Global warming discussion III

[Haig]

Haig. Ever thought about what is driving that cold air down towards the East Coast of the US, and why those weather patterns are becoming more persistant, or why there is more precipitation...

Yes I have Mikemcc.

Have you ever thought about what is driving the "changes" in the Jet Stream ?

Hint: It's a repeat of the conditions that are linked to the LIA

 

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Hint: It's a repeat of the conditions that are linked to the LIA

This appears to be a bare assertion. What evidence do you have that suggests this connection? Weather in a single region isn't sufficient.

 

[CapelDodger]

Since you believe humans are doing it, you should get busy stopping those two hurricanes on top of you.

bit_pattern is just some mortal who posts on the internet; he can't tame two cyclones at the same time, one in each hand. You need Al Gore or Obama for that sort of thing.

 

[CapelDodger]

Sure there is evidence ... it's just nature/history repeating itself

Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events

You appear to be claiming here that a D-O event is under way. Just to get things crystal clear, am I right in that interpretation?

 

[CapelDodger]

Logger is coming from an entirely wrong set of facts, but he's reached the same conclusion I have. It doesn't matter what America does anymore. The developing world (mainly India and China) are going to use fossil fuels, and a lot of them. It's just too cheap and easy for them to not use oil and coal.

It's not easy for them to miss or deny the effects on air-quality and the costs that brings.

And there's too much money to be made in America exporting it to them.

At current prices, not so much. At higher prices it's not so cheap to use them.

We could reduce our emissions by 50% in the next five years, and it would only postpone the inevitable environmental collapse.

In the long-term we're all dead; putting it off a bit seems not such a bad idea.

I think our efforts now need to focus on geo-engineering our way out of this.

Which would only postpone the inevitable environmental collapse.

 

[CapelDodger]

Shock News – Massive Calving of Jakobshavn Isbræ
http://greatwhitecon.info/2015/02/shock-news-massive-calving-of-jakobshavn-isbrae/

Just an event, signifying little in itself, but freakin' epic.

 

[hgus]

Shock News – Massive Calving of Jakobshavn Isbræ
http://greatwhitecon.info/2015/02/shock-news-massive-calving-of-jakobshavn-isbrae/

Just an event, signifying little in itself, but freakin' epic.

"Chasing ice" is well worth seeing. It is beautiful and thought inspiring.

 

[Mikemcc]

Yes I have Mikemcc.

Have you ever thought about what is driving the "changes" in the Jet Stream ?

Hint: It's a repeat of the conditions that are linked to the LIA

Great contradiction there in one post!

From your first link:

Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis and colleagues link that wavy jet stream to a warming Arctic, where climate changes near the top of the world are happening faster than in Earth's middle latitudes.

A new study from Francis and University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist Stephen Vavrus, published in IOPscience, backs up that theory, with evidence linking regional and seasonal conditions in the Arctic to deeper north-south jet stream waves which will lead to more extreme weather across the country.

"The real story is how persistent the pattern has been. It's been this way nearly continually since December 2013…Warm in the west, cold in the east," Francis said. "We think with the warming Arctic these types of very wavy patterns, although probably not in the same locations, will happen more often in the future."

So how does a warming Arctic have any link to the LIA?

 

[Haig]

Great contradiction there in one post!

From your first link:


So how does a warming Arctic have any link to the LIA?

Not really any contradiction Mikemcc ... climate change can occur in stages and now we are at that change

Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly pdf

 

[Haig]

Understanding these changes and what actually drives the waviness and global positions of the Jet Stream is key to understanding Climate Change.

We are still unsure what is causing the movement of the Jet Stream!

The Jet Stream

Today, movement of the jet stream north has been detected indicating possible changes in climate. Whatever the position of the jet stream though, it has a significant impact on the world's weather patterns and severe weather events like floods and droughts. It is therefore essential that meteorologists and other scientists understand as much as possible about the jet stream and continue to track its movement, to in turn monitor such weather around the world.

 

[Haig]

Could the changes to the Jet Stream be Solar driven ?

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory say (below) interesting hints that solar activity is associated with climate, but we don't understand the association but even if there is a climate link, Pesnell doesn't think another grand minimum is likely to trigger a cold snap.

Sun Headed Into Hibernation, Solar Studies Predict

Three independent studies of the sun's insides, surface, and upper atmosphere all predict that the next solar cycle will be significantly delayed—if it happens at all. Normally, the next cycle would be expected to start roughly around 2020.

The combined data indicate that we may soon be headed into what's known as a grand minimum, a period of unusually low solar activity.

The predicted solar "sleep" is being compared to the last grand minimum on record, which occurred between 1645 and 1715.

Known as the Maunder Minimum, the roughly 70-year period coincided with the coldest spell of the Little Ice Age, when European canals regularly froze solid and Alpine glaciers encroached on mountain villages.

(See "Sun Oddly Quiet—Hints at Next 'Little Ice Age?'")

"We have some interesting hints that solar activity is associated with climate, but we don't understand the association," said Dean Pesnell, project scientist for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

Also, even if there is a climate link, Pesnell doesn't think another grand minimum is likely to trigger a cold snap.

"With what's happening in current times—we've added considerable amounts of carbon dioxide and methane and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere," said Pesnell, who wasn't involved in the suite of new sun studies.

"I don't think you'd see the same cooling effects today if the sun went into another Maunder Minimum-type behavior."

That was in 2011 but in 2013 NASA say this

Solar Variability and Terrestrial Climate

There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate. A new report issued by the National Research Council (NRC), "The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth's Climate," lays out some of the surprisingly complex ways that solar activity can make itself felt on our planet.

Interesting times ahead as our Star weakens after just passing Solar Cycle 24 extremely weak maximum and towards an even weaker prediction for Solar Cycle 25.

New Little Ice Age with conditions appearing very similar to Maunder Minimum times very likely it seems ???

Nothing we can do about it except prepare for tough times to come but that's Climate Change for you on a planet in orbit around a variable Sun.

 

[Haig]

Eastern U.S. record breaking cold and snow as seen from space

I think this is a great comment and is hard to argue with! Anyone care to ?

Pamela Gray February 21, 2015 at 10:53 am
These jet stream loops that allow Arctic excursions into humid lower latitudes is a mini lesson on how glacial ages creep forward.

Read about the herky jerky cold/warm jitters (less related to Milankovitch cycles that also produce cold regimes) that are likely related to long term weather pattern variations allowing cold Arctic incursions into lower lattitudes:

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc130k.html

See a visual representation of hypothesized glacial extent during these herky jerky cold, wet spells and compare that edge with the current picture in this post:

http://hugefloods.com/Pleistocene.html

Bottom line, you must have a cold incursions mixing with precipitable water vapor for ice age glacial buildup to happen. Kinda like what we have right now but happening frequently during longer seasonal cold periods such that summer melt is squeezed down in time in a 100 plus year pattern.

Anybody who can’t or won’t see this mini-lesson in how ice can advance have to come up with far-fetched triggers while ignoring the present mechanism that is so easily understood and entirely plausible.

 

[CapelDodger]

Understanding these changes and what actually drives the waviness and global positions of the Jet Stream is key to understanding Climate Change.

We are still unsure what is causing the movement of the Jet Stream!

The Jet Stream

Yes, we are. You, in contrast, appear to be absolutely certain about something.

Do you think a D-O event is currently under way?

 

[CapelDodger]

Eastern U.S. record breaking cold and snow as seen from space

I think this is a great comment and is hard to argue with! Anyone care to ?

Do you think there's a Little Ice Age coming or a full-blown glaciation?

 

[Warmer1]

I think this is a great comment and is hard to argue with! Anyone care to ?

From the article Haig provided here
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc130k.html

"The unstable nature of the Earth's climate history suggests that it may be liable to change suddenly in the future. By putting large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humans are exerting pressure on the climate system which might produce a drastic change without much prior warning. As the geologist W.S. Broecker has said, "Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks".

I think this is a great comment and is hard to argue with! Anyone care to ?

Can't argue with that. Nice find Haig!

 

[Mikemcc]

Strange Ice age that has the planet experiencing the highest temperatures in recorded history... (yes I know we are in an Ice Age, and just in an interglacial period... don't be pedantic!)

 

[Fudbucker]

Haig and Arnold Martin have the same old kind of harmless arguments, a mix of fantasy and ambulance chaser rhetoric in a low level. AM, by copypasta of texts being it really his personal version of the "Like" button disguised as some sort of endorsement; Haig by championing epistemological hedonism and seeing what s/he wants to see, like the failed interpretation of Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events, as if we hadn't enough contemporary instances of warmed high latitudes along with unusually cold mid latitudes, besides the fact of getting cores from the regions where ice was meant to stay and not to vanish. Is it possible some critical comment about figure 4 in the linked page above? Is it possible to include variations in ice levels and circulation change owing to the very fresh water and iceberg flushes this is supposed to evidence for?

So far, the same old ****, where these would-be "lawyers", inspired by watching Perry Mason reruns, apply the adversarial system logic as if it is related to science and try to deal with each thin individual thread that makes the extremely thick rope which ties AGW to the current climate as if their objections were breaking a link in a chain and making it all fall apart. The fact that they can't even identify a valid objection makes the whole scene even more sad. The last germ of a valid objection that I remember here was an argument sketched by AlBell months ago.

On the other hand, Fudbucker and logger have clearly little, if something, to say about this thread's subject but the intellectual equivalent of a piece of chalk scratching the blackboard. Epistemological hedonism on steroids, as the example of "we're not causing it but we can geo-engineer our way out of it" and Sesame St. economics like "carbon tax makes them get money in a context of higher fuel prices, global cooling and desperate masses rejecting liberalism in the end" -whatever liberalism is in the mind of this person-. Of course, not even the epistemologic level of someone getting 601 in their SAT tests. Let's call my words a strawman if you like, though it was never intended as a counterargument of what was said by them but as a description of decay of quality and off-topicality that permeates this forum.

Let's make it climate science focused for these intellectual powerhouses: You got a nearly exceptional Antarctic sea ice extent and area for the 40 days around and following last solstice.

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/i...timeseries.png

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosph...teractive.html

What did it mean in terms of the planet's energy budget during those days? What can you infer from the global temperature sets for those days, including the satellite golem built by I. Jones at Huntsville? The 12-month running average was record high by January 2015 (there's always a set that says it isn't so), what do you expect it to be by February 2015?

Let's remind denialists -and some warmers- that the Earth's orbit is not circular.

By the way, I would like an AGW sceptic answering this question (I never got any reply to it from them, here and everywhere. They suddenly become mute when asked this and similar basic questions): Which is warmer, a mass of air at 20°C with relative humidity 50% or the exact same mass of air at 19.3°C with relative humidity 70%? The reply has to be "scientific" and you may use any of them or both if you're doubting about it being a mass of dry air or wet air.

Don't put words in my mouth. I'm certain we're causing climate change, and it's going to devastate the environment unless we get a handle on it.

I'm claiming that realistically, efforts to prevent rising GHG's are going to fail because of several factors:
- Politically, the GOP is going to control the House and/or Senate for the foreseeable future. They will not approve any legislation that harms the fossil fuel industry.
- Financially, there is too much money at stake for American fossil fuel companies to reduce production of oil, coal, and natural gas. You'll notice that under Obama, the oil industry has boomed and America has become the number one producer of natural gas and oil in the world. We'll most likely have another Democrat president in 2016 and the same thing will happen.
- Developing countries, like India and China, are already addicted to cheap fossil fuel energy. We'll continue to supply it to them

Here's a graph of coal exports since Obama took office:

Does that look encouraging?

We have to be realists and look at the situation without rose-colored glasses. We're going to blow past the two-degree warming threshold without a look back. We'll have to have plans in place to stop runaway global warming.

 

[Fudbucker]

It's not easy for them to miss or deny the effects on air-quality and the costs that brings.

Chinese cities have had horrific air quality for years. It hasn't stopped anything. The Chinese people are not going to revolt because it's smoggy.

And there's too much money to be made in America exporting it to them.

At current prices, not so much. At higher prices it's not so cheap to use them.

I would welcome higher prices. They make alternative-energy sources look feasible. Wind is finally becoming competitive with coal and natural gas, but not to scale. It doesn't even make up 1% of power production in America.

Low fossil fuel prices are not good for the environment.

We could reduce our emissions by 50% in the next five years, and it would only postpone the inevitable environmental collapse.

In the long-term we're all dead; putting it off a bit seems not such a bad idea.

I agree, but it costs money to power a country with renewables. China and India are going to go the cheap route.

I think our efforts now need to focus on geo-engineering our way out of this.

Which would only postpone the inevitable environmental collapse.

If we could successfully cool the planet, we might buy enough time to start a crash-program of renewable energy generation and usage. We might even buy enough time for it to have a positive effect on the climate.

 

[Warmer1]

We'll have to have plans in place to stop runaway global warming.

That would be the goal for many people participating here who clearly comprehend the staggering rate of change that is occurring and the nasty near future implications, including the massive loss of life that will likely increase on our planet which is already well underway. As an example the Great Barrier Reef has lost 50% of it's coral cover in only the last 30 years.

Unfortunately the human mind has not evolved enough from the hunter gatherer stage to allow our species to prevent our own mass extinction.

People continue to be climate science deniers even though they cannot find one single academy of science, or institute of higher education, anywhere in the world that agrees with their position on the issue. According to climate science deniers the entire international scientific community is wrong and deniers are correct, or there is a sooper secret conspiracy underway where all the climate scientists around the world contacted each other and secretly decided to lie about climate change, and of course 97% of climate scientists would never speak out about the global conspiracy and tell the truth. Sound a little ill????

Climate science deniers also cannot grasp that the most intelligent people on the planet do not agree with them. It seems they are not capable of considering what the most intelligent people believe. Climate science deniers believe they are more intelligent than Richard Branson, Bills Gates, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Steven Hawking, etc. just to name a few, as well as many other institutions such as The US Military, The Union of Concerned Scientists, NASA, NOAA, The Smithsonian Institute, Shell Oil, BP, The EPA, The CIA, The FBI, The AAAS, National Geographic, and on and on and on.

Try to imagine being a climate science denier and believing that you are more intelligent than all of the following entities listed in the following link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

The cognitive dissonance of the masses will wipe us all out.

 

[bit_pattern]

Does that look encouraging?

I look at that chart and I see the biggest collapse in US coal exports outside of the events around the great recession of 2008 - that's China and, yes, it does look encouraging, Is it ideal? No but it is encouraging.

Chinese cities have had horrific air quality for years. It hasn't stopped anything. The Chinese people are not going to revolt because it's smoggy.

I know we've danced this dance before but I don't think you really understand the dynamics of Chinese politics.

I agree, but it costs money to power a country with renewables. China and India are going to go the cheap route.

China is peaking it's coal consumption as we speak and will be rolling out 1000 GW of new renewable capacity and around 200 GW (iirc, that's just off the top of my head) of new nuclear capacity over the next 15 years.