Hello Warsaw: Greenland ice loss will be OK 'even under extreme scenarios' The UN Climate Change Conference in Warsaw is set to wind up tomorrow, probably without establishing any real prospect of human carbon emissions being seriously reduced in the foreseeable future. Many are worried that this could mean disastrous rises in sea level this century, with associated human misery on a grand scale. In …
If only the science was settled on this matter. Then we could conclude imminent sea level rise isn't a threat.
But as we all know, the science isn't settled, there's no consensus, etc etc. So Eric Schmidt's disastrous 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100 is entirely plausible and a worse case scenario that needs to be planned for.
But as we all know, the science isn't settled, there's no consensus, etc etc. So Eric Schmidt's disastrous 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100 is entirely plausible and a worse case scenario that needs to be planned for."
By that logic we should also allow for the case where the earth is only 6000 years old.
It looks like climate change disaster scenarios are moving from the horror section to the comedy section of the store.
No heat since 1995, no melting glaciers, no ice falling off Greenland, and a really quiet Sun. All those spenders of billions for green energy got the story wrong. Now we'll need a new reason to wean ourselves off oil use!
"It looks like climate change disaster scenarios are moving from the horror section to the comedy section of the store."
The UN are playing a game of political poker. Their first hand was CO2, the next will be Nitrus Oxide.
Unfortunately, the simple truth is that the UN will keep banging on, and on, an on ad infinutum, until all first world nations kotow to their global taxation demands.
Irrespective of the scientific debate, global taxation is the UNs ultimate goal and is why the IPCC should be replaced with a transparent and properly staffed scientific body that is independent from any form of political influence or scientific peer pressure.
No ice melt? What rock are you living under. There has been gobs of ice melt. Global temps are still rising and we have had some of the warmest years in centuries occurring. Greenland's ice sheets are rapidly depleting. As for oil, how about getting off it so that we stop pumping pollution into the air...you know, the stuff we breathe to survive. And maybe while we are at it, we can stop contaminating our waters...that stuff that makes up 70% of our bodies. But hey, what do I know. I just live on this planet.
As ice is removed from Greenland, the viscous asthenosphere beneath rebounds upward, with compensatory replacement from peripheral oceanic upper mantle, lowering the seafloor. Crustal rebound of up to ~ 1.0 cm/year has been measured in post-glaciation areas of north-eastern Canada.
Connect the dots, Professor Gore.
Sigh. There has been no increase in temps in 17 years. Greenland's ice sheets are not melting as fast as feared (rtfa) and recent research indicates that what has been melting is primarily due to geothermal activity. The decrease in Arctic ice has been more than off-set by a growth of Antarctic ice - the total global ice is exactly the thirty-year average.
The carbon dioxide we pump into the air is plant food. When photsynthesizing organisms evolved CO2 made up 20% of the atmosphere. When dinosaurs roamed, it was 5%. Today, it is less than 0.04%. If it falls under 0.02%, plants cannot phytosynthesize, and virtually all life on Earth ends. Even at today's levels, C3 crops like wheat stop growing in the afternoon in the UK on warm growing days due to localized shortages of CO2.
If you want to give up oil, go for it. But you have to give up your car, most of the clothes you wear, most foods you eat, and most definitely all your electric toys, since all of them are made, produced, or grown using proucts derived from oil. You would need to move into a cave (naked) and eat grubs to survive. Think I'll take a pass on following your lead.
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I hate to break it to you, but you're wrong and the guy you respond to was at least partly right.
"During the Devonian, which is when plants were really dominant, levels dropped from about 5000 to 500 parts per million. 20%? Pull the other one. Between 40 and 400 times too high."
Photosynthesis was not "invented" by plants but by cyanobacteria. When these evolved there was 0% O2 in the atmosphere and quite a lot of CO2 indeed, 20% isn't far off the mark.
"The pH would simply be too low. Even at 5% you wouldn't be getting any dinosaurs or fish."
Your pH assumption is bullshit, 5% CO2 is what we give to cultured mammalian cells in labs, precisely to keep the pH exactly right for them. That pH of course depends also on the bicarbonate concentration in the medium. With common lab media we achieve pH 7.4 with 5% CO2. Of course the sea is not a "common lab medium", but still 5% CO2 is not what I would call incompatible with life. Actually a lot -most- of your own cells are seeing 5% CO2 as you read this, and some (though much fewer) are seeing 20% indeed.
When correcting someone else's percieved mistakes, try not to make huger ones.
Give up on the "CO2 is plant food" meme. Too much CO2 will kill plants, but more to the point too much (for lesser levels of too much) CO2 causes ocean acidification, kills corals, which in turn has massive implications for the whole food chain/ecosystem. Too much CO2 also causes algal blooms which in turn have massive impact on marine life.
Plants growing is all very well, as long as they're the right plants in the right place, with too much food and no checks and balances seemingly innocent plants can cause devastation.
Carbon dioxide is not only plant food... most of it ends up in the oceans, which makes the ocean more acidic, which makes it harder for corals and shellfish with calcium carbonate exoskeletons to build and maintain their shells.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/animal_forecast/2013/02/ocean_acidification_and_oysters_shellfish_are_already_suffering_1.html
You may be able to paint sea level rise and even atmospheric temperature rise with a swath of "no consensus" but there is absolutely no doubt at all about how increases in atmospheric CO2 cause increases in ocean acidification.
Seafood supplies a large proportion of the protein in the diets of billions of humans. Do we want to play Russian roulette with that?
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_21619012/study-climate-change-threatens-seafood-supply
"and a really quiet Sun"
ORLY? http://io9.com/our-sun-emits-a-massive-x1-solar-flare-1468210258
"This is the latest in a string of recent outbursts, with yesterday's eruption among the most violent we've seen all year"
As for atmospheric warming... looks like the oceans have been taking the heat:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/what-ocean-heating-reveals-about-global-warming/
"The heat content of the oceans is growing and growing. That means that the greenhouse effect has not taken a pause and the cold sun is not noticeably slowing global warming."
At the rate things are going, we'll see Polar bears wrestling alligators by the end of the century. http://ghostsofdc.org/2013/07/15/holy-sht-two-alligators-found-in-rock-creek/
There is NO Carbon climate forcing, only FORCED Carbon commodity marketing, taxes and draconian controls. There is NO' 'sustainable' energy as all these green meanie schemes require more energy to crate than they produce. There is NO 'peak' oil as Hydrocarbons are created throughout the Universe and are a precursor to life, not a finite residual of past life.
See "Becoming A TOTAL Earth Science Skeptic" and be skeptical of the Demonic Warlords fables.
The 'Vikings' spent @500 years in Greenland as a fair chunk of it it was a green a lush verdant forested paradise, though albiet I'd wager with some nippy winters. It was only in the latter part of the 'Viking' colonisation that things started to freeze over.
On this basis, could someone please provide evidence of the ocean levels falling during the period of refreezing and the subsequent post industrialisation melting everything (allegedly).
Finally, yes ice mets in summer and freezes in winter - get over it....
'The 'Vikings' spent @500 years in Greenland as a fair chunk of it it was a green a lush verdant forested paradise,'
There were no forests in Greenland. It was low scrub and grassland. The wood was imported from Norway and from Iceland (hastening that country's ecological collapse). It was always a marginal agricultural society even during the warmest period reliant on a hay harvest to keep animals alive in the winter. As soon as the conditions began to deteriorate there was no slack in the system and the inflexibility of the Norse economy doomed them to starvation.
There's a very readable account of the Norse settlement of Greenland and its rather grisly fate in 'Collapse' by Jared Diamond.
'On this basis, could someone please provide evidence of the ocean levels falling during the period of refreezing and the subsequent post industrialisation melting everything (allegedly).'
By all means:
Nunn, P. D. (2000), Environmental catastrophe in the Pacific Islands around A.D. 1300. Geoarchaeology, 15: 715–740. doi: 10.1002/1520-6548(200010)15:7<715::AID-GEA4>3.0.CO;2-L
What happened? When did scientific discovery move from wonder to fear? The data on climate is scant the proxies are poor, the only reliable measurements (CET) shows nothing to fear in 400 years of measurements. Sea levels as measured barely show any increase and yet we must all scurry back to our caves and beg forgiveness from Gaia for having the audacity to want to be warm when it's cold.
Did all the A-arc scientists leave after the second world war and all that's left are b-arc climatologist? When did putting more food out for plants become a bad thing - when did slightly warmer become more feared than the known quick death from cold?
This ones for you noms - where is the evidence outside of the iPCC's scary computer games that there is actually anything to fear? Even in AR5 the likelihood of anything bad happening within the next 100 years is extremely unlikely to not very likely!
Stop being afraid of science - there is nothing to fear except wilful ignorance - and the precautionary principle is for cowards and slaves. Nature is not fragile it exists in evolutionary stable systems - and the more CO2 in the atmosphere the more the biosphere responds.
.. questions remain about what the specific affects will be, but Climate Change is real.
Only fully paid up members of the Tin Hat Brigade continue to deny it and they should be dismissed with the utter contempt they deserve. Really, grow up: reality isn't going to change because you don't like it.
True that. The atmosphere will be blasted away and the seas will boil off the surface of the Earth.
Oh, I thought you were talking about the catastrophic global warming event that is our Sun transforming into a red giant in a few billion years.
Because that is the only science that is "settled" as far as our climate is concerned.
I do wonder why some people don't float off into space - after all the science behind exactly how gravity works isn't settled, so clearly gravity can't exist. It's probably the weight of their pedantry keeping them down.
The science of climate change is clear enough to call 'settled' - the details on the other hand are hard to resolve - but even if you think it 'unsettled' why should you think that this time the toast will fall butter up?
"Deniers" is such a pissant word and nothing more than a new form of "Heretic".
I doubt any of those you label Deniers deny that climate change is real. All the non-religious know that ~20,000 years ago it was a lot colder in Europe than it is now, and that the climate changed, ergo climate change is real.
If you meant man-made climate change then please say that. No, the phrase "climate change" is not generally understood to mean "man-made climate change".
So please, if we are to be adult about this as you seem to want, stop calling people names and stop dismissing dissenting opinion as contemptible.
The suggestion was that people who denied the reality of climate change were contemptible - you don't believe that there are any - and by your own words you would think them deluded if they did exist.
And yes - the word climate change is commonly used as a short hand for man-made climate change - as 5 seconds on Google or any dictionary would show.
In the absence of anything other than 'faith' straw men are, I guess, your only weapon.
' rise of no more than 30cm even in the worst possible carbon-belching case - and more probably less, in other words no major change from the 20th century.' - nope 0.5 to 1 m for belching, 0.3 to 0.6 for aggresive control - want to lie down on a beach that is currently 30 cms above sea level in 90 years time and try breathing ?
This result makes sense to me: I've been to a couple of glaciers, and I even remember what I learned about them at school, and the melt-water running under a glacier basically runs in one or more channels: like streams/rivers. Almost all of the glacier ice is still in contact with the rock it is sitting on, and this is still the case no matter how fast the streams/rivers are flowing. So, no noticeable change to the slip speed even when there's more melt-water flowing.
What's that? You want my opinion on AGW/sea levels/Lewis Page/hippies? Not telling.
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