booj
join:2011-02-07
Richmond, ON | reply to vue666
Re: [Weather] Arctic sea ice melts to record low said by vue666:Smashed all recorded temperatures?
How long have we been keeping temperature records and how old is the earth?
This would be like comparing the results of the last week of an 80 year old man to his life...
Great insight there Vue. Records are a matter of record, everyone knows they don't go back indefinitely. |
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 vue666I'm in the prime of my senilityPremium
join:2007-12-07
Halifax, NS
1 edit | said by booj:said by vue666:Smashed all recorded temperatures?
How long have we been keeping temperature records and how old is the earth?
This would be like comparing the results of the last week of an 80 year old man to his life...
Great insight there Vue. Records are a matter of record, everyone knows they don't go back indefinitely. But that's not my point now is it... 
There was a time on our earth when crocidiles swam at the north pole but there is never a mention of that fact in these types of articles...
»esci.unco.edu/faculty/shellito/p···st1.html
»qbit.cc/when-crocodiles-roamed-the-arctic/ |
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vue666I'm in the prime of my senilityPremium
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Halifax, NS | More on crocidiles at the Arctic....
»www.polarfield.com/blog/arctic-f···-eocene/
quote:
More than 45 million years ago, the area we know as the Arctic was saturated in carbon dioxide (roughly 1,200 parts per million). Scientists studying that time period agree that the region was dominated by lush deciduous forests and animals that require tropical environments; crocodiles, turtles; thrived in waters that now sustain polar bears.
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booj
join:2011-02-07
Richmond, ON | reply to vue666
said by vue666:said by booj:said by vue666:Smashed all recorded temperatures?
How long have we been keeping temperature records and how old is the earth?
This would be like comparing the results of the last week of an 80 year old man to his life...
Great insight there Vue. Records are a matter of record, everyone knows they don't go back indefinitely. But that's not my point now is it... There was a time on our earth when crocidiles swam at the north pole but there is never a mention of that fact in these types of articles... » esci.unco.edu/faculty/shellito/p···st1.html» qbit.cc/when-crocodiles-roamed-the-arctic/ It's never mentioned because it's an irrelevant fact. If you can explain it's relevancy, I'm all ears. Your folksy attitude to global warming isn't constructive debate. |
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| said by booj:It's never mentioned because it's an irrelevant fact. If you can explain it's relevancy, I'm all ears. Your folksy attitude to global warming isn't constructive debate.
His quote is regarding "climate change happened a LOT when humans weren't present - so what if it's happening while we are present - it's not unexpected that climate changes happen".
And while climate scaremongers say "oh it's happening ever so fast - we've never seen anything like it" - no one really knows exactly how fast all of the shifts like these happened before - did the arctic go from crocodiles to polar bears in 10 years? 1000 years? 10,000 years? It's very hard to tell or know... so while it may appear that we're having climate shift "like never before" - no - "we're having climate shift like never before in the last few hundred years"...
So the question becomes "should we bother trying to fight it, or is our CO2 emissions and industrial complex ALL of the cause, PART of the cause, or just a SMALL BLIP on the cause" - and if it's just a part of the cause or a small blip on the cause, is it worth trying to fight it when it's going to happen anyway - just like it has thousands of times before in the earth's 4 billion year history. It's only if it is "all of the cause" that it's worth the battle - because then it might be a battle we could win.. otherwise, we're just along for the ride no matter what we do - and it may mean big changes ahead - but, hopefully we're smarter than the dinosaurs or other creatures of previous climate changes and can figure out how to survive a little longer - since we know how to build shelter, move where climate is better, survive in places where other creatures couldn't, etc. |
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vue666I'm in the prime of my senilityPremium
join:2007-12-07
Halifax, NS
1 edit | reply to booj
said by booj:
It's never mentioned because it's an irrelevant fact.
It's never mentioned because it will decrease the fear and guilt factor that man is to blame... |
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 IanPremium
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said by booj:Great insight there Vue. Records are a matter of record, everyone knows they don't go back indefinitely.
More involved article here.
»www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/201···eat.html
They are mainly referring to satellite data, which actually only goes back a few decades. And while everyone knows they only go back a certain degree, caution needs to be exercised about "freaking out" over modern changes. Indicative of mankind induced global warming? Sure. Sounds plausible to me. Again not necessarily reason to suddenly panic.
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| said by Ian:suddenly panic.
OH MY GOD HOW DO WE REPACK THIS ICE!?
Is there any way we can build giant freezers and ship them to the arctic to re-freeze the ice? |
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 KalfordSeems To Be An Rtfm Problem.Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-20
Ontario
kudos:1 | said by urbanriot:said by Ian:suddenly panic.
OH MY GOD HOW DO WE REPACK THIS ICE!? Is there any way we can build solar powered giant freezers and ship them to the arctic to re-freeze the ice? now you can get a research grant to find out.  |
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 Wolfie00My dog is an elitistPremium
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kudos:5 | reply to Ian
I don't think the words "panic" or "freaking out" appeared anywhere until you brought them up. The article says what it says, which is that Arctic ice is melting faster than models were projecting, and we are closer than we thought to the Arctic being completely free of summer sea ice. Since the Arctic is subject to strong feedbacks as the ice cover recedes, it's both an important bellwether and direct influence on global climate change. It has the potential to affect local and global circulation changes and create weather systems that are both more extreme and more persistent than normal. In fact unstable weather is already increasingly becoming the new normal. And, although the most accurate observations of ice extent comes from satellite observations going back a little more than 30 years, we can reconstruct the Arctic temperature record going back thousands, just as we can with the global record.
said by Hydraglass:His quote is regarding "climate change happened a LOT when humans weren't present - so what if it's happening while we are present - it's not unexpected that climate changes happen".
And while climate scaremongers say "oh it's happening ever so fast - we've never seen anything like it" - no one really knows exactly how fast all of the shifts like these happened before
The first sentence is simplisitic and basically meaningless, and the second one is not true. The resolution of past temperature records is sufficient to give us a good picture of how the climate has behaved in the past, what the major climate drivers have been, and the magnitude of their forcings. What is happening now is entirely unprecedented since long before the evolution of the human species. The last million years of climate has been dominated by regular glaciation cycles of roughly 100Ky duration with CO2 varying between a minimum of about 180 ppm to a maximum of around 280, and never more than 300 ppm, with climate systems tracking accordingly. These regular climate swings are the signature climate behaviour of the planet to which we and our ecosystem are adapted. That climate dynamic is gone forever. Not "under threat", or "vulnerable", but gone. CO2 levels are now almost 100 ppm higher than the maximum of any interglacial, and in fact higher than at any time in probably the past 15 million years when the earth was a completely different place, virtually an alien ecosystem in which no humans existed. Both of the attached charts show the historic variability of CO2 suddenly replaced by a vertical line going straight up representing the accumulated emissions of the post-industrial era, with no end in sight. Furthermore, CO2 is only part of the contributor to anthopogenic warming -- other causes are methane and other GHG emissions, land use changes, and other consequences of human activity. We're in uncharted waters, a new climate era sometimes called the Anthropocene (which means literally "the new era of man"). The temperature and the atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems are just beginning to respond. We are nowhere even close to equilibrium for this level of CO2, and the level is increasing by some 30 billion metric tonnes every year.
How we know this definitively, and where this will take us and what we should do about it, is another discussion entirely, a discussion which might go on somewhere -- just as a random guess -- for almost three years and 2,283 posts!  Or you can read the IPCC Fourth Assessment reports, particularly Working Group 1 which covers the physical science, and there are many good papers available free from the US National Academy of Sciences.
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| said by Wolfie00: The article says what it says, which is that Arctic ice is melting faster than models were projecting, ....
Whoah!!! Someone made a computer model and it turned out to have something predicted wrong? Wow, my head is exploding! Truly amazing, that is! Hope we're not say....relying on these models to accurately predict conditions really far out or anything.
said by Wolfie00:
...and we are closer than we thought to the Arctic being completely free of summer sea ice.
Much as it was 1,000 years ago during the MWP, and 9,000 years ago? Sure. Arctic sea ice is not something that is perfectly understood.
Very pretty graph that shows the CO2 levels back a few hundred thousand years. What was Stone Age Man and our Primate ancestors using to power their electricity plants and cars?
We're all well aware that the results of a modern technological society have no earlier precedent on the planet. Unless, that is, you're a believer in the theories proposed in the "Ancient Aliens" series on the History Channel. 
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booj
join:2011-02-07
Richmond, ON | said by Ian:said by Wolfie00: The article says what it says, which is that Arctic ice is melting faster than models were projecting, ....
Whoah!!! Someone made a computer model and it turned out to have something predicted wrong? Wow, my head is exploding! Truly amazing, that is! Hope we're not say....relying on these models to accurately predict conditions really far out or anything. One day you might realize that climate scientists model things conservatively. Usually in order not to sound alarmist. Sadly it lets quacks like you turn around and say the model was wrong. |
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vue666I'm in the prime of my senilityPremium
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Halifax, NS | quote:
Sadly it lets quacks like you turn around and say the model was wrong.
Why must threads like these always degrade into name calling and insulting?
People simply have differing opinions on this topic... Why can't we respect not everyone agrees or disagrees or is skeptical of "the science"? |
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IanPremium
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said by booj:One day you might realize that climate scientists model things conservatively. Usually in order not to sound alarmist. Sadly it lets quacks like you turn around and say the model was wrong.
Uh huh. All Climate Scientists? Or just some? And which models? I was more or less joking. But there is an over-reliance on "modeling" in the field. And a necessary over-reliance at that. Turns out we only have the one planet to experiment on at the moment for realz. So we don't actually know what the conditions would be like on the one we have under any given hypothetical conditions. So we make educated guesses at it. To what extent these educated guesses are themselves conservative or alarmist, I couldn't say.
In any case, this wasn't me, a "quack", pointing out that certain models were "wrong". It was the cited article, and scientists quoted therein. Thanks for playing though!
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“Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.” – David Wong |
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Wolfie00My dog is an elitistPremium
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kudos:5 | reply to Ian
said by Ian:Whoah!!! Someone made a computer model and it turned out to have something predicted wrong? Wow, my head is exploding! Truly amazing, that is! Hope we're not say....relying on these models to accurately predict conditions really far out or anything.
So the expectation is that to be useful, a model must always be exactly correct not only in all of its primary predictions, but all the second-order and third-order effects as well? 
The only thing of interest here is that we have yet another example of that alleged bastion of "alarmism", the IPCC, being overly conservative in its estimations. It's a wonder that your head isn't exploding!
said by Ian:said by Wolfie00:
...and we are closer than we thought to the Arctic being completely free of summer sea ice.
Much as it was 1,000 years ago during the MWP A ridiculously unsupportable claim, particularly since the MWP was neither globally synchronous nor was it nearly as warm as today in most of the regions affected. Many parts of the Arctic were significantly cooler than today.
said by Ian:Very pretty graph that shows the CO2 levels back a few hundred thousand years. What was Stone Age Man and our Primate ancestors using to power their electricity plants and cars?
One of your less lucid comments and I'm not even sure what it means. The main point of that graph is to show the cyclic and remarkably well-bounded nature of CO2 fluctuations during glacial cycles, reflecting a systematic and consistent transfer between carbon sinks and the atmosphere. Which leads nicely to the following...
said by Ian:We're all well aware that the results of a modern technological society have no earlier precedent on the planet.
Are we? "Modern technological society" is not the point here. The point is the rapid transfer into the atmosphere of very ancient and essentially permanent carbon stores that have been locked away for hundreds of millions of years, and suddenly re-introducing them into the planet's active carbon cycle at the rate of some 30 billion metric tons per year. Which is a terrific strategy if the plan is to recreate the climate of the Mesozoic, and to do so with all the careful diligence of performing brain surgery with a sledgehammer.
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| said by Wolfie00:One of your less lucid comments and I'm not even sure what it means.
I'll take that as a compliment. We've been burning fossil fuels. This is putting more CO2 into the air than prehistoric man did. I thought that was absurdly obvious. And thus a graph showing, that we were in fact, doing so, was restating the again, absurdly obvious. I'm not "surprised" that we're changing the planet. How bad is this? Guess we'll see. As you know, I think we should have our impact as small as possible for a variety of reasons.
One of the theories of detecting extra-terrestrial intelligent life from light years away is tell-tale atmospheric gases that only a technological society could produce. Obviously CO2 not one of those, but it's certainly assumed that a technological society will have some detritus here and there.
said by Wolfie00:said by Ian:We're all well aware that the results of a modern technological society have no earlier precedent on the planet.
The point is the rapid transfer into the atmosphere of very ancient and essentially permanent carbon stores that have been locked away for hundreds of millions of years, and suddenly re-introducing them into the planet's active carbon cycle at the rate of some 30 billion metric tons per year. Which is a terrific strategy if the plan is to recreate the climate of the Mesozoic, and to do so with all the careful diligence of performing brain surgery with a sledgehammer. Spiffy. Again, I'm not surprised that some think it's a bad idea. I do too. I'm sure you're doing your part, by cycling a stationary bike to power your PC, walking or cycling everywhere, and sharing a 3-room energy efficient apartment, rather than an inefficiently heated, wasteful detached house....in Canada.
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“Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.” – David Wong |
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Wolfie00My dog is an elitistPremium
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kudos:5 | Terrific. Let me see if I can summarize. You're not surprised that since the beginning of industrialization, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has taken off straight up like a skyrocket. From a pre-industrial level, I might add, that was precisely where it has always been in an interglacial every single time in the last million years -- and is now so highly elevated that it actually represents the historic differential between an ice age and an interglacial.
And you're not surprised that this is the inevitable result of releasing into the atmosphere long-term carbon deposits that have been safely locked in for hundreds of millions of years, mostly since the Mesozoic. And which have not only hugely elevated the CO2 in the atmosphere, but are now beginning to saturate the earth's active carbon sinks, like the oceans.
Then maybe this won't surprise you either. Or this. Perhaps you won't even be surprised by this, whose title is appropriately ironic in this context: "Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises."
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― Daniel Patrick Moynihan |
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IanPremium
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| said by Wolfie00:Terrific. Let me see if I can summarize. You're not surprised that since the beginning of industrialization, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has taken off straight up like a skyrocket. From a pre-industrial level, I might add, that was precisely where it has always been in an interglacial every single time in the last million years -- and is now so highly elevated that it actually represents the historic differential between an ice age and an interglacial.
Nope. I have an awareness of how much oil, coal and gas has been burned, and know that the combustion products have to go someplace.
If I put a stopper in the sink, and turn on the faucet, I have a similar lack of "surprise" when the water level fills up. If you'll forgive the immodesty, I guess I must be some kind of "genius".
said by Wolfie00:Then maybe this won't surprise you either. Or this. Perhaps you won't even be surprised by this, whose title is appropriately ironic in this context: "Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises."
You're correct. Not surprised at all that you would cut and paste things from the IPCC and NAP for some unknown reason. Perhaps the reason would surprise me?
From the last..... "The abrupt changes of the past are not fully explained yet, and climate models typically underestimate the size, speed, and extent of those changes. Hence, future abrupt changes cannot be predicted with confidence, and climate surprises are to be expected."
errr.... OK
"Agreement between proxy and instrumental records and between different proxy records lends confidence to paleoclimatic reconstructions and allows scientists to be very confident that abrupt climate change is a real, recurrent phenomenon."
So abrupt climate change happened in the past (before a significant anthropogenic influence is the unsaid, obvious inference), and can therefore happen in the future. Check. I'll get right on that.
"Furthermore, the paleoclimatic record demonstrates that the most dramatic shifts in climate have occurred when factors controlling the climate system were changing."
So dramatic shifts occurred when there were reasons for it, i.e. something to cause them. I hope the taxpayers who paid for this load of bullshit don't get wind of it.
and so on and so forth....
If you've been looking for a new drinking game, try Wolfie00  's third link and take one every time you come across a stupidly obvious statement. It will be a short game before an alcohol induced coma.
So what is it they were after?
Recommendation 1 :"Give us more money to look at it." And fair enough. They've already said they don't know, so that's not unreasonable on the face of it.
Recommendation 2 : "Make better climate models." Sure. Why not? See above.
Recommendation 3 : "Improve statistical approaches." Given that the statistical approaches within the climate science community have been ham-handed at best, also on board with that one.
Oddly lacking was a recommendation to "burn less oil". *shrug* Afraid to kill the goose laying the golden egg? Don't want the reason for all the new research funding and new 'puters to go away abruptly?
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“Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.” – David Wong |
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Wolfie00My dog is an elitistPremium
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kudos:5 | "NAP" is the publication arm of the US National Academies, which includes the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council. I take it from your comment that the publications of the National Academy of Sciences, just like those of the IPCC which are drawn from a wide range of peer-reviewed literature, must be dismissed if you personally don't like them. Apparently we should just stick with "reputable" sources like the denialist website of a former TV weatherman and make vapid analogies with your kitchen sink. That's cool with me. Not very realistic perhaps, or aligned with reality, but what can I do.
The scenario around abrupt climate change can be summarized fairly simply. Abrupt, non-linear transitions are fundamentally how the earth's climate system works, period. That is so well established in paleoclimatology that it's become incontrovertible. We don't (yet) know what the thresholds are in the current scenario. That's it, for better or worse. Actionable at this time? No, but dismissing it as irrelevant seems less than rational or wise.
It's merely an additional issue that compounds the problem. The impacts of climate change summarized in the first two publications I linked are a good summary of the extensive current state of knowledge and are based on predictable continuous effects of GHG forcings and known feedbacks. The possibility of abrupt discontinuous changes on top of those impacts is an ever-present additional threat.
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IanPremium
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| said by Wolfie00:I take it from your comment that the publications of the National Academy of Sciences, just like those of the IPCC which are drawn from a wide range of peer-reviewed literature, must be dismissed if you personally don't like them.
Did I dismiss or say I didn't like them? No. My criticism was based on the work in question being remarkably generic in tone, often stating the obvious.
said by Wolfie00:Actionable at this time? No, but dismissing it as irrelevant seems less than rational or wise.
Also not dismissed. In fact I said "got it". The earth's climate may change abruptly at any time. Yep. Good to know. Still not much I can do about it beyond worrying, which isn't particularly helpful. Although some seem to think enough worry and hand-wringing are worth brownie-points of some kind or or what-not. Enough and some cereal box tops and you get a junior eco-warrior decoder ring or something.
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“Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.” – David Wong |
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