"How many gigatonnes of ice must melt each year to raise the oceans one foot per decade? 1 foot = 305 mm = 3.05 x 10-1 meters
1 foot per decade = 3.05 x 10-2 meters / yr = 30.5 mm / yr
The number of gigatonnes of water that must be added to the oceans to raise the sea level 1 foot per decade is the same as the number of gigatonnes required to raise the oceans 30.5 mm/yr, and is given by:
360 Gt/mm x 30.5 mm/yr = 10,980 Gt/yr
Similarly, 10,980 km of water per year will raise the oceans 1 foot per decade."
A foot per decade takes nearly 3 times as much ice loss as you cite (ignoring ice mass in the antarctic increasing), *on top of the fact that arctic ice is mostly floating*, and so it wouldn't have *any* impact on sea levels.
So giving you a wildly optimistic (or pessimistic depending on your point of view) amount of leeway, you're threatening us with, what 4 inches of sea level rise per decade? I'm supposed to be *worried* about this insignificant rate of natural change?
That's a whole number.. not part of a fraction. A big number too.
The whole number hardly tells us if this is significant or not. Who cares if I lose five gazillion tons of water, if I originally have fifty million gazillion tons of water to begin with. Now give me the denominator, so we can understand if 14,000,000,000,000 metric tons is significant or not when compared to the entire amount of ice.
All the ice? Arctic, Antartic and Greenland? Sea level rise of around 80 metres.
Fanciful speculation. Not even the warmest of the warmists claim a complete loss of all ice on the planet in any human-scale time period. I could respond by warning of how far sea levels would drop if the entire planet became ice covered -> neither scenario is realistic.
Now we have large complex civilizations dependent on coastal cities. Humanity can survive, our individual states may not.
And how is this different than during periods of natural climate change?
We know what the Earth's orbit is, we can measure solar activity, none of that is having significant impact.
Unfounded assertions. You have no idea about significant impacts, the science as a whole is still incredibly young.
Why don't we start with your concise falsifiable hypothesis statement of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, so we can avoid the unfounded assertions and fanciful speculation you seem to be focused on.
the Artic has lost 14,000,000,000,000 metric tons of ice in the last 30 years.
Give me the denominator, not just the numerator:)
if we melt all the ice, people will die as a result.
Random speculation. If we melt all the ice, people will live as a result too. Now try and convince yourself that more people will die than live.
I'd love to know what you think is causing this if it's not CO2.
Natural climate change, of course. We don't have any deterministic model of course (as it is a stochastic system at heart), but we've had these kinds of natural variations long before humans were significant actors on the planet (assuming they are now).
It's nearly impossible to dispute that the cause of the rise in CO2 is mostly due to human burning of fossil fuels.
Actually, I'd argue that it's quite debatable. Understanding that an increase in temperature can cause outgassing of CO2 from oceans, and that any input of CO2 (be it from humans, or volcanoes, or ocean outgassing) is subject to all sorts of biological and chemical processing (growing plants, chemical transformations), you can't simply take one factor (human CO2 production), and consider it as a causal agent.
But that being said, that's not the weakest link in the CAGW (or AGW) storyline - the weakest links are the assertion that a warmer world is a world that is worse for humanity/biology, and that CO2 (from any source) is a primary driver of climate.
Yeah, Abiogenic petroleum is the big fly in the ointment of the whole Peak Oil crowd. Oil companies get to have it both ways - they keep prices artificially high by insisting that they're selling a non-renewable resource, when in fact they've got "dry" wells filling back up mysteriously:)
It certainly is more scientific than the unspecified Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis:)
I do look forward to a lot more research in this area, and fully expect that climate science, as we know it today, will continue to evolve, change and surprise us. The likelihood of any of the current explanations of climate variation being even close to complete or accurate is vanishingly small:)
Okay, we've removed 2007, and now the sea ice trend is infinitesimally downward. Should we be worried about natural climate variations of negligible magnitude? Or will you still insist that we're in some sort of "death spiral"?
"First Solar's eventual goal is "grid parity," a phrase that refers to making solar power cost the same as competing conventional power sources without subsidies. Right now the cost of making panels accounts for a little less than half the total cost of installation. The company estimates that it needs to get manufacturing costs down to $0.65 to $0.70 per watt, and other installation costs down to $1 a watt in order to reach grid parity—goals First Solar plans to reach by 2012. "
This is coming from 2009, of course, and the date has no doubt shifted further into the future since then:)
Subsidies and artificial price inflations of natural petroleum is what causes solar and wind to become "competitive". The actual unsubsidized cost per kWH still shows a significant market gap, often of double or more than double the alternatives:
For wind, you also have the problem of reliability, so every kW of wind power needs to have a corresponding emergency natural petroleum generator to take over when wind dies down.
There's no indication at all that basic research has gotten us significantly closer to economically competitive alternative energy - if it had, we would no longer need subsidies.
Some "missing bricks" may cause some leaks but doesn't necessarily cause the whole thing to collapse.
An interesting take on it, to be sure. To further torture the analogy, some "missing bricks" might actually indicate you're building something different than you originally thought:)
Of course you're correct, further study is necessary, but this kind of minor breakthrough in theory is *exactly* the kind of stuff the disappears when you say "the science is settled". If we all took the same attitude of "more work needs to be done before solid conclusions can be made" to the *whole* of climate science, we'd probably be closer to the truth, and the number of comment wars on slashdot might see a marked decrease:)
Solar is not cost-effective now. (I'll need a citation for wind turbines.) If we'd actually put some effort into researching alternative power, that would change.
As far as I can tell, solar subsidies aren't directing resources to research -> they're simply subsidizing the existing, non-cost effective solar technology.
Like it or not, the fossil fuels are going to run out, someday.
Not sure if that's true. Abiogenic petroleum represents an alternative view that puts the assertion into question. That being said, changing things before costs actually rise and scarcity is actually there is a significant opportunity cost. You could be improving efficiency technologies, instead of trying to do basic research on alternative energy sources, for example.
This word you use...I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yes, climate change is a scientific fact. Let's expound on that a bit.
Natural climate change is a scientific fact. We can assert this because climate change happened long before anything we currently deem "artificial" or "anthropogenic" existed.
Now, perhaps you only partially agree with this scientific fact. Perhaps you believe that natural climate change has stopped, and current climate change is no longer natural, but anthropogenic. On top of that, perhaps you even believe that this climate change is going to be catastrophic.
Anthropogenic climate change is far from scientific fact, and I'll bet you can't even start the scientific method by stating a succinct falsifiable hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change. But hey, go ahead and try!
The Cloud Graph link posted just one response above the one you are replying to says otherwise, yet here you are Denying the existence of it simply because it does not fit the Dogma you have chosen to believe.
There is always an ad hoc special pleading available for a Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis that is never unambiguously stated. Keep showing refutations of individual points, and warmists will keep insisting that it's all the *other* points that count.
Sounds like the cat is out of the bag on this one. A testable falsifiable hypothesis was formed, experiments were conducted, and the results look like they're going to revolutionize all existing climate models, and quite possibly whatever pre-CLOUD "consensus" existed.
"Although they never said so, the High Priests of the Inconvenient Truth – in such temples as NASA-GISS, Penn State and the University of East Anglia – always knew that Svensmark’s cosmic ray hypothesis was the principal threat to their sketchy and poorly modelled notions of self-amplifying action of greenhouse gases. In telling how the obviously large influences of the Sun in previous centuries and millennia could be explained, and in applying the same mechanism to the 20th warming, Svensmark put the alarmist predictions at risk – and with them the billions of dollars flowing from anxious governments into the global warming enterprise. –-Nigel Calder, 24 August 2011"
Okay, say you've excluded direct solar radiation...have you really excluded *any* external source? For example, cosmic rays affect cloud formation (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/24/breaking-news-cern-experiment-confirms-cosmic-rays-influence-climate-change/) -> the clouds are theoretically *internal* to the system, but the cosmic rays are *external*. If observations are consistent with both a greenhouse gas driven model, and with a cosmic ray and cloud formation model, why should we prefer one over the other?
I'm not sure that if we really have hundreds of things taken together -> we've got hundreds of things, and we can take them together, but that doesn't mean they hold water. All you have to do is miss a single brick in the damn, and the water flows through.
1) I am insistent that seasonal temperature variations are strongly influenced by ocean currents. The late eocene demonstrates this with a much smaller regional difference between tropical and polar areas.
2) I believe we don't have an accurate explanation for current warming, and don't have any reason to believe that anthropogenic CO2 is any more significant than say the heat from the earth's core.
3) I believe anyone who looks at the following graphs and decides that something unprecedented is occurring, and that we *must act now* is definitely cherrypicking.
As a side note, we'll recognize that layzej hasn't presented any sort of falsifiable hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, but has instead decided that the null hypothesis must be that there is no natural climate change right now, and everything is dominated by acts of man...or Acts of Mann, as it were:)
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If recovered sea ice from 2007 doesn't count, then neither should 2007, since that's just statistical noise, right?:)
Yeah, I'm not sure if I buy that either/or presented - what if global warming is caused by variations in cloud cover, for example? What would that look like?
My point being, you've offered only two options - stratosphere cools, or stratosphere warms. Are we to blithely assume that there are only two options to consider? What if warming is caused by a lack of aerosols? What if warming is caused by urban energy production? What if warming is caused by underground leprechauns?
It very well may be that you've defined something that is *necessary* for the CAGW (or it's lesser cousin AGW) hypothesis, but I'm not sure if you've defined something that is in itself *sufficient*.
What is the effect of a cooling stratosphere on say, agriculture in Iowa? Sunbathing in Aruba? Rainfall in Africa?
Now, that may be a prediction, and you might even find some people willing to say CAGW is falsified if that prediction is not true, but can you argue that it's useful?
Mod parent up. I can't believe we live in a day and age where a bunch of mostly secular atheists, who otherwise seem perfectly reasonable and rational, have created a whole new religion under the guise of science. And for fuck's sake, now we've got people who don't believe in evolution staunchly defending the scientific method! How did these wires get crossed? It's like anti-abortion/pro-death-penalty folk, or equal rights/affirmative action folk - the cognitive dissonance must be *killer*!
Actually, some of the biggest proponents of carbon trading markets have been the oil companies. When you can make a killing in alternative energy because of ludicrous government incentives, business people step in all the time.
The problem is that subsidies (and remember to measure these per unit of energy produced, not just in raw $$ per year), delay the need for real innovation. If you can make money with subsidies at $X/megawatt, why bother working for $X-1/megawatt?
Newtonian mechanics and Quantum mechanics have made falsifiable predictions (and in certain cases, haven't succeeded, indicating a need for further work in unification).
Despite much comment on the topic, you still haven't managed to come up with a falsifiable hypothesis statement of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Until you do, you can wash your mouth out with soap, count to ten, and put your temper in check:)
Add #5. You must prove that the disadvantages of a warmer world outweigh the advantages.
This is the real killer - because what matters when it comes to advantages and disadvantages is *weather*, not *climate*. It is the specific distribution of heat in the atmosphere that determines weather that actually affects people, not some imaginary average global temperature.
For example, if we were to move the average temperature of your house to -10C by keeping each room at -10C, that might be very uncomfortable. If we moved the average temperature of your house to -10C by having a single room refrigerated at -100C, and all the other rooms at a comfortable 26C, that's something completely different.
There are no credible models out there that can predict the specific heat distributions around the globe on any significant timescale, period.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a little math for you:
14 trillion metric tons is 14,000 gigatonnes. Divided by 30 years, that's 466 gigatonnes per year.
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/conversion-factors-for-ice-and-water-mass-and-volume/
"How many gigatonnes of ice must melt each year to raise the oceans one foot per decade?
1 foot = 305 mm = 3.05 x 10-1 meters
1 foot per decade = 3.05 x 10-2 meters / yr = 30.5 mm / yr
The number of gigatonnes of water that must be added to the oceans to raise the sea level 1 foot per decade is the same as the number of gigatonnes required to raise the oceans 30.5 mm/yr, and is given by:
360 Gt/mm x 30.5 mm/yr = 10,980 Gt/yr
Similarly, 10,980 km of water per year will raise the oceans 1 foot per decade."
A foot per decade takes nearly 3 times as much ice loss as you cite (ignoring ice mass in the antarctic increasing), *on top of the fact that arctic ice is mostly floating*, and so it wouldn't have *any* impact on sea levels.
So giving you a wildly optimistic (or pessimistic depending on your point of view) amount of leeway, you're threatening us with, what 4 inches of sea level rise per decade? I'm supposed to be *worried* about this insignificant rate of natural change?
The whole number hardly tells us if this is significant or not. Who cares if I lose five gazillion tons of water, if I originally have fifty million gazillion tons of water to begin with. Now give me the denominator, so we can understand if 14,000,000,000,000 metric tons is significant or not when compared to the entire amount of ice.
Fanciful speculation. Not even the warmest of the warmists claim a complete loss of all ice on the planet in any human-scale time period. I could respond by warning of how far sea levels would drop if the entire planet became ice covered -> neither scenario is realistic.
And how is this different than during periods of natural climate change?
Unfounded assertions. You have no idea about significant impacts, the science as a whole is still incredibly young.
Why don't we start with your concise falsifiable hypothesis statement of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, so we can avoid the unfounded assertions and fanciful speculation you seem to be focused on.
Give me the denominator, not just the numerator :)
Random speculation. If we melt all the ice, people will live as a result too. Now try and convince yourself that more people will die than live.
Natural climate change, of course. We don't have any deterministic model of course (as it is a stochastic system at heart), but we've had these kinds of natural variations long before humans were significant actors on the planet (assuming they are now).
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Arctic+loss+been+much+worse+historically+Study/5206595/story.html
Actually, I'd argue that it's quite debatable. Understanding that an increase in temperature can cause outgassing of CO2 from oceans, and that any input of CO2 (be it from humans, or volcanoes, or ocean outgassing) is subject to all sorts of biological and chemical processing (growing plants, chemical transformations), you can't simply take one factor (human CO2 production), and consider it as a causal agent.
But that being said, that's not the weakest link in the CAGW (or AGW) storyline - the weakest links are the assertion that a warmer world is a world that is worse for humanity/biology, and that CO2 (from any source) is a primary driver of climate.
Yeah, Abiogenic petroleum is the big fly in the ointment of the whole Peak Oil crowd. Oil companies get to have it both ways - they keep prices artificially high by insisting that they're selling a non-renewable resource, when in fact they've got "dry" wells filling back up mysteriously :)
http://www.rense.com/general63/refil.htm
It certainly is more scientific than the unspecified Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis :)
I do look forward to a lot more research in this area, and fully expect that climate science, as we know it today, will continue to evolve, change and surprise us. The likelihood of any of the current explanations of climate variation being even close to complete or accurate is vanishingly small :)
Okay, we've removed 2007, and now the sea ice trend is infinitesimally downward. Should we be worried about natural climate variations of negligible magnitude? Or will you still insist that we're in some sort of "death spiral"?
So are you arguing that we no longer need any solar subsidies because the economic model is now self sufficient?
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/solar-wind/4306443
"First Solar's eventual goal is "grid parity," a phrase that refers to making solar power cost the same as competing conventional power sources without subsidies. Right now the cost of making panels accounts for a little less than half the total cost of installation. The company estimates that it needs to get manufacturing costs down to $0.65 to $0.70 per watt, and other installation costs down to $1 a watt in order to reach grid parity—goals First Solar plans to reach by 2012. "
This is coming from 2009, of course, and the date has no doubt shifted further into the future since then :)
But hey, keep pickin' those cherries!
Subsidies and artificial price inflations of natural petroleum is what causes solar and wind to become "competitive". The actual unsubsidized cost per kWH still shows a significant market gap, often of double or more than double the alternatives:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-280.html
For wind, you also have the problem of reliability, so every kW of wind power needs to have a corresponding emergency natural petroleum generator to take over when wind dies down.
There's no indication at all that basic research has gotten us significantly closer to economically competitive alternative energy - if it had, we would no longer need subsidies.
An interesting take on it, to be sure. To further torture the analogy, some "missing bricks" might actually indicate you're building something different than you originally thought :)
Of course you're correct, further study is necessary, but this kind of minor breakthrough in theory is *exactly* the kind of stuff the disappears when you say "the science is settled". If we all took the same attitude of "more work needs to be done before solid conclusions can be made" to the *whole* of climate science, we'd probably be closer to the truth, and the number of comment wars on slashdot might see a marked decrease :)
That begs the question, what have you said that can be refuted - that is to say, what is the falsifiable hypothesis statement you're making?
When you make an irrefutable statement, you're not doing science. When you make a refutable statement that then *isn't* refuted, then you are.
As far as I can tell, solar subsidies aren't directing resources to research -> they're simply subsidizing the existing, non-cost effective solar technology.
Not sure if that's true. Abiogenic petroleum represents an alternative view that puts the assertion into question. That being said, changing things before costs actually rise and scarcity is actually there is a significant opportunity cost. You could be improving efficiency technologies, instead of trying to do basic research on alternative energy sources, for example.
This word you use...I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yes, climate change is a scientific fact. Let's expound on that a bit.
Natural climate change is a scientific fact. We can assert this because climate change happened long before anything we currently deem "artificial" or "anthropogenic" existed.
Now, perhaps you only partially agree with this scientific fact. Perhaps you believe that natural climate change has stopped, and current climate change is no longer natural, but anthropogenic. On top of that, perhaps you even believe that this climate change is going to be catastrophic.
Anthropogenic climate change is far from scientific fact, and I'll bet you can't even start the scientific method by stating a succinct falsifiable hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change. But hey, go ahead and try!
There is always an ad hoc special pleading available for a Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis that is never unambiguously stated. Keep showing refutations of individual points, and warmists will keep insisting that it's all the *other* points that count.
Sounds like the cat is out of the bag on this one. A testable falsifiable hypothesis was formed, experiments were conducted, and the results look like they're going to revolutionize all existing climate models, and quite possibly whatever pre-CLOUD "consensus" existed.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/25/some-reactions-to-the-cloud-experiment/
"Although they never said so, the High Priests of the Inconvenient Truth – in such temples as NASA-GISS, Penn State and the University of East Anglia – always knew that Svensmark’s cosmic ray hypothesis was the principal threat to their sketchy and poorly modelled notions of self-amplifying action of greenhouse gases. In telling how the obviously large influences of the Sun in previous centuries and millennia could be explained, and in applying the same mechanism to the 20th warming, Svensmark put the alarmist predictions at risk – and with them the billions of dollars flowing from anxious governments into the global warming enterprise. –-Nigel Calder, 24 August 2011"
Okay, say you've excluded direct solar radiation...have you really excluded *any* external source? For example, cosmic rays affect cloud formation (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/24/breaking-news-cern-experiment-confirms-cosmic-rays-influence-climate-change/) -> the clouds are theoretically *internal* to the system, but the cosmic rays are *external*. If observations are consistent with both a greenhouse gas driven model, and with a cosmic ray and cloud formation model, why should we prefer one over the other?
I'm not sure that if we really have hundreds of things taken together -> we've got hundreds of things, and we can take them together, but that doesn't mean they hold water. All you have to do is miss a single brick in the damn, and the water flows through.
Ha! Good to see you stalking me layzej!
1) I am insistent that seasonal temperature variations are strongly influenced by ocean currents. The late eocene demonstrates this with a much smaller regional difference between tropical and polar areas.
2) I believe we don't have an accurate explanation for current warming, and don't have any reason to believe that anthropogenic CO2 is any more significant than say the heat from the earth's core.
3) I believe anyone who looks at the following graphs and decides that something unprecedented is occurring, and that we *must act now* is definitely cherrypicking.
As a side note, we'll recognize that layzej hasn't presented any sort of falsifiable hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, but has instead decided that the null hypothesis must be that there is no natural climate change right now, and everything is dominated by acts of man...or Acts of Mann, as it were :)
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If recovered sea ice from 2007 doesn't count, then neither should 2007, since that's just statistical noise, right? :)
Yeah, I'm not sure if I buy that either/or presented - what if global warming is caused by variations in cloud cover, for example? What would that look like?
My point being, you've offered only two options - stratosphere cools, or stratosphere warms. Are we to blithely assume that there are only two options to consider? What if warming is caused by a lack of aerosols? What if warming is caused by urban energy production? What if warming is caused by underground leprechauns?
It very well may be that you've defined something that is *necessary* for the CAGW (or it's lesser cousin AGW) hypothesis, but I'm not sure if you've defined something that is in itself *sufficient*.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
So when we have increasing CO2, but recovering sea ice since 2007, what does that do to your hypothesis?
option 1) oops, I'm wrong. MightyMartian apologizes for the unnecessary alarm.
option 2) ooh, wait, I've got an ad hoc special pleading about this particular refutation!
Care to wave your hands a bit more? :)
How is that a useful prediction?
What is the effect of a cooling stratosphere on say, agriculture in Iowa? Sunbathing in Aruba? Rainfall in Africa?
Now, that may be a prediction, and you might even find some people willing to say CAGW is falsified if that prediction is not true, but can you argue that it's useful?
Mod parent up. I can't believe we live in a day and age where a bunch of mostly secular atheists, who otherwise seem perfectly reasonable and rational, have created a whole new religion under the guise of science. And for fuck's sake, now we've got people who don't believe in evolution staunchly defending the scientific method! How did these wires get crossed? It's like anti-abortion/pro-death-penalty folk, or equal rights/affirmative action folk - the cognitive dissonance must be *killer*!
Actually, some of the biggest proponents of carbon trading markets have been the oil companies. When you can make a killing in alternative energy because of ludicrous government incentives, business people step in all the time.
The problem is that subsidies (and remember to measure these per unit of energy produced, not just in raw $$ per year), delay the need for real innovation. If you can make money with subsidies at $X/megawatt, why bother working for $X-1/megawatt?
Oh, and google "abiogenic petroleum".
Newtonian mechanics and Quantum mechanics have made falsifiable predictions (and in certain cases, haven't succeeded, indicating a need for further work in unification).
Despite much comment on the topic, you still haven't managed to come up with a falsifiable hypothesis statement of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Until you do, you can wash your mouth out with soap, count to ten, and put your temper in check :)
Add #5. You must prove that the disadvantages of a warmer world outweigh the advantages.
This is the real killer - because what matters when it comes to advantages and disadvantages is *weather*, not *climate*. It is the specific distribution of heat in the atmosphere that determines weather that actually affects people, not some imaginary average global temperature.
For example, if we were to move the average temperature of your house to -10C by keeping each room at -10C, that might be very uncomfortable. If we moved the average temperature of your house to -10C by having a single room refrigerated at -100C, and all the other rooms at a comfortable 26C, that's something completely different.
There are no credible models out there that can predict the specific heat distributions around the globe on any significant timescale, period.