The North Atlantic’s natural heating system, which brings clement weather to western Europe, is showing signs of decline. Scientists report that warm Atlantic Ocean currents, which carry heat from the tropics to high latitudes, have substantially weakened over the past 50 years.
Oceanographers surveying the ‘Atlantic meridional overturning circulation’, the current system that includes the warm Gulf Stream current, report that it seems to be 30% weaker than half a century ago.
Failures of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation system are thought to have been responsible for abrupt and extreme climate changes during the ice age that lasted from 110,000 to 23,000 years ago.
Yes, this is more or less the scenario that started off the movie The Day After Tomorrow. I shouldn’t have to ask, but I will – does one stupid filmmaker tarnish the entire question of climate change? Of course not. The events in the movie would happen eventually, over the course of several thousand years, and that would only happen if we didn’t have ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gases floating around. [Update for clarity]: We do, so it probably won’t. You can bet that we’ll have change, but we’ll have to wait to find out what it is.
Once more for the slower folks: change is bad. Civilization flourished in an unusual window of climate stability. When that window closes civilization will very rapidly un-flourish. For example, the crops that we eat have a special biochemical pathway that lets them concentrate CO2 out of the air. Weed plants can’t do that. That means that the more CO2 we have in the air the better weeds grow relative to crops. ‘Global warming’ doesn’t mean warming everywhere; some places will get hotter, some will get drier and some will get a lot colder. Mean nighttime temperatures and polar temperatures will go up first (in fact they already have), which is a problem because heat deaths often track with unusually high minimum nighttime temperatures, and sea level depends on ice locked up in the poles.
If you’ve read Michael Crichton’s silly book, as I have, you can un-misinform yourself here, here and here.
***Update***
What to do? I’ve given that a lot of thought, and in the end I’m just depressed. But I’ll have a go at it in a future post.
Buddy
“For example, the crops that we eat have a special biochemical pathway that lets them concentrate CO2 out of the air. Weed plants can’t do that.”
I do not understand what you are saying, perhaps. How is it that weeds are somehow less able to process CO2 than ‘crop plants’ ? This statement just makes no sense to me. Most of the CO2 absorption is done by forests anyway, as is most of the CO2 consolidation.
Also the whole idea that more CO2 in the air makes crops harder to grow (and weeds grow better ?) really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. Now maybe the heat itself, yes, understandable. Excess CO2? Not understanding what mechanism could cause that to happen.
I’d agree change is bad. But we have only theories as to the mechanism. That’s not to say we shouldn’t conserve and reduce emissions, but shouting unproven theory as the end of the world, when there are other mechanisms that could be causing the issue, is not the way to accomplish that.
Tim F.
The Hatch-Slack cycle concentrates CO2 in plant tissues, which gives these plants (C4 plants) a competitive advantage when CO2 levels are low, as they are now. Crops are generally C4 plants while weeds are C3 plants, meaning that weeds don’t have the Hatch-Slack cycle.
At high CO2 levels it’s unnecessary to actively concentrate the gas, so C4 plants are spending metabolic energy on a useless cycle. Advantage: weeds.
Bob Munck
Huh? Could you expand on that? All plants separate CO2 into carbon and oxygen, release the oxygen, and use the carbon to make more plant material. I’m unaware of any mechanism that “concentrates” CO2. And why would that imply that weeds grow better in high CO2? How do you even know if something is a weed?
It should be noted that all that heat energy that was going to warm Europe will now stay in the south, making more and bigger hurricanes.
BIRDZILLA
Global warming is so much hogwash the biggist amount of hot air comes from the mouths of AL GORE and the eco-wackos at GREENPEACE and the other enviromental extremists since we were suppost to be having a new ice age back a few years ago i mean its all junk science and hogwash poppycock
Steve S
Trees put out more pollution than Humans!
Tim Worstall
“and sea level depends on ice locked up in the poles”.
Er, No. Note how the ice in the north floats on the ocean?
The worrying thing is actually nothing to do with ice at all. It’s the thermal expansion of the water itself. Something that will take some thousands of years to happen, if it does.
It should also be noted that while change is bad it is inevitable. Climate is not and never has been static.
Buddy
Again theory. What are the relative amounts needed for an advantage to be noticeable, if it is in fact linear at all?
C4 path fixation is more related to other conditions, nitrogen content, water, etc. Might not C4 plants have an even greater advantage due to higher CO2 levels?
DougJ
There’s no sound science to support any of this.
Lines
And now some notes on global warming:
Who can guess who wrote this piece of drivel without googling it?
don surber
Global warming causes mini-Ice Age. Too funny
DougJ
How come we never hear the good news about abrupt and extreme climate changes? What about the people who don’t like the climate the way it is now? Surely, they’ll benefit from extreme climate change. The problem is all the coastal elites who love the status quo climate.
Buddy
BTW, C4 plants like corn would seem to benefit greatly from increased CO2, especially in drought prone areas specifically because C4 plants don’t undergo photorespiration and don’t lose as much water at night.
Research I’ve seen seems to suggest that plant productivity would increase across the board, not decrease, in currently estimated CO2 increases.
srv
I always liked James Burke’s After The Warming. He did a series in 1991 on what the world would do when the Atlantic Conveyor started to stop. Sorta a history story from the 2050 perspective. It was amazing the things he predicted, how societies would change and adapt. But in the end, it was too late…
John Cole
James Dobson says God has a plan for each and everyone of us. I believe him, and think whether a couple of Brita get chilly in the next few years is just part of his plan.
Lines
The permafrost in Alaska is melting, which is cracking foundations and destroying roads that are basically sitting on top of the previously frozen ground.
Now Stevens will have tons to do with his windfall!
susan
We should have stopped bovine flatulence when we had the chance! As a consequence of such stupidity, all mankind is doomed.
Don’t be depressed super scienceman will save us all from nature’s wreck and ruin. However, I am wondering what Vaclav Havel meant when he pointed out that because modern science ‘fails to connect with the most intrinstic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more a source of disintegration and DOUBT than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.” (Havel, 1994) Surely he cannot be saying that because scienceman is so full of himself that he is basically becoming nutzo, is he?
UberNerd83
Just out of curiosity, does anybody have ANY idea what they mean when they use the terms “sound” or “junk” science? If you do, please elucidate. I’ve always been under the impression that they were just meaningless catch phrases that people use to dismiss an opponent’s arguments without having to actually address the actual content of said arguments.
Lines
susan: Havel is trying to say that because of awareness of issues that may or may not have an effect on our existance, we tend to fixate on them, creating a plurality state where we have to be cheerful and happy to make it in society, while deep down we know we are just killing ourselves with scientific advancements like cars, cows and hairspray.
DougJ
Ubernerd, “junk science” is what research scientists at universities do, “sound science” is what scientists funded by Exxon and the Discovery Institute do. I hope that helps.
Tim F.
Not anymore it doesn’t. At any rate the big ice reservoirs in the North are Greenland and Nunavut.
Don, you missed the part where I pointed out that it won’t happen. Read first, then comment.
Tim F.
Productivity would increase, yes. C3 productivity would just increase a lot more than C4 productivity.
Water loss, or evapotraspiration, is only an issue if the world gets drier. Some places will, some places won’t.
UberNerd83
Ohhhh…It’s all so clear now. Thanks DougJ.
Lines
No one wants to guess who wrote the quotation I gave in my first post? Come on, people, humor me.
DrG
Lines:
Okay…I admit to having to Google…Ann Coulter??
UberNerd83
Lines:
I’m guessing it’s someone over at Fox “News”? Bill O’Reilly perhaps?
Note: I shouldn’t be posting this much; I should be writing a research paper on ID. Unless one of you wants to do it FOR me…
Stormy70
Stupid sun. Isn’t Mars warming up, as well? I will just have to continue to live my life. Somehow.
Pb
Lines,
John Cole? :)
UberNerd83,
I think it’s similar to the distinction between “science” and “pseudo-science”, which is sort of like the difference between “evolution” and “intelligent design”. Often this has to do with whether a claim is verifiable and falsifiable. Ever take a course in Philosophy of Science?
Lines
DrG wins, but only because he cheated :)
Ann Coulter wrote that in 2003, and went on a few talk shows with the same type of diatribe, attempting to convince people that Crapitalism was wonderful and should still be the rule of the land.
Lines
Shorter Stormy:
As long as I have ice for my scotch, I don’t care.
Tim F.
Yes, climate is never static. But as I said above climate has been stable over most of human history. Without that stability civilization would never have reached its current state, and we shouldn’t be too eager to wreck it.
Stormy70
Yes, even if I have to travel to Europe to get it in the future.
UberNerd83
No, I haven’t. But one of my fraternity brothers is writing his honors/philosophy thesis on the topic, so I’ve learned a little bit just from talking to him.
CaseyL
Lines – There are too many candidates. Jonah Goldberg?
Folks, call her Mother Nature, or Gaea, or whatever, but the fact is, she tries her darndest to drastically thin our ranks every few centuries, and we’ve lately been making it harder and harder for her to do without throwing entire systems out of whack.
Once upon a time, all she needed was a good plague. Bubonic in the Old World, smallpox in the New, and a flu pandemic once in a while; all kept the naked ape population down to a manageable roar.
But now there’s, what, 8 billion of us? All madly consuming everything we can find like sentient locusts; all spewing waste products much more quickly than any system can break them down again; and reproducing like, well, naked apes.
In that context, it seems to me the quicker and more drastic the global climate change, the better, since “quick and drastic” is most likely to knock the global homo sap population down a few notches. Sure, we’ll lose a few million acres of coniferous forestlands. Granted, wild salmon and polar bears will be but a sad memory.
But the thing is, humans will not willingly change their ways in sufficient numbers to make a difference. We just plain won’t. You can take that to the bank.
In absense of internalized control mechanisms, all that’s left are external ones.
So we should nod and agree with anyone who still thinks global climate change is a Greenpeace conspiracy. And do our bit to just get it over with, already.
Buddy
“Productivity would increase, yes. C3 productivity would just increase a lot more than C4 productivity.”
Not necessarily. In colder climates, with less light perhaps they will achieve and advantage, though research is mixed. The C4 advantage is a factor of more than just CO2 levels. Their primary advantage is due to levels of light/temperature that C4 plants are better able to take advantage of which allow them to overcome the energy disadvantage they have to C3 plants in regard to processing CO2. An increase in CO2 levels would not necessarily equate to an increase in productivity of C3 and a decrease (or stable) of productivity in C4 plants.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/cdiac/cdiac129/cdiac129_T-Z.pdf
“It may be premature to predict that C4 grass species will lose their competitive advantage over C3 grass species in elevated CO2.”
Either way, yes there are some significant C4 crops, including sugarcane, maize and grain sorghum. There are also some significant C3 crops which include potatoes, tomatoes, dry beans, soy beans, ground nuts, sunflower and wheat.
Implying that an increase in C3 production would be a disaster seems a bit far fetched.
Lines
I think we have ourselves a nerd-off, ladies and gents.
scs
As a layman, I would think the advantage or disadvantage of C4 or C3 plants would only apply in the wild, where you have two different plants competing for space. The plants with the slight advantage to the environment would take over the slightly less advantaged plants. In a farming setting, you control which plants are planted and remove the other ones, so there is no competition. As long as either types of plants have enough to survive, I don’t think it would make much difference. Now your lawn, on the other hand – well break out the weed killer.
scs
I’m not sure if that is true. I’m under the impression the last big ice age in Europe ended pretty quickly. Perhaps there are more abrupt shifts in temperature as solar cycles change. I will have to google it later.
Tim F.
Then you misunderstand me. I never said that we’d perish for that reason alone. The point was meant to answer the people who claim that more CO2 is good because it will increase crop yields. Believe me, I’ve seen that a lot.
C3 crops help to round our diets but the global food staples are wheat, corn and rice, all of which are C4 plants. Potatoes and Soy may qualify as staples in specific circumstances but overall it’s the availability of the first three that directly corerlates with feast or famine.
Tim F.
Human history means civilization. Constrain your search to the last 15,000 years or so and you’ll see what I mean by stability. Historically the Little Ice Age of the medieval period barely counts as a climate blip, and its its impacts were huge.
Sherard
DING! scs nailed it. Weeds trying to outpace crops ? Neat idea. That whole CO2 thing would be a big deal if the weeds weren’t choking on weed-specific herbicides.
Nice try, though.
Lines
With new farming methods being encouraged (now I get to nerd out), you really don’t control the weeds as much. Drip irrigation, reduced tilling, and other methods will actually run into issues of weeds more than current farming methods.
The reduced tillage is to begin to reduce the amount of nitrogen lost due to the off-gassing that occurs as an after-effect of tilling. This, in turn, would reduce the need to rotate in crops such as alfalpha that inject nitrogen back into the ground, only to be tilled out when the alfapha is removed.
I think we should leave the southern border wide open so we can have more cheap weed-pickers, myself.
don surber
Maybe if we reduce our emissions — stop using electricity — you know, turn off our computers and quit googling Ann Coulter …
DougJ
Leave it to Don to introduce a note of pure stupidity.
Thank you, Don. We neede that.
TallDave
This is more proof the GW issue is bigger than the “any anthropogenic change is automatically bad” coverage it usually gets. What if the current is failing for reasons mostly unrelated to GW? Then that anthropogenic GW is suddenly a good thing, to the extent it ameliorates an Ice Age.
and that would only happen if we didn’t have ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gases floating around.
Has anyone yet explained the sudden fall in CO2 levels that happened near Ice Ages? That kind of near-extinction event worries me more than coastal flooding. And if we know very little about it, that should worry us too.
That means that the more CO2 we have in the air the better weeds grow relative to crops.
Yeah, but it’s not like they’re in a race. We have to kill weeds anyway. A dead weed doesn’t grow. It’s likely overall crop yields would increase with higher CO2. This is why some greenhouses spike their CO2 levels.
Buddy
“The point was meant to answer the people who claim that more CO2 is good because it will increase crop yields. Believe me, I’ve seen that a lot.”
But it will. In production environments we are already nuking the weeds anyway, and production of non-C4 plants, by your own argument, will increase somewhat.
Again C4 plants have more advantages than just the good use of CO2 in ‘low’ CO2 environs. They are better producers because of the lack of photorespiration (they don’t lose sugar via it) and because they have a high rate of photosynthesis, fast growth, and high efficiency in water and mineral use. Not all of these are entirely centered on the ability to use CO2 more efficiently.
That said, The C4 advantage is only really helpful in certain (read: tropical) environments. The C4 benefit diminishes a bit at lower temperatures. Also there are piles of research dollars going down the crapper trying engineer a C4 rice type if your assumption is right, but I digress.
It’s my guess that you would need 2-3x the current CO2 level to make a significant difference. If we get to that level, I’d presume we’d have other issues, probably.
jack
The Gulf Stream has shut down before….
Before industry. Before the purported human-caused global warming.
It seems to have happened several times. Would this not indicate something possibly cyclic? Or something caused by factors beyond human control?
Additionally, the article clearly states that the actual weather–a temp rise of .06 degree is at odds with what would be expected from the Gulf Stream failing–and, I might add, that it puts the facts at odds with the ridiculous scenario set out in the Worst Movie Ever Made.
Humanitys lifespan has encountered severe climactic change. We survived. We survived in caves with fires. We will survive the dread sccourge of Global Warming, accredited and vested by many of the same scientists who warned us, with equally dire predictions, about the coming Ice Age a mere 35 years ago.
Why is it so hard to admit that we do not fully understand the global climate? ‘Warming causes cooling’–well, wouldn’t that end the warming problem? ‘Cooling of Gulf Stream offset by Global Warming’–again, the one seems to cancel the other.
We don’t know. Keep your predictions–I want research.
scs
I’m kind of wondering if what I said was entirely correct. Is grass considered a weed type or not. This C3, C4 thing would effect us if grass was crowded out by other weeds because then cows would have less to graze on. Can cows graze as efficiently on other weeds?
Buddy
BTW here’s a pretty good study on the issue:
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/co2plant.htm
Findings are that pretty much across the board, crop levels increased (c3 more than c4, but increase nonetheless).
Downside: although crops produced more, they contained less nitrogen, which means they are less nutritious.
BlogReeder
UberNerd83:
Junk science is usually used to support dire predictions. “The world is going to end the day after tomorrow!”. No one would listen to a wacko environmentalist unless he was able to say the information is supported by “leading scientists”. That’s another clue, junk science uses that phrase.
Buddy
Also interesting:
“Under higher CO2 levels, crop plants showed a notable increase in reproduction while wild plants did not. On average, crops produced more fruits than did wild species (28 percent higher in crops vs. 4 percent higher in wild plants) as well as seeds (21 percent higher vs. 4 percent higher, respectively).”
TallDave
This was the only thing I could find directly addressing the cause of Ice Ages:
http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/USNewsWorldReport/1997/08/18/228085?extID=10026
It says the topic is “remarkably consensus-free.” Not a good sign. Of course, it’s outdated, being from 1997, and excludes the more recent core samples.
don surber
DougJ:
Great rejoinder.
I have been hearing Falwell tell me I have “see-end” because I don’t go bonkers over abortion or homosexuality and God is going to get me.
And it is no less goofy than someone telling me God is going to melt me/freeze me because some kid squirted his pits with Right Guard back in the 70s and “depleted” our ozone or someone drove an SUV.
Bad science is bad science, whether it is funded by Exxon or by the EPA. Both have ulterior motives — one for minimizing the effect, the other for maximizing it. I trust the EPA about as much as I do DOD
Bob In Pacifica
I have this vision of Stormy70 skating across the North Atlantic, to the Isle of Islay, for a keg of Laphroig, only to find out that malt doesn’t grow in below freezing temps and the peat that gives it that smoky flavor is buried under a hundred feet of ice.
What? Me Worry? At that point, Stormy will have switched to tequila.
Tim F.
Jack,
Now there’s an encouraging thought. I wonder why I haven’t heard that yet in an Exxon pamphlet.
Gosh, that sounds a lot like:
Spooky. It’s as if you read but did not read at the same time. Same goes for your comments about the dumb movie.
Tim F.
TallDave,
This will be the fourth time I’ve said it on this blog: we’re not going to have an ice age. Our CO2 level precludes it. Write it down this time.
DougJ
What’s going on here? Is BlogReeder doing the old me? His comments make Surber sound like Stephen Jay Gould.
Tim F.
Buddy,
Interesting. I’d like to keep up with the scads of research going on right now but it’s not my field anymore. If I hunted around, which I may do eventually, I’m sure I will find peer-reviewed work saying something completely different. When (if) I find a good, recent review paper I’ll put it up.
TallDave
This will be the fourth time I’ve said it on this blog: we’re not going to have an ice age. Our CO2 level precludes it.
This will be the 4th time I’ve told you: you don’t know that for certain, nor does anyone else. This time, please remember that.
Buddy
Tim: I’ve looked a bit. Not found anything, really except a few things in 1999 unless you count C02science.com as a source (I may be a lib/conserv but I don’t)
They have the research but I don’t necessarily trust their ‘summary’
-b
TallDave
Here’s PBS’ take:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ice/chill.html
CO2 level is certainly a factor, but it’s only one of many. It’s certainly unwarranted (based on what we currently know) to assert at least localized glaciation is impossible at current CO2 levels.
Lines
Ice Core Drilling Shows highest level of CO2 in 650,000 years:
Source
But according to TallDave, you can’t prove anything!
jg
If the polar ice thats floating, melts, the water level goes down.
Tim F.
Sorry for the snippy tone. There’s basically two things that I can say confidently: things won’t stay the same, and we won’t have a global ice age. The first is pretty much a no-brainer, the second not so much so. I say it because ice ages require what I call an albedo trap – ice reflects energy back into space, and if enough land and sea is covered with ice then the Earth will get caught in a positive feedback loop where it reflects more than it absorbs. Kind of like how you need energy to start an engine, you need a lot of sea ice before the ‘ice age’ cycle really gets started. We have such a potent greenhouse effect right now that the chance of getting enough sea ice for an albedo trap seems to me practically nil.
Tim F.
Northern sea ice already melted, and doesn’t amount to much compared with Greenland glaciers. Southern sea ice is vastly dwarfed by water tied up in the Antarctic ice cap.
jack
Tim, I’m sorry, is saying that humanity survived radical climate change with a far lower level of understanding about the world irrelevent? I’m not sure why you think the notion is facetious. I don’t.
And why is discounting wild predictions in favor of research the same as saying ‘wait-and-see’? I want real science–not science couched in quasi-socialist notions of ‘crapitalism must go’, a la Lines. And I’m sorry to say that a lot of the ‘science’ that errs on the side of global warming offers ‘solutions’ that sound suspiciously like implementing socialism–under the guise of ‘reducing emissions’ or ‘controlling output’.
I fully believe that science will a)show us the truth about all this, b)provide us with a course of action that does not rely on failed economic theories, and c)eventually give us much greater control over our environment.
Right now, there’s way too much conflicting theorizing, with ‘sides’ unwilling to listen to each other. Your own attitude is redolent of this–my point is that we don’t actually know for sure, that the situation requires some good, hard, scientific research–and you respond as if I’ve said that anyone who believes in global warming is an ass, that we should all just stick our heads in the sand and let what happens happen. The issue has become far too emotional–and that’s really bad considering that it could have severe consequences for humanity.
Regarding that movie, I was simply engaging in an in-joke of my own about it. We sat through it, and all it’s DVD extras. At some point we gave up trying to not scream at the screen. Like History’s Greatest Monster, The Worst Movie Ever Made exists outside this blog and I included the phrase because it amused me. I understood that you were discounting it(the movie) as well–but I felt that the fact of the rising temp was good enough to include as yet another stake in the things’ monstrous heart.
jg
Thats true but it doesn’t change the fact that floating ice raises sea levels. The height of the sea level in some places provides the equilibrium that prevents underground volcano’s from erupting. At least according to the Discovery Channel. Global warming won’t just affect the weather. We can survive whatever happens in the future but we won’t all survive and probably not even many of us will survive. Only so many can fit in a cave.
TallDave
Tim,
Probably true, and iirc the precession of equinoxes currently favors us as well, but shifting ocean currents could still lead to devastating cold in localized areas, if not a full Ice Age.
But as you point out, the main reason we don’t fear an Ice Age is those higher CO2 levels, which goes back to my original point that they probably aren’t all bad.
Lines
Crapitalism: Shitting on everything just to make an extra dollar you don’t need, then expecting mother nature to clean up after you.
TM Lutas
First of all change may or may not be good. I don’t think that anybody’s ever conclusively established that our current climate is the best possible which is what you’d need to do in order to responsibly adopt the “change is bad” ethic. We don’t know is the answer to an awful lot of questions.
My understanding is that there’s too much fresh water and the lackof saltiness means that not enough water is sinking. Here’s a simple idea, figure out how much excess salt you’d need to add to restore the current and add it. If we’re really talking about trillions of dollars of potential economic devastation, you should at least look at the possibility of amelioration.
Let’s say you calculated that you needed 5000 tons of salt dumped off the coast of Greenland, every year for 10 years. Let’s further say that this would cost $100B a year. If shutting down the current is going to cost more than that, institute a “conveyor tax” mine the salt and dump! It’s possible that there is a problem. It’s possible that the amelioration solution won’t work. That it isn’t even discussed is just not responsible.
BlogReeder
Who says we don’t need that extra dollar? I was going to send it my sweet ol’ mother nature. But you said we don’t need it.
Really, it’s best to make as much as you can. It’s not capitalism’s fault. Capitalism is an enabler. Socialism is a disabler.
DougJ
Are you for real?
BlogReeder
Huh?
don surber
I remember when the left was for change. Now we have reactionaries like Tim F. writing:
“Once more for the slower folks: change is bad.”
But I see the Trust Fund Babies still love to dump on capitalism
recklessprocess
why are the ice sheets in Antartica getting thicker? Is it the growing weight of the new loads of ice and snow pushing more ice into the ocean? There is more ice in antartica then ever before recorded.
Idiots who think they can model the climate take this challenge: if you can accurately predict EXACTLY what the weather will be like right here where I am in a year then I might start to think you have a leg to stand on.
Frankly the growing thickness of the ice sheets and the cooling of the north atlantic look more like an ice age ccomeing than global warming.
pat
The CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels simply recycles the CO2 back to whence it came, albeit with a time lag of 250 to 300 million years. The long term history of CO2 concentrations plotted against global temperatures can be seen on this Chart.
CO2 concentrations have been orders of magnitude greater than they are today. The Earth has also suffered ice ages at such high CO2 levels, most notably in the Ordovician period. CO2 concentrations have been in long-term decline over the last 500 million years.
Never forget that the default state of the Earth’s climate is Ice Age. We are currently in a relatively benign interglacial period and may be overdue for next one. When that arrives it will be a catastrophe for humanity.
recklessprocess
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/sir_robert_may_annotated.htm
Nudge nudge wink wink … say no more!
Tim F.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet or the East Antarctic Ice Sheet? Let’s see if you know the difference before I explain why you’re wrong.
For the first time in recorded history the region of the north pole is free of sea ice. If that’s ‘cooling’ then I’d hate to see warming.
Tim F.
From recklessprocess’s link:
Holy shit. That has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read, and that’s counting Surber’s last comment. One thousand years ago Greenland was the same damn country as it is today. That is to say, practically uninhabitable glacier sheets with tiny zones of habitability at the very apex of deep southwestern fjords. The tiny viking outposts persisted there, marginally, until the Little Ice Age choked off the glacier mouths and they starved.
Honest advice: save your time. If you want climate science without potentially fatal levels of stupid, try here.
jg
IIRC they called it Greenland so people would go there instead of the place they discovered that they liked, Iceland.
John S.
I tend to take comments by Don “Gettysburg Address” Surber with a grain of salt.
Buddy
“One thousand years ago Greenland was the same damn country as it is today. That is to say, practically uninhabitable glacier sheets with tiny zones of habitability at the very apex of deep southwestern fjords.”
Not necessarily true and modern research points to it being warmer (as well as most historians).
Quoting the American Heritage Dictionary:
“Greenland was warmer in the tenth century than it is now. There were many islands teeming with birds off its western coast; the sea was excellent for fishing; and the coast of Greenland itself had many fjords where anchorage was good. At the head of the fjords there were enormous meadows full of grass, willows, junipers, birch, and wild berries. Thus Greenland actually deserved its name. Another attraction of Greenland was that Iceland and northwestern Europe, including England, had a grievous year of famine in 976, and people were hungry for food as well as land.”
It is estimated that Greenland was 1.2C degrees warmer around 1000 years ago than it is today. That is fairly significant as most GW models are predicting you only need a 2C or so degree increase in Greenland to hypothetically melt the sheet totally/permanently. Lets not forget that Greenland went through a similar warming trend some 70 years ago and has been cooling ever since only recently to start another warming trend.
Frankly I think most of the GW models suck. There are just too many unknown variables.
Lines
No, you’re just trying to make excuses for why you have your head stuck in the….sand. I’ll be nice.
Do you like smog? Thermal inversions that kill people? Do you like the fact that in about 100 more years a lot of the pollution will seep into our water tables and our healthy style of living will be only out of bottles, not the tap?
Why not use every bit of evidence to encourage healthy living and alternatives for the future? Better cars, alternative fuels, better scrubbers in power plants and anything else that we can do to at least have healthier lives in the near future.
I’m sick of flying above my city and seeing a shit stain over it. I want clean skies, if not for myself, for my kids.
Tim F.
There are still green fields of grass in Greenland. They’re at the heads of the same Fjords now as they were then. Overall it’s silly to claim that the climate was at all inviting – the vikings only managed to keep a few cows alive through desperate effort, and the sheeps’wool was legendary throughout Europe. That last bit is significant because the harsher the environment the finer quality a sheep’s wool, and Greenland took the cake. Their islands still teem with birds and their sea still brims with fish. The reason you have fewer junipers and birch today is because the settlers cut them down and eroded the soil.
To claim as that website does that ‘Greenland,’ meaning the island itself, was a ‘verdant pasture’ is pure lunacy. One degree of average temperature doesn’t change that. Those guys are simply not credible.
BlogReeder
This business about C4 and C3 plants sounds silly to me. Just because weeds can grow better in more CO2 doesn’t automatically mean it will cause massive crop failure. When I tried my hand at gardening, the weeds always out grew any thing I planted. If it was up to me, CO2 or no CO2, the crop would fail. I think farmers are much better at keeping weeds at bay.
One thing I don’t understand about the CO2 bogey man is the fact that it’s measured in ppm. Parts per million. How is that going to cause a problem? Shouldn’t we worry when it gets to parts per thousand? I haven’t read anything that has shown me how it would be a good green house gas. Is it like fog to the long radiation rays? But fog analogy fails me because it’s measured in parts per hundred.
If someone knows of a link that shows precisely how the low concentration of CO2 causes such problems, I would appreciated it.
demimondian
You mean he’s *not* you? Is that really not you, or not you like “Marionette de Chausette” isn’t me?
jg
You should see Phoenix (LA East), we have a brown cloud that sits over our city on a regular basis and because we’re in a valley the winds don’t take it away. Does wonders for the skyline.
Lines
If not for pollution, LA wouldn’t be famous for their sunsets!
Uncle Al's Syncophant
Disclaimer: a much more intelligent and erudite person than I wrote this. I’m just passing it along.
The sin qua non Greenhouse Effect threat is not warmer winters lowering petroleum prices through surplus, or a wetter planet less drought and famine, or retreat of the tree line to higher altitudes and northward thereby growing larger forests, expanding ecosystems, and sequestering colossal quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide thus annulling the Greenhouse Effect. The cogent compelling Greenhouse Effect threat is that all ice on planet Earth will defrost, raising the level of the oceans, drowning Bangladesh, Hawaiian resort hotels, and Jewish retirement communities in Florida. Environmentalists fond of Hawaiian research conferences (free vacations plus unlimited expense vouchers) are livid with rage.
A complication of Official truth is intrusion of real truth at inopportune moments. It is one thing to foment multi-$million climatic computer models fed oodles of multi-$billion satellite telemetries, the whole adjusted and renormalized by battalions of PhDs to give politically desired and dialectically pure answers without bias. It is another thing to look up the heat of fusion of ice and have a high school kid run a short line of algebra to cry “foul!” at the whole exercise. (American zero-goal education has mostly moved algebra out of high school into university post- graduate instruction. Secure an Oriental seventh grader and go for it anyway.)
How much ice coats planet Earth? According to Science 282 2057 (1998), Gaia hoards a glut of frozen water to cool our drinks:
Storage Volume, km^3 Volume, cm^3 Average thickness
———————————————————–
Greenland 2.99×10^6 2.99×10^21 1.79 km
Antarctica 29.3 x10^6 29.3 x10^21 2.44 km
Floating 0.7 x10^6 0.7 x10^21
———— ————-
33.0 x10^6 33.0 x10^21
Thirty three million cubic kilometers of ice is a whole bunch of ice cubes, and you would not want to shovel your driveway if it were covered a couple of miles deep in ice. The density of ice is 0.9168 gm/cm^3, though a mile or two of overburden will compress it, rendering what follows conservatively low. The heat of fusion of ice is 80 calories/gram. Melting Earth’s ice requires 2.42×10^21 kilocalories (plus decimal trim for mountains’ ice).
The solar constant at Earth orbit is 1373 watts/m^2. Dust and clouds diminish surface irradiation as do seasons, latitude, and the night side of the planet. Each year each Earthly cm^2 on the average is offered 170 kcal/cm^2 incoming. Total surface area is 6.087×10^22 cm^2. Summed insolation is thus around 10^25 kilocalories, which is enough to melt all the ice 4000 times. There are heat loss mechanisms, and it doesn’t, not even once. Earth squats at the bottom of a very deep thermal hole.
For Enviroweenies to cry “Greenhouse Effect!” is to think you can toss a pebble at a boulder and send it careening across a meadow, smashing fragile and endangered species, deforming frogs, and getting your picture on all the TV networks’ 11 o’clock news.
jg
Hmmmm, maybe that explains our sunsets too. lol
Tim F.
Uncle Al,
Chewbacca.
TTT
So the actual stated threat of global warming is that ALL of the ice on Earth is supposed to melt? News to me. And, y’know, the entirety of the scientific community.
I wonder which is more likely:
1. Someone uses very basic math and very broad assumptions to quickly disprove mainstream science. It was so basic, broad, and quick, that mainstream science must surely be very stupid and lacking in common sense…. or is engaged in a giant global conspiracy, for which there is no evidence because the conspiracy is just *that* big, but it has to exist because, um, they can get money out of it or something. In related news, evolution is disproved by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and anyway no intermediate fossils have ever been found, except for the hoaxes. Just So!
OR
2. Someone uses basic math as grist for a straw man argument, to test an irrelevant hypothesis based on false premises, the whole thing being nothing more than window dressing for some rhetorical green-bashing.
I wonder: do architects and chemists have to put up with this too? Or is it just in bio-sciences where every TD&H thinks his common sense can outperform published results?
Buddy
“No, you’re just trying to make excuses for why you have your head stuck in the….sand. I’ll be nice.”
Nice personal attack. Nice straw man arguments too as I never said or even implied I like pollution or its affects. Next time you are going to attack someone attack on base of fact not on the person, because the personal crap gets very, very old and you knee jerk reactors on both the right and left have nothing really to add to the argument but conjecture and insult.
If you don’t like smog, and acid rain, fight against it, and move out of the city. Those are viable lines of attack. Global warming might be provable. The effects of it are not much more than theory, and that’s why I say GW models suck, because there are too many variables for them to be able to predict anything with any amount of certainty.
I’m all for healthier living and cleaner air. In fact I see the effects up here in the mountains on a daily basis, and it sucks. I use those reasons to fight for cleaner air, not unproven theory, so before you make an assumption about a person you might want to make sure exactly what their views are.
Most of the effects aren’t from warming, at all. They are from pollution. Frankly coal burning electric plants need to go away, as do in my opinion, cement plants burning old tires and all the like. Fight an honest fight, on proven science, not on conjecture, and you win a lot more people. It is possible to be a conservative, and a conservationist. There are a lot of us up here in the mountains, so.
Tim: the American Heritage Dictionary is not credible? Discovery Channel (well ok on DC) is not credible? They and quite a few other historical and scientific studies are making similar claims.
Tim F.
The dictionary is perfectly credible. The dictionary is not the one claiming that the island of Greenland was a verdant pasture. The above linked site is.
Insofar as Greenland was a “verdant pasture,” as long as it’s clear that one means isolated sites at the head of certain fjords, it still is.
Buddy
Well, lets define ‘Verdant’
“Covered with growing plants or grass; green; fresh; flourishing; as, verdant fields; a verdant lawn.”
vs
“enormous meadows full of grass, willows, junipers, birch, and wild berries.”
Very similar statements no? Frankly the truth lies in the middle, likely. No, Greenland wasn’t Florida. But it appears to have been a bit more livable than it is now, around 1000 years ago, according to historical evidence. A 1-2 degree average temp increase (most studies I’ve seen cite a 3-5 or so degree Fahrenheit average) is fairly significant. In fact most GW folk propose (world wide of course) that’s all its not going to take much more than that to put us into Armageddon.
That’s my biggest problem with GW advocates. I think GW itself is provable. I think it is probably somewhat related to human causation, although there are other mechanisms going on that we do not understand. I understand the desire to give way to caution on the matter.
I do not think, however, that their end-of-the-world junk science guesses are. If you are going to argue against CO2 pollution, argue on the facts, i.e. pollution, dangers of deforestation, the good in renewable resources, the facts of acid rain destroying forests (I see it every day up here, although some of it is caused by insect damage), the benefits of cleaner energy and etc, because they are provable, observable, fact.
We can fight this stuff factually, or we can hook junk science onto it, discredit the facts by embedding them in conjecture, and do the same crap others are accused of doing — making it up as they go along. That’s what I see a lot of the GW folk doing – acting as if the ‘Day After Tomorrow’ is factual, and that if we don’t invoke Kyoto next week we are going to be hit by a 2000 mile wide –500 degree hurricane.
Heck I’m all for getting rid of dirty energy plants. I’m all for more fuel efficent and cleaner transportation. I’m not for attempting to scare the pants off people with conjecture.
Tim F.
Buddy, you missed my point. ‘Greenland’ is a verdant pasture the same way that America is a Great Salt Lake. You can find it there, but it’s a bit dishonest as an overall descriptor.
That’s completely bogus. The only people who hate that movie more than you are climate researchers. Unless by ‘GW’ folk you mean uninformed shouters, and every group has its share of those.
I’m glad that you brought that up actually, because that’s one of the things that continually irritates me about the right wing. If they want to hate a group they find the most extreme possible person who can be even loosely affiliated with that group and then make that person’s name and the group a synonym. ‘Ward Churchill’ and ‘the Left.’ That is basically what you are doing here. I haven’t met any, but I’m confident that some environmentalist somewhere takes TDAT seriously. What does that mean to you? It doesn’t mean much of anything to me.
If I’m 95% certain that you will be hit by a truck, I will push you out of the way. You’ll understand if I didn’t wait for the suspicion to become fact.
Buddy
“Unless by ‘GW’ folk you mean uninformed shouters, and every group has its share of those.”
Well that’s my point. The uninformed shouters seem to be the media face of the GW position or at least they meld in crap science with their facts for ‘shock factor’.
Case in point this circulation issue. They present facts (which don’t necessarly appear to fit model data, for what its worth see here), and then toss in ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ crap. If it is viewed with such contempt, then why even mention it? Yes the article denotes the idea as ‘mere fancy’ but why even bring it up other than to attempt to scare people with conjecture?
I’d agree the media is largely to blame for the misunderstanding, but some of the scientists seem to stand by and allow it to happen because it pushes their agenda foward.
Tim F.
The story brings the movie up because authors always look for cultural touchstones to give readers a familiar connection to complicated phenomena. No conspiracy involved.
It’s important to understand why the movie is ridiculous. A Gulf Stream shift could very well trigger an ice age, but it would never happen to that degree (jet fuel freezing a chopper out of the air etc.) or within the space of a few months.
The RealClimate post doesn’t bring up any contradictions, unless you want to be specific. I’m not much of a modeler and I’ve been warning about slowdowns in thermohaline circulation for years now.
Buddy
I’m not arguing there is a conspiracy, I’m just saying there is biased media reporting floating around in major media outlets that plays the fear card every a tentative GW observation comes up, specifically with headlines that don’t really match what their articles actually state, and the whole TDAT conjecture crap.
Regarding RealClimate specifically:
“It should be stressed that should this be a sustained feature (and not affected by the +/- 6 Sv uncertainty estimated in the paper), this would be extremely significant. Modeling experiments suggest that this kind of decrease should be associated with a decrease in ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic of up to 2°C or so, and maybe 0.5° over Europe. Since these changes have not been observed (both the North Atlantic and Europe have warmed significantly over this time period)”
Basically according to modeling, Europe should already be cooling if the oceanic heat pump is undergoing sustained stalling to the extent this one measurement shows. Surprisingly it’s not (in fact its temps have been raising, as RC points out), which means there might be something else going on that is not currently known or able to be modeled. Many of the news articles state that the current change is fact. Real Climate observes that more data is needed, as these initial obs might not be all-telling.
Real Climate is tentative enough to be credible and they present information on both sides; that is refreshing. Many other GW proponents are not. Indeed the same TDAT crap is pulled in the national geographic article,
“That scenario [The Day After Tomorrow] remains far-fetched. But British scientists say their new findings indicate that the threat looks all too real for northern Europe and marine animals.”
And then the ‘oh but TDAT movie scenario is probably bogus’ is buried at the bottom of the article. Its all too real… no its fantasy… its heating… no its cooling.
Not to mention Quadfasel calls the movie ‘okay’ except for time scale. Sorta pokes holes in the ‘that movie is totally crap’ angle, if you ask me. Frankly to the nominal reader, they see TDAT and ‘MINI ICE AGE’ and you end up with people planning to sell their property and move abroad because of a possible collapse of the Atlantic overturning circulation. (From the nat geo article)
BlogReeder
Tim F, has anyone suggested that global warming could be caused by the 30% decrease in the ‘Atlantic meridional overturning circulation’? That the decrease is the cause and not the effect? Is it credible to suggest that?
Carrick
Why do you people persist with the illusion that melting floating ice will have any meaningful effect on the mean sea level? Ever hear of Archimedes Principle?
The buoyancy of an object is equal to the weight of the water displaced by that object.
For a floating object, the weight of the object is equal to the weight of the water displaced.
Melting a chunk of ice floating on the surface of an ocean will replace the volume of water displayed by the chunk of ice with a volume of water (from the chunk of ice) which is equal to that volume of displaced water.
Excluding effects due to composition (e.g., trapped moraine material or other dissolved minerals), melting the floating ice will result in the same exact mean water level.
Carrick
Blogreader:
I’m a bit skeptical too. It’s not obvious that an adjustment in the nutrients wouldn’t fix this problem immediately, and if that didn’t work… that hybridizing wouldn’t solve it in almost as short an order.
BIRDZILLA
Think about how much is put out by all those volcanic eruptions or all those gyseres just think of how much co2 is put out when OLD FATEFUL cuts loose or what about when MT ST HELENS or when MT PINATUBO went off and then theres all those termites and the fetulence from the wild critters and what else you have the co2 put out by industries pales in comparison compared to that put out by nature and its no different
TTT
Birdzilla:
You have metal in your body naturally, ergo, bullets are harmless.
scs
Yeah that’s true. I was getting confused for a second that ice has a larger volume than water. Okay, I just solved it. For the FLOATING ice that melts, arctic oceans, there will be no difference. For the ice that is on LAND, ie Greenland, when it melts, it will displace water into the ocean and raise ocean levels.
Well maybe we can turn Greenland into a gigantic reservoir. We’ll build a levee system. Hey, it worked in New Orleans. (joke)
scs
Okay I’ll block quote myself. I was just wondering how much ice is actually on land fulltime, because as we all saw in March of the Penguins, a lot of it melts in the summertime. So since a lot of the ice is on the ocean already, and a lot of ice on land melts in the summer anyway, how much difference can GW really make? Maybe some. Like they said, the coastal regions. But I don’t think the whole land mass will be under water like some act. Maybe this GW will be a boon after all. Okay, we’ll lose the coastal regions, but we’ll gain a lot of north Canada, Antartica, and Russia. Lot’s of potentially fertile land in there. Start buying real estate in the northern region of Canada now.