Arctic ice melting faster than predicted!

op2:

 

Do you want butter on that?

 

^ extra thick!

 

I believed in Al Gores Inconvenient Truth.
I then became a skeptic after learning the facts.
CAGW theory is built entirely on hypothesis.There are next to zero facts supporting AGW.They cant even get a few friggin thermometers in the arctic to get factual temperature readings. The temperatures are extrapolated.

 

I assure you the emoticon was not about the subject matter. But my apology anyway.

 

My friends on Facebook all think global warming is fake. They seem like smart people.

 

Sources please.

My references - IPCC, EPA, EIA, NOAA, NASA, etc, etc... the little guys, you know.

 

I still have to ask the question: Is your position that burning all the oil, all the Natural Gas, and all the coal on the planet have no consequence whatsoever?

 

From scientific point of view problem is that you are trying to model overly complex system many years in advance. There is a gazillion of variables not accounted for, or accounted wrongly, wrong assumptions, and pre-fabricated data to support someones believes. Many better models have err rate ~50% over next decade, how do you expect them to be accurate over millenia?

There were many facts got wrong (cloud formation, Amazon rain forest growth rates, etc), however there is no reason to discard all together including well established scientific facts. We may not know how exactly planet will react to increase in CO2, or how long it would take to get there, but we know that:
- atmospheric CO2 is increasing at rates similar to Siberian Traps
- 5C global temp increase is the upper limit
- increase in ocean temperatures reduces oxygen content and kills oceanic life
- Methane belch is real, it had happened several times (latest in Miocene 25mil years ago)

 

Cyclo, you may have read that earth surface temperatures increased 5oC (or 6) over 20,000 years entering the PETM. That period was at least 12oC warmer than now, but it is hard to get a firmer estimate for that.

It is not a correct interpretation that +5oC is an upper limit, but we would be hard pressed to find an expert who could establish one.

There are geological mechanisms to recover from extreme warming, but they take time (10,000 years minimum perhaps). New silicate minerals are brought to the surface by tectonics (which never quits), and the minerals react with (the other meaning of the word "weather") atmospheric CO2. An oxygenated atmosphere always will convert methane to CO2, so given enough time they amount to the same thing.

This reduces atmospheric CO2 and cools us back down. It was no doubt a major recovery pathway from the PETM, although the increased dominance of the land surface by angiosperm plants, and the new dominance of dry lands by C4 grasses helped a bunch too. They (net effect) put a bunch of carbon as organic matter into soils, where more than 4 "current atmospheres' worth" still resides.

It appears that great excursions in atmospheric chemistry are fixable in these ways, so long as the temperature does not rise enough to evaporate the oceans. Then you lose the mineral weathering 'fix' and earth becomes Venus II. We surely do not want that as a distant future.

As I've suggested here before, it makes more sense to think about rates than limits in the Earth System. We could (probably literally) inject any amount of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere and not mess the place up. But not too much per year! Now it is 9 petagrams of carbon per year, the Earth System can only remove half of that, so we are exceeding the Speed Limit.

As a result, a variety of directional changes are occurring. Most often I ask people to consider Lonnie Thompson's glacier work, because it shows clearly that these changes are unique over thousands or 100's thousands of years.

Yeah, we hear from time to time that anthropogenic climate change is hypothetical. The problem is, there is no hypothesis that does not involve infrared-absorbing gases that fits the Earth's recent history as we know it. People who reject the causal relationship with CO2 could gain a lot of traction by developing a different hypothesis. But those crickets have been chirping for a long time...

So, all we need to do is design an economic/industrial system that provides an acceptable standard of living for 9 or 10 billion people, while burning about half as much fossils as now. Energy efficiency and renewables are the best tools available for that, and we are making slow progress. Faster progress would seem preferable. But there is a lot of kicking and screaming in favor of the status quo.

Not at all surprising that the world's most (short-term) profitable industry, receiving the world's largest government subsidies, has little interest in dialing itself back by one half. So most likely, we will experience some consequences of exceeding the Earth's carbon speed limit. One can do little more than to hope they will be minor.

BTW cyclo, could you tell me what you mean by "facts got wrong...Amazon rain forest growth rates"? It is a topic I have been following, and perhaps you could teach me something.

 

Theres is no real proof that CO2 causes much change in temperature.
A doubling of CO2 will raise temps by a little over 1 degree.(Then further concentrations have a much lesser effect)
The "FORCING" theory is purely hypothetical.Surely you can not claim otherwise.
Without the forcing component of AGW theory you have nothing to stand on.
I think I can prove that forcing as Richard Alley explains it,is false.
Correct me if Im mistaken but Alley says its like interest on a credit card.
From ice age ,temp rise is initiated by an unknown event.
That temp rise ,raises CO2 which adds interest to the temp and raises it higher.
Observing Vostok ice core data of interglacial warming periods and CO2 levels.
The temp rises until it peaks.This is where I believe I can prove Alley is full of BULL S.
After the 15,000 year rise the temp dives back into ice age.
For up to 800 years the temp dives ,WHILE CO2 IS STILL RISING!!!
(why the 800 year delay?It takes that long for the oceans to react to absorb or release CO2)
Its impossible for CO2 to have much effect on the dropping temperatures.Obviously CO2 has next to zero effect on diving temperatures.This is while CO2 is still climbing.
If CO2 doesnt affect diving temps,it doesnt have effect to rising temps in the way Alley suggests.
As the temp continues to dive toward ice age, atmospheric CO2 begins to react to the lower temps by decreasing(being absorbed into the oceans).
(Obviously CO2 levels are a result of temperature,not that there is any dispute to that fact)
CO2 does cause a minor warming ,but CO2 cant possibly cause climate change in the past or the present or the future.

 

ICARUS- I take the agnostic believer position stated in Scienctific American global warming issue (1980?). That is, yes, global warming is certainly happening. But I am not sure if the effects of global warming are going to be as bad as the effects of running out fossil fuels and other earth resources. Both issues could be real bad. So I favor conservation, but not just for fossil fuels, other resources as well. You want to stop using fossil fuels to prevent imminent planetary destruction. I want to use less to save them for future generations, and/or because you might be right about the imminent planetary destruction thing. I have a foot in both camps.

 

by any means there were no attempt to establish limit at +5C, but there is a limit to what the ecosystem can take before we derail it. Maybe it is 12C, maybe it is 7C or 17C, do we wanna find out?

BTW the chemical process of removing CO2 you describe is responsible for ice age ~40Mil years ago, when Himalayas formed. I read about this a few years back.. No attempt to misrepresent anything, unfortunately it is not possible to have a discussion involving all relevant processes posting short messages.

Another very important global temperature control mechanism responsible for a series of heat ups and cool downs in last couple million years is Gulf stream. Arctic ice melting dumps huge amounts of cold fresh water, which stays on top and weakens Gulf stream. This in turn produces cooling down at polar caps, and freezing up.

Permafrost in Canada and Siberia is another very important part of the ecosystem responsible for rapid heating and cooling mechanism. Warming up results in decomposition of massive amounts of organic material collected in those areas with enormous amount of methane released. When the methane is oxygenated in atmosphere, planet starts cooling down and that prevents methane from forming which speeds up the cooling down.

yes.. problem is b/c there is no seasons per se in Amazon basin you cannot find tree growth rates by counting rings as you normally do with the trees. Everyone assumed the forest is growing with the same rate as everywhere else. Well it turned out it is not true, as sun is blocked by clouds. Carbon dating showed that little trees were hundreds years old, and the impact of rainforest on CO2 balance was overestimated by something like x10-x100 times.

There was also a study done by danish scientists (greenie by lifestyle) for which he was heavily ostracized by "global warming" activists. He studied the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation.. and found that the recent mini-cycles of heating/cooling were very much correlated to sun activity.

Also not all "good" environmental decisions are actually good. For example there was a (2003?) international ban on using non-processed high on sulfur oil in shipping industry. Well while it had help to cut down on acid rains, sulfur oxide is a potent cloud forming agent, and if shipping industry was a country it would have been 6th in the world by amounts of CO2 it produces. To make a story short this bumped up warming rate more then all Euro CO2 policies had reduced.

 

mojo, look on comments above about Gulfstream, and methane/Permafrost cycle. Not sure if the study looked at methane, and if methane would register in ice cores as it is 2.5 times lighter then CO2, and 1.56 times lighter then air.

If you look at CO2 only it would not make much sense as you only look at part of the picture.

 

If you spend a few minutes on the US EPA website, you will find there is no contorversy of whether climate change is man made or not. Their stance is 'it is highly unlikely changes are caused only by nature' and 'very likely changes are caused by human activity'.

 

I get a little weary of the dire predictions that pop up in the newspaper. I know what the EPA and all say. I've seen a chart stating 51% of GHG's from a family's household come from .. driving their cars. Yet, we are surrounded by conventional cars everywhere. Suburbans are still for sale down at GM. Tundras at Toyota.

Prius is available, and it's very good. But, it stands mostly alone in sales as a very green car. The 2nd place finisher sells about 1/6th the numbers.

Seems this fight should be mostly between the environmentalists and producers of - vehicles, energy, .. any other products or things that emit. I don't need to get in the middle of their battles.

 

I want to visit Glacier National Park as soon as possible before the rest of the glaciers disappear.