Change is what the climate does

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Things More Important Than CLimate Change

There are those among us who consider the growth of CO2 in our atmosphere to be an evil that must be stopped. Our flora would disagree. As CO2 has risen during the fossil fuel era our planet has been GREENING. CO2 is a trace gas essential for life on Earth. Our plants grow better, stronger, faster in a CO2 enriched environment. CO2 concentration has been much higher throughout most of the last 600 million years and yet here we are. No tipping point. No runaway global warming. In fact, throughout that period of time the Earth took turns as both a hot house and an ice house quite independently of the amount of CO2 in the air.

Change is what the climate does. Always has. Always will. Yawn!

Ten Things More Important Than Global Warming

Your list might be different.

Governor Perry Outforecasts the Experts

Back(2011) when Texas was experiencing a drought and the usual alarmist ‘experts’ were telling us this is what we should expect as climate change progresses and that the drought will be permanent then Governor Rick Perry calmly recounted some sage advice taught to him by his daddy: the rains will return.

And so, in 2015, they have.

West Texas city has wettest day in at least 129 years

Perhaps Mr Perry should become a climate change guru.

Summer of 2015 could turn into one of the all-time wettest in Midwest

Nothing like a little rain to get rid of the ‘permanent drought’.

There is a reason why Nobel physicist Richard Feynman taught: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts".

Will the alarmist admit his error and pomposity? Don’t hold your breath. Alarmists are never wrong; they just change the cause for their alarm. It’s not dry any more? Now it is wet. See, the climate changes and it is all our fault. Some people aren’t happy unless they can claim that the sky is falling. However, they resemble ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ more than Paul Revere.

Mr. Perry’s Dad knows that the climate doesn’t just change. It is cyclical.

Too-da-loo Tuvalu

“Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now,”Obama said. “We’re not acting fast enough.”

Is this an enlightening statement? Hasn’t the climate always been changing for the 4.5 billion years of the planet's existence? Can the POTUS name a year when climate change wasn’t happening? And he thinks we can stop it by controlling our CO2 emissions? It will be as effective as naked women dancing for rain.

Was the POTUS in Alaska when he made that statement? Shall we test those statements against reality?

Let’s pick on sea level rise(SLR) as our proxy for the Church of What’s Happening Now.

We can go to the PSMSL website to see a map of all the tide gauges that have been or are being used to measure the rise of the seas.

The tide gauges around Alaska do not present a clear picture as some show the oceans falling and some show the oceans rising. What gives?

Tuvalu is often regarded as one of the ground zero locations for global warming as it is a low lying group of islands in the South Pacific only 15 feet above sea level at its highest point. There have been many stories portending its demise beneath the rising seas. So what is happening there?

Tuvalu Devastation Over The Last 70 Years - pictures are worth a thousand words. Not much change over the last 70 years.

Tuvalu – Still Drowning After All These Years - back in 1988 SLR in Tuvalu was a concern. The tide gauge in Tuvalu shows no SLR. Have a look.

Guardian Shock News : Tuvalu Was Evacuated Twelve Years Ago - the ever sympathetic Guardian reported in 2001 that the world’s first climate refugees were ready to depart Tuvalu in 2002. Tuvalu is still there.

New York Times : Tuvalu To Drown - in 2007 the NYT gave Tuvalu a 50 year reprieve. Did the NYT figure that out by looking at the tide gauge data for Tuvalu? See above. There is no SLR in Tuvalu.

Real Estate Prices In Tuvalu Unaffected By Impending Armageddon - this one is a dead giveaway that the people in Tuvalu know there is no rising concern with SLR. No panic selling in Tuvalu. Why not?

Scamming For Climate Money - and now we get to the crux of the climate change due to human emissions of CO2 via the burning of fossil fuels nonsense. There is money to be had from countries who can be made to feel guilty over their CO2 emissions. Have the leaders of the developed world bought into the imagined crisis to assuage their guilty consciences or to redistribute the wealth of their citizens?

Shock News : Scientists Surprised To Learn That They Have Been Lying All Along - and it turns out that far from shrinking due to the encroachment of the oceans these island atolls have been growing.

Tuvalu isn’t going Too-da-loo due to an ocean uprising. To put modern SLR in perspective let us look at SLR since the Ice Age.

SLR in the Holocene

The last glacial period lasted from 110,000 to 12000 years ago. Then, for reasons not well understood the Earth warmed, ice sheets melted, sea levels rose and humans began to flourish. Since the end of last Ice Age and for the past 12000 years sea level has been rising as the land based ice receded and returned to the oceans from which it originated. As the graph below shows natural sea level rise was on average 11 mm/yr. In order for our current SLR to be unprecedented it would have to exceed 11mm/yr. As can be seen from the graph the current rate of SLR is much smaller.

A graph at the University of Colorado shows SLR to be 3.3mm/yr. NOAA admits to 1.7-1.8mm/yr. The average of all PSMSL tide gauges gives a value of 1.1mm/yr. And if you only take into account those tide gauges that are currently reporting the value is .63mm/yr. All of these values fall well within the upper bound of natural variability of 11mm/yr set in the Holocene.

These values are NOT accelerating and NOT unprecedented so who has been lying to us? Unless SLR shows acceleration at a rate that exceeds 11mm/yr over the last 60 years of human emissions how can it be said that climate change is happening now and humans are at fault?

The people in the Maldives, Vanuatu and Tuvalu are not concerned. They keep building airports, resorts and hotels to attract tourists to their island paradise. Do those touristy pictures present a picture of an apocalypse waiting in the wings?

Aren’t we all in the same bathtub? How can SLR be different in different locations? SLR can be difficult to measure because of erosion, land subsistence, land subduction, drained aquifers and land rising due to tectonic motion. (List not meant to be exhaustive)

But here are some recent studies that should inform even the most skeptical of alarmists that coastal cities and low lying islands are in no danger from an ocean uprising. Contemporary SLR does not support the alarm of President Obama. SLR has formed its own consensus and it doesn’t support the Chicken Little Obamanations of the POTUS.

“So let me sum up. We know that human activity is changing the climate. That is beyond dispute. Everything else is politics if people are denying the facts of climate change. We can have a legitimate debate about how we are going to address this problem; we cannot deny the science,” he said.

How do we know that human activity is changing the climate? Only if the changes happening during the last 60 years of human CO2 emissions are unprecedented and accelerating. SLR is NOT cooperating with his beliefs. The President is either ignorant or lying. Neither becomes the office.

REFERENCES:

PSMSL - http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/map.html

Today’s Fraud Focus – Sea Level

Sea Level Fraud – Worse Than It Seems - fraud is the new normal in climate science .63mm for currently active tide gauge stations

Sea Level Rise Alarm Turned Off? NOAA: ‘Absolute Global Sea Level Rise Is Believed To Be 1.7 – 1.8 Millimeters/Year’

NOAA agrees to less than 2 mm annual rise in sea level, but will Hansen or Algore stop their lies?

NOAA Undermines NASA’s Sea Level Lies

A Third Of The People In Tuvalu Are Skeptics

Climate Sensitivity

“Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now,”Obama said. “We’re not acting fast enough.”

Can we agree that if humans are responsible for the changes in the climate over the last 60 years of human CO2 emissions that we should see this in unprecedented and accelerating signals of change?

Climate sensitivity is the supposed response of the climate to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Pre-industrial CO2 is said to be 280 ppm. A doubling would be 560 ppm. We are currently at 400 ppm. That is almost halfway to a doubling.

In a recent paper Lewis and Curry find 1.64 as a value for climate sensitivity.

A summary of values for climate sensitivity found by the IPCC and as reported in the first, fourth and fifth climate assessment reports are summarised below.

1990 - 6 degrees reference FAR - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Report

Based on current models, we predict: under [BAU] increase of global mean temperature during the [21st] century of about 0.3 oC per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 oC per decade); this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years; under other ... scenarios which assume progressively increasing levels of controls, rates of increase in global mean temperature of about 0.2 oC [to] about 0.1 oC per decade.
Our judgement is that: global mean surface air temperature has increased by 0.3 to 0.6 oC over the last 100 years...; The size of this warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability. Thus the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability; alternatively this variability and other human factors could have offset a still larger human-induced greenhouse warming. The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect is not likely for a decade or more.
under the IPCC business as usual emissions scenario, an average rate of global mean sea level rise of about 6 cm per decade over the next century (with an uncertainty range of 3 – 10 cm per decade), mainly due to thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of some land ice. The predicted rise is about 20 cm ... by 2030, and 65 cm by the end of the next century.
The 1990 IPCC First Assessment Report estimated that equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling lay between 1.5 and 4.5 °C, with a "best guess in the light of current knowledge" of 2.5 °C.[19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity#Consensus_estimates

AR4 2-4.5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report

Climate sensitivity is defined as the amount of global average surface warming following a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations.[12] It is likely to be in the range of 2 to 4.5 °C, with a best estimate of about 3 °C.[12] This range of values is not a projection of the temperature rise we will see in the 21st century, since the future change in carbon dioxide concentrations is unknown, and factors besides carbon dioxide concentrations affect temperature.[12]

AR5 1.5 -4.5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report

The global surface temperature increase by the end of the 21st century is likely to exceed 1.5 °C relative to the 1850 to 1900 period for most scenarios, and is likely to exceed 2.0 °C for many scenarios
The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report stated: Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence).

An article on Jo Nova’s blog summarises recent research into climate sensitivity and shows a convergence toward the low end of the IPCC range.

We are almost halfway to a doubling of CO2 and we can ask Mother Nature: How fast is the Earth warming? The graph below provides an answer. Not very.

The current rate of change in Global Mean Temperature is not unprecedented or accelerating but well within range of natural variability

“The rate of warming curves for all 4 major temperature series show that there has been a significant drop in the rate of warming over the last 17 years. Now, in 2015, it is between +0.5 and +0.8 °C per century. The rate now is only about 30% of what it was in 1998.”

This rate is close to the 1.64 for a doubling of CO2 found by Curry and Lewis.

Isn’t this good news for the doomsters of global warming? Will they cheer?

There is no reason to divest - CO2 is not cigarette smoke; it is not arsenic; it is not cancerous. If fact, the greening of Earth is a sign that CO2 is benign

We owe CO2 an apology.

CO2, an invisible trace gas essential to life on Earth, is plant food. We exhale CO2 and help to feed the flora. In return they slip us oxygen of which we are rather fond in a mutually beneficial and amicable symbiotic relationship. From this evil comes?

Future generations will look back at this time and wonder how so many people could be taken in by the ‘hate fossil fuel’ hysteria. It will be the focus of Phd studies on how people could fall for the delusion that CO2 is a toxic pollutant. We exhale it people. It is in your lungs in concentrations approaching 40,000 ppm. How are you feeling? It is in the ambient air at 400 ppm and has been as high as 8000 ppm within the last 570 million years. We are here. There was no tipping point no runaway global warming beyond which the planet became uninhabitable.

Plants grow better, stronger, faster because of the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In concluding, the U.S. research team declares that "from this remarkable 30-year archive of satellite imagery, we thus see evidence of a greening trend," which clearly indicates that the net result of the climatic and physiological effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on Earth's terrestrial plant life has in the mean been decidedly beneficial.

Apart from that CO2 has no redeeming features

We need to stop all activities aimed at decreasing human emissions of CO2.

CO2 is clean and green. We need more of it not less. The globe is greening. This is a sign that CO2 is benign. CO2 has been exhaled during the creation of this post. No living thing was harmed. Some even liked it. Let the plants dance.

REFERENCES:

Relentlessly shrinking climate sensitivity estimates

Lewis and Curry: Climate sensitivity uncertainty

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/09/modern-science-refutes-global-warming-alarmism.php

Trillions and Trillions of Trees make that ‘giant sucking sound’ of CO2 from the atmosphere

No global warming for 18 years 8 months!