Guest AEUHHH??? by David Middleton
We are heading for a New Cretaceous, not for a new normal
Peter Forbes is a science writer whose work has appeared in New Scientist, The Guardian, The Times, Scientific American and New Statesman, among others. His latest book, co-authored with Tom Grimsey, is Nanoscience: Giants of the Infinitesimal (2014). He lives in London.
1,200 words
A lazy buzz phrase – ‘Is this the new normal?’ – has been doing the rounds as extreme climate events have been piling up over the past year. To which the riposte should be: it’s worse than that – we’re on the road to even more frequent, more extreme events than we saw this year.
We have known since the 1980s what’s in store for us. Action taken then to reduce emissions by 20 per cent by 2005 might have restricted the global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. But nothing was done, and the welter of climate data mounting since then only confirms and refines the original predictions. So where are we now?
Last November, the COP23 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn reported that warming by 3°C by 2100 is now the realistic expectation. With no check on emissions, we are on course to see preindustrial levels of CO2 double (from 280 to 560 ppm, or parts per million) by 2050 – and then double again by 2100. In short, we’ll be generating climate conditions last experienced during the Cretaceous period (145-65.95 million years ago) when CO2 levels reached over 1,000 ppm. What might that mean, given that we already achieve such levels of CO2 in bedrooms at night and in poorly ventilated crowded places, and when we know that, under sustained conditions of such high carbon-dioxide concentration, people suffer severe cognitive problems?
As it happens, the Cretaceous is one of my favourite geological periods. It gave us the great chalk hills and cliffs that straddle Europe. It gave us figs, plane trees and magnolias. It nurtured little mammals, who suddenly blossomed when the then-lords of creation – Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus and their cousins – went extinct at the end of the period. It was also very warm, with global temperatures 3-10°C hotter than preindustrial levels.
[…]
The next 955 words were even worse than the first 245… Including this gem:
It is now widely accepted, by scientists at least, that human beings have become geological agents, hence the assignment of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
The FRACKING Anthropocene is fictional. It has not and will never be recognized as a geological epoch.
How can such a distinguished science writer be so ignorant?
Biography
Peter Forbes is a science writer with a special interest in the relationship between art and science. He initially trained as a chemist and worked in pharmaceutical and popular natural history publishing, whilst writing poems, and articles for magazines such as New Scientist and World Medicine. He has written numerous articles and reviews, many specializing in the relation between the arts and science, for the Guardian, Independent, The Times, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Scientific American, New Scientist, World Medicine, Modern Painters, New Statesman, and other magazines.
He was editor of the Poetry Society’s Poetry Review from 1986-2002 and played a major role in the rise of the New Generation Poets. He has edited three anthologies: Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (Viking, 1999), We Have Come Through (Bloodaxe, 2003) and All the Poems You Need to Say I Do (Picador, 2004). In 2001 he published a translation of Primo Levi’s The Search for Roots(Penguin Press). The Gecko’s Foot, a book on the new science of bio-inspired materials, was published by Fourth Estate in 2005 and was long-listed for the Aventis Prize. His new book, Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage, published by Yale, won the Warwick Prize for Writing in 2011. He is currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at St George’s, University of London.
Back to the Cretaceous Miocene Pleistocene
We aren’t even headed for a new Miocene, much less a new Cretaceous. All of the warming in HadSST3 time series is dwarfed by the noise level of the FRACKING PLEISTOCENE!!!
The Cretaceous Period was “3-10°C hotter than preindustrial levels” for TENS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS! Even if the models were right, 3 °C of warming over 100 years is not comparable to tens of millions of years of 3-10 °C hotter average global surface temperatures.
The Cretaceous Period was much warmer than the Miocene Epoch.
Compare Cretaceous CO2 to that of the “Anthropocene.”
Fortunately, the models are wrong… 95% wrong. They’ve been wrong since 1988 and they haven’t improved much.
UAH 6.0 vs Models
It gets even worse if the models are initialized earlier
Why are the models so wrong?
All other factors held equal, it would take an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 2,000 to more than 10,000 ppmv to raise the bulk temperature of the atmosphere by 3-10 °C.
And that’s only if the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is actually as high as 1.28 °C per doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
About the Author
David Middleton has been a geologist/geophysicist in the “Climate Wrecking Industry” since 1981. His favorite geological periods are the Pliocene and Miocene because he has discovered a fair bit of oil & gas in the rocks of those two epochs.
Selected References
Berner, R.A. and Z. Kothavala, 2001. GEOCARB III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic Time, American Journal of Science, v.301, pp.182-204, February 2001.
Pagani, M., J.C. Zachos, K.H. Freeman, B. Tipple, and S. Bohaty. 2005. Marked Decline in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations During the Paleogene. Science, Vol. 309, pp. 600-603, 22 July 2005.
Royer, D. L., R. A. Berner, I. P. Montanez, N. J. Tabor and D. J. Beerling. CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate. GSA Today, Vol. 14, No. 3. (2004), pp. 4-10
Tripati, A.K., C.D. Roberts, and R.A. Eagle. 2009. Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years. Science, Vol. 326, pp. 1394 1397, 4 December 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1178296
Ward, J.K., Harris, J.M., Cerling, T.E., Wiedenhoeft, A., Lott, M.J., Dearing, M.-D., Coltrain, J.B. and Ehleringer, J.R. 2005. Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA102: 690-694.
Zachos, J. C., Pagani, M., Sloan, L. C., Thomas, E. & Billups, K. Trends, rhythms, and aberrations in global climate 65 Ma to present. Science 292, 686–-693 (2001).
We at linked in put this down in the late 90’s. (Emailgate/ e Anglea …) the Sky Dragon is still kicking I see.
Ah but we do have the IPCC and SR5.
“Since 1970 the global average temperature has been rising at a rate of 1.7°C per century, compared to a long-term decline over the past 7,000 years at a baseline rate of 0.01°C per century (NOAA 2016, Marcott et al. 2013).”
http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_chapter1.pdf
However Marcott said in his interview with Real Climate –
“Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/
I guess they don’t pay attention to those they quote,
I think most of the Climatariat literally don’t understand the concept of resolution… and pretty well everything else related to signal processing.
So the different arrangement of the continents had nothing to do with the climate being warmer?
Are they telling me that thousands of scientists have been wrong for decades?
PS: If the Cretaceous was so much warmer because CO2 was around 1000ppm, why was it so much colder a 100 million years before that, when CO2 levels broke 5000ppm?
Because CO2 is just one of many factors in the “equation.”
400 ppmv CO2 is not a “greenhouse atmosphere.”
His talk about the “Anthropocene” is a propaganda tactic to manipulate the responsible parties to fold and accept his fantasy.
His lack of factual knowledge regarding the extremely well documented medical effects of CO2 is not surprising from a climate extremist. It fits right in with the culture he is part of. But hacks are as gacks do.
It is disappointing to see yet another formerly credible publisher, Yale Press, devolve into yet a another CO2 obsessed fear merchant.
Anyone who describes the “Anthropocene” like this should be institutionalized…
A “-cene” is an epoch-scale time period in the Cenozoic Era. Neither the US nor the International Commission on Stratigraphy recognizes an Anthropocene Epoch or any other Anthropo- time period.
To borrow an epoch from a hilarious post above, in the Cretinocene the inmates have taken over the institution.
Yet the Noosphere can pause like the past decades, but cannot be reversed.
Sediments of the Cretinocene Pause include strange rotating blades, hectares of polysilicate.
Everyone forgets Apollo 13, the greatest CO2 catastrophe ever, and no-one was lost.
Here is the dialog – see page 384 for partial pressure levels.
Onboard they were showing symptoms but it looks like 60,000 ppm. Of course NASA has CO2 data.
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS13_TEC.PDF
No one was lost because they fixed the problem. You seem to be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Which is kind of how they fixed it.
Ha, ha, good one…..!
🙂
Dinosaurs were only as big as they were, due to high CO2.
More CO2 = bigger plants = bigger herbivores = bigger carnivores.
Ergo, high CO2 is good for both flora and fauna.
What is not to like, about high CO2….?
R
It also lowers the O2, reducing fire risk.
The big guys were an earlier biosphere experimental model.
Just look how many times feathers were given a test run before a flying model.
Lawfully our technology (should) have such a direction, but it sure looks like the oligarchy wants to reverse it with “climate” and CO2.
There is no road back to dinos, nor to a mythical golden-age equilibrium, nor even to stay forever in the present as “End of History” Fukoyama characterized the EU.
Our Noosphere cannot settle, which is why science is never settled.
His biography mentions that he’s written poetry, but nothing in his story rhymes. Go figure.
Couldn’t read further.
___________________________________________________
Why are the models so wrong?
All other factors held equal, it would take an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 2,000 to more than 10,000 ppmv to raise the bulk temperature of the atmosphere by 3-10 °C. –>
All other factors held equal, it would take an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 2,000 to more than 10,000 ppmv to SINK the bulk temperature of the atmosphere by 3-10 °C.
Don’t you take into account that CO2 redirects heat radiation and that thus soil warming
is lost
in favor of Planetary outgoing heat.
https://scied.ucar.edu/carbon-dioxide-absorbs-and-re-emits-infrared-radiation
However in the real world re-emission almost never happens since the average time a CO2 molecule stays in a metastable state after absorbing a quantum is vastly longer than the time between molecular collisions. Therefore the absorbed energy is almost always thermalized rather than re-emitted.
https://www.google.at/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=h3PaW-7rNbDQrgTstLmwBw&ins=false&q=co2+molecules+disperse+radiation+&oq=co2+molecules+disperse+radiation+&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.