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Bend Over And Kiss Your Ass Goodbye, The Planet is Baking

BrewerBob said:
Insurance companies and the US military are planning for it and there is no real political incentive for them to do so.

At this point arguing over whether or not it is caused or exasperated by humans seems a waste of energy. It is happening and it is too late to stop. We might as well start planning on how to adapt. It will suck for lots of communities but it isn't going to be the end of civilization and it will probably lead to lots of technological advances out of necessity.
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Obama, Clinton Foundation Donors Sold ‘Green’ Fuel to Military for $149 per Gallon - Washington Free Beacon
Here is one political incentive fore the military. They are spending billions on far more projects than this.
 
BrewerBob said:
Insurance companies and the US military are planning for it and there is no real political incentive for them to do so.

At this point arguing over whether or not it is caused or exasperated by humans seems a waste of energy. It is happening and it is too late to stop. We might as well start planning on how to adapt. It will suck for lots of communities but it isn't going to be the end of civilization and it will probably lead to lots of technological advances out of necessity.
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Move to all the new land that will be available in antarctica. Problem solved.
 
longview said:
While it is true that T-max has only been slightly declining in the US, China, and Greenland,
that does not change the fact that the vast majority of the warming is in nighttime lows not going as low
in the winter and spring cycles.
More recent publications combine and evaluate many of the earlier papers.
Diurnal asymmetry to the observed global warming - Davy - 2016 - International Journal of Climatology - Wiley Online Library
View attachment 67206683
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This paper ultimately contradicts your point. From the 1950 to 1993 data in Stone and Weaver 2002, global annual Tmin was increasing in that period about 138% faster than Tmax (~1.9K/century vs ~0.8K/century).

But from the later 1960 to 2009 data in this paper, the ratio decreased so that global annual Tmin was increasing only about 29% faster than Tmax (~0.075K/decade vs ~0.058K/decade).

In other words, Hansen, Sato and Ruedy 1994 were correct that the two trends would draw closer to equality over time.

Another recent study, Thorne et al 2016 seems to clarify this fact even further. I can't find an open access version of the paper, but the abstract notes that "Most of the estimated DTR reduction occurred over 1960–1980. In several regions DTR has apparently increased over 1979–2012, while globally it has exhibited very little change (−0.016 K/decade)." From a mean trend of about 0.165K/decade over that period (Wood for Trees), that would imply that Tmin has increased only about 10% faster than Tmax since 1979 (~0.173 vs ~0.157K/decade).

That means there's been a lot of Tmax increase over that period of recent, fastest warming.
 
So Mithrae.

Think the warming is enough to worry about?
 
Lord of Planar said:
So Mithrae.

Think the warming is enough to worry about?
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You're not turning into Tim are you? :lol:

The global average temperature change during the last deglaciation was around 3.5K (according to Shakun et al 2012, from ~80 proxy records around the globe if memory serves).

Of the IPCC's Representative Concentration Pathways, I'd guess that the most likely outcome of taking no (further) action/regulation of GHGs or promotion of alternatives would fall somewhere between RCP 4.5 and RCP 6.0: The former has CO2 equivalent (including all forcing agents) reaching 560ppm around 2070 and then more or less leveling out, whereas if memory serves on current trajectories 560ppm of CO2 alone will be reached sometime around 2060 if not earlier and there'd be little reason to suppose they will level out (unless oil prices increase 100% sometime in the interim a la Longview's $90 a barrel figure).

According to the most recent IPCC assessment report (AR5, WG1, Figure 12.5), even under RCP 4.5 the temperature increase between 1850 and 2100 could be as high as ~3.2K at the top end of their 1.64 standard deviation envelope from 42 CMIP5 model runs, which is barely above average for their RCP 6.0 runs:
Fig12-05.jpg




We've got a decent idea of how much change a ~3.5K temperature shift caused in the past:

2226_ban.jpg



Modern warming, even if it reaches 3.5K won't look that dramatic of course, because there's a lot less ice to melt even in the long-long-long term. But how dramatic will the ecological and environmental impacts of our comparatively rapid warming be?

The best of our current knowledge suggests that 2 degrees of warming above preindustrial will be somewhat bad for humanity and even moreso for less adaptive species, and 3 degrees would be even worse - and evidently that is very much within the range of possibilities even by 2100. The best responses that I have seen from opponents of action on climate change are that we don't know that for certain: The consequences of warming might not be as bad as the evidence suggests, GHGs might not increase as much as current trends seem to indicate, and it might not get as warm as the models project.

Personally I don't think a "close your eyes and hope for the best" approach is appropriate, in the circumstances. So yeah, I'm not losing any sleep but it is a little worrying.
 
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Mithrae said:
This paper ultimately contradicts your point. From the 1950 to 1993 data in Stone and Weaver 2002, global annual Tmin was increasing in that period about 138% faster than Tmax (~1.9K/century vs ~0.8K/century).

But from the later 1960 to 2009 data in this paper, the ratio decreased so that global annual Tmin was increasing only about 29% faster than Tmax (~0.075K/decade vs ~0.058K/decade).

In other words, Hansen, Sato and Ruedy 1994 were correct that the two trends would draw closer to equality over time.

Another recent study, Thorne et al 2016 seems to clarify this fact even further. I can't find an open access version of the paper, but the abstract notes that "Most of the estimated DTR reduction occurred over 1960–1980. In several regions DTR has apparently increased over 1979–2012, while globally it has exhibited very little change (−0.016 K/decade)." From a mean trend of about 0.165K/decade over that period (Wood for Trees), that would imply that Tmin has increased only about 10% faster than Tmax since 1979 (~0.173 vs ~0.157K/decade).

That means there's been a lot of Tmax increase over that period of recent, fastest warming.
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Perhaps not, an increase in DTR may or may bot have any relationship to warming.
For the most part the recent warming was caused by a decrease in DTR.
 
longview said:
Perhaps not, an increase in DTR may or may bot have any relationship to warming.
For the most part the recent warming was caused by a decrease in DTR.
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No, that is incorrect. If Tmin has only increased by about 10% more than Tmax since 1979 (from a mean trend of 0.165K/decade over that period with a decrease in DTR of 0.016K/decade, as cited above), then only 10% of the warming is associated with a decrease in DTR. 10% is not "for the most part," not by a long shot; nor is ~29% from the 1960-2009 figures which you provided.


(Edit: Actually not quite accurate on second thoughts, or it'd mean that 138% of the 1950-1993 warming was associated with DTR :lol: The DTR change/warming ratio is ~9.7% for 1979-2012, ~26% for 1960-2009 and ~81% for 1950-1993 based on those three sources. Again, Hansen et al and their so-called 'models' were evidently correct that it would approach equality over time.)
 
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Mithrae said:
You're not turning into Tim are you? :lol:

<snip>
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I look at things from a realistic point of view. I am certain that the RCP 4.5 and higher modeling will never come to pass, at least due to greenhouse gasses. Aerosols are what have me worried,changing the albedo of ice, and rapidly melting it.

I am a solid believer that land use has contaminated the actual rise in global temperatures as well.

Don't get me wrong. The greenhouse effect is real, and adding it does warm the planet. Just not to any alarming levels. The only two recent studies I have found that start from scratch, and don't rely on 70's methodology, has the sensitivity of CO2 far lower than the 3.71 Wm^2 for a doubling.
 
Mithrae said:
No, that is incorrect. If Tmin has only increased by about 10% more than Tmax since 1979 (from a mean trend of 0.165K/decade over that period with a decrease in DTR of 0.016K/decade, as cited above), then only 10% of the warming is associated with a decrease in DTR. 10% is not "for the most part," not by a long shot; nor is ~29% from the 1960-2009 figures which you provided.


(Edit: Actually not quite accurate on second thoughts, or it'd mean that 138% of the 1950-1993 warming was associated with DTR :lol: The DTR change/warming ratio is ~9.7% for 1979-2012, ~26% for 1960-2009 and ~81% for 1950-1993 based on those three sources. Again, Hansen et al and their so-called 'models' were evidently correct that it would approach equality over time.)
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The rate of warming is still not unprecedented.
There are clearly feedbacks in the system which are not accounted for.
I think one ice core goes back 800,000 years, all the inter glacial periods were within the temperature range we are currently in.
If some mechanism or tipping point existed that extra CO2 would send the climate spiraling out of control,
it would have happened before, and none of us would be here.
Our adding extra CO2 has likely caused a extra .6 C of warming, but it also has allowed us to expand and improve
a better quality of life to more people. We have enough food for everyone, (we still have political and distribution problems).
We have water and energy issues, but we also have viable solutions working in labs.
We are at the very dawn of Human Civilization, not the dusk!
 
Lord of Planar said:
I look at things from a realistic point of view. I am certain that the RCP 4.5 and higher modeling will never come to pass, at least due to greenhouse gasses. Aerosols are what have me worried,changing the albedo of ice, and rapidly melting it.
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The implications here, of course, are that the authors of the IPCC report and the papers they draw on are not as wise and down-to-earth as you; that their evaluation of land use and albedo changes are wildly incorrect; and thus your certainty is correct and their probability estimates are way out.

For the record, in one of our past discussions as you may recall I looked at the AR5 best estimates of black carbon on snow forcing (equivalent to 0.12W/m^2 of CO2 global average) plus its contribution (~20%) to ice melt feedback, for a vague but very generous estimate of 0.7W/m^2 contribution to warming - compared with the IPCC best estimate of 1.7W/m^2 from CO2 increases. As Threegoofs noted on that occasion, aerosols are a problem for which blame can now be shifted much more to developing countries.
December 2014

Lord of Planar said:
The only two recent studies I have found that start from scratch, and don't rely on 70's methodology, has the sensitivity of CO2 far lower than the 3.71 Wm^2 for a doubling.
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I don't suppose you'd care to share those studies?
 
Mithrae said:
I don't suppose you'd care to share those studies?
Click to expand...

I've linked them before. I don't know where they are off the top of my head. One of them claimed a sensitivity of 0.53, or maybe it was 0.56 W/m^2. The other one was just over 1 W/m^2.

All the warmers found reason to "deny" them.
 
Lord of Planar said:
I've linked them before. I don't know where they are off the top of my head. One of them claimed a sensitivity of 0.53, or maybe it was 0.56 W/m^2. The other one was just over 1 W/m^2.

All the warmers found reason to "deny" them.
Click to expand...

That brings up an interesting idea. Maybe we should revisit the "97%" argument by distributing a questionnaire to scientists that has essentially three AGW scenarios. One would be the catastrophic scenario pushed by alarmists, one "luke warmist" argument pushed by skeptics like Monkton, Pielke, Nova, etc., and one an argument for little or no AGW signal and see where the consensus actually falls between the three options. I would guess that the majority of scientists polled would fall into the middle group.
 
longview said:
The rate of warming is still not unprecedented.
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As far as proxy reconstructions of the past thousand years show, there may have been plenty of thirty or forty year periods with up to half a degree of warming before, but they're always followed by cooling of equal or similar magnitude. Usually slightly more cooling, during the long decline from the MWP to the LIA. But ~0.9 degrees of global temperature change in a hundred years is unprecedented during that period as far as we can tell from high resolution proxy stacks. (The graphics in most papers I've seen seem to have multi-decadal smoothing, but the supplemental information for Mann et al 2008 has some higher resolution graphs and is also one of the few which attempt a global reconstruction; Figure S5, page 17 of the PDF.)

It's also a lot faster than the much longer-term (though geologically very rapid) deglaciation warming of ~3.5K over six or seven thousand years (0.5K/century). With the limitations of proxy records we might not be able to say that the warming of the past century (a time-frame equivalent to a mere 3-4 PDO/AMO cycles) is unprecedented with very high confidence, but most likely given a few more decades with the trend we're on it will be unprecedented during the Holocene, even if we acted now to slow the trend.

longview said:
There are clearly feedbacks in the system which are not accounted for.
I think one ice core goes back 800,000 years, all the inter glacial periods were within the temperature range we are currently in.
Click to expand...

Overlaying the ~100Ka glacial/interglacial periods associated with Milankovitch cycles, there seems to have been a long-term cooling trend over the past 10 million plus years. Such a long-term, gradual trend I would guess is most likely due to continental drift (eg. variations in ocean circulation, Antarctica accumulating more sea ice and hence higher albedo as its mass increasingly centered on the South Pole etc.). It doesn't really suggest that the current warming is precedented, natural or benign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology
All_palaeotemps.png


longview said:
Our adding extra CO2 has likely caused a extra .6 C of warming, but it also has allowed us to expand and improve
a better quality of life to more people. We have enough food for everyone, (we still have political and distribution problems).
We have water and energy issues, but we also have viable solutions working in labs.
We are at the very dawn of Human Civilization, not the dusk!
Click to expand...

No argument here: Even if the whole species had followed the "don't give a damn" scenario all along, global warming probably wouldn't halt or even dramatically slow human progress, unless by some remote chance the far extremes of warming came to pass - 5 degrees or more. Though it's worth noting that even there we're not talking about impossibilities; the Nature Geoscience correspondence you've been citing recently suggests that as high as ~4.3 degrees is within the 5-95% confidence interval based on 1970-2009 observations, so warming greater than 5 degrees might be closer to a 1% chance than zero!
https://www.ethz.ch/content/dam/eth...documents/group/climphys/knutti/otto13nat.pdf

But even within the more plausible 20% (3 degrees) or 50% (2 degrees) range of probabilities, all the eviodence suggests that the consequences will be mixed, but on balance negative for humanity and even moreso for other, less adaptable species. The various sources I've looked into (mostly from the early-mid 2000s, so presumably based on the ~3 degree best estimate) suggest somewhere in the order of hundreds of millions to a few billion significantly adversely affected human lives. One doesn't need to deny or demonize all the good which fossil fuels have so far done our species in order to acknowledge that concern over their long-term climate impacts is appropriate!

Nor should we gloss over the fact that some of the cheap convenience they've offered us has led to what otherwise would be universally reviled as unconscionable waste; raw and finished products being shipped halfway around the world and back again for the cheapest labour, environmental, taxation and market conditions available, for example. In the twenty years since the Kyoto Protocol annual global emissions have continued to grow, so it's hard to say that anything has been done on that side of things: But at least there has been some modest public investment in and private preference for renewables, so if and when the political will to actually curtail greenhouse emissions arises, the alternatives are waiting.
 
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Lord of Planar said:
I've linked them before. I don't know where they are off the top of my head. One of them claimed a sensitivity of 0.53, or maybe it was 0.56 W/m^2. The other one was just over 1 W/m^2.

All the warmers found reason to "deny" them.
Click to expand...

That, or you're thinking of degrees Celsius :doh
 
Lord of Planar said:
I've linked them before. I don't know where they are off the top of my head. One of them claimed a sensitivity of 0.53, or maybe it was 0.56 W/m^2. The other one was just over 1 W/m^2.

All the warmers found reason to "deny" them.
Click to expand...

Back in the real world of non-dyslexic, non-autodidacts, we have lots and lots of data on climate sensitivity to CO2, with a pretty solid consensus that the rise in temps will be above 2 degrees for sure with a doubling of CO2, and could be up to 4.5, but most likely lies around 3 degrees C. Im not positive on this, but I think the estimate is of the temperature at the time CO2 doubles, which means you will see a lag effect lasting decades longer eventually.

The studies are below. You get the actual warming number by adding the non-CO2 GHG emissions like methane, which are assumed to add about 0.5 degrees (again, from multiple published peer reviewed studies from non-dyslexic, non- autodidacts) although this portion of warming may be underestimated by the potential for significant methane release in warming permafrost and other arctic sources.

Although, I know you will disparage this compilation of studies as being done by people who 'dont understand the issue" as well as you do, and who are part of the giant liberal conspir....errrr... librul groupthink.

tcr_landc.jpg
 
jmotivator said:
That brings up an interesting idea. Maybe we should revisit the "97%" argument by distributing a questionnaire to scientists that has essentially three AGW scenarios. One would be the catastrophic scenario pushed by alarmists, one "luke warmist" argument pushed by skeptics like Monkton, Pielke, Nova, etc., and one an argument for little or no AGW signal and see where the consensus actually falls between the three options. I would guess that the majority of scientists polled would fall into the middle group.
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If you have any capacity to do that it is a very good idea.
 
Mithrae said:
As far as proxy reconstructions of the past thousand years show, there may have been plenty of thirty or forty year periods with up to half a degree of warming before, but they're always followed by cooling of equal or similar magnitude. Usually slightly more cooling, during the long decline from the MWP to the LIA. But ~0.9 degrees of global temperature change in a hundred years is unprecedented during that period as far as we can tell from high resolution proxy stacks. (The graphics in most papers I've seen seem to have multi-decadal smoothing, but the supplemental information for Mann et al 2008 has some higher resolution graphs and is also one of the few which attempt a global reconstruction; Figure S5, page 17 of the PDF.)

It's also a lot faster than the much longer-term (though geologically very rapid) deglaciation warming of ~3.5K over six or seven thousand years (0.5K/century). With the limitations of proxy records we might not be able to say that the warming of the past century (a time-frame equivalent to a mere 3-4 PDO/AMO cycles) is unprecedented with very high confidence, but most likely given a few more decades with the trend we're on it will be unprecedented during the Holocene, even if we acted now to slow the trend.



Overlaying the ~100Ka glacial/interglacial periods associated with Milankovitch cycles, there seems to have been a long-term cooling trend over the past 10 million plus years. Such a long-term, gradual trend I would guess is most likely due to continental drift (eg. variations in ocean circulation, Antarctica accumulating more sea ice and hence higher albedo as its mass increasingly centered on the South Pole etc.). It doesn't really suggest that the current warming is precedented, natural or benign.




No argument here: Even if the whole species had followed the "don't give a damn" scenario all along, global warming probably wouldn't halt or even dramatically slow human progress, unless by some remote chance the far extremes of warming came to pass - 5 degrees or more. Though it's worth noting that even there we're not talking about impossibilities; the Nature Geoscience correspondence you've been citing recently suggests that as high as ~4.3 degrees is within the 5-95% confidence interval based on 1970-2009 observations, so warming greater than 5 degrees might be closer to a 1% chance than zero!
https://www.ethz.ch/content/dam/eth...documents/group/climphys/knutti/otto13nat.pdf

But even within the more plausible 20% (3 degrees) or 50% (2 degrees) range of probabilities, all the eviodence suggests that the consequences will be mixed, but on balance negative for humanity and even moreso for other, less adaptable species. The various sources I've looked into (mostly from the early-mid 2000s, so presumably based on the ~3 degree best estimate) suggest somewhere in the order of hundreds of millions to a few billion significantly adversely affected human lives. One doesn't need to deny or demonize all the good which fossil fuels have so far done our species in order to acknowledge that concern over their long-term climate impacts is appropriate!

Nor should we gloss over the fact that some of the cheap convenience they've offered us has led to what otherwise would be universally reviled as unconscionable waste; raw and finished products being shipped halfway around the world and back again for the cheapest labour, environmental, taxation and market conditions available, for example. In the twenty years since the Kyoto Protocol annual global emissions have continued to grow, so it's hard to say that anything has been done on that side of things: But at least there has been some modest public investment in and private preference for renewables, so if and when the political will to actually curtail greenhouse emissions arises, the alternatives are waiting.
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Within the GISS record we have J-D 1929 to 1944, a fifteen year period that saw .78 C increase, a rate of .52C per decade.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
The latest round of warming (since 1979), even counting the El Nini warming in 2015 is .71 C over 3.6 decades or .19 C per decade.
This does not sound unrepresented!
Humans will be Humans, selfish and greedy, if we address the problems acknowledging that fact, we can move on with our lives.
The price of fossil will increase, at about $90 a barrel, or a little higher, it will hit a price ceiling,
where the refineries will make their own feedstock for cheaper than buying oil.
The carbon neutral fuel will be the lowest price product on the market, ans people will buy it for that reason.
The only real danger is environmentalist causing the price the be artificially higher, because they are willing to pay more to save the planet.
 
Mithrae said:
That, or you're thinking of degrees Celsius :doh
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No.

It was W/m^2. Such a dramatic difference is automatically denied by true believers since it doesn't match with the faith, or dogma.

Being skeptical is part of science. When different studies come to different conclusions, it should be met with acceptance that we have no certainty. Those who deny other possible results is are the deniers. Not those of us who hold true to being skeptical with science.

I challenge you to take any material that uses the IPCC accepted 3.71 W/m^2, and follow the studies. Check at the methodology of how they arrive at that result. The methodology is 40 years old! We have a better understanding of atmospheric sciences since then.
 
longview said:
Within the GISS record we have J-D 1929 to 1944, a fifteen year period that saw .78 C increase, a rate of .52C per decade.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
The latest round of warming (since 1979), even counting the El Nini warming in 2015 is .71 C over 3.6 decades or .19 C per decade.
Click to expand...

That doesn't even remotely address what I said about centennial climate change, of course :roll: But it is funny the kind of results you can get by cherry-picking individual years, I agree. Natural variability can play a big role in multi-decadal variability, and even moreso on annual or decadal time-frames. Just look at The Pause, for example. Look at it!

mean:61
 
Mithrae said:
That doesn't even remotely address what I said about centennial climate change, of course :roll: But it is funny the kind of results you can get by cherry-picking individual years, I agree. Natural variability can play a big role in multi-decadal variability, and even moreso on annual or decadal scales time-frames. Just look at The Pause, for example. Just look at it!

mean:61
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When you add in the warming before 1950, which is acknowledged to be not AGW related, yes.
Look at your own graph, all the recent warming started in the 1979 to 1980 time frame.
I do wonder about your 5 year 1 month mean, was that the mean that cherry picked the best look?
Also on you graph see that big spike around 1940, with a 61 month mean, that is caused by the large temperature
increase I was talking about.
You can argue about the images, but the numbers tell a different story, even with GISS changing them often.
 
Too bad environmentalists have unanimously chosen CO2 has the culprit of this warming. Maybe the warming issue isn't as important as, for example, population overcrowding or using fossil fuels?
 
cabse5 said:
Too bad environmentalists have unanimously chosen CO2 has the culprit of this warming. Maybe the warming issue isn't as important as, for example, population overcrowding or using fossil fuels?
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Thats kinda like how biologists have unanimously chosen DNA and RNA as the code of protein. Or how chemists have unanimously chosen oxygen to be the culprit of rust.

But it is refreshing to see a denier actually acknowledge that there is an overwhelming consensus! (I anticipate massive backtracking in 1...2....3.....)
 
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