Beware your lack of understanding. Gravity and rotation and the sun and the moon all have an impact. Rest assured a 3m sea level rise at high tide near the equator would not be reflected in the Antarctic at low or high tide....
One of the craziest and most counter-intuitive things about ice sheets and sea level rise is the effect that the gravitational attraction of ice sheets has on the sea level around them. There is enough gravitational attraction in the ice sheets to raise sea level next to them by tens of meters to hundreds of meters near the Antarctic ice sheet. Research by Dr. Jerry Mitrovica has found that if you melted enough ice off of Greenland to raise average sea level by 1 meter that the drop in gravitational attraction coupled with the rebound of the land from the weight of the ice going away would drop sea level around Greenland by 5-7 meters.
Here's a short video from Dr. Mitrovica that explains it:
Of course if sea level is dropping near the ice sheets as the gravity releases it hold on the sea that means that sea level will have to rise even more the further you get from the ice sheet to compensate. For example if Greenland melts enough for an average sea level rise of 1 meter the sea level rise on the US gulf coast could be something like 1.25 meters.
Over 100 million cubic miles of additional sea water would be required to raise the level of the oceans a mere 12 inches. This ignores the additional surface area rising oceans would cover, and thus underestimates the volume of water necessary to raise the oceans a single foot.
All of Antarctica contains between 6 and 7 million cubic miles of ice. If it all melted today, we'd get less than an inch of sea level rise.
You're making it way too complicated. The area of the oceans is about 360,000,000 km^2. To raise the oceans 1 foot (~0.0003 km) would require about 108,000 km^3 of water (ignoring that it would spread out some and cover more area). The Antarctic ice sheet contains about 26,500,000 km^3 of ice, enough to raise sea level by more than 70 meters (about 230 feet) if it all melted.
Or if you prefer American units the area of the oceans is about 140,000,000 cubic miles. To raise the ocean 1 foot (0.00018939 miles) would require about 26,515 cubic miles of water.
The second biggest ice sheet, Greenland, seems to be adding mass since it's at a record level. And overall, snow accumulation in the Northern hemisphere is on a decidedly upward trend over the last 30 years.
The GRACE satellites beg to differ. They show Greenland losing ice mass at a rate of about 280 gigatons per year from 2002 to 2016.
As habig pointed out to you over on the Ocean Currents story your math is wrong. The energy doesn't stay trapped in the CO2 molecule but gets transferred to other molecules like O2 and N2 through collisions or spit out as a photon in a random direction so about half of it heads back toward the ground.
I'm afraid your math is missing two parts: one, the thermodynamics of the problem, the CO2 molecules aren't sitting there in a vacuum, they're rattling around in thermal equilibrium as part of the atmosphere; two, the direction of outgoing vs. incoming radiation. So, in order of what happens:
Any given CO2 molecule happens to be really good at absorbing IR (much more so than the rest of the stuff you list) while being transparent in the visible. Yep, very true, just go into a lab and measure absorption spectra. Turns out some even less common items like methane are even better at it, but let's consider just CO2 for now.
Next, that CO2 molecule, with the extra eV or so of IR energy it picks up from that one IR photon coming from some warm parking lot, can get rid of the bonus energy in one of two ways. It can give up that energy in a collision with other air molecules, turning the energy into thermal energy: air warms up slightly.
Or, it can spit an IR photon back out in a random direction. If the IR is coming from ground warmed up by sunlight, it's headed up into the air. When the CO2 re-radiates, half the time it's still going up. Half the time it's shining back down. So, in this very simple view, half the energy stays trapped... also warming things up slightly. Nowhere required a 2500K blackbody as you implied, two ways to get heat trapped.
But the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere just doesn't appear to be capable of being the big bogey man everyone is trying to make it out to be.
For your edification here is a link to a study that measured the change in forcing from the increase in CO2 over about a decade. It found a statistically significant trend of an increase in forcing of 0.2 W/m^2 per decade.
And there's a PDF copy of the whole thing here so you don't need a subscription to Nature to read it.
CO2 is, however, a direct by product of an industrialized society so stopping CO2 emissions would mean slowing down industry. And if you follow the money trail, in the US at least, when the USSR collapsed the US based Communists needed to go somewhere else to ply their trade so they joined the environmentalism movements. What better way to destroy capitalism then to claim the artifacts of a capitalist society are going to destroy all life on the planet by increasing plant food - CO2 ? Hard to see how our current levels of CO2 can destroy life when during the reign of the dinosaurs the atmosphere had CO2 levels in the range of 2000ppm and we're only at 400ppm.
I find that when people start bringing in economic arguments that they are very motivated to just ignore the science as if economics trumps science. That's a pretty dangerous attitude. If some of the high end predictions about AGW come to pass it won't destroy life on Earth but it could well cause the collapse of human civilization. The Earth doesn't care. It will just respond to whatever the inputs are. Even if AGW causes a massive die off and extinction of significant parts of the biosphere after a few million years evolution will bring it back, but not necessarily with humans in the mix.
Humans are a blind man trying to describe an elephant by feeling it's trunk. We don't know what we don't know yet, but it's damned sure it isn't anywhere near certain enough to make predictions accurate & reliable enough 100+ years out that we should make major upheavals in society or cripple ourselves and slow development of civilization.
You're assuming that not responding to the threats that climate science has so far been pretty accurate in predicting won't cause "major upheavals in society or cripple ourselves and slow development of civilization". If the worst of the predictions come to pass that won't be a good assumption.
No, I did not miss that article. It's certainly possible that the magma plume affects the stability of the ice sheet in Marie Byrd Land. But the magma plume has probably been there for over a million years while the ice sheet there has advanced and retreated many times. Meanwhile ice sheets are melting not just there but all over the place around the periphery of Antarctica and in Greenland, most of them not affected by magma plumes. So the question still is what makes you think there has been a sudden change in the magma plume that has caused an increase in ice melt rates rather than something that's been going on for many thousands of years?
You seem to have a faith based belief that scientists don't know nuthin'.
We already know that there is a greenhouse effect on Earth since the normal thermodynamic temperature of an object orbiting at Earth's distance from the sun is about 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-18 degrees Celsius). Earth's average surface temperature is about 58 F. The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere explains that temperature difference nicely. It makes sense that increasing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would increase temperatures. So scientists may not be able to predict with precision exactly what temperatures will be in 100 years but they can pretty easily predict they will be warmer than they are now as long as greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere continue to increase. It's difficult to predict exactly what will happen since there are no analogs in Earth's history to the current rapid increase in greenhouse gases. Uncertainty is not your friend because the effects could just as easily be worse than expected as they could be better than expected.
No, actually. What you're seeing is an objection to seeing the Autopay box ticked next to any "scientific consensus" that arises. The assumption that such "conclusions" must automatically be reflected in social/economic policies is obnoxious. That's a matter for the political sphere and people's ability and willingness to pay the freight, nothing else.
Well if the scientific consensus is correct you can pay now to mitigate the problem or you can pay later (and probably a whole lot more) to adapt to the changes coming down the pike. If the high end of scientific projections on anthropogenic global warming come to pass it could cost us our civilization. It doesn't matter that much to me since I'm old enough I'll be lucky to live another decade but if you're young you may be paying out your butt for the cost of adapting to things like sea level rise, more extreme weather events and disruptions in agricultural output. Good luck.
Hate to break it to you, but it actually proves we don't have a thorough-enough understanding of planetary systems to be able to make reliable predictions 100 years or more in the future.
I guess it was just an accident then that a relatively simple climate model from 1967 was able to make pretty accurate predictions of the climate.
Only recently it was accidentally discovered by a NASA satellite that the accelerated Antarctic ice-melt rates that had been blamed on AGW were actually being caused by a monster-sized magma plume rivaling the Yellowstone magma plume underneath the ocean floor under the Antarctic.
What evidence do you have that this magma plume is a recent phenomena that caused a sudden increase in Antarctic ice melt rates rather than something that has existed for thousands of years?
Scientists love to be surprised. It leads to new and interesting insights into the world we live in. Scientists question the results of other scientists all the time. Science is one of the most competitive areas of human activities. The problem for people like you is if you want to question scientific conclusions you need to bring some real science to the table with you.
Skeptical science dot com? You might as well have posted from dailykos or Fox News for all those biased jerks are worth reading.
At least SkepticalScience references peer reviews scientific literature. If you dig into the scientific literature on sea level rise over the past 4 or 5000 years you find that sea level remained pretty steady and if anything dropped a bit during the Little Ice Age. Since 1900 sea level rise has gone from around 1 mm/year to 2 mm/year in the middle of the 20th Century and over 3 mm/year since around 1993. That looks like acceleration to me.
No they haven't. In the last couple of thousand years there's been a slight drop in sea levels. Until about 1900 that is when sea level rise has been consistent and accelerating. Here's an interesting article on SLR over the past several thousand years.
I don't really trust their motivations here, but they're probably right that people would cheap out on repairs and a faulty sensor could be quite deadly on such a car.
If it's designed correctly the software on a self driving car won't let you "drive" it or at least limit the driving modes if a sensor if faulty.
There is a legitimate argument that the world is flat: if you look out the window it's plainly obvious.
I don't know about you but I've been high enough above sea level on the tops of mountains or in airplanes to see the curvature of the Earth. The Greeks had it figured out to within about 5% of the actual value nearly 3,000 years ago.
I did a little looking about the internet and I find that General Electric will sell a 50 MWt/15 MWe nuclear reactor to the US government for use in their navy submarines. By just about any definition of "small modular reactor" this qualifies. This reactor cost the US government about $100 million. To get the same 250 MW of electrical capacity as the Tesla "virtual power plant" it'd take 17 of these nuclear reactors, so about $1.7 billion. These reactors are fueled once and will run for 30 to 35 years. If we assume that these Tesla solar panels also last 30 to 35 years then this should be a pretty easy comparison.
You'd have to include the cost of the 10 or 15 people* who run and constantly monitor each of those naval reactors 24/7/365.25 in your estimates. Qualified nuclear techs don't come cheap.
*A guesstimate on my part but I can't imagine less than 4 or 5 people per shift to run them.
I usually disagree with you, often quite strongly, but on this I agree. The problem though it is would have to be a constitutional amendment otherwise the Supreme Court would just throw it out.
The planet is not in a death dive. It may be that human civilization is and we may take a lot of species with us but after we're gone give the planet a couple million years of evolution and it will be just as alive as it was before humans arrived on the scene.
Your restaurant analogy is silly. Carbon sinks don't have any kind of "intelligence" to decide to change the way they react. How they react is governed by physical laws that don't change their mind in any way. A carbon atom doesn't decide it would rather go to that other sink on a whim. It reacts to the balance between the different sinks and the physical factors that affect those sinks. It is largely a predictable linear reaction.
The trend of increasing carbon in all sinks of the active carbon cycle is driven by human emissions. It's kind of amusing to see all the contortions you've gone through to try and avoid that fact.
The atmosphere is one of the natural sinks/sources of CO2 along with the oceans and the land ecosystems. When humans dump more CO2 into the atmosphere it spreads out into the other natural sinks in rough proportion with each other. Yes there is some natural variability from year to year in how much is taken up by the various sinks but it's still just noise. There is no separation between human emissions and the increase in carbon in the various sinks of the carbon cycle.
Of course there is natural variability from year to year but as the post says the increase is caused by humans. To quote:
In case of Die Welt, one of my PIK colleagues had explicitly pointed out to the author, in response to a query by him, that the 5% human share of CO2 is misleading and that humans have caused a 45% increase. That the complete CO2 increase is anthropogenic has been known for decades.
The natural variability is just noise and averages out to 0 over the long run. The trend in the increase in natural sinks (they're all natural BTW including the atmosphere) is entirely due to human emissions.
Slashdot Mirror
Just another good reason I'm glad I haven't signed up for a Twitter account (or Facebook either).
Beware your lack of understanding. Gravity and rotation and the sun and the moon all have an impact. Rest assured a 3m sea level rise at high tide near the equator would not be reflected in the Antarctic at low or high tide. ...
One of the craziest and most counter-intuitive things about ice sheets and sea level rise is the effect that the gravitational attraction of ice sheets has on the sea level around them. There is enough gravitational attraction in the ice sheets to raise sea level next to them by tens of meters to hundreds of meters near the Antarctic ice sheet. Research by Dr. Jerry Mitrovica has found that if you melted enough ice off of Greenland to raise average sea level by 1 meter that the drop in gravitational attraction coupled with the rebound of the land from the weight of the ice going away would drop sea level around Greenland by 5-7 meters.
Here's a short video from Dr. Mitrovica that explains it:
The Fingerprints of Sea Level Rise
And here's a longer one that goes into more detail while taking on several denier memes about sea level rise:
The Fingerprints of Sea Level Change
Of course if sea level is dropping near the ice sheets as the gravity releases it hold on the sea that means that sea level will have to rise even more the further you get from the ice sheet to compensate. For example if Greenland melts enough for an average sea level rise of 1 meter the sea level rise on the US gulf coast could be something like 1.25 meters.
Earth has a radius of about 3960 miles.
Over 100 million cubic miles of additional sea water would be required to raise the level of the oceans a mere 12 inches.
This ignores the additional surface area rising oceans would cover, and thus underestimates the volume of water necessary to raise the oceans a single foot.
All of Antarctica contains between 6 and 7 million cubic miles of ice. If it all melted today, we'd get less than an inch of sea level rise.
You're making it way too complicated. The area of the oceans is about 360,000,000 km^2. To raise the oceans 1 foot (~0.0003 km) would require about 108,000 km^3 of water (ignoring that it would spread out some and cover more area). The Antarctic ice sheet contains about 26,500,000 km^3 of ice, enough to raise sea level by more than 70 meters (about 230 feet) if it all melted.
Or if you prefer American units the area of the oceans is about 140,000,000 cubic miles. To raise the ocean 1 foot (0.00018939 miles) would require about 26,515 cubic miles of water.
The second biggest ice sheet, Greenland, seems to be adding mass since it's at a record level. And overall, snow accumulation in the Northern hemisphere is on a decidedly upward trend over the last 30 years.
The GRACE satellites beg to differ. They show Greenland losing ice mass at a rate of about 280 gigatons per year from 2002 to 2016.
Greenland Ice Loss 2002-2016
As habig pointed out to you over on the Ocean Currents story your math is wrong. The energy doesn't stay trapped in the CO2 molecule but gets transferred to other molecules like O2 and N2 through collisions or spit out as a photon in a random direction so about half of it heads back toward the ground.
I'm afraid your math is missing two parts: one, the thermodynamics of the problem, the CO2 molecules aren't sitting there in a vacuum, they're rattling around in thermal equilibrium as part of the atmosphere; two, the direction of outgoing vs. incoming radiation. So, in order of what happens:
Any given CO2 molecule happens to be really good at absorbing IR (much more so than the rest of the stuff you list) while being transparent in the visible. Yep, very true, just go into a lab and measure absorption spectra. Turns out some even less common items like methane are even better at it, but let's consider just CO2 for now.
Next, that CO2 molecule, with the extra eV or so of IR energy it picks up from that one IR photon coming from some warm parking lot, can get rid of the bonus energy in one of two ways. It can give up that energy in a collision with other air molecules, turning the energy into thermal energy: air warms up slightly.
Or, it can spit an IR photon back out in a random direction. If the IR is coming from ground warmed up by sunlight, it's headed up into the air. When the CO2 re-radiates, half the time it's still going up. Half the time it's shining back down. So, in this very simple view, half the energy stays trapped ... also warming things up slightly. Nowhere required a 2500K blackbody as you implied, two ways to get heat trapped.
But the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere just doesn't appear to be capable of being the big bogey man everyone is trying to make it out to be.
For your edification here is a link to a study that measured the change in forcing from the increase in CO2 over about a decade. It found a statistically significant trend of an increase in forcing of 0.2 W/m^2 per decade.
Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010
And there's a PDF copy of the whole thing here so you don't need a subscription to Nature to read it.
CO2 is, however, a direct by product of an industrialized society so stopping CO2 emissions would mean slowing down industry. And if you follow the money trail, in the US at least, when the USSR collapsed the US based Communists needed to go somewhere else to ply their trade so they joined the environmentalism movements. What better way to destroy capitalism then to claim the artifacts of a capitalist society are going to destroy all life on the planet by increasing plant food - CO2 ? Hard to see how our current levels of CO2 can destroy life when during the reign of the dinosaurs the atmosphere had CO2 levels in the range of 2000ppm and we're only at 400ppm.
I find that when people start bringing in economic arguments that they are very motivated to just ignore the science as if economics trumps science. That's a pretty dangerous attitude. If some of the high end predictions about AGW come to pass it won't destroy life on Earth but it could well cause the collapse of human civilization. The Earth doesn't care. It will just respond to whatever the inputs are. Even if AGW causes a massive die off and extinction of significant parts of the biosphere after a few million years evolution will bring it back, but not necessarily with humans in the mix.
Humans are a blind man trying to describe an elephant by feeling it's trunk. We don't know what we don't know yet, but it's damned sure it isn't anywhere near certain enough to make predictions accurate & reliable enough 100+ years out that we should make major upheavals in society or cripple ourselves and slow development of civilization.
You're assuming that not responding to the threats that climate science has so far been pretty accurate in predicting won't cause "major upheavals in society or cripple ourselves and slow development of civilization". If the worst of the predictions come to pass that won't be a good assumption.
No, I did not miss that article. It's certainly possible that the magma plume affects the stability of the ice sheet in Marie Byrd Land. But the magma plume has probably been there for over a million years while the ice sheet there has advanced and retreated many times. Meanwhile ice sheets are melting not just there but all over the place around the periphery of Antarctica and in Greenland, most of them not affected by magma plumes. So the question still is what makes you think there has been a sudden change in the magma plume that has caused an increase in ice melt rates rather than something that's been going on for many thousands of years?
You seem to have a faith based belief that scientists don't know nuthin'.
We already know that there is a greenhouse effect on Earth since the normal thermodynamic temperature of an object orbiting at Earth's distance from the sun is about 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-18 degrees Celsius). Earth's average surface temperature is about 58 F. The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere explains that temperature difference nicely. It makes sense that increasing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would increase temperatures. So scientists may not be able to predict with precision exactly what temperatures will be in 100 years but they can pretty easily predict they will be warmer than they are now as long as greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere continue to increase. It's difficult to predict exactly what will happen since there are no analogs in Earth's history to the current rapid increase in greenhouse gases. Uncertainty is not your friend because the effects could just as easily be worse than expected as they could be better than expected.
No, actually. What you're seeing is an objection to seeing the Autopay box ticked next to any "scientific consensus" that arises. The assumption that such "conclusions" must automatically be reflected in social/economic policies is obnoxious. That's a matter for the political sphere and people's ability and willingness to pay the freight, nothing else.
Well if the scientific consensus is correct you can pay now to mitigate the problem or you can pay later (and probably a whole lot more) to adapt to the changes coming down the pike. If the high end of scientific projections on anthropogenic global warming come to pass it could cost us our civilization. It doesn't matter that much to me since I'm old enough I'll be lucky to live another decade but if you're young you may be paying out your butt for the cost of adapting to things like sea level rise, more extreme weather events and disruptions in agricultural output. Good luck.
Hate to break it to you, but it actually proves we don't have a thorough-enough understanding of planetary systems to be able to make reliable predictions 100 years or more in the future.
I guess it was just an accident then that a relatively simple climate model from 1967 was able to make pretty accurate predictions of the climate.
The first climate model turns 50, and predicted global warming almost perfectly
Only recently it was accidentally discovered by a NASA satellite that the accelerated Antarctic ice-melt rates that had been blamed on AGW were actually being caused by a monster-sized magma plume rivaling the Yellowstone magma plume underneath the ocean floor under the Antarctic.
What evidence do you have that this magma plume is a recent phenomena that caused a sudden increase in Antarctic ice melt rates rather than something that has existed for thousands of years?
Scientists love to be surprised. It leads to new and interesting insights into the world we live in. Scientists question the results of other scientists all the time. Science is one of the most competitive areas of human activities. The problem for people like you is if you want to question scientific conclusions you need to bring some real science to the table with you.
Skeptical science dot com? You might as well have posted from dailykos or Fox News for all those biased jerks are worth reading.
At least SkepticalScience references peer reviews scientific literature. If you dig into the scientific literature on sea level rise over the past 4 or 5000 years you find that sea level remained pretty steady and if anything dropped a bit during the Little Ice Age. Since 1900 sea level rise has gone from around 1 mm/year to 2 mm/year in the middle of the 20th Century and over 3 mm/year since around 1993. That looks like acceleration to me.
No they haven't. In the last couple of thousand years there's been a slight drop in sea levels. Until about 1900 that is when sea level rise has been consistent and accelerating. Here's an interesting article on SLR over the past several thousand years.
Sea level isn't level-Ocean siphoning, levered continents and the Holocene sea level highstand
I don't really trust their motivations here, but they're probably right that people would cheap out on repairs and a faulty sensor could be quite deadly on such a car.
If it's designed correctly the software on a self driving car won't let you "drive" it or at least limit the driving modes if a sensor if faulty.
There is a legitimate argument that the world is flat: if you look out the window it's plainly obvious.
I don't know about you but I've been high enough above sea level on the tops of mountains or in airplanes to see the curvature of the Earth. The Greeks had it figured out to within about 5% of the actual value nearly 3,000 years ago.
I did a little looking about the internet and I find that General Electric will sell a 50 MWt/15 MWe nuclear reactor to the US government for use in their navy submarines. By just about any definition of "small modular reactor" this qualifies. This reactor cost the US government about $100 million. To get the same 250 MW of electrical capacity as the Tesla "virtual power plant" it'd take 17 of these nuclear reactors, so about $1.7 billion. These reactors are fueled once and will run for 30 to 35 years. If we assume that these Tesla solar panels also last 30 to 35 years then this should be a pretty easy comparison.
You'd have to include the cost of the 10 or 15 people* who run and constantly monitor each of those naval reactors 24/7/365.25 in your estimates. Qualified nuclear techs don't come cheap.
*A guesstimate on my part but I can't imagine less than 4 or 5 people per shift to run them.
I usually disagree with you, often quite strongly, but on this I agree. The problem though it is would have to be a constitutional amendment otherwise the Supreme Court would just throw it out.
The planet is not in a death dive. It may be that human civilization is and we may take a lot of species with us but after we're gone give the planet a couple million years of evolution and it will be just as alive as it was before humans arrived on the scene.
But what would all the trout eat if you killed off the skeeters? I love me some tasty pan fried brook trout.
Your restaurant analogy is silly. Carbon sinks don't have any kind of "intelligence" to decide to change the way they react. How they react is governed by physical laws that don't change their mind in any way. A carbon atom doesn't decide it would rather go to that other sink on a whim. It reacts to the balance between the different sinks and the physical factors that affect those sinks. It is largely a predictable linear reaction.
The trend of increasing carbon in all sinks of the active carbon cycle is driven by human emissions. It's kind of amusing to see all the contortions you've gone through to try and avoid that fact.
The atmosphere is one of the natural sinks/sources of CO2 along with the oceans and the land ecosystems. When humans dump more CO2 into the atmosphere it spreads out into the other natural sinks in rough proportion with each other. Yes there is some natural variability from year to year in how much is taken up by the various sinks but it's still just noise. There is no separation between human emissions and the increase in carbon in the various sinks of the carbon cycle.
Of course there is natural variability from year to year but as the post says the increase is caused by humans. To quote:
In case of Die Welt, one of my PIK colleagues had explicitly pointed out to the author, in response to a query by him, that the 5% human share of CO2 is misleading and that humans have caused a 45% increase. That the complete CO2 increase is anthropogenic has been known for decades.
The natural variability is just noise and averages out to 0 over the long run. The trend in the increase in natural sinks (they're all natural BTW including the atmosphere) is entirely due to human emissions.
#2 is more correct.