Here (PDF) is a 2009 paper on the subject. Check out Fig. 6 on page 5. The estimates for 2100 range from around 80 to 180 cm depending on the scenario. Of course there could be events that we can't foresee that would change that but more than 8-10 feet by 2100 seems to be beyond reasonable given what we currently know. If we keep on with business as usual though 30 feet might be possible by 2200.
In my job as a systems, database and backup admin, if I'm doing it right there's not a tremendous work load most of the time. OTOH over my 26 years I've spent lots of time at work after hours and over holiday weekends installing upgrades or putting the systems back together when they go south. They pay me as much for my expertise as they do for my productivity.
The data was collected by a coalition of researchers from around the world, mostly not from the US. The JPL merely took the data from many studies and using their super computers put it together in a comprehensive whole for Antarctica.
Rising water levels won't change the area of the oceans all that much. The oceans already cover about 71% of the surface of the Earth. Maybe that goes up to 71.5%. Rising temperature does increase the evaporation rate though. There is around 4% more water vapor in the atmosphere now because of rising temperatures. What rising water levels do to the ice on Antarctica and Greenland is raise the grounding line where the ice sheets/glaciers meet the sea which destabilizes that interface and probably increases the melt rate. Increased temperatures and water vapor in the atmosphere will increase snowfall on the ice sheets somewhat but that's balanced more or less by an increase in the flow rate of the ice sheets. I doubt there is a higher rate of ice formation in the long run.
Oh, there's enough ice there it will take several thousand years for all of it to melt. But the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could slide into the ocean pretty fast which would be a problem. A collapse if the WAIS would amount to over 15 feet of sea level rise.
Well, you're talking best case scenario, I'm talking worse case scenario. Actual results are likely to be somewhere in between if we get an event like the 1859 solar storm. Here's an article from March 2011 in National Geographic on the subject. Some of the comments are interesting too.
Yes, the demand may be huge but to think that satellites could be replaced in a month or two is ridiculous. There aren't that many firms with the expertise and talent to build satellites around and it takes time to ramp up that sort of capacity.
The electromagnetic effects of a solar flare certainly could reach your car in it's garage. They could reach the replacement electronics sitting on the shelf. It's like an electromagnetic pulse. A fuse is not necessarily going to protect you if it's strong enough and your house wiring picks it up.
Admittedly I'm talking about worse case scenarios but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
I'm pretty neutral about jellyfish so I didn't comment on them. They do have an interesting life cycle though.
Practical logistics says it's going to take a year or two to get things organized and ramped up after a massive disruption. We build electronic navigation equipment where I work and some of the parts we use have 8 or 10 month lead times. The earthquake in Japan has caused us issues with some supplies. A global disruption is going to be even worse.
It won't take years to fully recover. I'd bet that if every satelite were destroyed on the same day, within 1 month we'd have them all replaced.
My, aren't you optimistic. Do you think there are a bunch of spare satellites just laying around waiting to be launched from spare rockets waiting to launch them? Rrriiiggghhhttt! If every useful satellite in orbit were destroyed it would probably take at least 5 years to replace them. It takes more than a year just to build most of them and there's not enough production capacity to build that many at once.
We'd lose only half of the satellites -- the other half would be shielded by an entire planet: the Earth itself.
Many of the useful satellites are orbiting in geosynchronous orbit. Most satellites are powered by solar cells so they can't afford to be out of the sunlight that much of the time. On top of that what causes the problem is not electromagnetic radiation but charged particles that the Earth's magnetic field could easily suck into the umbra anyway.
You are right that there wouldn't be a large effect on the natural world but your house might burn down because of the excess voltage generated in the wiring. The electric grid may fail spectacularly taking out a bunch of transformers, another thing that takes time to build and doesn't have a lot of spares available. The electronic module in your vehicle might be trashed making the car unusable. Same thing with your cell phone. I'm not saying all of that is going to happen but none of it is outside of the realm of possibility.
Business depends on their suppliers so if they can't deliver to you then you can't do much.
I'm with you on the falcons and cheetahs. I've had a picture of a cool cheetah wearing shades hanging on my office wall for over a decade. Sequoia seeds are small but not microscopic. They're around 4-5 mm in size including the wing and a mature tree produces around 300,000-400,000 of them in a year. They are pretty awesome trees though. I've stood on the stump of one that was cut down that was as big as the area of my 1,200 sq. ft. house.
In the end I just think you're very optimistic about what it will take to recover from a massive direct hit from a solar storm. I think it would affect practically everything electric and electronic around the planet. On the bright side the fiber optic cables would be unaffected but that doesn't do much good if the electronics that feed them are screwed.
Sometimes it's worth paying a higher price for strategic reasons. If the supply of something important is subject to disruption because of political considerations then it may be worth assuring that supply even if it costs more because the cost of not having it is much greater.
Umm, here is some information on the solar storm of 1859 that did disrupt telegraph lines as well having other spectacular effects around the world. The world is massively more wired today than it was back then so I would expect the effects on civilization to be massively greater too. Of course it's hit or miss whether we get a direct hit like we did in 1859 so maybe you're right but if we do get hit like that I expect it will take several years and maybe even a decade to fully recover from.
I had to laugh when I read your post because the quote at the bottom of the page was "Famous last words." I could apply.
Here is a peer reviewed paper that says if the Sun's activity level returned to a new grand minimum like the Maunder minimum it would reduce the projected temperature rise in 2100 by no more than 0.3C. I think that's a reasonable basis for the assertion.
Since the paper is paywalled you can see a summary of it here.
Of course the Sun affects the climate on the Earth. The global warming tenet you're talking about is that the Sun has not changed its output enough over the past half century plus to account for the changes we're seeing.
... if you're too lazy to make sure that you're buying a quality product then you deserve whatever comes to you.
That doesn't do your next door neighbor much good when the hurricane blows your house into his. Sure you can sue the offender but that doesn't guarantee they can cover your loses, especially if there are deaths involved. It makes more sense to me to require some minimal standards up front for the benefit of the society in general.
Oh, really. Care to be specific because I can't find anything that says the arctic has been totally ice free in the last million years? I assume you're not talking about in the last few years.
More snow is not an indication of temperatures getting colder and may indicate warming temperatures. The colder air gets the less water vapor it can hold which means the less snow it can drop.
Clouds generally won't form when the relative humidity is less than 100%. That's their correlation to water vapor. Clouds and water vapor are two different things when it comes to their greenhouse effects though.
I think your numbers are a bit off. According to Wikipedia distribution of the greenhouse effect among the important greenhouse gases is:
Water Vapor:-----36-70% Carbon Dioxide:---9-26% Methane:-------------4-9% Ozone:----------------3-7%
Clouds also have an effect that is thought to be slightly positive overall. Clouds of course are highly correlated with water vapor.
The reason the numbers have such a wide spread is that the level of water vapor is quite variable and as humidity drops the other GHG's become more important.
I might add to that a natural volcano eruption produces so much CO2, that our silly civilization cannot produce in a half a century.
You got that backwards. Volcanoes produce about as much atmospheric CO2 in a century as human burning of fossil fuel at the current rate does in about 1 year.
The ice that the tsunami broke off of Antarctica was from an ice shelf, not sea ice. Two different things. But you're right, the process of the cryosphere melting is not a strictly linear process.
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Here (PDF) is a 2009 paper on the subject. Check out Fig. 6 on page 5. The estimates for 2100 range from around 80 to 180 cm depending on the scenario. Of course there could be events that we can't foresee that would change that but more than 8-10 feet by 2100 seems to be beyond reasonable given what we currently know. If we keep on with business as usual though 30 feet might be possible by 2200.
I think you mean Googondolas.
In my job as a systems, database and backup admin, if I'm doing it right there's not a tremendous work load most of the time. OTOH over my 26 years I've spent lots of time at work after hours and over holiday weekends installing upgrades or putting the systems back together when they go south. They pay me as much for my expertise as they do for my productivity.
The data was collected by a coalition of researchers from around the world, mostly not from the US. The JPL merely took the data from many studies and using their super computers put it together in a comprehensive whole for Antarctica.
There are people alive today who will see 3-6 feet of sea level rise by 2100 if current projections are correct.
Rising water levels won't change the area of the oceans all that much. The oceans already cover about 71% of the surface of the Earth. Maybe that goes up to 71.5%. Rising temperature does increase the evaporation rate though. There is around 4% more water vapor in the atmosphere now because of rising temperatures. What rising water levels do to the ice on Antarctica and Greenland is raise the grounding line where the ice sheets/glaciers meet the sea which destabilizes that interface and probably increases the melt rate. Increased temperatures and water vapor in the atmosphere will increase snowfall on the ice sheets somewhat but that's balanced more or less by an increase in the flow rate of the ice sheets. I doubt there is a higher rate of ice formation in the long run.
Taxes are the dues you pay for a civilized society.
Don't you think all of the hot air from the politicians would cause a massive melt of the ice? Better to send them to Death Valley.
Oh, there's enough ice there it will take several thousand years for all of it to melt. But the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could slide into the ocean pretty fast which would be a problem. A collapse if the WAIS would amount to over 15 feet of sea level rise.
Well, you're talking best case scenario, I'm talking worse case scenario. Actual results are likely to be somewhere in between if we get an event like the 1859 solar storm. Here's an article from March 2011 in National Geographic on the subject. Some of the comments are interesting too.
Yes, the demand may be huge but to think that satellites could be replaced in a month or two is ridiculous. There aren't that many firms with the expertise and talent to build satellites around and it takes time to ramp up that sort of capacity.
The electromagnetic effects of a solar flare certainly could reach your car in it's garage. They could reach the replacement electronics sitting on the shelf. It's like an electromagnetic pulse. A fuse is not necessarily going to protect you if it's strong enough and your house wiring picks it up.
Admittedly I'm talking about worse case scenarios but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
I'm pretty neutral about jellyfish so I didn't comment on them. They do have an interesting life cycle though.
Practical logistics says it's going to take a year or two to get things organized and ramped up after a massive disruption. We build electronic navigation equipment where I work and some of the parts we use have 8 or 10 month lead times. The earthquake in Japan has caused us issues with some supplies. A global disruption is going to be even worse.
It won't take years to fully recover. I'd bet that if every satelite were destroyed on the same day, within 1 month we'd have them all replaced.
My, aren't you optimistic. Do you think there are a bunch of spare satellites just laying around waiting to be launched from spare rockets waiting to launch them? Rrriiiggghhhttt! If every useful satellite in orbit were destroyed it would probably take at least 5 years to replace them. It takes more than a year just to build most of them and there's not enough production capacity to build that many at once.
We'd lose only half of the satellites -- the other half would be shielded by an entire planet: the Earth itself.
Many of the useful satellites are orbiting in geosynchronous orbit. Most satellites are powered by solar cells so they can't afford to be out of the sunlight that much of the time. On top of that what causes the problem is not electromagnetic radiation but charged particles that the Earth's magnetic field could easily suck into the umbra anyway.
You are right that there wouldn't be a large effect on the natural world but your house might burn down because of the excess voltage generated in the wiring. The electric grid may fail spectacularly taking out a bunch of transformers, another thing that takes time to build and doesn't have a lot of spares available. The electronic module in your vehicle might be trashed making the car unusable. Same thing with your cell phone. I'm not saying all of that is going to happen but none of it is outside of the realm of possibility.
Business depends on their suppliers so if they can't deliver to you then you can't do much.
I'm with you on the falcons and cheetahs. I've had a picture of a cool cheetah wearing shades hanging on my office wall for over a decade. Sequoia seeds are small but not microscopic. They're around 4-5 mm in size including the wing and a mature tree produces around 300,000-400,000 of them in a year. They are pretty awesome trees though. I've stood on the stump of one that was cut down that was as big as the area of my 1,200 sq. ft. house.
In the end I just think you're very optimistic about what it will take to recover from a massive direct hit from a solar storm. I think it would affect practically everything electric and electronic around the planet. On the bright side the fiber optic cables would be unaffected but that doesn't do much good if the electronics that feed them are screwed.
Sometimes it's worth paying a higher price for strategic reasons. If the supply of something important is subject to disruption because of political considerations then it may be worth assuring that supply even if it costs more because the cost of not having it is much greater.
Umm, here is some information on the solar storm of 1859 that did disrupt telegraph lines as well having other spectacular effects around the world. The world is massively more wired today than it was back then so I would expect the effects on civilization to be massively greater too. Of course it's hit or miss whether we get a direct hit like we did in 1859 so maybe you're right but if we do get hit like that I expect it will take several years and maybe even a decade to fully recover from.
I had to laugh when I read your post because the quote at the bottom of the page was "Famous last words." I could apply.
Here is a peer reviewed paper that says if the Sun's activity level returned to a new grand minimum like the Maunder minimum it would reduce the projected temperature rise in 2100 by no more than 0.3C. I think that's a reasonable basis for the assertion.
Since the paper is paywalled you can see a summary of it here.
Of course the Sun affects the climate on the Earth. The global warming tenet you're talking about is that the Sun has not changed its output enough over the past half century plus to account for the changes we're seeing.
... if you're too lazy to make sure that you're buying a quality product then you deserve whatever comes to you.
That doesn't do your next door neighbor much good when the hurricane blows your house into his. Sure you can sue the offender but that doesn't guarantee they can cover your loses, especially if there are deaths involved. It makes more sense to me to require some minimal standards up front for the benefit of the society in general.
No man is an island.
Oh, really. Care to be specific because I can't find anything that says the arctic has been totally ice free in the last million years? I assume you're not talking about in the last few years.
More snow is not an indication of temperatures getting colder and may indicate warming temperatures. The colder air gets the less water vapor it can hold which means the less snow it can drop.
Clouds generally won't form when the relative humidity is less than 100%. That's their correlation to water vapor. Clouds and water vapor are two different things when it comes to their greenhouse effects though.
I think your numbers are a bit off. According to Wikipedia distribution of the greenhouse effect among the important greenhouse gases is:
Water Vapor:-----36-70%
Carbon Dioxide:---9-26%
Methane:-------------4-9%
Ozone:----------------3-7%
Clouds also have an effect that is thought to be slightly positive overall. Clouds of course are highly correlated with water vapor.
The reason the numbers have such a wide spread is that the level of water vapor is quite variable and as humidity drops the other GHG's become more important.
No, just get a push mower. The exercise is good for you.
That's an important point. Open water has a lower albedo than ice so ice melting and exposing open water or land exacerbates global warming.
I might add to that a natural volcano eruption produces so much CO2, that our silly civilization cannot produce in a half a century.
You got that backwards. Volcanoes produce about as much atmospheric CO2 in a century as human burning of fossil fuel at the current rate does in about 1 year.
The ice that the tsunami broke off of Antarctica was from an ice shelf, not sea ice. Two different things. But you're right, the process of the cryosphere melting is not a strictly linear process.