2050 looks like…

You've moved well beyond my vision. I'm still interested in getting a better handle on the metrics.

I am more pessimistic about ice and expecting a somewhat faster sea level rise. I see more risk from northern hemisphere ice. The reasons:

• Orbital - the northern hemisphere has a longer summer melt with more land-based, solar absorbing surfaces.
  • Southern melt season, solar light is more intense but shorter duration.
• Circumpolar current - Antarctica is insulated from land-based heat.
  • Antarctica will lose ice shelves but the land mass remains insulated by the shorter, summer melt.
  • Antarctica already loses most of the sea ice each year, many times to the shores.
  • Less land mass in the southern hemisphere.
• Southern hemisphere CO{2} - is definitely a lower concentration than the northern hemisphere reducing heating.
  • We see this in the single, seasonal sea level rise and length of day
• Southern soot - dirty ice is important for northern hemisphere, ice melt but the southern hemisphere does not have that forcing.

There are scattered reports of a warmer ocean waters invading Antarctica and we're seeing a few interesting eddies. But to have a major effect on Antarctica, the southern ocean heat somehow has to bust through that circumpolar current. I don't see a mechanism making that happen.

As for pests, diseases, and northern migrations, I see that happening in spades. The more important ones being sea borne ones given how much we harvest today. Fishery collapse is likely to lead to more fish farms.

Bob Wilson

 

i'll be a year older than my father.

 

I'll be 3 years younger than Bob Wilson who will be 100

 

he looks good for his age.

 

Had an interesting conversation at a local bar about the summer heat. He had complained that this summer was especially bad and asked if it was global warming.

I pointed out the higher temperatures increase the humidity and the loss of cooling effects from higher dew point. So when the morning shows a higher dew point, I use my wife's Prius with the electric air conditioner that still lets the engine stop at a light. Then using the example of Texas, how the drought was ended with a flood. The higher heat dries out areas, inducing drought, followed by intense, flooding rains.

Explaining the effects works because it relates to what is outside the door.

Bob Wilson

 

I'll have another Jack Daniels, then maybe this will make sense!

 

Drinking a tequila as I thumb type.

Bob Wilson

 

9.5 billion people, with average ages of the world starting to look more like the US as medicine spreads and people age. Major problems in Japan and Europe with old age pensions. That will probably increase fossil burn peaking around 2030,as renewables become more available and cheaper for high populations of china and India.

Sea Level up about 0.15 meters from today. ghg around 480 ppm co2. with 0.7 degrees C hotter. We will be able to feed all the new people from current farm land, but more land will be taken from nature for bio fuels.

 

Well I suppose it is time to throw a wrench into the works:
The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here | Rolling Stone

. . . Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.

On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren't cut, "We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. . . .

Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, "This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding."

. . . During a survey on July 4th, federal officials spotted 115 whales in a single hour near the Farallon Islands — enough to issue a boating warning. Humpbacks are occasionally seen offshore in California, but rarely so close to the coast or in such numbers. Why are they coming so close to shore? Exceptionally warm water has concentrated the krill and anchovies they feed on into a narrow band of relatively cool coastal water. The whales are having a heyday. "It's unbelievable," Thomas told a local paper. "Whales are all over
the place."

. . . This year, officials in California are bringing salmon downstream in convoys of trucks, because river levels are too low and the temperatures too warm for them to have a reasonable chance of surviving. One species, the winter-run Chinook salmon, is at a particularly increased risk of decline in the next few years, should the warm water persist offshore.
​

The point is we don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.

Bob Wilson

 

OK getting serious.
I also believe world population heading to 10 billion, some say it will max out there or so.
35-years is not far away.
I am thinking climate change is a slow motion train wreck, so maybe I should buy that shore house in VA beach, because it's cheap due to sea level rise and subsidence predictions.

By 35 years we may start to see fossil fuel scarcity again.
Natural gas as highly important. I see natural gas as harder to use, requires expensive import/export ports, and pipelines.
So the fact that NG is hard to use, makes it available if a country is in the position to use it.
Wind/solar/H2 all making strides, but I suspect we still need the fossil fuels too though at lower per capita consumption.
Nuclear will be there.

I think we need a shift to less coal and/or change over to clean coal technology globally. I am hoping some of the climate changes issues we are seeing are related to particulates, SOx, NOx, methane, etc. Worldwide we need to move to mitigate pollutants, in other words, CO2 reduction may be hard but there may be aggravating pollutants that can be addressed. This is happening already as bunker fuel sulfur is coming out of the ocean ships.

Mauna Loa CO2 up trend continues but possibly starting to bend over. This is a concern, but keep in mind the jump we have already made from 280 ppm to 400 ppm is probably bigger mathematical impact than the next jump from 400 ppm to maybe 500 ppm.

 

You did indeed estimate lower than me in terms of ppm ghg growth, which is suprising. I don't know if that is optimistic or pessimistic. You did come up with the same estimate of global temperature change, but your implied sensitivity is 4.1 degrees C/doubling of ghg concentration, which to me is on the high end.

Sea level change you have it accelerating to average 5.7 mm/year, which seems reasonable but fairly pessimistic compared to my estimate of 0.15 meters. Sea levels rose 3.5 mm/year in the 90s, but 2003-2011 slowed to 2.4 mm/year. I expect an acceleration but now as fast as yours. Of course Bob has posted the Hansen hair on fire prediction of over 3 meters in 50 years or an average of 60 mm/year which seems more out of touch every year as the apocalypse doesn't happen.

On population growth even though your estimate was lower than mine, I find it to be quite pessimistic on the possibility that medicine doesn't enhance life expectancy. I suspect our birth rate projections are similar. I think only 10% gain in crop yields waste reduction over 35 years is quite pessimistic compared to the progress of agricultural tech. Still our estimates are in the same ball park and far from the Hanson apocalyptic projections. Much depends on climate sensitivity and how china and india grow their economies. I expect pollution and raw materials use for their economic expansion to increase species extinction.

I guess that could drive a man to drink, but I was drinking at the pool yesterday afternoon. We are in the middle of a 7 day period of temperatures over 100 degrees, or as we call it august in austin. It was a pretty nice sunday, which may lead to my optimism.

 

if sensitivity is 1.555 for a doubling of Carbon Dioxide, then you would expect a 0.8 degree C from a rise of 1.43 = 400 / 280.
For that sensitivity a rise from 400 to 500 or 1.25, we would expect 0.5 degrees C, if sensitivity is 3 (center of IPCC sensitivity range) you would expect 1 degree C, or at a sensitiity of 4.5 (top of IPCC likely range) 1.4 degrees C.

Is 500 ppm your best guess? Its close to mine. You need to guess sensitivity too to get a guess of temperature rise. Mine was 480ppm with a sensitivity of 2.7 for a rise of 0.7 degrees C. The OP had the same rise in temperatures with less ghg and higher sensitivity.

 

My best guess is 2 ppm/yr on CO2 so up 70 ppm from now at Mauna Loa.
I want to be on low side of temperature sensitivity to CO2.

 

My numbers, sea-level, ice inventory, and length of day, are not projections and no way should be used to choose the top 10 out of 16 futures. I'll share them in other threads but when I look for a credible climate projection, I ran into something just today that makes sense:

• Source: Center for International Climate and Environmental Research - Oslo (CICERO)
• ~30-38 Gt CO{2}/yr - 2005-2014, mean ~34 Gt CO{2}/yr
• 2.1 ppm per year CO{2} increase - 2005-2014, Scripps
• ~38-75 GT CO{2}/yr - 2014-2050, mean ~56.5 GT CO{2}/yr

2.1 ppm / 38 Gt =
Scripps_CO2_ppm/yr / CICERO_CO2_Gt/yr = 2.1 ppm / 38 Gt ~= .0579 ppm/Gt
.0579 (ppm/Gt * 56.5 (Gt/yr) * 35 (yr) = 114.5 ppm increase

401.3 ppm (today) + 114.5 ~= 515.8 ppm @2050

Recently China has shown some success in reducing coal and CO{2} emissions so this may yet be a high estimate. Many others, a growing number, have like us Prius owners figured out they can not afford fossil fuels. Renewable energy can be called a 'style statement' but in the long term, it makes dollars and sense.

Educating girls, the most effective population control, continues but not nearly fast enough. Still, advanced countries have achieved more sustainable birth rates. But benighted populations still do everything they can to escape to peace and opportunity.

Bob Wilson

 

I may still be walking around at 93 years old as my dad is now 94 so I will report back to you guys.

- Galaxy S5