And evidence that our oceans are becoming acidic.[link]

Certainly looks like a Code Red emergency to me – with no indication that the government is actually prepared to do anything effective about it. We will see on Tuesday.

Oh, FYI Lake Superior is freezing over for the second time in 10 years. Normal average is once per 20 years. Curse that glowball warmenating!

Why is that supposed to mean something and this nothing:

In most parts of Europe, January and February were “very mild” with the average temperature rising above 7 degrees C. in Scandinavia. In fact, for the Scandinavians it was the warmest winter in more than 100 years.

Real scientist Richard Heim, meteorologist with NOAA’s National Climactic Data Center explains:

“Global warming means the frequency of temperatures will change. We will get warmer temperatures more often and we will get colder temperatures less often.”

You need to broaden your perspective from that blue blob on North America (image from
here). It’s not the whole world.

Let’s be frank, shall we. You’re smart enough to know that the scientific evidence is – in all likelihood – warning us of an unprecedented peril. You, and a lot of the professional denialists, intuit this full well as anyone. You arent actually so daft not to wonder whether the demonstrably increasing rate of cyclones, bushfires, droughts have a basic cause in human activity.

What concerns you, as a conservative, are the political implications of taking action. I sympathise in a way – it must be disconcerting to find the ideological certitudes – so recently victorious against the cold war foe – of an unregulated market, long-distance trade, growth at all costs, the modernisation paradigm economic development driving political liberalism, to the ‘end of history’ – might in fact turn out be leading us to an irreversible environmental (and recently, economic) disaster. Just like productivist, industrial state socialism would have too.

Maybe its starting to look like we in the West aren’t so clever after all. Maybe our paradigm is fatally limited. It works, but it cant last. And you worry some recrudescent leftists will turn climate action into some trojan horse for global socialism, or world government, or some similar evil. Or even if green social democrats hold the day, regulation of the market will have to come back into vogue if we are to act in time.

And ideologically, you just dont like that idea.

Well, fine. But you better get ready, because millions of us aren’t going to take this hapless drift to a truly unlivable future for our descendants lying down. Lets hope its a fair fight, democratically resolved, and we all get along with some mutual respect retained in the process.

But please – let not pretend you’re arguing from some sort of ’scientific’ perspective MarkL. If you didn’t even realise that one of the projected implications of global warming is a new ice age in certain parts of the northern hemisphere, then frankly, you just been following the basics of the scientific projections. And if you cant see that our day by day, year by year insolation is effectively a system constant – rather than some sort of random exogenous variable – then we just dont share a basic frame of reference, old chum, and I cant help you.

And before you bother with “solar flares yada yada”, see Brian at 43, and for that matter, just about every other piece of scientific evidence on the question.

The energy absorption spectrum of CO2 is well over 90% filled at 20ppm. At 40ppm, it’s over 97%. So you could take it up tomorrow to 1500ppm and it would make zero difference in energy retained by CO2

That’s not true, because what is important is the vertical stratification of the atmosphere. Although CO2 bands may be saturated near the ground, there are layers higher up where they are not saturated, which is where the effective radiating surface is. Increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration saturates the bands at these higher levels in the atmosphere raising this effective radiating surface even higher into the atmosphere, and this is what increases the GReenhouse effect.

But you did not know any of that, did you? Or that CO2 is only a trace gas, or that 95% of the total greenhouse effect is produced by water vapour.

Because this planet is covered with large standing bodies of liquid water (I trust you are aware of this) the water vapour in the atmosphere very quickly comes to equilibrium. Thus while water vapour is indeed the most important greenhouse gas, it acts as a feedback rather than as a forcing. It is the long-lived greenhouse gases that produce the greenhouse forcing.

Suffice to stay, if that big bright thing seen today was also there yesterday, and still there tomorrow, we might – fairly – consider it part of the ’system’ under consideration.

Weeel, I am glad that you have finally noticed this patter. It proves that you CAN learn. But that’s not quite what you said, is it, oh grand master of science?

1. Take a closed system
2. Burn things in it
3. See if the temperature increases

How ARE those Lefty Experiments burning petrol and diesel in the trailing Trojan points going, anyway??

Your definition of a closed system is… the universe. Well argued, that!

Then, if we systematically and exponentially add known greenhouse agents to the atmosphere … well, maybe our grade eight friend could fill the rest in for you.

But now we regress from including the sun in the closed system to discussing the biosphere. Boy, you ARE a genius! The Ptolomaic models of the universe with the sun on a crystal sphere is where you are apparently arguing from. That’s just a tad outdated, now, child.

Oh, BTW? The energy absorption spectrum of CO2 is well over 90% filled at 20ppm. At 40ppm, it’s over 97%. So you could take it up tomorrow to 1500ppm and it would make zero difference in energy retained by CO2 (oh, and all plantlife would rejoice, and 1000-1500ppm was what we evolved in, too).

But you did not know any of that, did you? Or that CO2 is only a trace gas, or that 95% of the total greenhouse effect is produced by water vapour.

It ain’t rocket science! Which is probably a good thing for our purposes.

Thanks for admitting that ‘your purposes’ are entirely political, and not science based. Rare to get an AGW reactionary dogmatist to ever admit that.

What is it you have against scientific method, btw? Are a religious sort, or just suspicious of book-learnin’?

I suspect I am several degrees ahead of you, and projection is never a pretty thing. Probably why you do it so often.

But DO keep on chanting your AGW-religogibber mantras, it is deeply entertaining.

Anyhoo, must off to work, as amusing as clubbing baby seals is. Now clap your flippers like a good seal.

MarkL
Canberra

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36972

this (courtesy of LeftE59’s link above, which I incorrectly accredited to Brian in my #60 comment) shows how the rapidly warming polar region gives the effect of a general cool down when warm air over the pole pushes colder air away from the pole. This is the freezer door effect. If you open the freezer door the outflow of chilled air will give you a cooling effect, while the freezer itself has begun to thaw. You have to take a whole system view to properly evaluating what is going on.

Suffice to stay, if that big bright thing seen today was also there yesterday, and still there tomorrow, we might – fairly – consider it part of the ’system’ under consideration.

Then, if we systematically and exponentially add known greenhouse agents to the atmosphere … well, maybe our grade eight friend could fill the rest in for you.

It ain’t rocket science! Which is probably a good thing for our purposes.

What is it you have against scientific method, btw? Are a religious sort, or just suspicious of book-learnin’?

Why yes I do see it, MarkL … and I think it may the only bright thing out there.

Dude, you have to broaden your social circle away from all-leftist anti-scientific religious reactionary AGW-dogma true believers.

So, having noticed the sun for the first time, do you still think that the planet is a closed system? (Hint: the sun is not a part of the planet)

Oh, FYI Lake Superior is freezing over for the second time in 10 years. Normal average is once per 20 years. Curse that glowball warmenating!

MarkL
Canberra

Geoengineering through aerosols is pretty cheap – tens of billions of dollars per year, rather than trillions per year. Another decade of warming and *many* people will favor it as a short-term countermeasure. And you don’t need international cooperation to do it – it’s an act well within the budget of every great power. Meanwhile, most of the OECD is already gearing up for moderate emissions reductions in the coming decade. Not enough to get us off the path to an ice-free planet, but traversing that path is a thousand-year process. I think it *extremely* unlikely that short-term warming (to 2050, say) will so overwhelm civilization that it cannot mount a serious program of decarbonization, aerosol cooling, and drawdown of atmospheric carbon.

The endgame for the era of runaway climate change is advanced nanotechnology. If it doesn’t kill us, it should make air capture fast, cheap, and voluminous. (About a thousand mountains of diamond, each one kilometer cubed in volume, should do the trick.) But it remains to be seen whether we can uncork that particular genie without doing ourselves in.

The future will be managed on an individual basis 40 years from now. Shanty towns will start to appear as they did in the great depression. This time formed by growing numbers people, uninsured against the various pestilences that global warming will bring, and having lost their property forge their own solutions as the government becomes progressively less able to perform.

That is my thinking now. It would take a dramatic change of position from our governemnt for me to see the future differently. With rud hell bent of a clean coal and CCS future with a huge 20% of renewables the Earth’s future environment is on its own. Following your links I came to

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36873

In the future those oil slicks will be bubble streams of escaping CO2.

Certainly it has been hot before, but Hansen is aware of what has happened over the last 700 million years and I am merely giving you his opinion. The last truly massive methane release was the PETM spike 55 million years ago (google it at Wikipedia – my connection is sludge right now) where the carbon was released over thousands of years and took 100,000 to 200,000 years to repair, not a few hundred years. The thought is that the repair work was done via the decay of rocks, a very slow process.

But well before 15C we could run a bit short of oxygen to breathe. I’ve been meaning to post about this and maybe I should put it to the head of the queue.

One of my study communities is Angra do Reis in Brazil. Here you see a style of community development that is more probable for our future world. Huddled communities where foot transport over shorter distances is a far better model and inter community public transport is far more efficient.

Right now it is certain that many cities around the world will have to move. My favourite city of Christchurch NZ being one of them. So the question is how far to move. Responsible government would would be making those decisions now, acquiring land and pre planting long growth vegetation (trees for major parks), in forest form if necessary with view to thinning as plans were drawn up. Then the next question is what form of development to promote in view of all of the mistakes that have been made, mistakes that built the mess that we are now in. There will be much sadness for loss as we move into the next 50 years, but much promise of a new way of living as well. And plenty of time to castegate the idiot politicians who are now locking us in the future that we must face.

You need to know that he cut his teeth early in life studying the atmosphere of Venus.

Have there been any models done of what the world might be like with the worst case 15 degC temperature rise? What does the climate become at that point?

By comparison, the daily insolation at the top of the atmosphere is about 1.5 x 10^22 J, or 500 000 times greater.

Paul, the Climate Code Red mob with their initial report The Big Melt were ahead of the curve in that they worked out the implications of Hansen’s recent research before the great man himself.

It is interesting that in 2006 Lovelock was considered an extremist and way out there. Now what he was saying looks increasingly realistic.

The current issue of the print version of the New Scientist has an article describing the 4C world as a realistic probability and in terms almost straight from Lovelock. There is also an article about geoengineering as something we need to urgently research because it will almost certainly be needed. The current online issue is onto parts of the Amazon reaching a tipping point as a matter of fact story. When I blogged about that a couple of years ago a lot of people thought I was being alarmist.

I’ve just found the 4C article. Don’t miss this map which shows the habitable parts almost exactly where the ice sheets were in the last big freeze, which was exactly what Lovelock said. The text tells us that if we go to 4C it probably won’t stop there for reasons I in part outlined @ 22.

BTW the map isn’t adjusted for sea level change.

Happy days. I’ll seeya tonight.