2C limit?

Ever time I reevaluate what can be done, it keeps coming back as an economic problem, not a scientific problem. I don't know if climate models will ever work, just like I don't know if hurricane tracking models can ever be accurate more than hours in advance. I do know the right actions to take for both increasing fuel costs, pollution, and hurricanes. Most people do once their wallet is involved. US contributions to CO2 have actually gone down over previous years while China's contribution is skyrocketing. But China is also choking on all the other related pollution as well. The only solution to the chinese pollution issues, such as coal particulate, ultimately must be an economic solution figured out in China.

Now economic approaches, planned out intelligently, will work. The worry is Wall Street influence for any economic policy results in a destructive economic approach....and our political system is extremely tied to Wall Street influence.

 

Bob I would not agree that woodcutters have passed into history! Amazonia and Indonesia get most of the media coverage, but DO NOT read about Madagascar if you at all susceptible to depression.

At least mojo and I are interested in causes and effects of the Little Ice Age. It would deserve a separate thread so as to not distract from 2 oC here. One of us should start that. If it's mojo, we could expect a flamboyant beginning. If I, boring start at the wikipedia page, and then onwards. I'd rather the flamboyant, so maestro, if you please...

 

Bob, it would be better to think about the next great extinction event tied to habitat loss, and to hunting/eating. If you asked me to name a species thunked by recent decades' +1 oC, I'd come up dry. So don't ask.

Earth's most recent substantial thermal excursion (+5 to +7 oC) Was PETM 60 ish milion years ago. Dinosaurs (the previous prime movers) had recently been deleted. Rat-like mammals rose to the challenge, diversified dramatically, and we get to now. Now is a world where one mammal did the agriculture thing, the fossil-C-burn thing, and the technology thing. Runs the show. Yay us.

Plants on land found their way through PETM, along with most critters at sea. This is a heckuva durable planet, biologically speaking. We should be glad that is the case. Ongoing habitat loss will snuff more species, and if those might have provided crucial medicines, well too effing bad. But by no means am I convinced that an additional 1 (or 3) +oC are the major concern in re.

If a +2 oC lmiit has value, it is not linked to the biosphere at large. It is better linked to the human enterprise, growing food and shipping things to other people to buy, and getting energy and potable water to billions of humans still at the bottom.

Things need to be done. Humans have the means to achieve. All we need to do is settle on a balance between increasing renewable E and increasing CO2, and get on with it.

In that context, all who imagine their great abilities to redefine the discussion in terms of 'greatest hoax ever' or 'coming ice age' or all the other Gish gallops are having a peak just now. In a few decades they will fade from view as everyone else settles down to the serious business of improving the human enterprise. I only wish we could turn to that sooner, because it might save a lot of money to do so.

 

...we just got back from the Florida Keys, and I mean all the way out to Dry Tortugas, the furtherest keys 70 mile boat ride from Key West by the National Park Service. We saw some small keys diminishing in size, but there is also a small new key forming ...good enough for sea turtle to have a successful nest in the sand. I asked the park ranger if there was concern (about rising sea levels), and he simply said it was under study. Apparently they have only recently started measuring the sea levels at the old Fort at Garden Key (Dry Totugas).

In Virginia, we hear much concern about Virginia Beach/Norfolk being flooded out due to climate change. I did not hear too much of that talk in FL, perhaps I just missed it. But also in VA the land is subsiding due to Ice Age glaciers flexing of the land upwards.

 

In Florida, officials ban term 'climate change' | Miami Herald Miami Herald
http://www.floridaoceanscouncil.org/reports/Climate_Change_and_Sea_Level_Rise.pdf

The keys are definitely at great risk. Politically they don't want to talk about it. Reducing ghg, the democrats strategy (as long as its someone else's ghg) won't do anything to lower risk at the keys. Sea level rise is already locked in. What would b prudent is to over the next 20 years slowly increase the flood insurance premiums to what it will really cost. That will slowly move people out of harms way. I don't think sea walls will even help here, but they will on the east coast.

 

Good point, I forgot they were not allowed to talk about it in FL by policy.
But on the surface appearance, there is no obvious loss of Keys so far.
The coral reefs took a hit in 1983 due to die-off of the black spiney sea urchin to disease..coming back.
I saw lots of them snorkeling....don't know if the sea urchins there were replenished by man.

 

A couple of things about FL sea level rise:
1) The continuous motion of sand bars and beach edges has already been halted completely with beach, seawall and condo construction for decades. The "replenishment business" is here to stay. The speed of sea level rise will be quite slower than the speed of dredging additional muck and sand for quite a few decades and probably a century or two.
2) Nearly all the property on or by the coastline is super-expensive. Unlike the rest of the world, this will not be a case of the "poor" being ravaged. The poor have already been evicted.
3) The cost will show up at every big hurricane to arrive. If a hurricane hits Florida, then it hits expensive property except for the swamp of the everglades. We are already in this water damage situation, so the rise of sea level will be insignificant for decades or longer compared to hurricane effects over those same decades or longer.

 

Bob,
You just posted from a non-scientific blog, and inside the blogs own post, it included data to contradict itself.

And you have to ask yourself, why the IPCC would lower its estimate in 2013, if this 2011 paper included all the science we need to know about. The answer is quite simple. The IPCC looking at a much wider number of peer reviewed papers, and the acatual temperature record found that indeed values under a sensitivity of 2 are indeed likely.

If green house gases (remember there is more than carbon dioxide in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivelent grams of green house gases) the models look at) were a spark plug giving feedback much greater than 1.5 then we should have seen more warming between IPCC reports. Again the problem is climate modelers can't tell natural variation well from ghg warming. This gives a rather large variation in sensitivity ranges that may have happened. Mr. Schmidt's models assume the world would be cooling without man's fossil C contributions, other models assume half of the warming would have happened just as a positive feedback system from the little ice age.

This does not cover tipping points, and indeed, the world may get much warmer even with no more fossil ghg contributions. We know from the last two interglacials that sea level rise is already past the previous tipping points of green house gases, we simply need to wait for the ice to melt.

Again because of scientific uncertainty, setting an arbitrary limit on global temperature rise, leads to some pretty strange politics. Instead other goals such as setting ghg or technology targets are something that can be discussed and agreed upon outside of pseudo science blogs like sceptical science or watts up with that.

 

apologies. it does point to a good paper, one that actually purports good news of lower climate sensitivities than the IPCC had. Unfortunately the blog mischaracterizes what the paper really says. Its a problem even from neutral reporting, to take a complicated paper and try to put it in laymans terms.

The paper ties to put out a better white box model, which is something we can verify with satellites and temperature measurements over time. The authors think that sensitivity is likely between 2-3 degrees C, but they can't rule out the tails (higher or lower values). That is good news if you thought it was 2-4.5 as the previous IPCC stated.

We do have physics here, which gives a sensitivity of 1.2 degrees C for a doubling of CO2e. There is broad agreement on some positive feedback above this amount, but disagreement in how much. The higher figures above 5 seem ruled out by history, as papers have shown that if sensitivity was this high there would be more ice ages. We probably have a 95% confidence that it is between 1.2 and 5

The problem is we just don't know, but we know what we are doing may be vary bad for the planet. CO2e targets can be established independant of what amount of global heat is expected. Sea level rise and changes in percipitation are much more likely to cause problems than a single number for global temperature.

 

A new Little Ice Age thread. Second call, mojo. Mine would be boring and sciency. Nobody wants that. We want MOJO!

 

Coincidentally .
When The AMO Turns, Forget Global Warming | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
"The question now is just how much temperatures will fall when the AMO index begins to track downwards, as it soon will. Regardless of what happens in the Southern Hemisphere, when this happens, we can then expect 30 years of cold in the north."

 

For mojo to explain Atlantic multidecadal oscillation without referring to wiki might be tough.

While we wait, we note that it has been measured for less than 2 centuries. Hard to know then, where it was during LIA. and if negative, how it stayed that way for so long. Not a behavior it has shown more recently.

But yes, unless CO2 heat trapping somehow prevents it, AMO will go negative again. And global decadal T increases will be slower than they would have been otherwise. but to reverse the whole thing? A bold claim.

 

I wish to return to #34, not just to emphasize that mojo and I agree that ocean dynamics have had large roles on climate that the models haven't yet 'handled' - that is old news.

The new news is the link provided to build the case is based on HADCRUT temperature series. In the past we might have supposed that mojo does not accept their validity. He might have even said so. But now, all that is behind us and mojo accepts HADCRUT. This appears to be more than a small step. To celebrate, if in the future I make reference to HADCRUT it will be as 'mojo's HADCRUT '

Welcome aboard!

 

Mildly amusing image, not related to these discussions. I think it is important that mojo entered HADCRUT into evidence here. I expected him to make his own 'escape plan', (they are always good reading)

Now you have one handed to him by playing the ridicule card. Bob, go wash the dishes or something as penance.

 

What a bunch of moronic replies.