Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates

[Capt.Slog 0]

Story:

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/14/AR2009021401757.html

[rushmc 18]

Love the article title vs the 1st paragraph of the "story"



Same old fear mongering bullshit

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[shropshire 0]

Someone else wants us to pay even more money from our already dwindling funds to counter something that they can't even prove is defeatable... If it's a natural cyclic event then no amount of my hard earned cash is going to stop, let alone reverse it.

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[Amazon 7]

Quote

Love the article title vs the 1st paragraph of the "story"



Same old fear mongering bullshit

Ever been to Death Valley?

[shropshire 0]

I bet Death Valley has been a bit warm since before the industrial revolution.

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[billvon 2,478]

>Someone else wants us to pay even more money from our already
>dwindling funds to counter something that they can't even prove is
>defeatable... If it's a natural cyclic event then no amount of my hard
>earned cash is going to stop, let alone reverse it.


1 February 2009
Irreversible Does Not Mean Unstoppable

Susan Solomon, ozone hole luminary and Nobel Prize winning chair of IPCC, and her colleagues, have just published a paper entitled “Irreversible climate change because of carbon dioxide emissions” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We at realclimate have been getting a lot of calls from journalists about this paper, and some of them seem to have gone all doomsday on us. Dennis Avery and Fred Singer used the word Unstoppable as a battle flag a few years ago, over the argument that the observed warming is natural and therefore there is nothing that humanity can do to alter its course. So in terms of its intended rhetorical association, Unstoppable = Burn Baby Burn. But let’s not confuse Irreversible with Unstoppable. One means no turning back, while the other means no slowing down. They are very different words. Despair not!

Solomon et al point out that continued, unabated CO2 emissions to the atmosphere would have climatic consequences that would persist for a thousand years, which they define operationally as “forever”, as in the sense of “Irreversible”. It is not really news scientifically that atmospheric CO2 concentration stays higher than natural for thousands of years after emission of new CO2 to the carbon cycle from fossil fuels. The atmospheric CO2 concentration has a sharp peak toward the end of the fossil fuel era, then after humankind has gone carbon neutral (imagine!) the CO2 concentration starts to subside, quickly at first but after a few centuries settling in a "long tail" which persists for hundreds of thousands of years.

The long tail was first predicted by a carbon cycle model in 1992 by Walker and Kasting. My very first post on realclimate was called “How long will global warming last?”, all about the long tail. Here's a review paper from Climatic Change of carbon cycle models in the literature, which all show the long tail. A number of us “long tailers” got together (electronically) to do a Long Tail Model Intercomparison Project, LTMIP, just like the big guys PMIP and OCMIP (preliminary results of LTMIP to be appearing soon in Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences). I even wrote you guys a book on the topic.

The actual carbon-containing molecules from the fossil fuel spread out into the other carbon reservoirs in the fast parts of the carbon cycle, dissolving in the oceans and getting snapped up by photosynthetic land plants. The spreading of the carbon is analogous to water poured into one part of a lake, it quickly spreads out into the rest of the lake, rather than remaining in a pile where you poured it, and the lake level rises a bit everywhere. In the carbon cycle, translated out of this tortured analogy, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content rises along with the contents of the other carbon reservoirs.

Ultimately the airborne fraction of a CO2 release is determined largely by the buffer chemistry of the ocean, and you can get a pretty good answer with a simple calculation based on a well-mixed ocean, ignoring all the complicated stuff like temperature differences, circulation, and biology. The ocean decides that the airborne fraction of a CO2 release, after it spreads out into the other fast parts of the carbon cycle, will be in the neighborhood of 10-30%. The only long-term way to accelerate the CO2 drawdown in the long tail would be to actively remove CO2 from the air, which I personally believe will ultimately be necessary. But the buffering effect of the ocean would work against us here, releasing CO2 to compensate for our efforts.

As a result of the long tail, any climate impact from more CO2 in the air will be essentially irreversible. Then the question is, what are the climate impacts of CO2? It gets warmer, that’s pretty clear, and sea level rises. Sea level rise is a profound consequence of the long tail of global warming because the response in the past, over geologic time scales, is tens of meters per °C change in global mean temperature, about 100 times stronger than the IPCC forecast for 2100 (about 0.2 meters per °C). The third impact which gains immortality from the long tail is precipitation. Here the conventional story has been that climate models are not very consistent in the regional precipitation changes they predict in response to rising CO2. Apparently this is changing with the AR4 suite of model runs, as Solomon et al demonstrated in their Figure 3. Also, there is a consistent picture of drought impact with warming in some places, for example the American Southwest, both over the past few decades and in medieval time. The specifics of a global warming drought forecast are beginning to come into focus.

Perhaps the despair we heard in our interviewers’ questions arose from the observation in the paper that the temperature will continue to rise, even if CO2 emissions are stopped today. But you have to remember that the climate changes so far, both observed and committed to, are minor compared with the business-as-usual forecast for the end of the century. It’s further emissions we need to worry about. Climate change is like a ratchet, which we wind up by releasing CO2. Once we turn the crank, there's no easy turning back to the natural climate. But we can still decide to stop turning the crank, and the sooner the better.

(Walker JCG, Kasting JF. 1992. Effects of fuel and forest conservation on future levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol. (Glob. Planet. Change Sect.) 97:151–89)

[Amazon 7]

Quote

I bet Death Valley has been a bit warm since before the industrial revolution.

Yup..... BUT... I wonder what the desertification of large parts of this continent will look like.... similar to Death Valley?

[shropshire 0]

It'll still rain in the NW



I'm probably just being naive but I'm not whole convinced yet..... It also kind of pisses me off that folks keep trying to tell us little people to cut our Carbon output (turning off a few light - Pah) whilst the big boys are jetting around in empty Lear jets and chuffing big engined cars and powering their factories from coal fueled power-stations.

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[rushmc 18]

Quote

Quote

I bet Death Valley has been a bit warm since before the industrial revolution.

Yup..... BUT... I wonder what the desertification of large parts of this continent will look like.... similar to Death Valley?

Ya, another good prediction

California Weather Exposes Fiction of Global Warming

Saturday, February 14, 2009 6:04 PM

By: Lowell Ponte




The Golden State could become a desert wasteland, with no more winter salad greens from its parched Central Valley or wines from its withered Napa-Sonoma vineyards, before this century ends unless America takes drastic steps to slow global warming, warned U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu.


“We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California,” Chu told The Los Angeles Times, adding, “I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going.”


Cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego could become sandstorm-blasted ghost towns, Chu seemed to be saying.


January had been unusually dry, the start of a third dry year in a row for California. But soon after Chu's interview, rain began falling. Rainstorm after rainstorm – an average of one every two days – rolled across and drenched much of the state. By Feb. 10, water-short San Diego had surged to 2 inches above its normal-to-date rainfall, and southland mountain ski lodges opened quickly.


This rain pattern continues, with huge storms expected to thicken the Northern Sierra snowpack that supplies much of California's water when it melts. The snowpack was only 61 percent of its usual thickness when Chu voiced concern about a drought.




The Chu Effect


“It's the Gore Effect,” says a laughing James Taylor, editor of the Heartland Institute think tank journal Environment & Climate News. “Almost every time global warming doomsayer Al Gore speaks or his movie is shown, unusual cold or blizzards happen. And now we have the Chu Effect. He warns of global warming-caused drought in California, and the heavens reply with almost nonstop rains. Maybe somebody up there is trying to tell us something.”


With little or no planetary warming since 1998, alarmists and climate opportunists point increasingly to brief regional droughts as second-hand evidence of global warming.


“It's amazing how many big-mouth global warming alarmists get media attention who were never trained as climatologists,” Patrick Michaels, a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, tells Newsmax.


Chu is the latest example. He is a brilliant physicist who shared a 1997 Nobel Prize for his research into how to manipulate atoms with lasers. He has been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California Berkeley. But like most global warming doomsayers, Chu has no degree in atmospheric sciences, meteorology, or climatology.


Politicizing Science


Like many scientists eager to influence national policy, Chu became an outspoken activist in fields far from his expertise. He joined the Copenhagen Climate Council, a private collaboration between science and business to promote a 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in the Danish capital — and, it acknowledges, to use “emotional storytelling” about global warming.


Giving emotion more credence than concrete evidence worries other officials.


“I am hopeful Secretary Chu will take note of the real-world data, new studies, and the growing chorus of international scientists that question his climate claims,” says Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee. “Computer model predictions of the year 2100 are simply not evidence of a looming climate catastrophe.”




Among Chu's fellow council members preaching politicized science are Thomas Lovejoy, president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and Environment; doomsaying eccentric scientist and founder of Gaia theory James Lovelock; idealistic airline magnate and spaceflight privatizer Sir Richard Branson; and Copenhagen Climate Council President radical climate activist, author of “The Weather Changers;” and paleontologist Tim Flannery.


A few years ago, Chu was one of six Nobel laureate scientists (none climatologists) who posed sitting against a huge tree on the UC-Berkeley campus for a Vanity Fair photograph to show their concern about global warming.


To the consternation of some extreme leftists, Chu played a role in establishing the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) at UC-Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and the University of Illinois — a far-ranging $500 million project researching alternative fuels funded by BP, formerly British Petroleum, a multinational corporation.


EBI investigates ways to use grasses instead of corn to make biofuel ethanol more efficiently with less environmental and economic impact.


Chu Dislikes Nuclear Power, Coal


Chu has been reluctant to embrace nuclear power, even though it emits no greenhouse gases, out of concerns with its waste and proliferation safety. He also finds problems with clean coal technologies, even though America's huge reserves make it “the Saudi Arabia of coal” and offer a clear path to energy independence.


“Coal is my worst nightmare,” says Chu, who describes the typical coal plant's radioactive fly-ash pollution as giving off 100 times more radiation than a nuclear plant.


As an adviser, Chu may have influenced candidate Barack Obama's Jan. 17, 2008, statement to the San Francisco Chronicle that he planned pollution taxes that would “bankrupt” anyone who tried to build a coal-powered plant.


And Chu is an early signatory to Project Steve, which advocates the teaching of Darwinian evolution. Its name may have been chosen to mock Bible-believing proponents of Intelligent Design and traditional marriage by evoking their slogan “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”


Will the West Run Dry?


“Is there more drought in America? Yes, but it has nothing to do with climate change,” University of Delaware and Delaware State Climatologist David Legates tells Newsmax.


“Averaged over wet and dry years, most places are getting roughly the same amount of precipitation they did in past decades,” Legates says. “Some recent regional dry spells appear to be caused by a Pacific Ocean cyclic phenomenon called La Niña. But because more people want and need water, we have demand-side 'drought.' ”


And Cato Institute environmental fellow Patrick Michaels tells Newsmax: “If anything, the 20th century was a bit wetter than average, and the Pacific Southwest continues to get slightly wetter.


“The latest research predicts that more global warming would make California drier in summer, when little or no rain falls anyway, but wetter in winter,” says Michaels, co-author of the 2009 book “Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know.”


“Surely humans could adapt to that, store increased winter precipitation, develop drought-resistant crops, import water from H2O-rich Canada, or desalinate sea water along California's 800 mile coastline on the Pacific Ocean,” he says.


“This doomsayer idea that Californians would be helpless and do nothing innovative to protect their cities and crops from drought is ridiculous and an insult to the human mind and spirit,” Michaels says.




“The Obama administration is top-loaded with global warming extremists,” Michaels tells Newsmax, “and we're all going to pay a price for that.”


Man-Made Water Shortage


California once supported only a few thousand Native Americans but today sustains more than 36 million people because people built dams to store and aqueducts to redistribute water.


San Diego, for example, gets 60 percent of its water from the Rocky Mountains, where this season's snowpack is heavier than average, via the Colorado River.


Los Angeles gets most of its water from Northern California. L.A.'s biggest threat of water shortage comes not from drought but from Federal District Court Judge Oliver Wanger.


On Sept. 1, 2007, this judge put strict limits on the pumping of water each December to June from the San Joaquin-Sacramento River delta to protect a 3-inch-long endangered fish, the Delta Smelt. This ruling costs Southern California up to 30 percent of what used to be its California Aqueduct water each year. (President George H.W. Bush appointed Wanger a federal judge in 1991.)


Therefore, the global warming alarmists are strangely correct. Man causes much of the water shortage in large areas of California — and that man is a federal judge.


© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[Capt.Slog 0]

Quote

It'll still rain in the NW



I'm probably just being naive but I'm not whole convinced yet..... It also kind of pisses me off that folks keep trying to tell us little people to cut our Carbon output (turning off a few light - Pah) whilst the big boys are jetting around in empty Lear jets and chuffing big engined cars and powering their factories from coal fueled power-stations.

"Mony a mickle maks a muckle."

The boys' jets are coming under increasing scrutiny, and the factories are making stuff that YOU (and I) buy.

[Capt.Slog 0]

Quote

© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

[Amazon 7]

Quote

It'll still rain in the NW



I'm probably just being naive but I'm not whole convinced yet..... It also kind of pisses me off that folks keep trying to tell us little people to cut our Carbon output (turning off a few light - Pah) whilst the big boys are jetting around in empty Lear jets and chuffing big engined cars and powering their factories from coal fueled power-stations.

Well maybe it will get a bit more like San Diego... better jumping
San Diego on the other hand... may look a tad more like.. Los Cabo

The point to most of it is pretty simple.. to effect change.. we need the VAST MAJORITY of people... to make little changes... that start to add up...

BUT.. most important.. when all those little people find its reprehensible for the BIG people to just go on with the same business as usual..... the BIG people will stop... because they live in the world of public opinion and negative views of their companies.... affect their bottom line..

[kelpdiver 2]

Uh, within 2 inches of normal in San Diego isn't very much, and essentially missing the point. Rainfall in SD does not supply the water system. It's snow in the Sierra,and 61% of normal after 2 drought years is not great by any stretch of the imagination. (Mind you, there was a similar drought in the late 80s, so this can be independent of the usually GW discussions)

We're definitely in a pretty good storm pattern right now, that will certainly improve what was a very bleak outlook just a month ago.

[Andy9o8 0]

Science and politics are two different things. Generally speaking, those who tend to confuse the two are frequently idiots.

[TrophyHusband 0]

"The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said."


you lefties are the ones with your panties in a wad about burning fossil fuels, so why not step aside and let us get on with building more nuclear plants? seams like it would make both sides happy.

"Your scrotum is quite nice" - Skymama
www.kjandmegan.com

[billvon 2,478]

>you lefties are the ones with your panties in a wad about burning fossil fuels, so
>why not step aside and let us get on with building more nuclear plants?

Sure! Careful, though - you might end up having to work with those disgusting "liberal intellectual elites" to get the next generation of PBMR's and HTGR's built.

[TrophyHusband 0]

can you elaborate on what those are? i've worked in pwr's and bwr's so i'm familiar with those, but i'm woefully ignorant on other types of reactors.

"Your scrotum is quite nice" - Skymama
www.kjandmegan.com

[rushmc 18]

Doesnt change things though does it?



..and to think, you post that after you have linked to the Washingon (com)post

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[rushmc 18]

Quote

Science and politics are two different things. Generally speaking, those who tend to confuse the two are frequently idiots.

And with that I absolutly agree.

Problem is, many dont know the difference

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[rushmc 18]

I will call your Washington Compost link and raise you a Boston Herald

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/national/general/view/2009_02_15_Former_astronaut_speaks_out_on_global_warming/srvc=home&position=recent

THIS is closer to the truth that anything printed in a while

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[rushmc 18]

From the link at realy good comment

Quote

Of the global warming debate, he said: "It’s one of the few times you’ve seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it’s coloring their objectivity."

And billvon says its the deniers who are being political. Guess there are others who see it differently

Of couse, the "consenus" is the all powerful

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[Amazon 7]

Quote

Doesnt change things though does it?



..and to think, you post that after you have linked to the Washingon (com)post

Desparate post #1

[Amazon 7]

Quote

Quote

Science and politics are two different things. Generally speaking, those who tend to confuse the two are frequently idiots.

And with that I absolutly agree.

Problem is, many dont know the difference

Desparate post #2

[lawrocket 3]

I've got anb idea for an article:

Headline: "Obama shot dead"

Synopsis: "Some predict assassination of the POTUS."

Or how about:
Headline: "Jesus jas returned!"

Synopsis: "Some predict second coming of Jesus."

the articles provides no data. Only a prediction. But headline says it is happening.

What the???

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[Amazon 7]

Quote

I will call your Washington Compost link and raise you a Boston Herald

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/national/general/view/2009_02_15_Former_astronaut_speaks_out_on_global_warming/srvc=home&position=recent

THIS is closer to the truth that anything printed in a while

Desparate post #3