Guest clobberin’ time by David Middleton
As global warming continues, Trump wants to burn fossil fuels with an arsonist’s glee
By THE TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD
SEP 29, 2018Here’s some disquieting, if unsurprising, news: The world is nowhere near where it needs to be if we are to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. That’s the gist of a report to be delivered this week in South Korea by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an independent body providing scientific analysis on climate change. According to early details given to the Guardian newspaper, the report warns that barring drastic and near-immediate changes in how the world creates energy, uses transportation and grows food, we will fall short of the 2015 Paris agreement goal of limiting the global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above what it was in pre-industrial times. Currently, the global temperature is nearly 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial benchmark.
That means trouble. Glaciers already are melting. The shrinking ice cap could mean an ice-free Arctic in the summertime by the end of the century, a reduction that many scientists believe fuels a feedback loop: The less ice there is, the more solar energy the Arctic absorbs, increasing the water temperature and reducing the amount of ice still farther.
[…]
Well… it never fueled a feedback loop during the vast majority of the Holocene, when the Arctic Ocean was likely to have been ice-free during summer. McKay et al., 2008 demonstrated that the modern Arctic sea ice cover is anomalously high and the Arctic summer sea surface temperature is anomalously low relative to the rest of the Holocene.
Over most of the Holocene, >50% sea ice coverage occurred from 5.5 to 9 months each year. During the “Anthropocene”, >50% sea ice coverage has ranged from 9 to 12 months each year.
While McKay’s cores were from the Chukchi Sea, there’s no reason to think that the rest of the Arctic Ocean behaved differently.
Borrowed from: Another Dis-alarming Analysis of Arctic Sea Ice
Back to the LA Times editorial board…
Worse, the melting of glaciers raises the level of the ocean (melting Arctic ice doesn’t do that since the cap floats on the sea). The ice sheet covering Greenland has been melting at an increasing rate since 2003…
How Big is the Greenland Ice Sheet?
According to U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386–A (2012), the volume of the GrIS is 2,600,000 km3. The USGS cites a 1954 reference for this number and also cites Bamber et al., 2011, which puts the volume at 2,900,000 km3. Bamber has subsequently upped his estimate to 2,960,000 km3. This is funny. Either the GrIS added 360,000 km3 of ice from 1954-2013 at a time when NASA said the GrIS was losing 4,089 km3 or the uncertainty of the volume of the GrIS is about 1,000 times the annual ice loss that is asserted with such precision by Amazing GRACE.
How Does the Recent Ice Loss Compare to the Volume of the Greenland Ice Sheet?
According to Kjeldsen et al., 2015, the GrIS lost over 9,900 km3 of ice from 1900-2010 and an article in The Economist asserted that the GrIS lost 375 Gt/yr (409 km3/yr) from 2011-2014.
| 1900–1983 | 75.1 ± 29.4 gigatonnes per year | |
| 1983–2003 | 73.8 ± 40.5 gigatonnes per year | |
| 2003–2010 | 186.4 ± 18.9 gigatonnes per year | |
| km³/yr | gigatonnes/yr | |
| 1900–1983 | (82) | (75) |
| 1983–2003 | (81) | (74) |
| 2003–2010 | (203) | (186) |
| 2011-2014 | (409) | (375) |
Here’s a graphical depiction of this projected up to 2017:
Here’s a graphical depiction of this projected up to 2017:
For a little more perspective, let’s convert this to ice cubes.
The “funny” thing is that the volume of Holocene ice appears to be as large or larger than the volume of Pleistocene ice.
In much of Central Greenland about 12,000 years worth of Holocene ice is thicker than over 100,000 years of Pleistocene ice. This is due to the fact that glacial stages (AKA ice ages) are very cold and very dry. The snow accumulation rate during the Holocene has been much higher than that of the last Pleistocene glacial stage.It’s particularly notable that in Central Greenland there is still a significant remnant of Eemian ice.
Borrowed from: A Geological Perspective of the Greenland Ice Sheet
The current rate of global ice melt will raise the seas by 2 feet over the next 80 years, according to a report earlier this year.
I don’t think so.
- 2 feet = 610 mm
- 610 mm / 80 yrs = 7.6 mm/yr
This is a sea level reconstruction using the data from Jevrejeva et al., 2014. 1.9 mm/yr is just s bit shy of 7.6 mm/yr.
The key features of Jevrejeva et al, 2014 (J14) are a falling sea level near the end of Holocene neoglaciation phase and then a steady, secular rise of about 1.9 mm/yr since 1860 as the Earth warmed up from the Little Ice Age.
The steady rise from the Little Ice Age is punctuated by a multi-decadal quasi-periodic fluctuation (a cycle to a geologist)…
The slope change in 1993 is at the beginning of the satellite record and was their basis to declare an acceleration in sea level rise from about 2 mm/yr to the current 3 mm/yr.
For sea level rise to accelerate to anywhere near a rate that could lead to 2 feet of additional sea level over the next 80 years, it would have to accelerate to a rate much faster than that of the Holocene Transgression…
The Holocene Transgression required this sort of ice melting…
Greenland melting a bit around the edges cant’ get there from here.
Back to the LA Times editorial board…
What will all this mean for man and the planet on which he resides? Without a massive global effort to change how we create energy, we can expect…
Back to the LA Times editorial board…
Under the Paris climate pact, world leaders committed to limiting the rise in global temperature to 2 degrees above the pre-industrial era, but with an aspiration to limit it to 1.5 degrees.
Done!
And climate sensitivity estimates are falling faster than the Arctic sea ice is melting…
Back to the LA Times editorial board…
And the Pentagon recognizes that rising seas threaten military bases, particularly naval installations, around the globe. But the administration seeks to make the problems worse rather than take steps to combat them.
They link to a Grauniad article that links to the Center for Climate & Security, a warmunist activist group composed mostly of Obama-era retired military brass, including Rear Admiral David W. Titley, USN (Ret) and a document supposedly from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. The document discusses US military facilities that are vulnerable to bad weather, including excessively cold weather.
Back to the LA Times editorial board…
Humanity is spinning pell-mell toward self-inflicted disaster, and the largest economy in the world — the country with the second highest industrial output — has official policies to ignore it. Indeed, the U.S. plans to add to the problem for the sake of short-term energy sector financial gains. Whether Trump’s policies are bred of ignorance or cynicism, they push the nation — and the planet — into ever-more dangerous territory.
So… Which half of humanity should bite the bullet? The Haber-Bosch process, which manufactures synthetic fertilizer from natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen, feeds nearly half of the world population.
Even if one ignores the multitude of other benefits of fossil fuels, the ability to feed 48% of 7.6 billion people means that at least 3,648,000,000 people stand to gain from our continued “addiction” to fossil fuels.
President “Trump wants to burn fossil fuels with an arsonist’s glee” because he understands three things that the clueless LA Times editorial board will never be able to comprehend:
- It’s a fossil fueled world.
- It will remain a fossil fueled world for the foreseeable future.
- And as hard as people may wish otherwise, unicorns don’t exist.
MAGA!
Who are the LA Times editorial board and why should anyone give a rat’s @$$ about their opinions on energy?
- Nicholas Goldberg: Bachelors degree in something from Harvard.
- Jon Healey: “B.A. in history from Princeton University.”
- Kerry Cavanaugh: “a graduate of New York University and Columbia Journalism School.”
- Mariel Garza: “a graduate of San Francisco State University.”
- Robert Greene: “a graduate of USC and Georgetown University Law School.”
- Carla Hall: “a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard University.”
- Karin Klein: “attended Wellesley College, did her graduate work in journalism at UC Berkeley, and is currently an adjunct professor of journalism at Chapman University in Orange. She lives in Laguna Beach, where she is a volunteer naturalist.”
- Scott Martelle: “author of several history books, and previously worked as a journalist in Western New York and Detroit, where he honed a deep interest in labor issues.”
- Michael McGough: “An honors graduate of Allegheny College, he also studied English literature, philosophy and religion at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, and holds a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale.”
Any guesses as to who the LA Times energy experts are?
Selected References
Erisman, J. W., Sutton, M. A., Galloway, J., Klimont, Z. & Winiwarter, W. How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nat. Geosci.1,636–639 (2008)
Jevrejeva, S., J. C. Moore, A. Grinsted, and P. L. Woodworth (2008), “Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago?”, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L08715, doi:10.1029/2008GL033611.:
Jevrejeva, S., J.C. Moore, A. Grinsted, A.P. Matthews, G. Spada. 2014. Trends and acceleration in global and regional sea levels since 1807, Global and Planetary Change, vol 113, doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2013.12.004
Nerem, R.S., D.P. Chambers, C. Choe & G.T. Mitchum. Estimating Mean Sea Level Change from the TOPEX and Jason Altimeter Missions. Marine Geodesy. Volume 33, Issue S1, 2010, pages 435- 446 Available online: 09 Aug 2010 DOI: 10.1080/01490419.2010.491031.
Tabone, Ilaria, Javier Blasco, Alexander Robinson, Jorge Alvarez-Solas, and Marisa Montoya. The sensitivity of the Greenland ice sheet to glacial-interglacial oceanic forcing. Clim. Past Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2017-127. Manuscript under review for journal Clim. Past. Discussion started: 8 November 2017.
Williams, R.S., Jr., and Ferrigno, J.G., eds., 2012, State of the Earth’s cryosphere at the beginning of the 21st century–Glaciers, global snow cover, floating ice, and permafrost and periglacial environments: U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386–A, 546 p.
Hi David I have Windows 10 using Edge most of the imported graphics are blanked out, solution?
I’m having the same issue. The images appear just fine in the editing window. But, when I open the post it takes forever for the images to appear. Same thing on my Android phone/
Same thing with Firefox!
FF 62.0.3 seems to be working fine for me.
Firefox recently provided an update (62.0.3) and the illustrations are now showing up.
Same thing with Chrome. Hitting “Reload” fixed it for me.
Everything is fine with chrome +
When I copy the image address of the first image from the editing window I get this:
When I copy the image address of the first image from this window I get this:
data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7
I think this is a Word Press issue.
clearly and act of GOD, ALAA, with a BRA in there somewhere.
OMG – the Name that can’t be spoken!
There was an issue with how the graphics were formatted. Which is weird, because I copied them directly from other posts. I think I’ve fixed it.
Try Opera browser guys.
Since when has the IPCC been an “independent body”?
It is certainly independent of the scientific method.
Thank you DAvid M.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/20/gov-browns-phony-climate-summit-conceals-global-wide-increased-use-of-fossil-fuels-and-rejection-of-climate-alarmism-energy-policy/#comment-2463951
My expertise is energy. Cheap, abundant, reliable energy is the lifeblood of society – it IS that simple.
Fossil fuels comprise 85% of global primary energy, the rest is almost all nuclear and hydro. Grid-connected wind and solar power would be ZERO, except for trillions in wasted subsidies.
One of the biggest hidden subsidies is that wind and solar are forced into the grid ahead of dispatchable power. This scheme typically requires costly spinning reserve (backup) power to fill in when the wind dies or sunlight is shielded by clouds.
These “green energy” technologies fail utterly due to intermittency, high cost and lack of cost-effective energy storage.
The leftists get energy entirely wrong, because they are uneducated in science and technology – they believe leftist political fictions instead of proven energy facts. They believe in anti-fossil-fuel, green-energy idiocy.
Fossil fuels keep you and your family from freezing and starving – that is what you need to know.
____________________________________
“The leftists get energy entirely wrong, because they are uneducated in science and technology – they believe leftist political fictions instead of proven energy facts. ”
Unfortunately, most Americans are uneducated in science and technology, and become susceptible to the “leftist political fictions” because “proven energy facts” don’t register with the bulk of the citizenry, by far most of whom are completely innumerate. It is unfortunate but accurate, and is why the political sledge hammering of fairy tale disaster stories eventually makes a mark. They tell the big lie and repeat it often enough that those without the innate ability to comprehend the technical or mathematical details eventually believe some of it, and that engenders others to accept it, in a real “feedback loop”. The LA Times editors are Goebbels at work.
BobM wrote:
“Unfortunately, most Americans are uneducated in science and technology, and become susceptible to the “leftist political fictions” because “proven energy facts” don’t register with the bulk of the citizenry, by far most of whom are completely innumerate.”
I agree Bob – but your statement is also true for most Canadians, Brits, French, Germans, Dutch, Danes, etc. etc.
Heck, in Canada we actually elected Justin Trudeau (aka Climate Ken) and Climate Barbie – these people are not just innumerate – they are remarkably gullible and stupid – and that’s on their good days! But then you elected Obama and Bill and almost elected Hillary – call it a draw. 🙂
When I was school age, the ice was going to cover the whole planet soon.
Average the two, I figure a net zero!
An ice free arctic by the end of this century? I thought it was supposed to be by the end of last century! Hard to keep up.
Here I am ragging the puck and the goalposts have been moved from behind me to way out in front. I guess we’ll have ice for hockey season, anyway!
I stopped reading after (from LA Times) :
“… the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an independent body providing scientific analysis …”
“According to early details given to the Guardian newspaper, the report warns that barring drastic and near-immediate changes in how the world creates energy, uses transportation and grows food, we will fall short of the 2015 Paris agreement goal of limiting the global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above what it was in pre-industrial times.”
how about this:
… some report warns that barring drastic and near immediate changes in how humans breathe air, perform respiration, and processes bodily waste, we will fall short of some fantasy-world agreement goal of limiting the occurrence of death by old age.
or
… barring drastic and near immediate changes in how humans walk upright, use muscular effort to move their skeletal structure, and sleep one third of their lives, we will fall short of some fantasy-world agreement goal of limiting joint strain.
Makes about as much sense.
If we all stop breathing now, then we can solve most of the world’s problems. It’s really quite simple.
Fake news of the Day is a new LAT feature.
If the LA Times gets there wish and the US divests from fossil fuels to “save the planet,” won’t they really just shift manufacturing offshore to countries that rely more heavily on coal? Seems like that would accelerate sea level rise (if one is a true believer in CO2 as the magical molecule).
It’s not as though the LA Times is looked upon as the repository of scientific knowledge. ANY scientific knowledge.
UNFCCC
Articles
Search results: California, USA, activities.
https://unfccc.int/gcse?q=California
Maybe the LA Times Board thinks people around the world don’t know what’s taking place now and what has already taken place in California?
This is how the LA Times should have read:
Humanity is spinning pell-mell toward self-inflicted disaster, and the largest economy in the world on a current purchasing power basis — the country with the highest industrial output — has official policies to ignore it.
Indeed, China plans to add to the problem for the sake of short-term energy sector financial gains.
Whether Xi’s policies are bred of ignorance or cynicism, they push the nation — and the planet — into ever-more dangerous territory.
You’re welcome.
The LAT news bots are seeking site volume hits like Yahoo and others.
That they have ignored the countries that have INCREASED their levels of CO2 emission and gone after those that have DECREASED these emissions tells us two things. One they concern of CO2 emissions cannot be as great has claimed and two there is a clear political intention which has nothing to do with the science .
Excellent analysis with fully documented and supportable climate and energy data presentations unlike the garbage political propaganda presented by the Times – as usual.
The L A Times is nothing but a climate alarmist renewable energy advocacy propaganda publication machine for the Democratic Party with the papers leadership hopelessly lost in an irrelevant make believe world that is completely disconnected from reality and focused solely on a political agenda that is unsupported by scientific data and absent of any informed understanding of global energy growth and consumption.
Yes, of course the only possible reason Trump wants to burn fossil fuels is because he is an evil maniac, who eats babies and kills kittens. I hate this political polarization and the corruption of all debates. I hope some day we live in an age where people don’t automatically assume their opponent is an evil moustache twirling villain.
So, that’s what they do with fossils at Planned Retirement.
It was good to see the anagram Grauniad in use again. I havent seen it in years.
David,
Remember, no linear regression equations or r2 calculations with an n less than 30 where one can assume the student t distribution approximates a normal distribution. That was one place I agreed with your french? Tormentor a a couple of posts back. It is truly a statistical no no. The green line in the Jevrejeva global sea level reconstruction apparently violates this rule though I could not find an n for that part of the graph so am just eyeballing it.
1. A lack of a trend is statistically insignificant.
2. The “green line” is since 1993 and matches the satellite trend, which is also since 1993.
3. If I plotted the data in months rather than years, the “n” would have been 12 times whatever it was.
In the real world the assumption of populations being normally distributed is bogus in most cases, in any event, but rules of statistics must still be followed or we all become like the ‘climate scientists’ in the end. No offense intended.
There is no n>30 “rule” in statistics and the Rule of 3 doesn’t dictate statistical significance…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(statistics)
The greater the n-value, the more robust the correlation, or lack thereof.
A n-value >30 just makes the rule of three a good approximation.
Time vs sea ice extent or time vs sea level has one variable.
http://www.statisticssolutions.com/sample-size-formula/
I am quoting what I was taught 53 years ago and it was a rule for least squares regression analysis if one desired to quote r2 or the y=ax+b equation with statistical significance. Perhaps times are a changin but we were ranked 1, 2, or 3 with Cal Tech and MIT for science and engineering when I attended and my curriculum was heavy in statistics. I still have some of my college stat books. I’ll go with what I was taught.
David,
I don’t forget much but cannot always access my data bank anymore. At the age of about 25 I was a bank officer in charge of research and development and was gjven the task of working with a well respected outside consultant who gave me an analysis to present to our CEO. They were being paid $250k for their anaysis. I reviewed it and it looked very good but I missed the fact that an r2 and y=ax+b was included on a regression analysis the had done on a time series with 14 data points. One of the VPs who had a PHD and probably as much statistics or more as I handed me my ass with the comment “you could stretch a rubber band through those dots and it would be as meaningful”. Never forgot that as he was right by what we were taught back then. Luckily the CEO liked me and not knowing much about statistics overlooked my missing that.
“The shrinking ice cap could mean an ice-free Arctic in the summertime by the end of the century”
Umm?……..Wasn’t it supposed to have happened by now?
YES!!!!! Burn baby burn!!!!!!!
I think the LA Times editorial is bred of ignorance.
They think they know what they are talking about but demonstrate that they don’t know anything.
David, I liked that CO2 Estimated Climate Sensitivity graph. The numbers just keep getting lower and lower. A downtrend. 🙂
The U.S. is reducing CO2 production. If the LA Times were really interested in fixing the problem, rather than bashing Trump, they would be complaining about China and India and a few other nations that are building coal-fired powerplants as fast as they can.
But they just want to bash Trump. That’s their main focus.
These LA Times people think they are so smart but it is Trump who sees clearly, not them.
David:
Once again you are on target. Thank you.
Let’s see:
Inflammatory? ✔️
Inaccurate? ✔️
Misleading? ✔️
Magical thinking? ✔️
Deceitful? ✔️
Extremist? ✔️
Exaggerated?✔️
Yep, it is a great example of yet another “Daily Hate” from a second rate derivative newspaper.
Who decided that 1 to 2 degrees C since the industrial age began is a reasonable temp increase? Who decided that any warmer than this and the planet is doomed? I really want to know the answers to these questions because I have not seen any data to support these nutty ideas. Or is it like the data that supports the CO2 Endangerment scheme, super-secret never to be revealed under pain of death? This is not the kind of science I learned to do.
“Who decided that 1 to 2 degrees C since the industrial age began is a reasonable temp increase? Who decided that any warmer than this and the planet is doomed?”
Those are good questions. I think those figures are educated guesses.
In the meantime, the Earth is 0.8C cooler today than it was in Feb. 2016, the socalled “Hottest Year Evah!”, so we are heading away from the socalled “danger zone”.
And btw, the Earth is 1.3C cooler today than it was in the hottest part of the 1930’s (according to Hansen 1999). We haven’t gotten that warm since then, and it doesn’t look like we are going to revisit that level any time soon. So we can rest easy. 🙂
LAT wants to burn science inquiry with a witch burners glee.
It’s clobberin’ time!
The Thing was OK (sorta a ripoff of the Hulk), but I liked the invisible woman myself….
Another excellent article, thanks, David.
I very much enjoyed the two embedded clips, as well!
{:o)