Global warming?

[Aggers]

I read the other day that Earth's southern ice cap has thickened considerably recently.

Does this mean that the global warming theory is wrong?

We really do need to know.

[Workingman]

There is evidence that Antarctic sea ice has thickened, but this happens annually due to summer and winter; it is cyclical. Some of these cycles run over decades, centuries or thousands of years and when they coincide we do get anomalies - both ways. The latest results, according to the Dutch, come from strong winds off the Southern Ocean driving cool water onto the Antarctic land mass.

Sea ice thickening, however, is not the same as the ice cap getting thicker, it isn't. It is still losing about 250 million metric tonnes of ice every year.

If it does all melt it will probably take hundreds, thousands or millions of years to achieve and there could be many events in the meantime to reverse the trend. That does not mean that climate change (global warming) is not upon us or that it will not affect us.

It will be the atmosphere that goes first. Gases (air is one) are much more susceptible to minute changes in temperature than liquids or solids, and the changes they go through are more dynamic. They are not uniform in pressure and temperature within a fixed volume as they tumble and swirl and bubble, and each region has different properties. One of the most dramatic of these regions in modern times is causing the current drought conditions in Oklahoma reminiscent of the 1930s Dust Bowl.

But don't worry too much, running out of oil, food and drinking water will get us long before the climate does..... though it might help us on our way.

[Kaz]

Oil is the big worry in ours and our children's lifetime IMO

[Suff]

Was this the article you saw Aggers?

In terms of Mail reporting, it's almost neutral. Even given the fact that the content of the article does not match the headline, but that's nothing new for the DM is it??

The headline says "More Ice". The Article says "Less ice but More Sea Ice".

Again, nothing new for the DM.

Before reading anything in the DM about Antarctica, it's useful to read this guardian article.

The thing to keep in mind with climate change reporting is that it is no longer about science. It's about politics. Because it is evident to everyone (except those with an unreasonable doubt), that the resolution to Climate Change will be a radical change in the way we live and travel.

Sadly the idiot Greens got in there first and told everyone we would have to return to the 1700's in the way we live and work. Naturally this is dismissed out of hand. But it's legacy remains in every off the cuff statement by people who are politically opposed to Green's and their like.

The reality is very different. Climate Change could be the single greatest shift forward of humankind on our planet. The required technology changes to support the generation and storage of energy are the very things we need to catapult us into a 21st century where people are more equal and have a better standard of living.

Naturally those who are currently rich and powerful will spend much of their fortune fighting any chance of more freedom and living standards for the poor. Because it destroys their power, even if it might make them richer than their wildest imaginings.

So the stage is set. In our 4 corner ring stand.

The true and honest scientists. Those who believe that the challenge of climate change is the single biggest challenge the human race has seen to date. Even more so than the last ice age which saw a population of ~1M Humans decimated to little more than 1,000.

The educated or the believers. Those who have made it their mission to seek out the reality of the situation and understand it. Most of us believe that Knowledge means we DO and are not Done To.

The power brokers. Those who will lose most from the transition to clean energy and high volume energy storage. These are surrounded by their hirelings. Such people as the campaigners FOR smoking with the experience of successfully managing to confuse the courts for half a decade on the issue or whether cigarettes are a carcinogen or not. Also paid for tame "scientist" and a few (<12) accredited climate scientists who, for various reasons, have chosen to rubbish good science with manufactured graphs and statistics.

In the final corner the ideologues. Including the cross over of some of the "scientists" from the corner above. Most of these have ideological reasons for their position. They cross support each other and will agree with ideas which are 180Deg opposed to them if they match the same goal. Many of them can be found on wattsupwiththat and you can tell them by their ranting. Lord of the flies has nothing on this lot.

As you can imagine, the last two corners are the bruisers and the rabid dogs in that order. Imagine that this is a fair fight? The Scientists have no hope, some of the enlightend, including WM and me, are able to hold our own and strike back, but we are the minority, most are just lost in the noise.

So is it any wonder that you are confused about what you read in the press? All I can say is that if you want fair and unbiased reporting of climate change in the UK press, you will need to stick with the guardian. This annoys me because I simply can’t stand it’s Labour bias, economic stance or general reporting of the Government. But on Climate Change I give them 9 out of 10.

If you want to read about the scams, lies and pure disinformation then there is no better site than Skeptical Science.

Let me now dissect that article in the DM I linked.

Headline

MORE ice: Antarctic levels reach a record high because of climate change


First line of the article

Earlier this year, global warming was blamed for the ‘irreversible retreat’ of west Antarctic glaciers.


Third line

The comments come as Antarctica’s sea ice set a record this week


Buried in the body of the article

The Dutch report found that despite the increase in surface ice expansion each winter, the total mass of ice around Antarctica is continuing to shrink because of the underwater ice melt.


Followed by

In May, Nasa scientists told reporters that vast glaciers in West Antarctica seem to be locked in an irreversible thaw linked to global warming that may push up sea levels for centuries.
In a few hundred years they say the irreversible melt that has already started could eventually add four to 12 feet (1.2 to 3.7 metres) to current sea levels.


Now, let’s try that again.
MORE ice: Antarctic levels reach a record high because of climate change
Earlier this year, global warming was blamed for the ‘irreversible retreat’ of west Antarctic glaciers.
The comments come as Antarctica’s sea ice set a record this week
The Dutch report found that despite the increase in surface ice expansion each winter, the total mass of ice around Antarctica is continuing to shrink because of the underwater ice melt.
In May, Nasa scientists told reporters that vast glaciers in West Antarctica seem to be locked in an irreversible thaw linked to global warming that may push up sea levels for centuries.
In a few hundred years they say the irreversible melt that has already started could eventually add four to 12 feet (1.2 to 3.7 metres) to current sea levels.


Is it any wonder you are confused?

If you want to become even more confused, you need to look at the Guardian dissection of the David Rose article. He uses the talisman of Judith Curry. One of the very few accredited Climate Scientists left on the dark side (not my words). Most Scientists are sad to see such an esteemed colleague destroy here entire career. Others would just like to burn her at the stake….

Let us see what David Rose says.

Prof Curry also revealed that because of the ‘pause’, in which world average temperatures have not risen for more than 16 years,

Now around the more mild statements, he drops this one like a bombshell. Judith Curry has been heavily involved in the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group study of the temperature records. Only to turn on the team when they found that the scientists method of averaging missing stations data actually understated the rise in temperature, not overstated it as was thought to be the case.

So where does this “16 years” come from. Well don’t focus on the 16 bit. This year it’s 17. Next year it will be 18… Etc, etc, until we see another super el nino year such as 1998.

Let’s look at the temperature record.



Saying that temperatures have not risen for 17 years is like saying that temperatures did not rise between 1976 and 1992. Ah but nobody would say that would then. Unless they were young. Because everyone over 35 remembers 1976. Everyone would challenge that statement. Just look at the chart.

However these people who say there has been no warming for 17 years will not be drawn on 18 years or 19 years or even 20. Not this year. Why? Just look at the chart. Plus it does not include 2012,13 or 14. 2012 and 2014 were well up with 1998.

I know that this has been a long dissertation on the situation, but it needs a lot of explaining if you are going to be able to read the press and understand when someone is blagging you….

[Suff]

Oil is the big worry in ours and our children's lifetime IMO

No. Power stability, food security and water resources will be the big worries. Oil is simply going to become more expensive. Already the grain producing countries are having to rely on climate generated bumper harvests in one part of the world to offset the decimation of harvests in another. The price of grain and subsequently flour jumped when the US stated it would no longer be able to export grain. It subsided again after Argentina took up the strain, but the path is set.

I, personally, watched the huge volumes of grain transports travelling through France when the Russian grain fields burned in 2010. It was reserves being distributed. But reserves only last so long. I had never seen it before and I have not seen it since. However, we will see fires of this magnitude again. If we were also to see a superoutbreak of tornado's in the US and an el nino driven die back of crops in Argentina, it would leave only Australia as the major grain exporter of the world.

These are the realities of our integrated global market. The UK already imports 40% of it's food.

Oil is the least of our issues. We have Oil and we can choose to stop selling it and use it. We also have 300 years worth of coal at 1980's usage patterns. Coal to Oil is viable at the right price point. We are almost there.

Britain needs clean energy security but we can do it dirty too if we have to.

But we can't make it rain and we can't make food grow on parched land or land inundated by salt water. Although we can do nuclear desalination. With rationed water that costs close to the price of petrol.

Not a bright future is it???

[cromwell]

Food security for certain is going to be a biggie (especially as the UK doesn't have it!)

[Workingman]

some of the enlightend, including WM and me, are able to hold our own and strike back, but we are the minority, most are just lost in the noise.

My take on why that might be the case is because of education, or the lack of it, and the connection between Physics and Geography. The link between the two is broken and today's pupils do not even know that it ever existed never mind how to repair it.

In Physics we did Boyle's law, the combined gas laws and the laws of thermodynamics. We were not physicists at Yr. 9 CSE, all we had were the basics, but they were enough. From them we knew that 'hot' always travels to 'cold', that an increase in speed creates a decrease in pressure and that pressure, temperature and volume are all inter-related.

In Geography we learned about the Tropics, sub-tropics, temperate, sub-polar and Polar zones, We did weather and how it was dependent on the atmosphere. We learned why living at 50ºN in Canada was different from living at 50ºN in the UK. We used what we learned in physics to try to understand why.

Today all of that is lost, even for what we call the intelligent. Go and ask 100 people how many equators the Earth has and I bet 99 of them will say one.

[Suff]

Not sure it's the science with me. I can hold a basic logic argument. When you analyse the literature of that group we like to call the "Denialosphere", because they deny research rather than create research of their own, you find that they either use simple redirection, limited sets of data, or contradict themselves in their quest to find an ever more solid "reason" for denying the ever growing body of science.

Fighting this huge steamroller of carbon energy funded misinformation becomes more of an excercise in defining inconsistency and less of an excercise in understanding fundamental physical sciences.

Communication is a really key thing, saying it so that ordinary people, who don't care that much, can clearly understand it. One of the best I've seen, to defeat the "we're not capable" argument is a simle definition of how large the atmosphere is compared to the world itself. Hold up a standard basketball. Then clarify that, to scale, the atmosphere of the Earch would stand off the surface of the basketball by 1/4 of an inch.

Relative sizes are a wonderful key communication point. It shows that the relatively thin covering of gasses which make up the air we breathe is quite limited and quite finite in comparison to the planet it sits on. Quite easy, in fact, for a few billion humans, with a few million power stations and several billion vehicles, to destabilise a livable habitat....

This is more communication than science.

Sadly, for some, it is not enough and they will continue to believe any vaguely credible story which seems to fit the bill. Even if the last one actually said totally the opposite but espouses the same result. Namely that if we do nothing, things will somehow magically be OK.

I like a statement from a Clive Cussler book.

The oceans produce 50% of the oxygen we breathe. If a red algae started to cover the world's oceans, blocking that oxygen production, doubling in size every day. Then in the current political climate, nothing would be done until that algae covered half the earth's oceans.

If you look back at that statement again, you will recognise that once the idiots finally realised it was a catastrophy waiting to happen, they would have One Single Day to fix it.

This is very similar to what is happening with Climate Change. It is so slow that governments can't get any "danger" factor from it. People simply won't believe that we can't just fix it. So the momentum continues and it builds and it builds and it builds. As has been said already, it's a HUGE planet with a HUGE ecosystem. Of course once you have overridden that, you have a HUGE problem.

People seem to think that, come crunch time, we'll be able to do something to fix it. You know, some quick fix like sucking the CO2 out of the air and creating huge blocks of carbon or some other really wierd and wonderful gizmo.

Let us try and level set the problem.

For more than 200 years, every single person on the planet, to some degree or other, has been doing two things.

1. Removing the foliage and forests that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere
2. Burning some form of non renewable carbon fuel and dumping the CO2 into the atmosphere.

Just look at the scale of the problem. The ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE PLANET is dumping CO2 into the atmosphere faster than the planet can suck it back out again. That entire output changes the CO2 balance by 2ppmv (parts per milliion volume of the general atmosphere), each year. We have to not only stop putting it up there, but, at the same time, pull at least 100ppmv out of the atmosphere. Even if we could create machines and forests that could suck out as much again as every vehicle, power station and ship pumps out each year, even with a total ban on all burning of coal, oil, gas and wood, starting tomorrow, it would still take 50 years to put us back to a level which was seen at the end of the last ice age.

If we had started 30 years ago with reductions, clean energy, forrestation and change in land use, we would still have 100 years of hard work to go in order to rebalance our climate. But we didn't. We were convinced the "Science wasn't settled". So we did nothing. And it got worse. And Worse. And Worse.

Now we have to do 10 times the change for 10 times as long.

This is considered inflamatory. But based on what I have said above, I believe it is justified. Those who rubbished solid and corroborated science, for money or fame, with the only aim being to delay action on climate change and reduce our emissions; are nothing less than murderers. Oh the people may not die in my lifetime or at least the blame will not be laid where it belongs in my lifetime. However, to my
mind, nothing is more certain.

So when you next read David Rose's epistle which claims that there has never been such a rapid recovery of ice in the arctic ever before. You will know that:

1. It was impossible for ice to recover that far or that fast because it would have had to come down both the Atlantic and the Pacific to expand that far and it simply is not cold enough for that, winter or not.

2. That the only reason we've seen 2 million square KM of extra ice growth in that winter season is because we lost 2.5M square km of that ice in the first place and it is nothing more than water at -100c freezing in winter as you would expect.

3. That David Rose was silent when the arctic ice cap became fully free of ice for thousands of square miles around it and that this is a great disaster for humankind on earth. Not because we'll see more changeable weather or even hotter weather. But because land will start to produce less food. Which means more dead people.

Perhaps you can then understand (or not), why I say our species is too stupid to survive. At least the dinosoars were killed off by a huge asteroid and a change in the orbital mechanics of the planet (hardly surprising when a chunk of rock hits the planet like a bullet hitting a watermelon).

In the end discussing this just makes me msiserable. I have to stop it.

[Workingman]

Sorry Suff, my message came out all wrong.

I intended it to mean that the vast majority of people out there, the ones who are neither supporters nor deniers of the theory, do not have the tools to challenge or question what they are being told. My MP (or his assistant) is one. I send him information and the replies show all the understanding of a pre-school infant. I am of the opinion that he and his team are representative of a parliament filled with holders of degrees in PPE and no grasp of anything useful.

I like this from your post:

I like a statement from a Clive Cussler book.

The oceans produce 50% of the oxygen we breathe. If a red algae started to cover the world's oceans, blocking that oxygen production, doubling in size every day. Then in the current political climate, nothing would be done until that algae covered half the earth's oceans.

If you look back at that statement again, you will recognise that once the idiots finally realised it was a catastrophe waiting to happen, they would have One Single Day to fix it.

I bet that if I send him that, with a full explanation, he would still not get it. The reply will probably ask what sort of red algae I am referring to.

[Suff]

I bet that if I send him that, with a full explanation, he would still not get it. The reply will probably ask what sort of red algae I am referring to.

And probably want to know where it comes from. All the irrelevant things, nothing important.

And these are supposed to be our representatives.....

It is so true though. Year after year as it becomes more and more blindingly obvious that we can't go on the way we are and expect things to just keep on working the way they did.

Have you been keeping track of the whole 30/40 year climate lag debate? Depending on where you read it, 90% of the heat sequestered by greenhouse gasses is locked away from the normal climate for 30-40 years before returning to the system.

The Accepted answer is that the heat is absorbed into the upper layers of the ocean and then ocean currents drive it deep into the ocean depths. However those same currents bring the heat back to the surface some 30 - 40 years later. Hence the warming we see today is driven by heat saved in the ocean 30 - 40 years ago. Or, 1994 -1984 for the current heat.

Let us just consider what happens when the heat sequestered in the late 1990's and 2000's makes it's way back out. let alone the 2010's.

The whole thing is going to spiral out of control and it will start to happen in the next 10 to 20 years. We are doing nothing to reduce our impact, in fact we continue to produce more net CO2 decade on decade if not year on year. Plus the impact of the CO2 is already overwhelming weather systems and the jet stream.

Hindsight's going to be a real bitch and no consolation for those of us who have had our eyes wide open and our brains in receptive mode...