Vocal Voices

As you know I check all the climate sites regularly, I check the stats reported for ice loss, heat and sea level rise. It's only about two months since I went to the NASA site and checked on the JasonII to see what they were saying about average SLR. 3.4mm per year they were saying, same as it has been since 2010.

So you can imagine my utter amazement when I find this article posted on one of my climate sites.

Yep the title is about "hottest year on record, two years in a row".

But inside it says

The El Niño event also brought on a surprising surge in global sea levels, which rose 15 millimeters between late 2014 and early 2016, far outstripping the usual pace of around 3 millimeters per year, the WMO reports.

Erm.... 'k me sideways. 15mm in 18 months. That's not just a LOT that absolutely outrageous. If we sustained that it would be 4" per decade. The London barrier would be overwhelmed on storm days by about 2040. That is seriously not funny.

However it does say

While the WMO relied on data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in proclaiming the 2016 record, these agencies have not announced a formal record yet. They will presumably do so early next year once all the data is in. The WMO said its statement is “provisional” and will be updated in early 2017.

Aha you say, yet another bit of propaganda to scare us. Doesn't pass the sniff test. Yes I was thinking that and so was Bill Fothergill on Neven's site. So he went and got the data from NASA himself and analysed it.

He says:

However, as one should always practise scepticism, I had a look at the FTP data for this. (See the link on the Vital Signs page, or go direct to...

ftp://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/allData/merge ... 201607.txt

I thought there might have been an artificially low MSL value followed 18 months later by an artificially high MSL value. Column (12) is the important one to look at, as this has 60-day smoothing and compensates for both cyclicity and for Isostacy.

When I looked at this, my response was something along the lines of ... "Fuck me gently!!!!"

Quite!

I know a lot of it is driven by the Nino heat, the excessive heat in the Pacific causing thermal expansion. BUT. That can't explain this all. There has to be ONE HELL OF A LOT of ice melting, off land, into the sea, to do this.

This does not bode well for the near term future. Some of the pacific islands are within 6" of inundation. A large chunk of the Bangladesh delta is within a foot. Those pacific islands just lost half a decade of time to deal with it. At this rate they'll be overtopped by somewhere between 2035 and 2040. In even mild storms that will change to 2025 at this rate.

I'm sad to say that this is just the beginning. It may settle and it may seem to go "back to normal", whatever that is as "normal" in the 1990's was 1.5cm per year. But in reality this is just one more hop step on the way.

I read the same article in another place and then went on to read some 500 or so comments. I was astounded to see that about 60% of those commenting were so much against the science and were even using some of it, very persuasively I might add, to argue against it. They were not, for the most part, people like us, Suff, who have an interest, they were just ordinary people giving their views. The message simply is not getting across.

I have also been watching a programme by the anthropologist Prof. Alice Roberts, the Incredible Human Journey. In it she has been looking at the Out of Africa hypothesis and asking how we humans spread to all corners of the globe, especially to Australasia and the Americas, which are today cut off by oceans.

The initial migration was ~70,000 years agos, slightly before the peak of the last Ice Age. Australasia was conquered some 40,000 years ago. just after the peak. Using climate and geological models she showed that there was a land bridge all the way from present day Malaysia to the Australian land mass. Why was that? It was because of the kilometres thick ice caps reducing sea levels. As they melted the land bridge disappeared.

She also showed that nearly 15,000 years ago, when there was still a 3km deep ice sheet over N. America, the retreating sea ice created a land route down the whole of the west coast of N. and S. America. That land route is now below fathoms of water.

The process is still going on and if people think that water will respect our efforts to control it they should think again.

Frustrating isn't it. Equally the land bridge that allowed the nomads of north eastern Asia to cross to North America. Simply put it takes a few miles of ice over most of Europe and America to do that to sea levels. 90m the rise was at the end of the last glacial period.

What most people have no clue about is that rather than dipping into the next Glacial, as has happened with regular monotony for the last 2.5 million years (800,000 of which we have detailed records of), we are rapidly (on Geological timescales), changing the climate of the planet and pushing it to a state it has not seen in the last 800,000 years, at the very least.

It's important to understand where we are right now and what we are doing. 19,000 years ago the last ice age ended. Multiple breakout events happened over the following 15,000 years where sea levels and temperatures swung around violently with the mass release of fresh water into the oceans and with the sequestration of huge amounts of heat in the oceans. over 125 meters of sea level rise was the result.

Then, about 3,000 years ago things began to level off, temperatures started to drop again and the natural cycle of dropping into the next ice age began. This was the way things were until about the start of the industrial revolution. Although the cross over had already begun with the mass explosion of humanity round the planet. Chopping down forests, burning them, and husbanding animals which also increased the number of them and their methane emissions.

Long before the industrial revolution humans had already extended our Interglacial beyond it's normal path.

Enter the Industrial revolution where we started to dig up, in an industrialised mode, carbon resources sequestrated under the earth. Now we know that nature had always been using these resources at the end of each ice age because of the methane spikes from the clathrates and permafrost which melted.

So is it any surprise that about 90 years after the industrial revolution really got going that the marks of that activity was visible on the climate of the planet?

It's pretty much guaranteed that without the industrial revolution the ice age would now be descending upon us. However humanity knows no such thing as restraint. Humanity has had to go full on in burning the carbon resources of the planet, changing the atmosphere to levels of CO2 only ever seen in prior epochs. I.e. millions of years ago.

So here we stand today. Addicted to fossil fuels. Unable to stop burning them. Bickering about whether changing the atmospheric CO2 content of the planet will cause sea level rise or not, when all the empirical evidence is that not only does CO2 drive it but that it is one of the principal agents of nature in warming the planet.

During the deglaciation sea levels rose as much as 6 meters in 140 years. It was warmer than today, 1C warmer (or 2C warmer than pre industrial), but also there was much, much, more ice available to absorb that 2C. Essentially the ice melted and the planet cooled.

More ice melted at the end of the Ice age than exists on the planet, in total, today. It took 15,000 years for that ice to melt. In the last 150 years we, humans, have caused 10,000 to 15,000 years of warming. That warming will melt ice. But there is not enough ice left to absorb that kind of rise in temperature.

The end is not in doubt. Just the time scale. If there is one thing I've learned in the last 29 years, is that the planet will decide what that time scale is; not us.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that we can put all the information we want, out there, but people are not quite able to take it on board. They were not taught any of this in Geography when at school, even if they did Geography. Their appreciation of things lies in what they see, and what they see is not much. Tornadoes, Atlantic hurricanes and Pacific typhoons are 'over there' and have always happened. Even floods on their own doorsteps have happened before.

Even in well educated societies, such as ours, there are tens of millions of people who think that the world has pretty much always been like this. The land masses have always been where they are and always looked much the same. Same with the oceans and seas. They of course know about tectonic plates because they cause volcanoes and earthquakes, and when those earthquakes happen under the sea we get tsunamis.

I do not blame them, because the education system cannot cover everything, but this has been known about for so long that it should have been in the curriculum for at least 15 to 20 years.

Ah but there are so many in government who went through Geography without Global Warming and didn't learn much anyway, who will block adding it to the curriculum because they still believe that Global Warming is a political thing, not a physical thing.

There are terms people can understand. If you hold up a basketball in your hand and make the size relative to Earth, the atmosphere would be 1/8 of an inch above the surface. Not exactly that much to change in comparison with the planet is it?

The new ice core they are going to pull out of the Antarctic, 3.3 km long and going back 1.5 million years into history. From the start of the industrial revolution to now would cover a small fraction of a millimetre. Yet they measure prior ice ages and interglacials in meters and centimetres.

Now for another visual one and very close to what you say above. What is happening today is like a frog in a pot of water. What does that mean? Put a frog in boiling water and it will jump out. But put a frog in cold water and bring it up to boiling point and it won't because it can't detect that the temperature is going to kill it.

However, even more evocative, on geological terms, what we are doing is like putting a frog in a liquidiser and flipping the switch. Forget the time to boil it, that's way too long.

I think the real problem is that the vast majority of people just don't want to know, and don't care. So really, there is not much point in us being concerned about it.
We are really wasting our time. We cannot undo the damage that has already been done, and I suggest the best course for us to take is to try to enjoy what life is left for us on this planet, and let them get on with their plans - even those which will no doubt eventually usher in terrible consequences. At some point in the future it will become clear that the human race has by then brought about its own inevitable demise, but it will then be too late to do anything about it. It's just a pity that we wont be here to say, "We told you so".

I take a slightly different tack Aggers.

There will always be those who will survive. My role, as I see it, is to educate my Children and especially my grandchildren, in understanding what is coming, how to avoid it in the best case and how to survive it in the worst.

To do that I have to be fully informed and aware. Regardless of whether they believe me today or not.

CO2 is now officially on the rise again. It bottomed out over 400ppm and is heading up again.

That is the last time that humans will see CO2 below 400ppm for the next 15,000 years unless we do something drastic and carry on that drastic action for about 100 years.

Well we could create a canal from the subsea Sahara areas and flood them, then ring the area with solar and nuclear powered desalination plants and plant the entire Sahara with water conserving trees (the Israeli's did it). Should only take about 100 years to bring things back to a reasonably warmer level.

We could also create an absolutely huge solar reflector to reduce the solar energy reaching the planet. But, of course, that would require the nations of the earth to work together and they're much happier killing each other or stabbing them in the back...

15mm sea level rise, CO2 in new uncharted areas, the North Pole, just the other day, was only slightly below zero and the whole of the 80N arctic is experiencing levels of warmth never before recorded since the satellites gave us the ability to measure it. Notably both Extent and Volume are also at historic lows and the re-freeze is rather slower than expected.


The image is clickable and takes you to the DMI page where you can click on the other years and compare them. Makes an interesting comparison. Namely that there is none. We've never seen this before since we were able to measure it.

For instance here is a comparison with 2005, 11 years ago.

Aggers wrote:I think the real problem is that the vast majority of people just don't want to know, and don't care. So really, there is not much point in us being concerned about it.

I hate to admit this, Aggers, but I think you are right.

All the evidence is out there, but we are more interested in our here and now. Sod the future. Sod our grandchildren, let them sort it. Suff is also right, there will be survivors. They will be in a bit of a confused state, though..

On the one hand they will be living the hunter/gatherer life, but they will still be able to use some of our modern technology - engines, pumps, steel, oil, for a while.... but they will not have money, precious gems, and gold will be worthless. Trade, pah!

Humans, MK2, might actually succeed where we failed.