Calling attention to a problem that is likely to occur after the plants in question are all shut down is, in fact, alarmist. The only possible impact is on cleanup, and that's not something to prepare for right now. Keeping water out for a while is a straightforward engineering problem that has been more or less mastered for over a century.
Given the porosity of the underlying limestone bedrock (think Swiss cheese) keeping the water out at Turkey Point in Southern Florida may not be as straightforward as you believe it is.
Fortunately, we have these things called dikes, levees, and cofferdams that we can build when we need to to protect them from actually being underwater (as long as they're properly built and maintained).
Dikes and levees to keep the sea out don't work very well in much of Florida because the underlying bedrock is largely porous limestone. Even if you build a levee the water will just come up through the ground.
"Conventional sea walls and barriers are not effective here," says Robert Daoust, an ecologist at ARCADIS, a Dutch firm that specializes in engineering solutions to rising seas. "Protecting the city, if it is possible, will require innovative solutions."
Now all they need to do is pass the thing. Does anyone know what kind of poison pill has been inserted yet, which will cause somebody to get off the boat and sink it? We all know there is one...
They actually somewhat compromised, hoping Obama will sign the damn thing.
Republicans gave up defunding Planned Parenthood. Democrats pulled out proposed additional gun control. Republicans gave in on not adding vetting for Syrian refugees. Possibly some others.
Sounds like they actually want this passed.
I'm sure it's full of pork, but aren't they all.
A couple of other biggies: They ended the ban on exporting domestic crude oil and they extended tax credits for wind and solar power for another 5 years.
I believe that mitigating climate change will have a major impact on my 1st world life.
What if not mitigating climate change will have an even more major impact on your 1st world life? Are you prepared for that because the bet you are making is that mitigation is more costly than adaption. A lot of scientists and economists say otherwise.
I'm in my 40s, I likely won't live long enough for any of it to matter.
If you are in your 40s and live to sometime in your 80s I don't think there is any doubt you will serious complications from anthropogenic global warming in your lifetime. Effects are already being felt in places but they're still subtle enough for the most part at this point that most people can still get away with ignoring them.
It's certainly not "exponential", which would be a much faster CO2 increase than linear. Maybe you meant "logarithmic". But, looking at the most recent NOAA/ESRL charts, the CO2 rise still looks pretty close to "linear". GHG time-series plots [noaa.gov]
Your graph is for a short period starting in 1979 that makes it look more linear than it is. Here is a graph that starts around 1750. It looks pretty exponential to me.
So, while there very likely is an anthropogenic component to this rise, it is a very steady rise, evidently independent of recent changes in man-made production and recent temperature fluctuations (1998 Nino etc), suggests it is some kind of buffered response, which tends to smooth out natural and man-made variances (as Mother Nature likes to do).
When the rise in atmospheric CO2 from year to year is less than half of the total emissions from human activities it's kind of hard to argue that the rise is not nearly all anthropogenic. As far as buffering, the rise from year to year is about 2 ppm out of (currently) 400 ppm so relatively small changes in anthropogenic emissions get lost in the noise.
We can argue all day about different temperature measuring techniques but the fact remains that liquid in glass thermometers have been in use for over 300 years and are a well understood technology measuring directly in the medium being measured as are more modern thermometers while satellite measurements are using the proxy of microwave emissions for temperatures and require complex calculations to come up with an actual temperature. Also they don't measure the surface temperature but rather a blob of air somewhere above the surface.
... 1C per century, consistent with the milleniums-old slow rise in temperature since the last ice age.
If you actually look at temperatures over the last 10,000 years they reached a peak in the 6,000 to 8,000 years ago period and have been slowly declining since. This is consistent with the expectations from an analysis of Milankovitch cycles and the slight cooling trend should be continuing... but it isn't.
No, the warming by CO2 forcing as defined by IPCC is immediate: T-change = climate-sensitivity x CO2-forcing.
What to you implies that the temperature change is instantaneous. There are different kinds of climate sensitivity and they are all time dependant. From Wikipedia:
Equilibrium and transient climate sensitivity
The equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) refers to the equilibrium change in global mean near-surface air temperature that would result from a sustained doubling of the atmospheric (equivalent) carbon dioxide concentration (deltaTx2). As estimated by the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) "there is high confidence that ECS is extremely unlikely less than 1C and medium confidence that the ECS is likely between 1.5C and 4.5C and very unlikely greater than 6C."[4] This is a change from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which said it was likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5 C with a best estimate of about 3 C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5 C. Values substantially higher than 4.5 C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values.[5] The IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) said it was "likely to be in the range of 1.5 to 4.5 C".[6] Other estimates of climate sensitivity are discussed later on.
A model estimate of equilibrium sensitivity thus requires a very long model integration; fully equilibrating ocean temperatures requires integrations of thousands of model years. A measure requiring shorter integrations is the transient climate response (TCR) which is defined
That seems to be a Republican trait. Some of what cost Jimmy Carter reelection was the Reagan campaign telling the Iranians they'd get a better deal if he was President.
In fact such policies probably would not survive more than a few weeks after Trump leaves office.
If Trump were in fact to become President and tried the implement such a policy the SCOTUS would probably strike it down as unconstitutional in short order.
BTW, if the conspiracy you allege has been able to maintain itself for over 30 years involving tens of thousands of scientist around the world it's the most impressive conspiracy ever. You might as well give up if they're that good.
When someone makes references to WUWT like you do I just roll my eyes.
In fact, satellite-based estimates of the Earth's mean global temperature have shown no statistically significant global warming for almost 20 years. Yet the CO2 levels measured in Hawaii keep on rising. (Even though man-made CO2 production has leveled off for the past two years). How do you explain that?
CO2 production may have leveled off. If so all that does is change the curve of rising CO2 to linear from exponential. People like you like the satellite temperatures because they support your position but do you have any idea what goes in to producing the satellite temperatures? What they are actually measuring is the microwave emissions of oxygen molecules in the atmosphere not temperatures directly. From there they have to make adjustments for the different satellites that have been launched, sensor deterioration over time, orbital drift of the satellites, data corruption because of clouds, high elevations and other reflections from the surface. After all of that they finally calculate a temperature for a rather amorphous blob of the atmosphere somewhere above the surface. Thermometers are a much more straightforward way of measuring temperature.
"Hysteresis" you say? But the canonical explanations of "CO2-based green-house warming" all say that the warming happens immediately, because the warming is supposed to be directly proportional to the concentrations of green-house gases. Explain how a CO2 (H2O, methane, whatever) molecule, floating in the troposphere and "excited" by a recent absorption of an IR photon, doesn't transfer more thermal energy to the surrounding molecules. Are you denying the "green-house" effect?
The forcing from increased CO2 happens immediately but the warming takes time. Over 90% of the heat from global warming goes into the oceans and a small change in how much is going in the oceans from things like El Nino/La Nina can have significant effects on atmospheric temperatures. Think of it like this; if you put a pot of water on a hot burner it takes time for the water to start boiling. In the same way it takes time for the oceans to catch up to the forcing from increased CO2 and because of ocean-atmosphere coupling that affects the atmosphere too.
A greenhouse gas that absorbs an IR photon is more likely to emit another IR photon than transfer the thermal energy to surrounding molecules. Since the direction that photon is emitted is random approximately half of it is emitted back toward the Earth. That is the greenhouse effect.
Get off the racist soapbox. This has nothing to do with Obama... He's just an ignorant fool that is harming our country. Being black has absolutely NOTHING to do with his lack of backbone or character.
Sometimes it take more courage to exercise restraint than it does to lash out. Any "harm" Obama may have done pales in comparison to the harm from George W. Bush's administration.
There's a lot of hysteresis in the melting of the great ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctic and they're just getting started melting. That 0.12 inches/year was more like 0.08 inches/year in the mid 1990s and 0.04 inches per year in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Are you willing to bet that the rate of sea level rise will not continue to accelerate in the future?
But you're right that 60 feet will take several centuries to be realized. The point is there may not be a damned thing we can do about it at this point.
Want to really annoy Daesh? Try ignoring the whole "terrorism" thing, and treat this as just another murder investigation. Being treated as common criminals is much worse than any official acknowledgement of those clowns....
Exactly. That's what I thought we should have done after 9/11 too, treat it as just another criminal action. None of these terrorists are an existential threat to the US unless we let them scare us into wasting our resources on unproductive wars that make the situation worse.
Mitigation isn't free but neither is adaption. If you look at history mitigation if often less expensive than adaption. That's where the old adage "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." (Ben Franklin) comes from.
Third, we still don't have actual evidence that there is a serious problem.
There isn't any actual evidence that there is not a serious problem either. By working against possible solutions you are making a huge bet there isn't a huge problem. Are you prepared to lose that bet? I think I'll continue to believe the climate scientists who have gotten more right than wrong in their predictions.
Kiribati is history. All they can do is leave. There will probably be 20 or 30 feet of sea level rise over the next several centuries. That's the minimum of how long it will take the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to reach a new equilibrium. The last time CO2 was 400 ppm sea level was over 60 feet higher than now. It's not just the rich in Miami and Norfolk that are being affected.
It's probably too late for emissions cuts to save Kiribati (or Miami, FL for that matter) but the sooner emissions are cut the less overall sea level rise there will be. The last time CO2 levels were 400 ppm sea level was over 60 feet higher than it is now. It may be that there's already that much sea level rise baked in and it's just a matter of how long it takes to get there.
It's not just Kiribati that is affected by rising sea level. All along the US East Coast and Gulf Coast will be affected. Just ask the people of Miami,FL and Norfolk, VA about nuisance flooding which is only going to get worse as sea level continues to rise. The US West Coast is affected too but geography makes it less of a problem over the short one.
It's true that some people base their positions on some things based on what some other people they either admire or revile think about it. Not much I can do about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling attention to a problem that is likely to occur after the plants in question are all shut down is, in fact, alarmist. The only possible impact is on cleanup, and that's not something to prepare for right now. Keeping water out for a while is a straightforward engineering problem that has been more or less mastered for over a century.
Given the porosity of the underlying limestone bedrock (think Swiss cheese) keeping the water out at Turkey Point in Southern Florida may not be as straightforward as you believe it is.
Fortunately, we have these things called dikes, levees, and cofferdams that we can build when we need to to protect them from actually being underwater (as long as they're properly built and maintained).
Dikes and levees to keep the sea out don't work very well in much of Florida because the underlying bedrock is largely porous limestone. Even if you build a levee the water will just come up through the ground.
"Conventional sea walls and barriers are not effective here," says Robert Daoust, an ecologist at ARCADIS, a Dutch firm that specializes in engineering solutions to rising seas. "Protecting the city, if it is possible, will require innovative solutions."
Link
Now all they need to do is pass the thing. Does anyone know what kind of poison pill has been inserted yet, which will cause somebody to get off the boat and sink it? We all know there is one...
They actually somewhat compromised, hoping Obama will sign the damn thing.
Republicans gave up defunding Planned Parenthood.
Democrats pulled out proposed additional gun control.
Republicans gave in on not adding vetting for Syrian refugees.
Possibly some others.
Sounds like they actually want this passed.
I'm sure it's full of pork, but aren't they all.
A couple of other biggies: They ended the ban on exporting domestic crude oil and they extended tax credits for wind and solar power for another 5 years.
Trying to parse that. Is it some sort of Scottish turn of phrase?
That's because he's a lunatic with a dead cat on his head ...
I thought it was a tribble transplant.
(BTW, I stole that from someone else.)
I believe that mitigating climate change will have a major impact on my 1st world life.
What if not mitigating climate change will have an even more major impact on your 1st world life? Are you prepared for that because the bet you are making is that mitigation is more costly than adaption. A lot of scientists and economists say otherwise.
I'm in my 40s, I likely won't live long enough for any of it to matter.
If you are in your 40s and live to sometime in your 80s I don't think there is any doubt you will serious complications from anthropogenic global warming in your lifetime. Effects are already being felt in places but they're still subtle enough for the most part at this point that most people can still get away with ignoring them.
It's certainly not "exponential", which would be a much faster CO2 increase than linear. Maybe you meant "logarithmic". But, looking at the most recent NOAA/ESRL charts, the CO2 rise still looks pretty close to "linear". GHG time-series plots [noaa.gov]
Your graph is for a short period starting in 1979 that makes it look more linear than it is. Here is a graph that starts around 1750. It looks pretty exponential to me.
So, while there very likely is an anthropogenic component to this rise, it is a very steady rise, evidently independent of recent changes in man-made production and recent temperature fluctuations (1998 Nino etc), suggests it is some kind of buffered response, which tends to smooth out natural and man-made variances (as Mother Nature likes to do).
When the rise in atmospheric CO2 from year to year is less than half of the total emissions from human activities it's kind of hard to argue that the rise is not nearly all anthropogenic. As far as buffering, the rise from year to year is about 2 ppm out of (currently) 400 ppm so relatively small changes in anthropogenic emissions get lost in the noise.
We can argue all day about different temperature measuring techniques but the fact remains that liquid in glass thermometers have been in use for over 300 years and are a well understood technology measuring directly in the medium being measured as are more modern thermometers while satellite measurements are using the proxy of microwave emissions for temperatures and require complex calculations to come up with an actual temperature. Also they don't measure the surface temperature but rather a blob of air somewhere above the surface.
If you actually look at temperatures over the last 10,000 years they reached a peak in the 6,000 to 8,000 years ago period and have been slowly declining since. This is consistent with the expectations from an analysis of Milankovitch cycles and the slight cooling trend should be continuing ... but it isn't.
No, the warming by CO2 forcing as defined by IPCC is immediate: T-change = climate-sensitivity x CO2-forcing.
What to you implies that the temperature change is instantaneous. There are different kinds of climate sensitivity and they are all time dependant. From Wikipedia:
Equilibrium and transient climate sensitivity
The equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) refers to the equilibrium change in global mean near-surface air temperature that would result from a sustained doubling of the atmospheric (equivalent) carbon dioxide concentration (deltaTx2). As estimated by the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) "there is high confidence that ECS is extremely unlikely less than 1C and medium confidence that the ECS is likely between 1.5C and 4.5C and very unlikely greater than 6C."[4] This is a change from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which said it was likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5 C with a best estimate of about 3 C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5 C. Values substantially higher than 4.5 C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values.[5] The IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) said it was "likely to be in the range of 1.5 to 4.5 C".[6] Other estimates of climate sensitivity are discussed later on.
A model estimate of equilibrium sensitivity thus requires a very long model integration; fully equilibrating ocean temperatures requires integrations of thousands of model years. A measure requiring shorter integrations is the transient climate response (TCR) which is defined
That seems to be a Republican trait. Some of what cost Jimmy Carter reelection was the Reagan campaign telling the Iranians they'd get a better deal if he was President.
In fact such policies probably would not survive more than a few weeks after Trump leaves office.
If Trump were in fact to become President and tried the implement such a policy the SCOTUS would probably strike it down as unconstitutional in short order.
BTW, if the conspiracy you allege has been able to maintain itself for over 30 years involving tens of thousands of scientist around the world it's the most impressive conspiracy ever. You might as well give up if they're that good.
When someone makes references to WUWT like you do I just roll my eyes.
In fact, satellite-based estimates of the Earth's mean global temperature have shown no statistically significant global warming for almost 20 years. Yet the CO2 levels measured in Hawaii keep on rising. (Even though man-made CO2 production has leveled off for the past two years). How do you explain that?
CO2 production may have leveled off. If so all that does is change the curve of rising CO2 to linear from exponential. People like you like the satellite temperatures because they support your position but do you have any idea what goes in to producing the satellite temperatures? What they are actually measuring is the microwave emissions of oxygen molecules in the atmosphere not temperatures directly. From there they have to make adjustments for the different satellites that have been launched, sensor deterioration over time, orbital drift of the satellites, data corruption because of clouds, high elevations and other reflections from the surface. After all of that they finally calculate a temperature for a rather amorphous blob of the atmosphere somewhere above the surface. Thermometers are a much more straightforward way of measuring temperature.
"Hysteresis" you say? But the canonical explanations of "CO2-based green-house warming" all say that the warming happens immediately, because the warming is supposed to be directly proportional to the concentrations of green-house gases. Explain how a CO2 (H2O, methane, whatever) molecule, floating in the troposphere and "excited" by a recent absorption of an IR photon, doesn't transfer more thermal energy to the surrounding molecules. Are you denying the "green-house" effect?
The forcing from increased CO2 happens immediately but the warming takes time. Over 90% of the heat from global warming goes into the oceans and a small change in how much is going in the oceans from things like El Nino/La Nina can have significant effects on atmospheric temperatures. Think of it like this; if you put a pot of water on a hot burner it takes time for the water to start boiling. In the same way it takes time for the oceans to catch up to the forcing from increased CO2 and because of ocean-atmosphere coupling that affects the atmosphere too.
A greenhouse gas that absorbs an IR photon is more likely to emit another IR photon than transfer the thermal energy to surrounding molecules. Since the direction that photon is emitted is random approximately half of it is emitted back toward the Earth. That is the greenhouse effect.
Get off the racist soapbox. This has nothing to do with Obama... He's just an ignorant fool that is harming our country. Being black has absolutely NOTHING to do with his lack of backbone or character.
Sometimes it take more courage to exercise restraint than it does to lash out. Any "harm" Obama may have done pales in comparison to the harm from George W. Bush's administration.
I have to say the SR-71 was an amazing piece of engineering for the period it was developed in and built.
There's a lot of hysteresis in the melting of the great ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctic and they're just getting started melting. That 0.12 inches/year was more like 0.08 inches/year in the mid 1990s and 0.04 inches per year in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Are you willing to bet that the rate of sea level rise will not continue to accelerate in the future?
But you're right that 60 feet will take several centuries to be realized. The point is there may not be a damned thing we can do about it at this point.
Want to really annoy Daesh? Try ignoring the whole "terrorism" thing, and treat this as just another murder investigation. Being treated as common criminals is much worse than any official acknowledgement of those clowns....
Exactly. That's what I thought we should have done after 9/11 too, treat it as just another criminal action. None of these terrorists are an existential threat to the US unless we let them scare us into wasting our resources on unproductive wars that make the situation worse.
Mitigation isn't free but neither is adaption. If you look at history mitigation if often less expensive than adaption. That's where the old adage "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." (Ben Franklin) comes from.
Third, we still don't have actual evidence that there is a serious problem.
There isn't any actual evidence that there is not a serious problem either. By working against possible solutions you are making a huge bet there isn't a huge problem. Are you prepared to lose that bet? I think I'll continue to believe the climate scientists who have gotten more right than wrong in their predictions.
Yes, Norfolk is subsiding but sea level is also rising. The two factors together make the flooding that much worse.
According to satellite altimeter readings sea level has been rising by over 3 mm/year since the early 1990s. Do you expect that to have no effect?
It was worse in Pittsburgh, PA around 1900.
How can rising sea level not cause increased flooding? Here's and article| from U Florida about sea level rise in the state.
Kiribati is history. All they can do is leave. There will probably be 20 or 30 feet of sea level rise over the next several centuries. That's the minimum of how long it will take the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to reach a new equilibrium. The last time CO2 was 400 ppm sea level was over 60 feet higher than now. It's not just the rich in Miami and Norfolk that are being affected.
It's probably too late for emissions cuts to save Kiribati (or Miami, FL for that matter) but the sooner emissions are cut the less overall sea level rise there will be. The last time CO2 levels were 400 ppm sea level was over 60 feet higher than it is now. It may be that there's already that much sea level rise baked in and it's just a matter of how long it takes to get there.
It's not just Kiribati that is affected by rising sea level. All along the US East Coast and Gulf Coast will be affected. Just ask the people of Miami,FL and Norfolk, VA about nuisance flooding which is only going to get worse as sea level continues to rise. The US West Coast is affected too but geography makes it less of a problem over the short one.
It's true that some people base their positions on some things based on what some other people they either admire or revile think about it. Not much I can do about that.