Last Friday I woke to the dulcet tones of Tim Thwaites telling Fran Kelly that the Greenland ice sheet was melting faster than previously thought. If the whole thing goes the sea will rise by 6.5 meters, inundating the usual suspects â Bangladesh, Florida, the Nile delta, parts of Europe and elsewhere. Also cities such as Manila will have trouble with salt water penetrating the aquifers from which they draw their water.
So I decided to google around a bit. Iâd have to say that the best straight reporting of the story came from the Peopleâs Daily Online, though the San Francisco Chronicle did pretty well, I thought, bringing in other studies and the Antarctic ice sheet as well, noting that although both together they were now contributing five times as much to the rising sea level as they had in the previous century that only amounted to about one millimetre each year. Thatâs 100mm per century. Can that be a problem?
But then at the end a bloke called Oppenheimer from Princeton said:
â?The time scale for future loss of most of an ice sheet may not be millennia,” as glacier models have suggested, “but centuries.â? (Emphasis added.)
Now I think of it, Byron Tapley who directed the Texas project which produced the new finding on Greenland said:
“This melting process may be approaching a point where it won’t be centuries before Greenland’s ice melts, but a much shorter time-frame,” Tapley said, noting that it isn’t possible to tell how much sooner this will be.
I know that the IPCC (2001) report was anticipating sea level rises of about 0.5 meters (9-88cm) over the next century mostly on the basis of thermal expansion and regarded the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets as stable. I know also that James Hansen director of the
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute has been concerned ever since that the IPCC may be mistaken on this count. He must have important things to say because the Bush administration is trying to shut him up.
First up the relationship between CO2 and methane (CH4) etc in the atmosphere, temperature and ice sheet melting is a bit of a no-brainer according to the paleoclimate record. This graph shows the relationship over the last 400,000 years between CO2, CH4 (roughly = greenhouse gases or GHGs ) and temperature.
GHGs produce âclimate forcingâ expressed in watts/m2. A simple model of how this happens is given on page 9 of this 2004 article by Hansen (small 310kb pdf file and well worth a read!) It is 340 watts in from the sun and, thanks to GHGs, 339 watts out. That is one Christmas light bulb per square meter all over the planet. This tiny imbalance, however, will produce 0.75C temperature change.
This diagram shows the relationship between GHGs, climate forcings, temperature, ice sheets and sea levels in the paleoclimate record.
As I say it is a bit of a no-brainer that they move in concert. But the compression of the time scale masks a delay between temperature and ice sheets. This is why in the last century we see the ice sheet line stable. But have a look at what we are doing with GHGs in the last 100 years (middle graph) and tell me itâs not a problem!
Hansen goes into this time-delay phenomenon in an editorial essay in Climate Change in 2005 entitled The slippery slope (253kb pdf file). It seems that the climate responds in a time frame of 50-100 years after we put the GHGs up there. Ice sheets, he thinks then respond in terms of âcenturies, not millennia, as commonly assumed.â?
So even though the current annual loss of 240 cubic kilometres is a lot of ice it is not all that much compared with the whole ice sheet of 2.85 million cubic kilometres, a repeat that effect over 50 -100 years and the impact on the ice sheet could become quite dramatic as it is structurally weakened. Then things can happen quite quickly. Hansen says that 14,000 years ago the sea rose an average of 1 metre every 20 years for 400 years. Thatâs 20 meters.
In the most recent Iâve seen from Hansen, the slides from his Denver lecture of 10 July 2006 (warning 2.5Mb pdf) there is a graph (slide 23) showing a steep upwards curve of the number of âice quakesâ or glacial earthquakes. These are disturbances ranging from 4.6 to 5.1 on the Richter scale within the ice sheet which is up to 3k thick. Beginning with 7 in 1993 the number has been rising quite steeply to over 30 in the first 10 months of 2005. Other slides in the Denver lecture and in his National Acadamy of Sciences lecture of April 2006 (5.6Mb pdf) show the increased warming and melting on Greenland. You might want to look back at the spectacular waterfall-like photo in his 2004 paper (page 8). The âwaterfallâ is actually a moulmin, a hole that takes the water straight down to the base of the sheet where it lubricates the friction between the sheet and the rock, thus destabilising it.
Hansen has applied his mind on what we should do to avoid disaster. He said quite a bit about this in his expanded online version of his 2004 Scientific American article
Can we defuse the global warming time bomb? (1.4Mb pdf). In his Denver talk he says that we can look forward to 2.7C warming (+ or â 1C) by 2100 on a business as usual basis. This might not sound much but remember a cooling trend of 3C would see us entering an ice age. But if we stay on our present path Hansen thinks the sea could rise by 25m over 400 years. That would displace about 700 million people in the US, Europe, China/Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan and swamp some of the most productive land.
25m, after all, is no big deal in paleoclimatalogical terms. Since the last glacial maximum
20,000 years ago the level has risen 120m. But worst of all, according to Hansen, it would be a system out of control, looking for a new equilibrium.
Bearing in mind that Hansen says any more than a 2m rise will be âdangerousâ? there are no precise paleoclimate analogues for what are doing now. In the Eemian interglacial it seems sea levels were about 5m higher when it was about 2C warmer.
Hansen in his New York Review of Books article last month says:
The last time that the Earth was five degrees warmer was three million years ago, when sea level was about eighty feet higher.
Unfortunately there is some support growing for James Lovelockâs favoured analogue
of 55 million years ago. Then, he says, the planet warmed by 5C at the tropics and 8C in temperate regions as a result of a similar carbon output.
In support Professor James Zachos earlier this year found that over a period of about 10,000 years about 4.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide had entered the atmosphere. Zachos found that human activities are now releasing exactly the same gases â but more than 30 times faster. âIf present trends continue, humans will release the same 4.5 trillion tons of CO (carbon dioxide) over just three centuries,â? he said.
If that happens the productive, liveable parts of the earth will be roughly where the ice was in the last ice age – around the Arctic ocean and Antarctica plus maybe New Zealand, Tasmania, Madagascar and a bit of South America. And it took 200,000 years to recover.
Hansen thinks the time for action is now, not next year or in ten years, but now. He thinks we can stay reasonably safe if we keep the additional warming to about 1C and the CO2 below 485ppm. It was 180 in the last ice age, then 280 and now 380 and rising 2ppm per year and accelerating. If we leave it 10 years all bets are off.
This will mean (see his Denver lecture) building nothing but CO2 sequestered new coal power plants from 2012 in developed countries, ditto from 2022 in developing countries and bulldozing all conventional power stations from 2025 to 2050. And yes, it will mean using nuclear power.
Unfortunately, according to Hansen, we are not doing a damned thing that would make any difference right now. No wonder they want to shut him up!
Business as usual will drive us to 560ppm with a high degree of certainty. If we listen to Hansen we could limit the peak to 485ppm.
“We have to, in the next 10 years, get off this exponential curve and begin to decrease the rate of growth of CO2 emissions,” Hansen explains. “And then flatten it out. And before we get to the middle of the century, weâve got to be on a declining curve.
“If that doesn’t happen in 10 years, then I donât think we can keep global warming under one degree Celsius and that means weâre going to, that thereâs a great danger of passing some of these tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You canât tie a rope around the ice sheet. You canât build a wall around the ice sheets. It will be a situation that is out of our control.” (Emphasis mine.)
Great post Brian. I see Al Gore’s got a film out about global warming http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/
I was thinking of you as I did it, Lefty.
Haven’t seen Gore’s film but Hansen’s NY Review of Books piece is meant to be a review of Gore’s film, Tim Flannery’s book and one by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Just to reiterate part of Brian’s post, by way of emphasis, check out the middle graph.http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_12/fig1.pdf
Though global warming is a far greater issue, Its important to note, I think, the effectiveness of concerted international action. The Ozone layer is healing up. http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1047997
Bugger. That link again
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_12/fig1.pdf
Nice one, Brian!
Methane = CH4
Better fix that before they start faulting your science
Since Brian’s probably asleep, AM, I checked that and you’re right so I’ve fixed the post. I’m sure it was just a typo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
I saw the Gore movie recently in SF.
He gives a bravura performance. He’s now a cuddly wonk.
Moreover, I believe that the movie is Gore’s version of a campaign biography. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him running for the Democratic nomination for 2008.
AM and Kim, thanks for picking up and fixing the typo.
Al Gore is worth a separate thread, but I’ll give you some stuff here. I think the planet and the human race took a drastically wrong option in 2000 when the Supreme Court appointed the wrong bloke. It was a true Sliding doors moment in our recent history. If you only follow up one of these links, make it the Grist review which combines with a fine touch the personal, the political and the substantive issue.
If you have video facilities this preview is stunning. Being a pedant I noticed one serious error. He points at picture of Antarctica and says “If this were to go the oceans would rise 20 feet’. In fact if Greenland were to go the sea level would rise 20 feet (6.5 metres, Wikipedia says 7.2). Antarctica has about 10 times as much ice as Greenland.
But 6.5 metres is all that it would take to produce the effects in the subsequent footage, including the inundation of the Twin Towers site.
For mainstream views you could go to Time Magazineand The Observer which tend to track off into the personal and the political.
Then there are articles like this one in the Boston Globe that concentrate on the negative personal impacts of heat and disease (as though no-one lives in the tropics). It’s important, but myopic and trivial when if we do nothing the probable outcome is a world of drastically reduced bio-productivity, with centres of population in Antarctica, and in northern Canada, Siberia and Alaska, with the best fishing in the Arctic ocean.
Which brings me back to that graph and others like it. To me it says that we are doing something of scale and speed that may produce effects we have not seen since the Permian-Triassic extinction event of 251 million years ago.
As Quiggin says, the scientific debate is resolved. But as Hansen says of Gore:
It still happens here on our ABC. They almost always dredge up some climate change denialist in the interests of balance.
But apart from Gore, Hansen and Sir David King, Chief Scientist in the UK, few have understood the threat of rising waters.
Which is why I’m a bit passionate about it.
Didn’t the Vikings call Greenland “Greenland” because when the dicovered it it was…..Green?
Someone also needs to fix the bit that calls methane “MH4″; and carbon dioxide is “CO2″, not “Co2″.
Weekbyweek is a climate change denialist.
WbW I can only tell you what I’ve just looked up in Wikipedia. It seems that Erik the Red after being exiled from Iceland settled there and
That’s from the entry on Greenland, where it says that the ice sheet covers 81% of the land mass. The Icelanders arrived in 982AD. But then:
I have heard that the problem was that they didn’t learn from the locals how to hunt and eat what the local environment offered, but stuck to an alien diet. You’ll find a summary of Jared Diamond’s explanation of what happened here.
While they were there the Scandinavians had enjoyed the Medieval Warm Period, which may have been a localised event rather than worldwide, prior to the Little Ice Age.
A wonderful thing, Wikipedia!
Thanks, silkworm, I think I’ve got it fixed now.
In case anyone wants to bring it up, there was a warm period in Iceland in the 1930s. This is sometimes raised by nitpicking contrarians. But you’d have to be daft to think that people like Hansen don’t know that. If it meant anything he’d say so, becasue he is passionate about following the science and keeps saying that he hopes he’s wrong about melting ice sheets.
That’s one thing denialists never seem to be able to grasp. How humble and thorough and concerned with the truth most of the scientists are. I’m so sick of denying the conspiracy, and I’m sure it sounds to their deaf ears like we protest too much.
Oh well. Intelligent rational argument and good scientific work usually win in the end.
Great Post Brian.
Until you got to the last bit and you started panicking.
Right up unitil then you were doing just fine. And you remind me of no-one more then Tim Flannery.
Same scientific mind. Tims a terrific scientist. I’ll not ever refer to him as a “SCIENCE WORKER”.
And all the reasoning is just fine all the way along. And you would expect he would come to exactly the same conclusions as me.
But at the very last moment BULLSHIT MOMENTUM trumps REASON and he PANICS ……………..and there you are.
Same for you Brian.
And you were doing so well.
â?The time scale for future loss of most of an ice sheet may not be millennia,â? as glacier models have suggested, âbut centuries.â?
BUT CENTURIES………
BUT CENTURIES!!!!!!!
Brian.
I thought you were LAUGHING at these guys.
“WbW I can only tell you what I’ve just looked up in Wikipedia. It seems that Erik the Red after being exiled from Iceland settled there and…”
Brian. Your whole Wiki post is a joke and proof that Wiki is run by teenage leftists when it comes to these politicised subjects.
I’ve heard it said that Erik named it Greenland to attract people. But why he would want to attract people to a block of ice is beyond me. WAS HE A BONDSMAN?
I’ve heard this said but not BEFORE this nutty campaign against warmer winters in Invercargill took hold in the full bloom of its craziness.
He named it Greenland because it was Green. That would be the assumption.
And Cold Kills. So the other assumption would be that once the Medieval warming period was over they would have been outcompeted by dudes who were more adapted to living in a freezer. And the cold most likely would have cut them off from Guns, Germs and Steel.
So don’t beleive this tendentious Wiki JIVE.
Because I’ve argued with these guys and they are mostly naughty teenage socialists.
OK all of you Dorothys.
We all have to click our heels three times and get back to Kansas.
We face fresh water shortages in some poor countries this century.
CO2 warming will INCREASE precipitation. CO2 reduces plant transpiration and increases the productivity of plants… As well as the WATER!!-productivity of plants.
Bangladesh aside there is no reall downside to CO2-based warming. Insofar as AVERAGE temperatures will be warmer then otherwise this is primarily due to less heat differentials…
Less heat differentials between the Poles and the Equator. Between Winter and Summer, Between the heat of the day and pre-dawn.
So (Bangladesh aside) What… the hell…. is the problem.
We are in an ICEAGE.
We have been in an ICEAGE for 39 million years.
For three million years we have been in a MOST SEVERE PHASE of this ICEAGE.
So can we all just stop being silly and grow up.
Bird, in all that verbiage there is a point I’ll respond to, but a bit later.
Right.
Well you do that.
Be we have been in an endless cycle of glaciations for three and a half million year now. And none of these guys has yet repealed the 39 million year ICE AGE.
Antarctica seems to be cooling though it is surely true that the far north is warming. But until both Poles are unambiguously warming in both Summer and Winter we have to assume that glaciation is the greater danger.
The earth has never overheated in the last 200 million years that anyone knows of.
But it has certainly been TOO COLD. It has been TOO COLD 80% of the time these last 3 million years. Actually I would argue its too cold now.
Ergo. The default position has to be that THIS is the greater threat. That glaciation is the civilisation-threatening risk.
Not warming.
CO2-based warming is GOOD.
Well I’m shocked. Bird very rarely hands out praise like that. He just compared you to Tim Flannery, Brian!
However he is exaggerating by claiming the only downside is ‘Bangladesh’. Possibly Bangladesk and a lot of other low lying islands in the Pacific, perhaps Indonesia, and all those outbreaks of nasty diseases in tropical countries.
We don’t even know yet whether the sea will rise. The islanders are no problem. They have richer places to move to.
Bangladesh is really the only substantial problem.
Yes, Jason, with a 6m sea level rise we only inundate 24m Bangladeshis. Ahead of them is Western Europe (26m), India/Sri Lanka (46m) and China/Taiwan (93m). Just behind is Indonesia (23m). New York and London would be in trouble and go diving for the Maldives and a number of other islands.
Bird, I have heard it said that the total rainfall in the world will increase with global warming. I’m happy to take that on board as a working notion, but again it would be amazing if scientists working in this area didn’t know that.
I did hear a British agronomist saying that for every 1C increase in temperature they’d need 10% extra water to grow the same crops. I think it was grain he was talking about.
The effects will be different in different places. Apparently Australia was mostly wetter during the ice age apart from the glacial maximum around 18-20,000 years ago.
But here we’ve been talking mainly about ice sheets which are typically dry, with little rain and snow. As the planet warms there will be more precipitation at higher latitudes. It was thought that in Antarctica there may be more snow with warming which could result in the ice building up, which would offset melting elsewhere as well as thermal expansion. It could have even resulted in a net fall of the sea level.
But now they’ve found that snowfall has not increased in the last 50 years.
In Greenland what is happening is what I imagine happens to the lovely snow in the Australian alps when it rains. As the precipitation increases and the temperature rises less rain turns to ice and more runs off, eroding the ice sheet. I understand that rain also reduces the reflectivity of snow, which means it absorbs more heat from the sun.
It’s all a pretty simple concept, I think.
I’m not sure they know what is really going on in Antarctica, but part of the West Shelf is below sea level. There is a notion that Greenland goes first and Antarctica follows a bit later. In any case Antarctica is already leaking ice at about two-thirds the rate of Greenland. We only need 0.75 metres from each, plus half a metre of thermal expansion and receding glaciers elsewhere and it’s trouble.
Ask the Dutch, the Londoners and the people of New Orleans for starters.
“Bird, I have heard it said that the total rainfall in the world will increase with global warming. I’m happy to take that on board as a working notion, but again it would be amazing if scientists working in this area didn’t know that.”
Left-winger DO know that. They just don’t care.
“I did hear a British agronomist saying that for every 1C increase in temperature they’d need 10% extra water to grow the same crops. I think it was grain he was talking about.”
He’s conveniently leaving out the SOURCE of the extra warmth. If its from a doubling of CO2 levels the plants will grow much FASTER using LESS water.
This is manna from heaven for the love of starving children. And you people are turning it down.
EVERYONE knows this about CO2. YOU know this about CO2.
These young left-wingers are not like some of the oldtimers Brian. Whereas some folks in the old days want to be leftist to help people these guys just want to steal and boss us around for its own sakes.
The agronomist knows this about CO2. For DECADES people have been pumping CO2 into greenhouses to get faster plant growth out of season.
You know this.
I know this.
But somehow the left has gotten things so compartmentalised in their brains they don’t take it into account. That we spend most of our time under ice to them is a seperate subject from the relative risks of global warming or cooling.
This isn’t a problem with the weather. Its a mental problem.
And the fact that CO2 will give people everywhere more food and fresh water is compartmentalised away.
Industrial CO2 is the greatest dumb luck this planet has ever experienced.
“But now they’ve found that snowfall has not increased in the last 50 years.”
CO2 release doesn’t stipulate what will happen since CO2 is but one factor.
We can only expect to be able to predict THE DIFFERENCE that CO2 will make. We cannot expect to predict the actual outcome on the basis of knowing what will happen to CO2 alone.
For all we know, without industrial CO2, we might already be slipping into another glaciation. But suppose we started slipping into another glaciation…..
This would NOT imply that CO2 was pushing us into another glaciation.
We can only be confident in the effect of CO2 on an Apriori basis. We can say… without CO2 things would have been drier and colder then they actually are. But we cannot say that CO2 actually CAUSED the lesser snowfall of the last 50 years that you are referring to.
Actually I heard that Antarctica peaked in its warmiing around 1966.
But then neither your information or mine can be trusted these last few years if it comes off the net. Since the craziness has taken over with a vengeance. Its all confusion out there.
“A new study that shows Antarctic snowfalls have changed little in 50 years, despite global warming, could be evidence that the worst is yet to come, says one of the authors.”
This is just ridiculous. The second part of the sentence doesn’t follow the first. And it ignores the fact that Antarctica is cooling.
Does anyone know the author. Get her on here so I can give a good talking to.
Every sentence these people write ends with some nightmare that they just pull out of thin air.
Bird, just on that last Antarctic bit, I understand that most of the continent is in fact cooling a bit. But I heard a climatologist on the radio say that the weather circulation systems have been pulled into a tighter pattern around the pole because of the ozone hole. Which is why we have been having huge high pressure systems over southern Oz and the lows have migrated south to the detriment of our weather. Fix the ozone hole and we might get more rain, but Antarctica might also warm again. I understand the ozone hole has only just stopped getting larger. It’s not patched up yet.
In 2002 ice dramatically fell of the Larsen B ice shelf which is a small part of the Antarctic peninsula which is a small part of Antarctica but I understand sticks out from the cooling pattern. That’s a comfort in a way but I know that many glaciers in the Antarctic are in retreat and there is a lot of contact between ice and water, especially, I imagine, in the Weddell Sea and the Ross Ice Shelf (top and bottom bays in this picture.) As the sea rises from thermal expansion and the melting of Greenland and with warmer water around Antarctica itself you’d expect melting to increase. Against that it may well snow more in the next 50 years in Antarctica and how all that balances out and whether it would only provide a temporary reprieve is more than I can say.
I’d remind you though that the main sources of climate forcing are CO2 and methane, yes and black soot (see diagram on p6 of Hansen 2004 – pdf file). Last night I read Sir David King’s Zuckerman lecture (650kb pdf). Remember pre-industrial CO2 was about 280ppm. We are now at about 380. He sees us as getting to 1,000ppm by 2100 on a business-as-usual basis. If we take concerted drastic action, like now, he thinks we can stabilise it at 550ppm where it would be thereabouts for a few centuries. Both scenarios are real worry IMHO and the warming effect is likely to overwhelm whatever may give us a little hope in Antactica in the next century or so.
I’ll leave it there right now. I’ve got to go and do some stuff. But I’ll have a look at your obsession with ice-ages, what’s best for the planet (not necessarily us in the short term) and CO2, warming and plant growth in due course.
Well you just can’t get good information anymore. This is how crazy the situation has gotten.
Ice breaking off is no big drama. Ice moves like a slow-motion river. Ice breaking off is normal so thats neither here nor there. Because of its riverlike motion if it didn’t break off it would have covered the world already. Thats all good and normal.
But the Antarctica still cooling is something I’ve heard a bit. But I’ve heard the contradiction to this also. You simply cannot rely on these people anymore. Its like nothing that I’ve seen in my lifetime. Nor would you have either I would think.
Still I think Flannery is reliable and can be trusted on concrete facts. Thats why I find it so strange he takes the ultimate conclusion that he does.
Here’s a link over at Catallaxy that claims the Antarctic is cooling.
What I am pretty sure of is that the Mid-troposphere of the Antarctic has been warming. And at ground level I THOUGHT that it had been cooling a bit:
Oops. They haven’t yet got their new archive up properly at Catallaxy.
I’ll find it for you sometime in the future.
You know in many ways the things we are experiencing in this day and age….. well in some ways it is the first time round for us. The first time Western nations have been so overrun by government in their research and education. All of them simultaneously and for decades on end.
We ought to expect things to be weird and not expect that the good name of science can be maintained.
Let’s just talk a bit about ice ages. Much, of course depends on how you define them.
There seems to be one definition that counts an ice age by the existence of an ice sheet anywhere. On this definition, we are in a long ice age beginning with the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet about 40 million years ago. Wikipedia identifies four ‘long’ ice ages, beginning with the daddy of them all, Snowball earth between 750 and 580 million years ago. This ice age was unusual in that the continents were clusters around the equator. Ice ages are normally associated with changes in the composition of the atmosphere and periodic changes in the orientation of the earth in its orbit. They are also more likely when continents are clustered around the poles.
If you check out the graphs near the beginning of Paul Monk’s paper Abrupt climate change you will see that we have been on a downward temperature trend since at least 65 million years ago.
Within these longer ice ages, we talk of ice ages and interglacials.
During the last ice age in this sense the temperature was about 5C lower than it is now. James Lovelock tells us that the planet was actually more bio-productive then than it is now. Just to remind you, the ice sheet in North America came as far south as St Louis. New York was a mile under. But this image needs to be balanced with this one. The point here is that significant additional land was exposed, much of it adding to the very bio-productive arc from India to China.
He also says that the oceans were more productive at those temperatures. Conversely raise the temperature 5C from the present and most of the oceans will be a desert.
Interesting, I think.
Right.
Just about everything there I agree with. Except when you got to James Lovelock and this idea that glaciations are bio-productive.
Perhaps for Krill or something. But it would be a great disaster to have another glaciation.
But you see that is the context. That we are in an ice age. And if you push these guys to give you the evidence that we shouldn’t be more worried about freezing then warming then there isn’t enough there to alter that basic default position. Certainly not to start imposing costs on folks. Or denying them the benefits of CO2.
The idea that we could have an abrupt climate change leading to a serious glaciation is not something TO BE BALANCED with the understanding of the ice sheets.
Its something to REINFORCE the notion of the risk of glaciation. And therefore to welcome any melting of the ice that we can get hold of.
Some of these alleged scientists will try and gyp you about this rather obvious conclusion.
They are like that Israeli mentioned in the John Cleese silly walks skit. They have this ability to turn themselves inside out with every other step.
Watch it Brian…you are talking too much sense, Birdy’s brain might implode…or he will just resort to calling you a liar and a stupid lefty.
Brians talking sense.
But you Penguin are being a complete idiot.
See what happens Kim when you delay my posts.
Dilemma for a moderator. I should have scrubbed both those last two comments for their ad hominem content. But then they both complimented me…!
Err. Birdy, I am neither omniscient nor omnipotent and have been out all night and have not been doing anything whatever to moderate your comments. And Brian has correctly captured the dilemma I would have had if I had been around!
my bad…must remember not to let the other avian types stir me up.
Ad-hominem retracted. As you were birdy.
That’s because you’re not TEH GODDESS OF REASON Kimberella, and you never can be …
‘night …
Jason, after relegating me to the lesser pantheon of TEH GODDESSES, it’s hardly sporting to cut and run!
“Dilemma for a moderator. I should have scrubbed both those last two comments for their ad hominem content. But then they both complimented me…!”
But Brian and Kim. I WROTE the comment with that in mind. I would have been happy with you scrapping both comments. I just didn’t want the Penguin getting away with his crap unmatched. You could now wipe six comments starting with the Penguins… two of mine (including this one) and clean up the thread.
Actually you could wipe everything from the Penguins comment down and keep the thread undiluted.
That’s logical, Bird, but my philosophy and our comments policy has a bias towards free speech. Also it provides a small diversion and shows that a couple of people other than you and I are reading the thread!
Back to the topic at hand…
Now I want to bring attention to this idea of ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE.
We haven’t yet much in the way of evidence for this ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE being a problem for HEATING.
I don’t know that anyone is saying that the Earth ever got too hot in the last two hundred million years. The risk has always been that it gets too cold. And if one was worrying about an abrupt climate change towards coolness we would want to be sure that our starting point was a warm planet. The best thing we could do would be to melt all the ice off.
As for the Younger Drayas and Paul Monks speech…
There is no mystery to the Younger Drayas.
What happened is that as those massive North American ice sheets melted the meltwater pooled into a giant lake in the region of the great lakes area. This lake got to be many times the size of all the great lakes put together. Perhaps bigger then all the lakes in the world today.
Well one day its South-East bank burst. And so all this fresh-water landed on top of the Gulf-stream. It was cold fresh water landing straight on top of the Gulf-streams salty water. And it stopped the Gulf-Stream COLD.
It wasn’t some sort of subtle loss of water saltiness. It was a massive dramatic event. The biggest dam-burst in the last 80,000 years no doubt. An incredible deluge since the lake itself, before the burst seems to have been bigger then all but two or three States of the current United States.
So this slams down on the Gulf Stream which itself moves with the flow of twenty Amazons. But in some way all those ocean flows are somewhat connected.
So it throws the ocean circulaltion right out.
Now what are people panicking about. There is nothing comparable possible. Since there are no meltwater lakes of that size around anywhere. You are not going to cut off that flow just from some sort of slow addition of fresh water at the poles and Greenland. This is boogie-man stuff.
And even if such an abrupt climate change were on the way we would want more CO2 out there. To help us cope with any such disaster that may befall us.
Brian: What the hell does a world without an Ice-sheet look like?
Bird: On what scientific basis are you rejecting Lovelocks bio-production thesis?
‘Other avian types.’ Ha. How many of you are there, by your count Pingu?
Oh dear. The anonymity keeping me safe from the consequences of my last bad joke has just disintegrated.
Well Lovelock is a nut. But I’ll wait for someone to give me a reason to believe such a thesis from the getgo before I’ll take it into consideration.
So far we only have Lovelocks sayso. That aint worth anything.
A SUDDEN COOLING OF THE OCEAN.
Its this sort of thing that ought to alarm us. Yet my bet is that it won’t alarm anyone at all. So powerful is the momentum towards worrying about warming.:
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10273
This link from the spectator out on 25/8.
Jason always ridiculed my idea that the greater threat has to be considered to be cooling. Its still a little early for the I-Told-You-So moment.
But this new development should be quite shocking and cause much cognitive dissonance anyhow.
I’m having trouble posting a comment. I’ve saved it in word, but I’ll try with this one.
Bird, that is an interesting link and it will be interesting when the paper comes out to see how Hansen et al respond. I said years ago that I suspected there was scope for a paradigm shift or two in this adventure as we go along, but who am I to say?
Other than that there may be a simple explanation. I undrstand it takes about 100 years for heat to transmit from the surface to the bottom of the deepest ocean. What is showing up as cooling could simply be a cool wave going down from the 1960s or something when there was a period of global dimming.
Bird, what you say about the Younger Dryas and Paul Monk is pretty right, as far as I can see. And Monk is more paranoiac about cooling than he is about warming. But Hansen is quite clear about this, and I suspect he’s right. He says that the degree of human-caused climate forcing simply overwhelms anything that may have been caused by perturbations of orbits etc and that there will never be another ice age, as commonly understood, unless the human race goes extinct. No-one, not even Lovelock, is that gloomy. He thinks there will be some “breeding pairs” that make it to Antarctica.
That’s a bit OTT IMHO, but Lovelock has a lot of good science in there if you can cut your way through to it. He can read and quote other people as well as the next bloke.
I’ve contemplated a separate post on what I think is his genuine contribution. Also perhaps one on the notion of ‘abrupt climate change’ which is not to be dismissed entirely, I think.
Good question. No-one had a camera 40 million years ago. But the sea level would have been 80 metres higher than now, which I think would put our place in the Mt Coot-tha foothills in Ashgrove, Brisbane pretty much on the beach, I suspect. Hansen’s NASA slide show (slides 27-31) (large pdf) shows graduated maps relating to the New York and Washington areas, plus the US, Europe, China and India with population information that is pretty scary.
But the world was too hot 55m years ago for about 200,000 years after a sustained release of methane over 10,000 years of similar dimensions to what we are doing to the atmosphere now in the course of a few centuries. This gave plus 5C at the tropics and plus 8C in the temperate zones. Lovelock has a map of the wooded forest areas. As I’ve said it had the forest roughly where we had ice 20,000 years ago. Except the shaded forest areas included the Himalayas, in Siberia it spreads over to and includes Japan, plus New Zealand, Tasmania, Madagascar and the pointy bit of South America. Remember also that the land mass would shrink because the sea would be 200m higher than that map.
Lovelock says the equatorial areas and up to northern France and Canada would be desert, open savannah and scrub.
Not nice. A bit of real estate on the Canterbury Plains near Christchurch as long as it’s high enough, could be a useful present to the grandchildren.
Third time lucky, via the spaminator and then a broken link.
All good now, I think. I’m going out in the garden to clear a spot for the rainwater tank we are having delivered and installed on Monday!
Very Interesting Brian.
I’ve got a feeling that the haggling over who gets to live on that property in the Canterbury Plains might not be as civilised as all that. Property deeds may not be worth the paper they’re printed on when push comes to shove.
“But Hansen is quite clear about this, and I suspect he’s right. He says that the degree of human-caused climate forcing simply overwhelms anything that may have been caused by perturbations of orbits etc and that there will never be another ice age, as commonly understood, unless the human race goes extinct.”
You see what he’s saying here is that we’ve overcome the ice age in its entirety. Thats a big claim. But that is cause for the popping of champagne bottles. Not for gloom.
Yet most predictions of warming don’t leave us a planet anywhere near panic stations. Most of the warming predicted is just where you would want it.
And when the CO2 gets to be over 1000ppm then we can start thinking about growing a lot more trees and things. If thats the point at which we get diminishing returns for the productivity of the natural world then we can think about trying to use less and less land and covering the place with trees. But in any case already the natural world is taking off and the tree line is moving North in the far North. Its hard to imagine that this is a bad thing.
I see nothing that would cause people like Hansen to panic. I think he is acting as if the extra warmth is an increase in the temperature at the heat of the day rather then primarily a decrease in temperature differentials.
You go to his site and its a nightmare on every pdf.
Just what is the problem. Darwins climate spreads down to Brisbane. Thats no big deal.
But Michael G. There will be more and not less liveable land around the more the ice melts. So what are you talking about?
And we won’t see that sort of sea rising in 500 hundred years. So very few people will even notice it. It would be like sitting around waiting for an oak tree to grow.
I dont know. Like usual.
Bird, I’m sure Hansen is pleased that there will be no more ice ages, and yes, it is a big claim. His worry is over the rising sea levels. In the table he has in those slides he counts only the main N hemisphere centres of US, Europe, and the more populous countries from India to China and Japan. 6 metres dislocates 235 million, rising to 1.4 billion with 75 metres.
But it’s the continual disruption and retreat that is as much a problem as the final numbers. Consider what happened in New Orleans last year. A year later and less than half have returned. Of those that did there is an epidemic of marriage breakdowns and suicides. And the physical defences of the city are in worse shape than they were a year ago. If the sea keeps rising and the hurricanes keep coming over the next few decades the whole of that coastline and much of Florida will be in continuous trouble.
But these people are not going to resettle in the northern edge of the farming land in Canada, which is undoubtedly marginal farming land, not the best, and is probably national park.
A similar problem will occur with London in terms of flooding and spare a thought for the Dutch. When their dyke system is overwhelmed are they going to take off for northern Siberia? (I do understand that they are planning to concede part of their land to the sea, but their retreat could still be overwhelmed by events of unexpected severity.)
But Hansen’s biggest worry is that we will be in multiple positive feedback in major environmental systems, which interact with each other to produce multiple ‘tipping points’ and the total climate system will be out of control.
He and others are also worried about the ability of animals, plant and insects and insects to cope. In his NY Review of Books piece based on Elizabeth Kolbert’s book he says that the ‘isotherms’ (the lines on the map marking temperature) are migrating polewards at the rate of 35 miles per decade. If we do nothing this will double by 2100. But animals, insects and plants are only managing 4 miles per decade on average.
Mass extinctions loom, which is not nice.
But change is not a smooth process. It’s not a matter of Brisbane migrating northwards climatically. If so we would be getting more rain. As it is we are getting less (seventh year in a row now) and this is in accord, we are told, with climate change models.
If it takes 500 years to rise six metres it doesn’t dislocate anyone.
Animals will cope better if they can migrate. Its our fences and land use that stop them not our CO2.
What is Hansen claiming in terms of how quickly sea level will rise?
75 metres sounds totally outlandish to me. Where is all that ice going to come from?
This strikes me as just so far out of the ballpark.
Though he reckons these iso-therms travel 35 miles and not 4 per decade the animals which might be affected by this can have ten generations and more in that decade. Particularly the insects.
So whats going to be relevant is the COMBINED effect of many generations AND migration. Not migration alone. If he was right a single year of odd weather could wipe out a species. Because there will be more variation in that one year then in the trendline of the decade he’s talking about.
A few million dollars can get you a trip to put a dart in the polar bears ass and take him northward some. This sort of species by species thing is a better way of dealing with the problem.
To slow CO2 on this basis is like trying to wipe out the moon since moonlight brings on the crazies.
Hansen sounds like a bit of a lunatic to me.
We are going to have mass extinctions just on the basis that we have roped everything off. Nothing to do with the CO2.
Sounds like Hansen doesn’t understand nature. Its competitive. His thesis is a bit like saying all the egg-farmers will compete with eachother and they’ll all go broke simultaneusly because the competition will get too hot.
But if its something that affects all the species they’ll hardly all die in the ass together when they are competing with eachother.
My point is that climate change and sea level rises will produce a series of unusual events all along the way – events that haven’t happened before. Some people call them acts of God.
Yes, it’s our fences, our monocropping plus rivers and cities etc that get in the animals’ way.
The main point is the speed with which things are happening. Flannery says that we are warming 25 times faster than we did coming out of the last ice age, when the conifers migrated from Northern Florida to Northern Canada over a period of five centuries.
55 million years we put out the same carbon over 10,000 years that we are now putting out over about 300. There were no mass extinctions then. The last biggie was 65 million years ago.
Not sure, but I don’t think he claims to know. His concern is what is going to happen in 100 to 500 years time and the long time leads required to change anything. He reckons it will take 50 years to reduce significantly our output of greenhouse gases. It takes another 50-100 years before that reduction significantly changes warming/climate change. It takes yet another 50-100 years for the ice-sheets to stabilise. Or that’s the best estimate right now. He says in fact he’s no glaciologist. He studied under Van Allen. He says he hopes he’s wrong. But he has glaciologists working for him and he gets them to them and others to read his papers before he publishes them. He’s not an idiot.
6.5 to 7 metres from Greenland, 5 metres from the West Antarctic ice shelf, 60-65 metres from the East Antarctic ice shelf, and about 5 metres from the rest of the glaciers (Himalayas etc) and thermal expansion. That’s 80ish and off the top of my head, but those are the ball park figures.
Lovelock is the only one I know who thinks we are already past the tipping point where 80 metres is inevitable on the analogy of 55 million years ago. But he admits that he doesn’t know and hopes he’s wrong.
That’s it from me tonight. Bed calls.
Great stuff. But that 80 metres sounds thousands of years away.
The way I see it the main thing to keep a healthy natural world are:
1. To change land use. Which means a shift to a greater proportion of government revenue to be raised through the land value tax (in the context of smaller and smaller government of course.)
2. Getting height restrictions taken off building everywhere. 1 & 2 will make it easier to:
3. Create ubiquitous nature corridors. So that the critters aren’t fenced in. Even and perhaps especially us homo-sapien critters.
4. We use islands to save specific species.
and then the other important thing is:
5. More CO2. More CO2 is just critical. Because that means more plant growth. And more plant growth means more for the critters to eat.
Here are some links on the manna from heaven that CO2 represents:
This is where Mr. BC Hardcore gives us the greater wisdom when it comes to growing the Gunja.
http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/3368.html
Here is another link. This time its CO2 enrichment for the growing of tomatoes. The reccomended level is 1000-1500ppm.
âCarbon dioxide is necessary for growth, and optimal levels for tomatoes may be two to five times the normal atmospheric levels (1000 to 1500 ppm CO2 versus ambient levels of 350 ppm). Plants can deplete the CO2 in a closed greenhouse in a matter of hours, significantly reducing growth rates.â?
âThe normal atmospheric level is about 340 parts per million (ppm). Research has shown that plants are able to use more CO2 than is available in the atmosphere (up to 1500 ppm) to grow larger and faster. CO2 enrichment in your grow room has the potential to dramatically increase your yield with little cost.â?
http://www.maximumyield.com/article254.htm
Here is one where CO2 reduces the damage done to Pine trees by ice storms:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAlerts/2006/2006081522902.html
Here is one where CO2 improves cotton growth:
âIt was inferred from the results that while increasing the yield future elevated carbon dioxide levels will not have deleterious effects on fiber quality if nitrogen nutrition is optimum.â?
Here is one where the writer thinks that a CO2-enriched environment enriches the soil with carbon AND nitrogen. Thus also mitigating the build-up of CO2 since a lot of C (ie carbon) will remain imbedded in the soil.
http://escholarship.bc.edu/dissertations/AAI1411120/
Now bear in mind if we get this land use going right we can give over much more land to the natural world and this in itself will soak up a lot of CO2.
Bird, you amaze me. Do you realise that you are not far away from what Lovelock seeks. He wants to return a third of the planet to ‘nature’ in order to allow the earth to heal itself. It is just that rather than enhance the land’s productivity he wants to use technology to manufacture food from its component chemicals to give the land a rest.
But your recommendations are not the worst I’ve seen. Apart from “more CO2″. When Bob Carter first started lauding atmospheric CO2 as fertiliser, I asked my brother about it so that I could have the opinion of a university agronomist rather than rely on a geologist with a rather narrow specialty.
My bro says that CO2 is good for plant growth other things being equal. So let’s agree that CO2 is great stuff for plants. But I would balance this with a few other factors.
The plants I know get most of their nutrition from the ground rather than the air. (I do know one that can grow in a hanging basket with no soil, but it grows better on the ground.) They also like water (in varying amounts) and grow within a temperature bandwidth.
I’ve noticed btw that if it gets really hot and there is no moisture that plants tend to die no matter how much fertiliser they get. Funny that.
The problem with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is in part that it causes the temperature to go up through the greenhouse effect. In some places it will rain less, in some more, but on the average it will tend to rain less often but in larger amounts.
That last point is a matter of simple physics. Warm air holds more water but when something triggers precipitation there is more of it up there to come down. So you get more of the drought and flood effect which, generally speaking, is not good for agriculture.
There are two cases where temperature rises are quite critical. One is sea algae which flourish when the water temperature is 10 – 12C. They remove CO2 from the air and produce a gas which is instrumental in cloud formation. It is thought that when CO2 reaches 500ppm (in about 40 years time) the point will be reached where most of the algae die off. The temperature of the planet is likely to increase quite significantly as a result. It’s a tipping point at about the same point where the melting of Greenland ice sheets will become unstoppable.
The other one is trees where the ideal growing temperature is apparently 20C. Too much CO2 means too much heat, plus more droughts. If you fry the tropical rainforests they become a carbon source rather than a carbon sink. Without us, in other times when the buildup happened more slowly the rainforests may have been able to migrate. But not this time, I think.
So CO2 is great stuff, but like Golidilocks and the three bears porridge, we need just the right amount.
But you can have as much as you like growing Gunja in a totally enclosed environment or with your hydroponic tomatoes.
Just to throw a spaniard in the iceworks, researchers are now proposing that ice sheet melt during major ice cycles is intially due to solar activity and the subsequent melting ice control atmospheric carbon dioxide and drive feedbacks that amplify ice growth and melting.
A whole new “what-ifs”
http://www.physorg.com/news72982748.html
Bird – When you’re not playing Super Bird, saviour of the world – and taking on all comers – you’re decidely reasonable.
I do wonder how you’re gonna create all these nature corridors without disrupting western ‘culture’ as we know and love it.
And isn’t the most base point one about demographics? It would seem to condition anything we do regarding land use or vehicle use or city planning
And thanks Brian. That warm air/tropical downpour explanation gave me a ‘duh, of course that’s how it works’ moment. My dad’s the scientist in the family.
Yes well rog, you just linked to an anonymous article (“source: University of Virginia”) in a cut and paste cheapy site which bills itself as a “photonics journal” with no masthead, human names or any physical entity whatsoever. Just an email address as the sole point of contact.
Hope you’re not buying a car or a laptop off ‘em.
One born every minute folks.
Try this,http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/releases2006/20060725icesheets.html blowhard
http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/releases2006/20060725icesheets.html
Yeah, I thought it was the same guy. His hypothesis two years ago sounded really neat. He said that 8000 years ago we would have started sliding back into an ice age apart from humans farming, clearing forests and in particular growing rice, which produces a fair bit of methane from the paddies. So our activities have had the effect of inadvertently keeping things sweet until the industrial age when we started putting out carbon at an even greater rate.
It sounded neat and plausible. Last I heard (this is from memory) the effect he identified was real but only accounted for about a quarter of what happened (9% to 36%, I think). So it is not so neat and simple.
So I’d wait to see what other scientists now do to complicate his new simple idea.
In any case it has no bearing on ‘anthropogenically generated’ climate change in the modern industrial era, which is something entirely new and so powerful that Hansen has suggested a new geological era, the ‘Holocene’.
I heard it from a climatologist, Michael G. I’m sure there are a lot of other factors that have an influence. My elder brother tells me that Rockhampton has one of the most variable precipitation records in the world. In midsummer there the sun is straight overhead. I was there a few years ago when they were having some storms. He rang up his mates to see where the rain fell. He’d get answers like, “We had nothing here but X over at Y had 8 inches and over at Mt Z they had 11 inches in four hours!”
It just doesn’t happen quite like that 2000k further south, but you’ll notice that places like Melbourne and Adelaide have been a bit surprised at what they’ve occasionally gotten in recent times.
Well just as long as that includes Belgium, an insignificant country on the shores of the North Sea, which is notable for having produced nothing of importance throughout its history, but which would make an excellent bird sanctuary.
And yet I heard, GregM, that Belgium has more trade than the entire continent of Africa. I started adding up the figures for the main African economies and it became clear that the claim was true!
The reasons why Belgium has more trade than the whole of Africa, Brian, are that:
1. Most African countries have not followed sane economic and development policies over the most of the last forty years and therefore have little to trade.
2. The evil Common Agricultural Policy of the EU, an institution headquartered in the Belgian capital, Brussels, a city otherwise notable only for its contribution to the world’s cuisine of a vegetable which is hated by children everywhere, blocks them from trading the one group of commodities, ie agricultural produce, in which they would readily have a comparative advantage if allowed to trade it.
3. Belgium sits on the estuary of the Rhine and therefore its ports, principally Antwerp, receive a lot of the trade going up that river and thence into central Europe, while, of course, occupying land which should be returned to marsh and wetland so as to provide a habitat for water-birds.
I am sure that the Dutch would be glad to take over their trade while returning Belgium to its pristine state of around 1000 BC would be a powerful signal by the EU that they are really serious about tackling global warming.
I want you to think about this Brian. Because when we get far I get my suspicions that the MOMENTUM has gotten so strong that even authentically talented scientists have been swept up and enticed into taking all their creativity to invent scary scenarios.
Lets take just one item here and I’ll show you how this phenomenon of MOMENTUM has likely had its influence.
“The problem with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is in part that it causes the temperature to go up through the greenhouse effect. In some places it will rain less, in some more, but on the average it will tend to rain less often but in larger amounts.
That last point is a matter of simple physics. Warm air holds more water but when something triggers precipitation there is more of it up there to come down. So you get more of the drought and flood effect which, generally speaking, is not good for agriculture.”
I’ll translate for you what that means. Moving from Melbourne to Brisbane I got the overnight train to Roma street and then headed for Fortitude Valley waiting for the pubs to open up. It was about 6.00am or 6.30 am when I arrived and it was February and the air was warm and humid.
A bit later I saw schoolgirls in different school uniforms and I suppose its quite a disgraceful trick of memory but I don’t remember any schoolbuys.
Anyhow a few drops of rain started. And these girls in school uniforms quickly headed for cover. Which I immediately thought was odd. Why head fo cover with just a few drops of rain falling?
Well I soon found out. Because the stray raindrops preceded a sudden deluge of the sort that I didn’t see in Melbourne.
For sure. It rains in Melbourne. It even rains HARD in Melbourne. But not with that sort of suddeness. AND THE RAINDROPS WERE BIGGER AND HAD LESS SPACE BETWEEN THEM.
Pretty soon the early morning streets of Fortitude Valley were like a series of small rivers but it went just as fast as it came and with nothing to show for it but wet streets and the sun came out.
Now lets see what you said again:
“The problem with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is in part that it causes the temperature to go up through the greenhouse effect. In some places it will rain less, in some more, but on the average it will tend to rain less often but in larger amounts.
That last point is a matter of simple physics. Warm air holds more water but when something triggers precipitation there is more of it up there to come down. So you get more of the drought and flood effect which, generally speaking, is not good for agriculture.”
We are not talking doom and gloom here though are we? All we are talking about is the difference between rain in July in Melbourne and rain in February in Brisbane.
What you are saying will not manifest itself as pockets of pure desert and pockets of hard rains, destroying all the topsoil, making life impossible. It will just mean a spreading of the potentially more fertile areas.
For otherwise how could it be that there is such an abundance of life in the tropics?
If you look at the most productive areas, as far as nature is concerned, in this world most of them have 2 things in common.
1. Hot and Humid
2. Haven’t been subject to too much human depredation and burning.
But if what YOU said was true all these incredibly productive places would have washed away down to mud or would have dried up into desert.
So I’m not faulting your reasoning here so much as saying to watch out for the consequences of MOMENTUM. And the consequences as far as I can make it is our best theorists like Tim Flannery getting sucked in to using all their smarts and creativity to conjure nightmare scenarios.
I’ll turn to this panty-waist algae in a little while.
“There are two cases where temperature rises are quite critical. One is sea algae which flourish when the water temperature is 10 – 12C. They remove CO2 from the air and produce a gas which is instrumental in cloud formation. It is thought that when CO2 reaches 500ppm (in about 40 years time) the point will be reached where most of the algae die off. ”
Is this because of the temperature change?
I misunderstood this at first. I thought this was some piss-weak algae that didn’t deserve to live. Since it gave it all up with the extra CO2. So I thought that if you can’t handle the CO2 at the rate of 1.004% recurring per year you don’t really deserve to live.
But now I see its the water temperature that is the problem.
Why wouldn’t this algae just move North and South?
And you say it will give up a lot of CO2. But this ignores that all over the natural world land will be opening up and the yields on plants will have increased as much as 5 or 10%. So why wouldn’t the extra plant growth suck up the CO2 that the algae wasn’t getting?
We want to keep this issue of CAUSE MOMENTUM in mind when we think about this.
Look at how Norton tried on the Lock-In-And-Build technique to believeing what he wants to believe.Thats what you see all the time going on now. Many things we’ve been lead to believe over the last few years have come about by incredibly determined acts of Lock-In-And-Build.
“The other one is trees where the ideal growing temperature is apparently 20C. Too much CO2 means too much heat, plus more droughts. If you fry the tropical rainforests they become a carbon source rather than a carbon sink. Without us, in other times when the buildup happened more slowly the rainforests may have been able to migrate. But not this time, I think.”
Has there been any time in history when this has happened? If average temperatures were 10 degrees higher then they are now 65 Million years ago, that extra energy doesn’t manifest itself as higher temperatures at the equator. It manifests itself in warmer winters and more warmth at the poles and more warmth before sunrise.
I see no reason to believe that the wet places will dry out. The commentators are acting like the sun is heating up and not as if there is more CO2 out there. The CO2 won’t increase the Noonday temperatures at the equator. If anything it will shave a bit off them. Instead it will reduce the heat differentials and spread the warmth out.
Yeah I think there is a Goldilocks amount of CO2 that you want. I don’t think you want it at 2000ppm. I think you want it at 1000ppm to 1500ppm max. This is how we get a fertile Australia. Make it 1000ppm to be conservative.
Instead of trying to predict the future I’d want the modellers to work on trying to figure out what a 1000ppm CO2 world would look like. I’d want them to figure out just what it is we’d have to adapt to. And what sort of world we would wind up with.
I think it would be a better world.
I really do.
But at the rate we are going (CO2 increasing at 0.4% per year) it will take about 242 years to get there.