.3 mm/yr
Range (over average of 54 yr period) is -3.2 mm to 4.0 mm
We are tectonic country
M
Correction need:
From “2018 to 2168” is hundredandfifty years
Fixed, thanks.
w.
Absolutely critical value, a climate prediction time scale must be beyond the scope of anyone reading it still being alive.
I’ll start to prepare in about, oh………….149 years.
So Hansen taxed on …er… tacked on another 150 yrs to his prediction because the energy to melt ice is not available to heat the planet?
Has anyone told him that the energy required to boil the oceans would also not be available to heat the planet?
Maybe he’ll tack on another 150 yrs?
“Say what? That’s so far off it’s not even wrong!”
Given that the boiling oceans “hypothesis” calculations could be 10 orders of magnitude or greater than this, what would that be – not even wronger than wrong ??
You probably covered it all though with the technical terminology – “plethora of piss-poor predictions”.
I’m sure the climate scientist and the MSM will give him a break if they mention it at all.
After all, he was wrong for the right reasons.
I’ve been hearing the world is going to end soon since I was a teenager. Now that I’ve pushed past 60, I no longer give them more than a passing thought. Wisdom…
Regarding “Sea ice is basically unchanged”: Arctic Sea ice is near record low for this time of the year, and Antarctic Sea ice set a record low earlier this year and is currently below average for the time of year. As for how much this affects the calculations, I will have an easier time figuring that out after I get home from work.
Sea ice is moot, it is just floating due to the peculiar nature of hydrogen hydroxide crystallization. Sea ice does little to inhibit glacier calving into icebergs as these are pushed, not pulled into seas/fjords or bays. Ice has little tensile strength.
Sure, sea warming will increase volume but warmer air increases evaporation which is the primary cooling mode of sea water. Primary heating mode is radiation which we assume is constant. Net effect of GHG increase is still a wash with respect to sea temperature.
IMO dihydrogen monoxide not only sounds scarier, but is the correct chemical nomenclature, unless it’s hydrogen oxide. However, to each his own.
Scariest of all is hydrohydroxic acid.
Don’t matter where the ice is when all you’re doing is calculating the energy necessary to melt it.
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Your “record low” statement is simply ridiculous and preposterous.
Arctic sea ice shows no trend since 2007.
I checked how much sea ice melted. I have yet to get a hard and fast figure for tons lost since 1979, but the rate seems nearly an order of magnitude less than the land ice loss rate mentioned in the article of 500 gigatonnes per year.
A true polymath you are, Willis. Numerate wordsmiths are quite rare. Polar opposites of innumerate con artists aka politicians and grant swilling climatologists.
I agree that Hansen is feebly trying to cover up his lie with another lie, but I am not sure I agree with the calculation. Was this the energy needed to convert ice at 0C to water at 0C? If so what about the energy needed to bring that large mass of ice up to 0C for the much colder temperatures that much of it is at presently?
Willis is looking at sea ice which is assumed to be at sea water temperature. Or at least the boundary condition since thermal conductivity is nil. Plus specific heat of water is tiny compared to enthalpy of crystallization.
OK, Makes sense then.
And specific heat of ice is half that of water
Andrew, despite Keith’s claim, I’m looking at land ice. Here’s the thing.
The process of melting ice actually consumes energy, and as a result that energy isn’t available for warming the world. That’s why Hansen can use it for an excuse for the world not warming.
But when you warm up anything else, from ice blocks to tropical beaches, that will be counted when we measure how much the world has warmed. So that’s NOT the energy that Hansen is discussing.
Regards,
w.
Willis’ calculations for ice-melt are correct.
Beyond ice-melt, there is another 0.01 W/m2/year going into land warming and atmosphere warming.
And the big one is ocean warming which is still only 0.5 W/m2/year.
But that is very far off the GHG/Anthro forcing of 2.4 W/m2/year which is supposed to be there in 2017.
And there is supposed to another 0.8C X 2.0 W/m2 of feedbacks like water vapor and cloud reductions showing up.
4.0 W/m2/year should be traceable but only 0.523 W/m2/year is actually showing up.
So, what does Hansen say about how much extra the out-going IR radiation should be now. Did he say that OLR will increase by 3.47 W/m2/year as at 2017???
Well you cannot tell what the climate models predicted for this because they never told anyone what it should have been. If 75% of the forcings just end going back to space without doing anything, then we should have been told that from the very beginning.
Bill, is not the large 0.8C X 2.0 W/m2 of feedbacks like water vapor and cloud reductions admittedly (by the IPCC) of low confidence. (IMV they may even have the sign wrong with regard to W/V cloud feedbacks.)
I didn’t know that fire alarms in cheap whorehouses sounded differently from those in expensive whorehouses or any other structure, but am glad to know that whorehouses have fire alarms. I suppose that in Nevada, they’re required. But are there any cheap whorehouses in Nevada? That would be a surprise.
It’s loud ’cause the walls are so thin, I gotta assume … never paid a professional for it myself, I’m a fan of amateur sports …
w.
Me, either, but my Army buddies who contracted the clap in Mexican border cribs said that there weren’t even floor to ceiling walls, thick or thin, just cubicles. But maybe that’s too cheap of a whorehouse. No doubt you’re right that slightly less cheap ones do indeed have walls, however thin.
It’s nice Hansen has lived long enough to answer for the joke his forecasts turned out to be .
The scary global warming industry has at least learned that lesson so they rebranded to
“climate change ” and personal intimidation tactics and bullying . Deniers .. Slave trade , Tobacco ,
Settled science . Too late though , the public only sees aging chicken little promoters who’s ice free Arctic
pronouncements are proven lies . Too bad so many energy users have died from fuel poverty and financial hardship based on a con job .
Another factor (albeit minor) w/r/t sea level rise: As the oceans ‘rise’, the ocean surface area increases…meaning a constant net ‘inflow’ of meltwater/runoff/etc. will have a decreasing impact on the rate of rise over time. To maintain a steady rate of rise, the inflow would have to grow (to cover the additional surface area). I’m assuming the models account for this, but I have not examined them for this factor.
Theyouk, thanks. While this might have been an issue during the 20-fathom (30 m) sea level rise since the last glacial, it’s nowhere near large enough to affect the modern changes, which are on the order of 8″ (200 mm) per century.
Thanks,
w.
…. per Century ??
Yep. Thanks.
w.
Totally agree, Willis, and it’s certainly a non-factor when basing calculations/predictions on observed reality. The alarmists, on the other hand, ignore this consideration (well, they ignore nearly everything) when they publish predictions of 120 foot sea level rise by 2100. Really enjoy reading your pieces, btw!
Totally agree, Willis, and it’s certainly a non-factor when basing calculations/predictions on observed reality. The alarmists, on the other hand, ignore this consideration (well, they ignore nearly everything) when they publish predictions of 120 foot sea level rise by 2100. Really enjoy reading your pieces, btw!
I can’t help but notice that Hansen’s predictions are taken from a picture of a writeup from Spin magazine referring to a specific paper in the August 20, 1988 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research. It’s not clear how the predictions were made. Were they made from graphs of his scenarios? Did Hansen specifically say “two to five degrees Fahrenheit in the next thirty years”? Is it “unfair use” to quote paywalled journals?
Willis
Thanks for another interesting and thought provoking article. However, I think Hansen might perhaps have been thinking not of the heat required to melt ice but of an indirect effect of ice melting in high northern latitudes,.That is, a freshening in the North Atlantic and, in particular, the Laurentian Sea. Such a freshening would reduce the density of cold surface waters, cutting convective deep water formation and hence weakening the Atlantic meridional overturning circualtion (AMOC). A weakening of the AMOC would lead, at least in some climate models, to substantial cooling Northern Hemisphere cooling, with relatively little effect on SH temperatures. The GISS-E2-R model is particularly susceptible to this effect. Whether or not there is any prospect of it occurring in reality is another matter. I think not this century, at least. IPCC AR5 concluded with high confidence that in the 21st century it is “Very unlikely that the AMOC will undergo a rapid transition”.
The Polar ice melting? Not so fast! A Limerick.
The Icecaps we see at the poles
are growing again, who controls?
With less cold it snows more
makes more ice than before.
Just one of the clouds many roles.
With charts and explanation: https://lenbilen.com/2017/07/22/the-polar-ice-melting-not-so-fast-a-limerick/
You mean to say the “Settled Science” of climate doesn’t even include the latent heat of all the ice that melts?
Willis,
The Abstract for Hansen et. al 2011 in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics says: “Improving observations of ocean heat content show that Earth is absorbing more energy from the Sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum. The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.58±0.15Wm−2 during the 6-yr period 2005–2010, confirms the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change.” So, even if we use that number your 0.01 W/m2 from the melting of the ice he is saying that reducing the planetary energy imbalance from 0.58Wm−2 to 0.57Wm−2 has reduced the potential warming of the earth’s temperature by over two and a half degrees in thirty years. YSM, He actually has a degree in physics?
Yeah, Joe, that’s his claim. It’s based on ocean heat data that (to my examination) is nowhere near accurate or complete enough to support that claim. Especially to two decimal places.
w.
Um, Mr Eschenbach, why don’t you actually look at the original paper, its graphs, and then at actual data before you blather away criticizing it. Your criticism is rather like a thirteen-year-old marking up a poster with crayons.
I think a retraction is in order, as do others. Of course Anthony Watts doesn’t ever retract either, apparently.
hypergeometric July 22, 2017 at 5:03 pm
What, did someone take a dump in your oatmeal this morning? You stupidly assume I haven’t read the original paper, and then based on that asinine assumption, you get all huffy about what you foolishly imagine are my failings.
If you’d done a decent google search (say my name and the name of the paper in question) you would have found my analysis of that very paper here.
I did it 11 years ago, I’d do it differently now, but there it is …
As for your request for a retraction, you can fold that until it’s all corners and place it gently up your fundamental orifice.
However, you’d do well to retract and apologize for your baseless nastiness, your pathetic lack of research, and your puerile assumptions … or not. Your reputation, your choice. Sadly, however, I often find that those hiding behind an alias are happy to attack but rarely apologize … they just pick another alias and move on to their next nastiness.
w.
niclewis July 22, 2017 at 2:15 pm
Nic, good to hear from you. However, that seems quite doubtful, makes the same bad number alarm go off.
First off, if we concentrate the cooling effect by assuming that the ice melts and flows into the Atlantic, the total volume is too small to cool much. Let me get some numbers … OK, here we go, NOAA data.
Area of the North Atlantic = 4.8e+12 square metres
Volume of ice: 500e+6 m3
Sea level rise: 500e+6 m3 / 4.8e+12 m2 * 1000 mm/m = 0.1 mm of additional water on the surface …
So even if it were to be concentrated by a factor of ten from that level, it’s still only 1 mm of additional water on the surface. I’m simply not believing that that will weaken the AMOC.
Finally, what he actually said was that “we get a cooling effect from the melting ice”. Maybe that’s code for the AMOC, but I’m not seeing it.
w.
“Volume of ice: 500e+6 m3”
In your head post it was “500 billion (500e+9) tonnes of ice per year”.
Thanks, Nick. My bad. In fact, I blew the other number as well. The area of the North Atlantic is ten times larger than the value I gave. Combining those new figures (if I haven’t made another mistake) says that if every ice cube that melted anywhere on the planet ended in the North Atlantic it would give us about a 1 cm layer of water … however, that’s not gonna happen.
A more reasonable assumption would be that perhaps the NA gets twice the ice you’d expect given its size. If that’s the case, the layer of water would be about 3 mm thick or so.
I’d still hold that a few mm of fresh water on top of the ocean isn’t going to change a damn thing. Remember that rain falls all across the North Atlantic, on the order of a meter a year or so depending on location.
I simply don’t see how adding another couple of mm of ice melt to that metre of rain is gonna slow the AMOC … what am I missing here?
w.
Nice post, WE. Had not caught Hansen’s blown prediction excuse. Obviously stupid. The other way to show how stupid is to simply observe there has been no acceleration in SLR since 1988 as his excuse would require.
There is a funny backstory to this Hansen saga. As late as 2012, Mann was defending Hansen 1988 in a presentation at Rutgers. Just two problems. 1. Mann overlaid land only when Hansen plainly referred to GisTemp ( land plus ocean). Land only is warmer, removing some of the discrepancy. 2. His comparison chart stopped in 2005, conveniently erasing 7 years of pause. Not even dodgy, just overtly doubly dishonest.
NASA global temp records did not include sea surface temps until 1995.
Hansen used observed land only temps in his 1988 paper – the reference to data therein is Hansen and Lebedef 1987. So, ‘GISTEMP’ at the time was land-only.
The current global data sets combine SSTs with land station data. Hansen’s model was of surface air temps land and ocean (not sea surface). He commented on this, referring to the 1988 model, in a 2006 paper.
“Temperature change from climate models, including that reported in 1988 (12), usually refers to temperature of surface air over both land and ocean. Surface air temperature change in a warming climate is slightly larger than the SST change (4), especially in regions of sea ice. Therefore, the best temperature observation for comparison with climate models probably falls between the meteorological station surface air analysis and the land–ocean temperature index.”
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2006/2006_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
The entire story about the atmosphere being a giant heater is fake anyway. The atmosphere is a cold bath conduction chilling the earth. It’s not a heater and adding more and more light blocking medium into a bath conduction chilling something doesn’t warm it anyway. Anybody who believe that can be made to happen is free to submit their evidence.
Is it your opinion that if all GHGs (including water vapour) were removed from the atmosphere, there would be no change in surface temperature?
As late as 2012, Mann was defending Hansen 1988 in a presentation at Rutgers… Mann overlaid land only when Hansen plainly referred to GisTemp ( land plus ocean). Land only is warmer, removing some of the discrepancy
Gavin Schmidt used GISTEMP land/ocean for his realclimate comparison in the same year. ‘GisTemp’ in 1988 was land-only (it didn’t yet have SST data), but the ’88 model was of air temperatures for the whole globe.
Willis, do you have a link to the article in “Spin” magazine in 1988?
It’s in the article just below the “Climate Scientists Move Global Meltdown from 2018 to 2168” … in the head post.
w.
This is what Hansen predicted: http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen06_fig2.jpg
found here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/comment-page-2/
..
Looks like “Spin” is just spin.
Here are Hansen’s actual numbers. Anybody who wants to debate Hansen’s 1988 predictions should bookmark and/or save these pages.
Temperature predictions (1951 to 1980 baseline, actual observations cut-off as of 1984 so 1985-on is predicted).
http://www.realclimate.org/data/scen_ABC_temp.data
Effective forcings (even Scenario B was +2.47 W/m2 increase from 1958, ridiculous in that he must have calculated it wrong going by the GHG assumptions, ie. climate scientists are always bad at math as in they moved into climate science from other disciplines because their math grades were so bad).
http://www.realclimate.org/data/H88_scenarios_eff.dat
GHG assumptions (Scenario A is actually very close to the actual observations but CH4 is a little high in that Scenario)
http://www.realclimate.org/data/H88_scenarios.dat
PPM in 2015 for each scenario in the 1988 paper:
A: 410 ppm
B: 406 ppm
C: 367 ppm
That would suggest obs should lie between scenarios B and C, closer to B.
Steve McIntyre has a slightly different take, recommending using scenario B.
To the extent that “somewhere between A and B” represents Hansen’s GHG forecast, in that GHG increases appear to have been closer to B than “somewhere between A and B”, it is more reasonable to use B to assess the model performance.
https://climateaudit.org/2008/01/24/hansen-1988-details-of-forcing-projections/
Another factor to consider is that Hansen’s model has a climate sensitivity of 4.2 per doubling CO2 – a bit higher than the mean estimate since 1990.
The exact trajectory of the ‘forcings’ in the model (including CH4, aerosols etc) could not be predicted past 1988, so a direct comparison with what actually happened is quite tricky.
The realclimate figures for Hansen 1988 scenarios are different from the ones I found:
2015 CO2 concentration:
A: 403 ppm
B: 399 ppm
C: 368 ppm
Observed 2015 CO2 concentration is 399.4 ppm.
This dovetails with McIntyre’s take.
Probably worth noting, too, that el Ninos bump up CO2 levels, so 2016 observed level is probably not a good reflection of the 88 model scenarios. 2015 may also be bumped up slightly, as el Nino developed early in that year and persisted throughout, peaking at the end of the year (temp data has a lag of a few months to el Nino).
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml
In Hansens’s paper you can see that their three scenarios were not for three different levels of CO2 to be reached by some target date. They were three different emission scenarios.
Their “worst” (business-as-usual) “scenario A” assumed 1.5% annual growth rate of emissions, and calculated the CO2 level which they thought would result from that.
1.5% growth for 26 years (1988 to 2014) = 47% growth.
In fact, carbon emissions have increased by 66% over that time, an average annual emission growth rate of 1.97%, which is well above Hansen’s Scenario A “worst case.”
The reason CO2 levels have not risen as he predicted is that he didn’t anticipate the extent to which negative feedbacks have curbed the growth in CO2 levels.
His paper predicted that his Scenario A would cause 0.5 °C warming per decade, or 1.5 °C in thirty years.. (Note that the Spin magazine article apparently got it wrong: 5 °F = 2.78 °C, which is nearly twice what his paper actually predicted.)
The actual increase was about 0.6 °C according to the WoodForTrees temperature index:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/plot/wti/trend
Or about 0.5 °C according to the satellites:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/plot/uah6/trend/offset:0.6/plot/uah6/offset:0.6/plot/rss/trend
Or 1.0 °C to 1.3 °C according to GISS:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/plot/gistemp-dts/trend/offset:0.6/plot/gistemp-dts/offset:0.6/plot/gistemp/trend
Or about 0.8 °C according to the HADCRUT:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/plot/hadcrut3vgl/trend/offset:0.6/plot/hadcrut3vgl/offset:0.6/plot/hadcrut4gl/trend
Perhaps Spin Magazine got it right, but gave the figure in Fahrenheit rather than degrees C?
In fact, carbon emissions have increased by 66% over that time
Atmospheric CO2 increase is about half that of emissions, so not directly comparable. Proper comparison is with concentration increase.
Yes, they are scenarios for a range of emissions – alluded to in my first post. CO2 is the easiest data to get hold of, and what many people are talking about here in relation to the paper.
Re CO2 – the scenario begins with 1981 (not 1988) CO2 data and then increases by 1.5% growth of the annual increment thereafter. From Appendix B on trace gas scenarios from the paper;
” Specifically in scenario A CO2 increases as observed by Keeling for the interval 1958 to 1981, and subsequently with 1.5% growth of the annual increment.”
Dunno what the initial increment is, though.
Barry, I think your take is incorrect; ( Barry says “Proper comparison is with concentration increase”)
The reason it is incorrect is Hansen clearly underestimate ( by a wide margin) the ability of earth’s system to uptake CO2. This underestimation had a greatly impacted the alarmist perspective regarding CAGW, and so should not be ignored. The entire equation is important, and Hansen was simply wrong.
“The reason it is incorrect is Hansen clearly underestimate ( by a wide margin) the ability of earth’s system to uptake CO2”
Hansen wasn’t estimating the ability to uptake at all. It wasn’t part of his study or the operation of the model. No data on measured emissions is cited, for the good reason that in 1988 there wasn’t much. In particular, CO2 emission due to land use change was really not documented globally until Houghton in 1995. Hansen’s measure of emission was the observed increment in gas concentration. For CH4 etc, which he also describes as emissions, that is still the only actual measure.
I showed above (it’s here) the section in Appendix B where he is actually setting out how he calculated his emissions. Barry quotes from it. Steve McIntyre paraphrases it in this post thus:
The same CA post links to the numerical data posted at CA.
Nick Stokes wrote, “Hansen wasn’t estimating the ability to uptake at all. It wasn’t part of his study or the operation of the model..”
Oh, but he/they most definitely were. It was built-into their assumption, that if emissions went up 1.5% per year, then CO2 levels would also go up 1.5% per year. That assumption was completely wrong.
NIck continued, “Hansen’s measure of emission was the observed increment in gas concentration.”
Which was a huge error.
Note that without the erroneous assumption that CO2 concentration would rise as much as emissions rise, the case for curbing CO2 emissions is damaged. Very obviously, if increased emissions cause CO2 levels to increase much less than he thought, then the value or importance of reducing those emissions must necessarily also be much less than he thought.
Huge error? Scenario B, which Hansen said in the paper was most plausible, has a very close match to CO2 concentrations of the last few years.
The model was based on concentration, not emissions. Have you understood that yet?
If not, I’d be curious to know how you interpret this sentence from the trace gas scenarios, appendix B.
“Specifically in scenario A CO2 increases as observed by Keeling for the interval 1958 to 1981, and subsequently with 1.5% growth of the annual increment.”
Assuming you’re familiar with Keeling’s data (atmospheric concentration CO2), how do you interpret this to mean emissions?
daveburton
“It was built-into their assumption, that if emissions went up 1.5% per year, then CO2 levels would also go up 1.5% per year.”
There was no such assumption. There was no quantification of CO2 emissions at all in the study, other than via concentration. No assumption is needed, and none was available, due to lack of information. You couldn’t just look up CDIAC on the web in 1988. The situation of CO2 was the same as CH4 (or N2O) now; there is no direct measure of emissions, only concentration. It’s hard to even identify the sources of CH4 or N2O, let alone quantify. But we can measure the increases in concentration, then and now. Yet when Hansen speaks of a 1.5% increase, he is talking about all trace gases.
“Note that without the erroneous assumption that CO2 concentration would rise as much as emissions rise”
Again, there was no error. As Barry noted, scenario B was very close to observed CO2 concentration till now. The question of linking CO2 emission rate to CO2 concentration is a separate one, to be resolved separately. A GCM works from a concentrations scenario.
How Barry and Nick keep bypassing Hansen’s clear emissions assumptions is astounding. He did BOTH emmision estimates and GHG ppm estimates. You cannot get to an future estimated PPM number sans emmission estimates, and actual emmisions were, as daveburton quoted from Hansen, considerably higher then Hansen stated in his worst case senario.
“He did BOTH emmision estimates and GHG ppm estimates.”
Where? Quote them please. He cited absolutely no data on emissions, other than concentration. As Barry says, his scenario in terms of concentration is quite clear. Here it is again, just for Scen A:
Note that there he does use manufacture rates for CFCs, and quotes his source. He also gives a figure for lifetime, as you have to do to relate emission flux rate to concentration. For CO2 (and CH4) he makes no assumption about flux or lifetime. He simply assumes 1.5% increase in concentration increment, using Keeling (concentration) data. That is all he needs, and Steve Mc has the numbers.
He did BOTH emmision estimates and GHG ppm estimates
The confusion is understandable. The term “emissions” appears quite a few times. You’re not the first to take that literally.
Emission estimates are usually done in gigatonnes (Gt). There’s nothing like that in the paper. There is not one single numerical value for the then current or past emissions, while there are numerical values for CO2 in ppm, past and present (in 1988).
Where scenarios are expressed in percentage growth rate “emissions” in the main body of the paper, these are exactly the concentration growth rate values used in the appendix specifying the model scenarios. If Hansen et al were talking about actual emissions scenarios, those values would not be equivalent (concentration growth rate is a fraction of emissions growth rate), and you’d expect to see discussion on the relationship between the two.
Basically, the use of the term ’emissions’ in this 30 year-old paper is equivalent to growth in atmospheric concentration. 30 years later it’s confusing, unfortunately, but not indecipherable.
Steve McIntyre understands it well:
CO2 Projections
One idiosyncrasy that you have to watch in Hansen’s descriptions is that he typically talks about growth rates for the increment , rather than growth rates expressed in terms of the quantity. Thus a 1.5% growth rate in the CO2 increment yields a much lower growth rate than a 1.5% growth rate (as an unwary reader might interpret). For CO2, he uses Keeling values to 1981, then:
A: 1.5% growth of annual increment after 1981. Figure B2 shows 15.6 ppmv in 1980s and opening increment set at 1.56 ppmv accordingly.
B: 1.5% increment growth rate to 1990;1% to 2000, 0.5% to 2010 and 0 after 2010. Thus constant 1.9 ppmv increase after 2010.
C: equals A, B through 1985, then 1.5 ppmv increase through 2000; then fixed at 368
“Keeling values” – all model scenario estimates are about concentration.
Finally, all future trace gas values in the paper are related to modeled ‘forcing.’ That is a function of atmospheric content. They couldn’t possibly have done a forcing estimate from emissions (apart from that being a poor metric), because, as Nick points out, they didn’t have emissions estimates at that time.
Hansen’s predictions were for what would happen to both CO2 levels and temperature if we behaved as described in his three scenarios, where A represented his highest emission scenario, and C was his lowest emission scenario.
Hansen’s predictions were way off. CO2 emissions have soared, above even his scenario A. Yet CO2 levels are slightly below his scenario A (closer to B than A, though CO2 levels in his A & B scenarios are about the same for 2017), and actual temperature increases have been nowhere near the eye-popping 0.5 °C/decade that he predicted for his scenario A.
Hansen has made a career of being spectacularly wrong. Remember when he predicted that global warming would warm higher latitude oceans less than lower latitudes (because he thought cold meltwater would keep the higher latitudes cool), and the increased temperature difference between high and low latitudes would cause stronger storms? He went on Letterman and said “the increasing temperature gradient [between high and low latitudes] is going to drive stronger storms” as lower latitudes warm faster than higher latitudes. In 2009 he even wrote a book entitled, “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.”
“The Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity” — what a title! Yet climate catastrophists still object the the “C” (for “catastrophe”) in “CAGW.”
When we criticize Al Gore for saying things that ridiculous, the climate campaigners demur, saying, “well, Gore’s not a scientist.”
So what’s their excuse for Hansen?
I think his title makes a good survey question for evaluating the “consensus” of scientists on climate change: “Do you think this is our last chance to save humanity from the existential threat of catastrophic climate change?”
What level of agreement do you think Doran would find if he surveyed scientists and asked them that question? What percentage of scientific papers do you think John Cook could find which endorse that position on climate change?
Now, about those terrible storms which Hansen predicted due to the “increasing temperature gradient” [between high and low latitudes: I hope everyone here realizes that’s wrong. Hurricanes and tropical cyclones seem to be declining slightly, and pretty much everyone now agrees that AGW warms high latitudes more than low latitudes.
In fact, even in 2004, half a decade before Hansen’s appearance on Letterman, the Arctic Impact Climate Assessment already discussed “amplification” of global warming in the Arctic, and reported that, “Arctic average temperature has risen at almost twice the rate as the rest of the world in the past few decades.”
Nick & barry, do you at least acknowledge that if increased CO2 emissions cause CO2 levels to increase much less than Hanson expected, then the value or importance of reducing those emissions must also be much less than he thought?
David, A: “He did BOTH emmision estimates and GHG ppm estimates.”
Nick Stokes: Where? Quote them please.
Possibly David will quote the 1.5% growth rate with the word emissions next to it. But that’s not an estimate because there is no estimate of observed emissions in the paper (whereas there are observationally based estimates of CO2 ppmv concentration for given years).
David, can you quote any CO2 emissions estimate in Gt (gigatonnes) or equivalent? An actual numerical value for the then (1988) present or past emissions?
What, for example, was Hansen’s estimate of annual CO2 emissions for 1979 or 1987…?
I’m a home brewer: beer, mead, cheese. One of the frustrating parts of the process is cooling the 212 F wort so you can pitch your yeast and not kill it. Just like Mr. Hansen, I have noticed if I throw 6 ice cubes into my 5 gallons of liquid, the level rises 3 inches and cools 30 degrees F!
Given that amount of CO2 emissions, his prediction was that by now, temperatures would have gone up by five degrees Fahrenheit, or about 3°C.
Obviously, nothing like that has happened. Despite the fact that millions of folks believed his prediction in 1988 and continue to listen to him today, the UAH MSU satellite data says that since 1988 it’s warmed by … well … about a third of a degree. Not three degrees. A third of a degree. He was wrong by an order of magnitude. So obviously, he desperately needs an excuse for this colossal failure.
Not true, I suggest you check his paper referred to in that excerpt:
The paper referred to predicted nothing like what’s in that excerpt. Hansen’s published predictions were actually pretty good (see David Middleton’s post: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/22/autopsy-of-an-excuse/#comment-2558670)
His predictions ranged from 0.6-1.4ºC by now relative to the 1950-1981 mean, not since 1988. (See Fig. 3)
There’s no Fig. 3 in your link. You lost me there, Phil.
Also nothing to support Hansen’s predictions were “pretty good”. Where does this come from?
And since when does the Scientific Method says “pretty good” results mean anything scientifically, or support a theory?
So, the past 30 years did not see a “continued expansion of fossil fuel use”? If that’s the case, what’s all the fuss about. We have already solved the problem.
Using an understanding of English grammar, “…continued expansion of fossil fuel use…” would lead one to surmise that Hansen did intend to predict a 5 F. increase.
Reg Nelson July 22, 2017 at 4:28 pm
There’s no Fig. 3 in your link. You lost me there, Phil.
Sorry the figure in David’s post is based on fig 3 in Hansen’s 1988 paper, I hadn’t realized he’d omitted the caption.
That figure also shows the ‘pretty good’ prediction, beats the original false claim of an ‘order of magnitude’ error based on a completely bogus report.
Strange the lack of response to this article from Nick Stokes, Griff, Seaice et al. You would think that they’d be rushing to the defence of one of the high priests of their religion.
Tamino pretty much demolishes it.
A good skeptic considers multiple sources.
The best source here is hansens own paper. go read it.
Demolish what, Steven?
“This article”
“Strange the lack of response to this article from Nick Stokes”
I don’t have much to add to what Nic Lewis and David Middleton had to say. It’s unlikely that Hansen was talking about the latent heat of melting of ice when he spoke of its cooling effect. And David M showed the original plot. The rise to 2018 was nowhere near the 3 degrees first quoted in the post, and Hansen was not out by a factor of ten. I see that despite the rather crude rejection of a request for retraction, the original claim has now been modified by a factor of three.
Of course, the other part of that <i”He was wrong by a factor of 3. So obviously, he desperately needs an excuse for this colossal failure.” is the usual con here of comparing surface predictions with troposphere results. Hansen was not predicting troposphere temperatures as measured by UAH V6.0. He was not even predicting troposphere as measured by UAH V5.6 or RSS V4. He was predicting surface temperatures. And as David Middleton showed, he got it pretty much right.
Hansen of Borg could also be called two of Twenty. HuffPost featured him second in a list of “20 Champions Of Climate Change.” If Hansen, Gore, or any of the other champions of climate change have never gotten a prediction right, why should we put any stock in their new and improved predictions?
Notice the date, 1988. Reagan was still president and his administration regarded Hansen a lunatic alarmist, which continued through the Bush administration. It was also the year that the IPCC was formed and Hansen’s predictions were fundamental to justifying the existence of the IPCC. Hansen is also the one who first botched the applifcation of Bode’s linear feedback amplifier analysis to the climate a few years earlier which was presented as the theoretical foundation for massive amplification by positive feedback in AR1.
The mistake made by Reagan was not to fire this guy for incompetence back in the early 80’s, instead he ended up being put in charge of GISS. I’m not sure it it was the peter principle at work and Reagan put him in charge or if it was a bonehead move by the Carter administration on their way out. Either way, science has suffered horribly since.
Hansen is also the criminal who claims that if a government computer is nitrogen cooled till it’s fast enough, it can calculate the temperature of our compressible phase matter gaseous atmosphere, using only the Stefan-Boltzmann portion of the math needed to solve temperatures of gases. This fake ‘calculation’ gives up a 33 degree shortfall in ‘ ‘ solving ‘ ‘ for global atmospheric temperature: when anyone who has any education in solving for temperatures of gases knows – you must solve for the density of gases, and all the compressible phase fluids in forms of vapors, gas, this sorta thing.
The part of the math deliberately left out of proper calculation of atmospheric temperature is called the ‘hydrostatic equation’ and it solves, for what’s known in gases as the ”hydrostatic condition.” In other words the density.
This is another mark of the empty suits claiming to ”understand climate math” and ”understand climate science.” As soon as you delve into their ignorant fraud, the glaring errors of utter error explode the so-called ‘work’ they’ve done and – this is what drives the insane, insulting, snide, low-life thugs of the CO2 warming church to act like the crackpot criminopaths they are, deep down. Once shown, it’s obviously so simply fraud, that only those who have some truly criminal need for the fraud to continue, – making money, making themselves famous on the back of a giant chemistry scam – will even dream of further endorsement of it.
It’s hideously transparent fraud at a level that a middle schooler can disrupt the world’ most pre-eminent so-called ‘scientist.’ *It’s the fraud that destroyed peoples’ trust of all science anywhere – globally. People are appalled at the level of obviously – obviously willful misrepresentation of everything from the nature of sunlight itself to the basic mathematics of ‘what happens to the temperature of a light warmed rock, less light warms?’
High Octane,
The macroscopic behavior of the climate system can be completely quantified by the SB LAW and you don’t need a supercomputer cooled to absolute zero in order to figure this out. A simple calculator is sufficient.
If we start from an ideal BB like the Moon, given the solar profile, heat capacity of the surface and the SB equation, we can calculate the time varying temperature of any part of the Moon’s surface with a high degree of accuracy, limited only the accuracy of the heat capacity and reflectivity of the surface. NASA did these calculations prior to the Moon landings so they could understand the thermal limits they needed to design for.
The equations governing this are simple.
Psun (1-a) = Po + dE/dt
E = k*T
Po = eoT^4
where Psun is solar flux, T is the temperature of the surface, Po is the emissions by the surface, E is the solar energy stored by the surface, a is the albedo, k is related to the heat capacity of the surface and e is the emissivity of the surface which is approximately 1. Note the lack of assumptions and arbitrary knobs and dials, even when expanded out to comprise a gridded analysis. The average sensitivity of the Moon to changes in forcing (solar input after reflection) is when Psun(1-a) is exactly equal to Po and dE/dt (the forcing term) is zero. This can be calculated EXACTLY as 1/(4eoT^3), where T is the average surface temperature, e is the effective emissivity and o is the SB constant.
If Earth had an atmosphere containing only N2 and O2, the average temperature and sensitivity would be the same as for the Moon since O2 and N2 are transparent to both incoming solar energy and outgoing LWIR. The only difference would be that both the cold and hot extremes would move a little closer to the average for 2 reasons. First is the faster rotation of the Earth and second is the smoothing effect of convection by atmospheric gas molecules.
When we add GHG’s and clouds, the only thing we need to do to the Moon equations to make them fit the data is reduce the emissivity from 1.0 to about 0.62 in which case the deterministic average sensitivity becomes 1/(4eoT^3), where e is 0.62, o is the SB constant and T is the average temperature of 288K. The result is an average sensitivity of 0.3C per W/m^2 which is below the IPCC’s lower limit of 0.4C per W/m^2.
The fact that SB predicts a sensitivity below the level needed to support catastrophic consequences and the need for an organization like the IPCC is why the alarmists deny this kind of analysis as being relevant.
co2isnotevil July 23, 2017 at 9:15 am
In a post called “The Cold Equations” I pointed out the problem with your equation 2, E = k * T. That equation states that heat storage in the ocean is a function of surface air temperature.
I see absolutely no reason to believe this without evidence. Oceanic heat storage depends on two things: how fast the heat goes in, and how fast it comes out. Neither of these is a simple function of temperature, far from it.
For example: when it gets warmer, more ice melts. More icewater runs into the ocean, it cools down … so in this case, the equation totally reverses, becoming something on the order of E = – k * T.
And this is only one of a number of phenomena that affect the heat balance of the ocean. Here’s another. Let’s say that we have some given amount of downwelling radiation. For some reason that doesn’t concern us, let’s say solar goes down and downwelling goes up.
Now, the two kinds of radiation affect the ocean very differently. Sunlight penetrates deeply into the ocean, while IR is almost all absorbed in the first mm. This means that the shift affects the heat balance of the ocean differently, despite the fact that the total downwelling radiation is unchanged.
Here’s another. When heat builds up in the Eastern Pacific, it kickstarts the El Nino / La Nina pump. This pumps a huge amount of warm water from the surface to the poles, where it can radiate much more freely to space. So the heat content of the Pacific is greatly reduced … but the immediate affect on T, which is the air temperature, is to warm it up. Air T warming … heat content E going down … I’m sure you can see the problem.
So no … you cannot simply use those equations. They are lovely, they are alluring, lots of scientists have been seduced by them, but they simply are not true.
Regards,
w.
Reagan was still president and his administration regarded Hansen a lunatic alarmist, which continued through the Bush administration.
I thought climate scientists were government lackeys?
Climate scientists are only government lackeys if the administration aligns with their personal politics.
You might want to think that through.
“Notice the date, 1988. Reagan was still president and his administration regarded Hansen a lunatic alarmist, which continued through the Bush administration. It was also the year that the IPCC was formed and Hansen’s predictions were fundamental”
Far from it. From the National Security Archive
The US supported UN resolution 43/53 which established the IPCC. Bush went on to support the formation of the UNFCCC in 1992. He submitted it to the Senate for ratification, where it passed without the need for a roll-call vote.
Nick,
And as I have pointed out, Hansen and his incredibly sloppy science was the driver of this insanity.
If you want to debate the broken science, I’d be happy to engage, but I’m pretty sure you’ll have trouble keeping up and will completely fail to address the many ways I can falsify the absurdly high sensitivity claimed by the IPCC nor will you be able to come up with a coherent argument against my repeatable, testable and highly tested proof of a low sensitivity.
Nick Stokes July 23, 2017 at 1:05 am
Nick, I don’t understant this. co2isnotevil said that the IPCC began in 1988. You say the same, although it’s not clear because you left out the first sentence. With it, the para reads:
What’s the problem? According to you both, the IPCC started getting formed in 1988. What am I missing here? Is it your point that the final IPCC documents weren’t formalized for several years? So what?
Regards,
w.
I think Nick is rebutting the notion that Reagan and Bush Snr thought Hansen was a lunatic, but rather were on board with concern about AGW.
Yes. The “far from it” refers to the assertion that “1988. Reagan was still president and his administration regarded Hansen a lunatic alarmist, which continued through the Bush administration.”
In fact, there is no evidence of that. Reagan’s Admin supported the formation of the IPCC, and Bush signed the US up to the UNFCCC, with Senate ratification. I don’t know who thought what about Hansen personally, but their actions were consistent with his advice.
Nick Stokes July 23, 2017 at 2:46 am
Thanks, Nick, that is exactly what I was missing. I thought you were referring to the year, not the president.
w.
… yet I am fairly confidence neither Bush or certainly Regan, knew the IPCC would degenerate into the corrupt political organization using alarmist non-peer reviewed sources literature (WWF and Greenpeace) and cherry picked alarmist pal reviewed literature, (see the Wegman report) while ignoring extensive skeptical peer reviewed literature. (See NIPCC)
All of the above has happened post 1988.
And GISS hasn’t been the same since. 😎
I thought it interesting that the author of the SPIN article claimed
“well beyond the 30,000 years of history since our species emerged.”
This “30,000” is about the time of the invention of harpoons and saws, twisted rope, ovens, and rock paintings.
Maybe the writer left out a zero.
An interesting “spin” in SPIN magazine.
Ignoring the utter lack of skepticism in such a source, I’m really curious how this 1988 climate change related article from a record industry magazine came to the attention of Willis.
” The variable “heat_required” is the calculated number of joules required to melt 500 billion tonnes of ice in one year.”
I’m certainly not a climate alarmist and enjoy reading this site, but wouldn’t the energy needed to melt ice depend on the initial temperature of the ice? Warming ice from -50 to -40 could also be considered “melting”, even if it will still take a while for the actual phase change.
Another Ian July 22, 2017 at 3:05 pm
Curiously, Lincoln actually stated the corollary in the same speech, just before the part you quoted.
However, for me the best quote on this subject is from Megan McCardle:
Regards,
w.
Willis
Thanks. I’ll save Megan’s version
“my numeric legend detector ringing like a fire alarm in a cheap whorehouse.”
Wait…what?
Hansen’s theory of global warming being caused by increases in CO2 has been totally disproved by Prof. Don Easterbrook and numerous world leading scientists who have been able to produce the real evidence of ice cores which clearly show that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere always follow major movements in global warming including the twentieth century warm period (from about 1932 to 1998) which was actually caused by
a massive increase in sunspot activity just as were some of the previous global warm periods
Measurements of Antarctic ice mass can’t tell if its losing or gaining mass. They have to fiddle with the data because physics does not support ice melting when the ave. temperature in the interior of Antarctica is -57 C and in the coast -10 C. You can melt the ice submerged in the sea and it doesn’t add to sea level. No wonder 65% of tide gauges worldwide don’t show significant sea level rise
.
http://notrickszone.com/2017/06/05/sea-levels-are-stable-to-falling-at-about-half-of-the-worlds-tide-gauges/#sthash.I17jTXzu.dpbs
Melting ice? The problem here is how to keep my glass of water liquid
Whisky on the rocks is the only civilized way to melt ice.
Understanding,, as I do,. why you don’t get facts from “spin” and you don’t get truth from this site, I am not surprised to see this here.
You, and Antony Watts, owe the world an apology. You owe James Hansen an apology and you owe NOAA an apology.
We won’t get it. Liars are after all, prospering from their lies but that will not last long either.
Not from anything we do, but when Mother Nature herself stuffs this nonsense down your throats.
Stop looking to “Spin” for your facts, go to the paper itself. It really isn’t that hard to find.
Hansen’s “bulldog” is having a go at you. Not man enough to discuss it here though.
Willis basically forgot to go and read Hansen’s actual words in his actual paper.
quoting Spin is worse than quoting wikipedia.
Steven Mosher:
You say
But these words from you are merely another example of your usual practice when confronted with truth you cannot dispute; i.e. you lie and insult.
As Willis explained above
Mosher, your visits to here don’t improve[snip].
Richard
richardscourtney,
In Willis’ own words.
And I was also 100% wrong, to believe a contemporary article rather than go back to the original paper. Mea maxima culpa
He may have read the Hansen paper more recently than 11 years ago, but he relied on Spin Mag for this article, hence the error.
For which he’s apologized. ‘Nuff said.
No Barry, not “nuff said” at all. In fact is willfully disingenuous of you to make such a statement and not put Willis statement in context. You left out…
“However, this makes no difference to my point. His claims about melting ice are a wild exaggeration. The amount of cooling from the melting of ice is far, far too small to have the effect, whether by now or by the end of the century.”
Willis simply made a mistake in not digging a bit deeper. Your post is a clear example of bias.