Guest clobberin’ time by David Middleton
As global warming continues, Trump wants to burn fossil fuels with an arsonist’s glee
By THE TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD
SEP 29, 2018Here’s some disquieting, if unsurprising, news: The world is nowhere near where it needs to be if we are to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. That’s the gist of a report to be delivered this week in South Korea by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an independent body providing scientific analysis on climate change. According to early details given to the Guardian newspaper, the report warns that barring drastic and near-immediate changes in how the world creates energy, uses transportation and grows food, we will fall short of the 2015 Paris agreement goal of limiting the global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above what it was in pre-industrial times. Currently, the global temperature is nearly 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial benchmark.
That means trouble. Glaciers already are melting. The shrinking ice cap could mean an ice-free Arctic in the summertime by the end of the century, a reduction that many scientists believe fuels a feedback loop: The less ice there is, the more solar energy the Arctic absorbs, increasing the water temperature and reducing the amount of ice still farther.
[…]
Well… it never fueled a feedback loop during the vast majority of the Holocene, when the Arctic Ocean was likely to have been ice-free during summer. McKay et al., 2008 demonstrated that the modern Arctic sea ice cover is anomalously high and the Arctic summer sea surface temperature is anomalously low relative to the rest of the Holocene.
“Modern sea-ice cover in the study area, expressed here as the number of months/year with >50% coverage, averages 10.6 ±1.2 months/year… Present day SST and SSS in August are 1.1 ± 2.4 8C and 28.5 ±1.3, respectively… In the Holocene record of core HLY0501-05, sea-ice cover has ranged between 5.5 and 9 months/year, summer SSS has varied between 22 and 30, and summer SST has ranged from 3 to 7.5 8C (Fig. 7). (McKay et al., 2008)
Over most of the Holocene, >50% sea ice coverage occurred from 5.5 to 9 months each year. During the “Anthropocene”, >50% sea ice coverage has ranged from 9 to 12 months each year.
Yes… I know there are only 12 months in a year.
While McKay’s cores were from the Chukchi Sea, there’s no reason to think that the rest of the Arctic Ocean behaved differently.
Borrowed from: Another Dis-alarming Analysis of Arctic Sea Ice
Back to the LA Times editorial board…
Worse, the melting of glaciers raises the level of the ocean (melting Arctic ice doesn’t do that since the cap floats on the sea). The ice sheet covering Greenland has been melting at an increasing rate since 2003…
How Big is the Greenland Ice Sheet?
According to U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386–A (2012), the volume of the GrIS is 2,600,000 km3. The USGS cites a 1954 reference for this number and also cites Bamber et al., 2011, which puts the volume at 2,900,000 km3. Bamber has subsequently upped his estimate to 2,960,000 km3. This is funny. Either the GrIS added 360,000 km3 of ice from 1954-2013 at a time when NASA said the GrIS was losing 4,089 km3 or the uncertainty of the volume of the GrIS is about 1,000 times the annual ice loss that is asserted with such precision by Amazing GRACE.
How Does the Recent Ice Loss Compare to the Volume of the Greenland Ice Sheet?
According to Kjeldsen et al., 2015, the GrIS lost over 9,900 km3 of ice from 1900-2010 and an article in The Economist asserted that the GrIS lost 375 Gt/yr (409 km3/yr) from 2011-2014.
| 1900–1983 | 75.1 ± 29.4 gigatonnes per year | |
| 1983–2003 | 73.8 ± 40.5 gigatonnes per year | |
| 2003–2010 | 186.4 ± 18.9 gigatonnes per year | |
| km³/yr | gigatonnes/yr | |
| 1900–1983 | (82) | (75) |
| 1983–2003 | (81) | (74) |
| 2003–2010 | (203) | (186) |
| 2011-2014 | (409) | (375) |
Here’s a graphical depiction of this projected up to 2017:
99.58% of the Greenland Ice Sheet has not melted since 1900.
For a little more perspective, let’s convert this to ice cubes and bodies of water.
Based on the asserted loss of ice since 1900, the GrIS has lost the equivalent of a Lake Superior-sized ice cube. However the GrIs remained larger than the Gulf of Mexico (by volume) despite losing a Lake Superior. The Gulf of Mexico has a volume of about 2.5 million km3. If the GrIS melted, the volume of water would be about 2.71 million km3. Before losing Lake Superior, the water volume was 2.72 million km3.
The “funny” thing is that the volume of Holocene ice appears to be as large or larger than the volume of Pleistocene ice.
Greenland Ice Sheet Stratigraphy: “This print resolution image shows one cross-section of the age of the Greenland Ice Sheet as determined by MacGregor et al. (See citation under the ‘More Details…’ button below) Layers determined to be from the Holocene period, formed during the past 11.7 thousand years, are shown in Green. Age layers accumulated during the last ice age, from 11.7 to 115 thousand years ago are shown in blue. Age layers from the Eemian period, more than 115 thousand years old are shown in red. Regions of unknown age are filled with a flat gray colour.”
In much of Central Greenland about 12,000 years worth of Holocene ice is thicker than over 100,000 years of Pleistocene ice. This is due to the fact that glacial stages (AKA ice ages) are very cold and very dry. The snow accumulation rate during the Holocene has been much higher than that of the last Pleistocene glacial stage.
It’s particularly notable that in Central Greenland there is still a significant remnant of Eemian ice.
Who would have guessed that the “Anthropocene” GrIS is actually larger than it was during the Late Pleistocene? WUWT? X-axis is in calendar years AD(BC).
Borrowed from: A Geological Perspective of the Greenland Ice Sheet
The current rate of global ice melt will raise the seas by 2 feet over the next 80 years, according to a report earlier this year.
I don’t think so.
- 2 feet = 610 mm
- 610 mm / 80 yrs = 7.6 mm/yr
This is a sea level reconstruction using the data from Jevrejeva et al., 2014. 1.9 mm/yr is just s bit shy of 7.6 mm/yr.
Figure 1. Sea Level Reconstruction (Jevrejeva et al., 2014)
The key features of Jevrejeva et al, 2014 (J14) are a falling sea level near the end of Holocene neoglaciation phase and then a steady, secular rise of about 1.9 mm/yr since 1860 as the Earth warmed up from the Little Ice Age.
The steady rise from the Little Ice Age is punctuated by a multi-decadal quasi-periodic fluctuation (a cycle to a geologist)…
Figure 2. J14 exhibits alternating periods of fast (~3 mm/yr) and slow (~1 mm/yr) of sea level rise.
The slope change in 1993 is at the beginning of the satellite record and was their basis to declare an acceleration in sea level rise from about 2 mm/yr to the current 3 mm/yr.
3.2 mm/yr is still just a bit shy of 7.6 mm/yr. Sea level graph from NASA… Hand with beads and ruler added for scale.
For sea level rise to accelerate to anywhere near a rate that could lead to 2 feet of additional sea level over the next 80 years, it would have to accelerate to a rate much faster than that of the Holocene Transgression…
Projected sea level rise through 2100 AD.
The Holocene Transgression was real sea level rise… and SUV-free.
The Holocene Transgression required this sort of ice melting…
Greenland melting a bit around the edges cant’ get there from here.
Back to the LA Times editorial board…
What will all this mean for man and the planet on which he resides? Without a massive global effort to change how we create energy, we can expect…
Back to the LA Times editorial board…
Under the Paris climate pact, world leaders committed to limiting the rise in global temperature to 2 degrees above the pre-industrial era, but with an aspiration to limit it to 1.5 degrees.
Done!
Output of 38 RCP4.5 models vs observations. The graph is originally from Carbon Brief.I updated it with HadCRUT4 to demonstrate the post-El Niño divergence. HadCRUT4 shifted to 1970-2000 baseline.
And climate sensitivity estimates are falling faster than the Arctic sea ice is melting…
Back to the LA Times editorial board…
And the Pentagon recognizes that rising seas threaten military bases, particularly naval installations, around the globe. But the administration seeks to make the problems worse rather than take steps to combat them.
They link to a Grauniad article that links to the Center for Climate & Security, a warmunist activist group composed mostly of Obama-era retired military brass, including Rear Admiral David W. Titley, USN (Ret) and a document supposedly from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. The document discusses US military facilities that are vulnerable to bad weather, including excessively cold weather.
Back to the LA Times editorial board…
Humanity is spinning pell-mell toward self-inflicted disaster, and the largest economy in the world — the country with the second highest industrial output — has official policies to ignore it. Indeed, the U.S. plans to add to the problem for the sake of short-term energy sector financial gains. Whether Trump’s policies are bred of ignorance or cynicism, they push the nation — and the planet — into ever-more dangerous territory.
So… Which half of humanity should bite the bullet? The Haber-Bosch process, which manufactures synthetic fertilizer from natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen, feeds nearly half of the world population.
Trends in human population and nitrogen use throughout the twentieth century. Of the total world population (solid line), an estimate is made of the number of people that could be sustained without reactive nitrogen from the Haber–Bosch process (long dashed line), also expressed as a percentage of the global population (short dashed line). The recorded increase in average fertilizer use per hectare of agricultural land (blue symbols) and the increase in per capita meat production (green symbols) is also shown. Erisman et al., 2008
Even if one ignores the multitude of other benefits of fossil fuels, the ability to feed 48% of 7.6 billion people means that at least 3,648,000,000 people stand to gain from our continued “addiction” to fossil fuels.
President “Trump wants to burn fossil fuels with an arsonist’s glee” because he understands three things that the clueless LA Times editorial board will never be able to comprehend:
- It’s a fossil fueled world.
- It will remain a fossil fueled world for the foreseeable future.
- And as hard as people may wish otherwise, unicorns don’t exist.
Can you spot the unicorn?
MAGA!
Who are the LA Times editorial board and why should anyone give a rat’s @$$ about their opinions on energy?
- Nicholas Goldberg: Bachelors degree in something from Harvard.
- Jon Healey: “B.A. in history from Princeton University.”
- Kerry Cavanaugh: “a graduate of New York University and Columbia Journalism School.”
- Mariel Garza: “a graduate of San Francisco State University.”
- Robert Greene: “a graduate of USC and Georgetown University Law School.”
- Carla Hall: “a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard University.”
- Karin Klein: “attended Wellesley College, did her graduate work in journalism at UC Berkeley, and is currently an adjunct professor of journalism at Chapman University in Orange. She lives in Laguna Beach, where she is a volunteer naturalist.”
- Scott Martelle: “author of several history books, and previously worked as a journalist in Western New York and Detroit, where he honed a deep interest in labor issues.”
- Michael McGough: “An honors graduate of Allegheny College, he also studied English literature, philosophy and religion at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, and holds a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale.”
Any guesses as to who the LA Times energy experts are?
Selected References
Erisman, J. W., Sutton, M. A., Galloway, J., Klimont, Z. & Winiwarter, W. How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nat. Geosci.1,636–639 (2008)
Jevrejeva, S., J. C. Moore, A. Grinsted, and P. L. Woodworth (2008), “Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago?”, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L08715, doi:10.1029/2008GL033611.:
Jevrejeva, S., J.C. Moore, A. Grinsted, A.P. Matthews, G. Spada. 2014. Trends and acceleration in global and regional sea levels since 1807, Global and Planetary Change, vol 113, doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2013.12.004
Nerem, R.S., D.P. Chambers, C. Choe & G.T. Mitchum. Estimating Mean Sea Level Change from the TOPEX and Jason Altimeter Missions. Marine Geodesy. Volume 33, Issue S1, 2010, pages 435- 446 Available online: 09 Aug 2010 DOI: 10.1080/01490419.2010.491031.
Tabone, Ilaria, Javier Blasco, Alexander Robinson, Jorge Alvarez-Solas, and Marisa Montoya. The sensitivity of the Greenland ice sheet to glacial-interglacial oceanic forcing. Clim. Past Discuss., https://ift.tt/2ArdOLk. Manuscript under review for journal Clim. Past. Discussion started: 8 November 2017.
Williams, R.S., Jr., and Ferrigno, J.G., eds., 2012, State of the Earth’s cryosphere at the beginning of the 21st century–Glaciers, global snow cover, floating ice, and permafrost and periglacial environments: U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386–A, 546 p.
via Watts Up With That?
October 3, 2018 at 01:20PM
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