Moderated Global Warming Discussion

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Saggy said:
I did, and just found the answer .... (note - right clicking on the photo didn't work for me, using Firefox, but just going up the chain in the URL did) .. at

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/IceVolume.php

Arctic Sea Ice Volume Anomaly

Sea Ice Volume is calculated using the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) developed at APL/PSC by Dr. J. Zhang and collaborators.


So, it's an elaborate procedure with measurements, models, etc., etc., with the definitive description here ..

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/IDAO/index.html

From the above link .....

A Pan-Arctic Ice-Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) is used for this project. PIOMAS is a coupled Parallel Ocean and sea Ice Model (POIM, Zhang and Rothrock 2003) with capabilities of assimilating ice concentration and velocity data. It is formulated in a generalized orthogonal curvilinear coordinate (GOCC) system and designed to run on computers with a single processor or massively parallel processors. PIOMAS couples the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) with a thickness and enthalpy distribution (TED) sea-ice model. The POP model is developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The TED sea-ice model is a dynamic thermodynamic model that also explicitly simulates sea-ice ridging. The model originates from the Thorndike et al. (1975) thickness distribution theory and is recently enriched by enthalpy distribution theory (Zhang and Rothrock, 2001). It has 12 categories each for ice thickness, ice enthalpy, and snow ((Zhang et al., 2000). This multicategory TED model consists of seven main components: a viscous-plastic ice rheology that determines the relationship between ice internal stress and ice deformation (Hibler 1979), a mechanical redistribution function that determines ice ridging (Thorndike et al. 1975; Rothrock, 1975; Hibler, 1980), a momentum equation that determines ice motion, a heat equation that determines ice growth/decay and ice temperature, an ice thickness distribution equation that conserves ice mass (Thorndike et al. 1975; Hibler, 1980), an ice enthalpy distribution equation that conserves ice thermal energy (Zhang and Rothrock, 2001), and a snow thickness distribution equation that conserves snow mass (Flato and Hibler, 1995). The ice momentum equation is solved using Zhang and Hibler's (1997) ice dynamics model that employs a line successive relaxation technique with a tridiagonal matrix solver, which has been found to be particularly useful for parallel computing (Zhang and Rothrock, 2003). The heat equation is solved over each ice thickness category using a modified three-layer thermodynamic model (Winton, 2000). The configuration of the finite-difference grid of PIOMAS is shown below.

OK, so how many people on the planet understand the above?
Click to expand...

Sounds pretty straight-forward to me, I would imagine that the number of people with the capacity to understand the above ranges in the tens of millions for a low-end, rough estimation.

So, does it boil down to - Do you trust Jinlun Zhang, or not?
Click to expand...

Trust would seem irrelevent as it details the process and references the necessary details.
 
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Saggy said:
So, it's an elaborate procedure
Click to expand...
That boils down to: volume is area X thickness

Saggy said:
OK, so how many people on the planet understand the above?
Click to expand...
The ice is drifting and this needs to be accounted for because the thickness observations they have are not taken at specific times or locations. This really isn’t all that hard to understand.
Saggy said:
So, does it boil down to - Do you trust Jinlun Zhang, or not?
Click to expand...

You can either reproduce his math yourself or trust peer review to catch any significant errors. Either way you don’t need to trust him specifically. Really, it seems like you are trying to argue that “it’s all just to complex for you to understand therefore you are not sure if it’s true”
 
One wonders if it needs simple like Russia opening a port facility in the Arctic Ocean to get it through....

Russian gas tanker forges Arctic passage to China
August 25, 2010 by Alissa de Carbonnel A Russian gas tanker, the Baltica, is sailing from Russia's northernmost port of Murmansk to China

Enlarge

A NASA-issued photo shows the end of the Arctic's melt season. A Russian gas tanker is this month making a historic voyage across the famed Northeast passage as receding ice opens up an elusive trade route from Asia to the West sought for centuries by explorers.y.
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http://www.physorg.com/news201951880.html

maybe he thinks the biome is in on the conspiracy :boggled:

The greening trends observed in the satellite data are now supported by quantitative, long-term in situ vegetation measurements from the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) and the Back to the Future (BTF) projects. As in the satellite measurements, the most evident changes appear to be occurring first in the sparsely vegetated areas of the far North. A study of plots at Alexandra Fiord, Ellesmere Island is the first to demonstrate significant changes in above and below ground biomass over the last 25-30 years (Hill and Henry, 2010, accepted; Hudson and Henry, 2009) (Fig. V2). In addition, there has been a change in the relative abundance of species with an increase in the dominant species over this same time period. The changes in the tundra plant communities are most likely in response to the increase in air temperature over the past 35 years of between 0.6-1.0°C/decade, with the strongest increases seen in the winter temperatures. The increases in biomass also correspond with longer growing seasons, with extensions into the late summer, and with deeper active layers (depth of summer soil thawing). In another far-north Canada study, repeat photographs of permanent vegetation study plots 46 years after their initial installation near the Lewis Glacier, Baffin Island, document rapid vegetation changes along the margins of large retreating glaciers (Johnson et al., 2009; Webber and Tweedie, personal communication, 2009).
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http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/vegetation.html
 
lomiller said:
Really, it seems like you are trying to argue that “it’s all just to complex for you to understand therefore you are not sure if it’s true”
Click to expand...

That is correct. I would like to see a simple argument that I can understand and that is has data to back it up.

Otherwise, I would have to believe the argument on trust. I do generally trust science, but based on what I know so far I don't trust Zhang and his PIOMAS program. It does not appear to be established science but rather it is the work of one group. It's completely new, it's obscure, I have no idea how many people have even attempted to understand it outside his own group, much less verify it. Just reading the abstract it looks like a parody ! of an incomprehensible mishmash.
 
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Saggy said:
That is correct. I would like to see a simple argument that I can understand and that is has data to back it up.
Otherwise, I would have to believe the argument on trust. I do generally trust science, but based on what I know so far I don't trust Zhang and his PIOMAS program. It does not appear to be established science but rather it is the work of one group. It's completely new, it's obscure, I have no idea how many people have even attempted to understand it outside his own group, much less verify it. Just reading the abstract it looks like a parody ! of an incomprehensible mishmash.
Click to expand...

We are influencing the climate.
 
Chodorov said:
Well thats a powerful argument you have there fella. I don't think the woo-town-clan are going to best that fantastic argument of yours.

Yet the fact is that we cannot show any warming since the 30's. So much for the effect of CO2.
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Could you demonstrate this lack of warming, data, evidence and citations.

Sorry at this point it is just an assertion you have made.
 
Tell ya what Chodo ....you email Dr. Gammon and state your opinion....

likely hear the howls of laughter from here


Here is what Gammon had to say concerning links between humans and climate change.

This is like asking, ‘Is the moon round?’ or ‘Does smoking cause cancer?’ We’re at a point now where there is no responsible position stating that humans are not responsible for climate change. That is just not where the science is.…For a long time, for at least five years and probably 10 years, the international scientific community has been very clear.”

In case there is any doubt, Gammon went on:
This is not the balance-of-evidence argument for a civil lawsuit; this is the criminal standard, beyond a reasonable doubt We’ve been there for a long time and I think the media has really not presented that to the public.”

Dr. Richard H. Gammon
Professor of Chemistry and Oceanography*
Adjunct Professor Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Originally Posted by Saggy

That is correct. I would like to see a simple argument that I can understand and that is has data to back it up.
Click to expand...
If you actually bothered to read any atmospheric science you would understand that C02 can be a feedback or a forcing.....
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/

Without fossil carbon injected into the atmosphere by us or by magna intrusions into carboniferous strata the normal carbon cycle magnifies changes in either direction from forcings like Milankovitch cycles.
As the world cools in the ice part of the cycle a colder ocean takes up more C02 and so the cooling trend is magnified both by lower C02 and lower water vapour.
So a small change is magnified.

In the other direction as the planet moves into a warmer part of the orbit/tilt/precession the oceans warm, C02 and companion water vapour increase and it's magnified in the direction of greater warmth until a radiative equilibrium is reached.

Again very basic atmospheric processes basically outlined and understood for a 100 years or more and warned about for 60 or more.

Without C02 earth would be tens of degrees C cooler.

Add 50% C02 from sequestered fossil stores - as is happening now and has happened in the past then the radiative balance changes as more heat is trapped by again - a process understood by theory and observation for over a 100 years,

We HAVE done that to the point where the C02 levels are higher than any point in 15 million years.....the global climate is warming as a result - the oceans and cryosphere act as dampers but they have tremendous hysteresis and once started the process is inexorable.

Where uncertainty lies is in how fast the additional energy will show up in the climate and weather systems.
Already there is substantially more water vapour load as the result of a warmer atmosphere and you get more extreme rain and snow events as a result.
Hydrology changes are leading edge as is desertification.....advancing quickly in Southern Europe.

Is the reduced radiation to space observable...yes, the boundary above the troposphere has observed cooling a result expected.

Eventually a new radiative balance will be struck if we do not continue to add GHG gases or kick off something like a methane release from clathrates.

and unlike methane carbon sticks around....in human terms....forever.....

So each year accumulates and the effect persists. Methane is more powerful but drops out.

Short of active removal of C02 what we have set in motion stays - it does not decay back to pre -industrial levels in anything short of 100k years.

That's 100,000 years in case you are math challenged.

Your descendants will curse you for being obdurate and rightfully so..

The actual physics and processes are rather simple despite your best efforts to say otherwise.

The pace and timing of the outcome is far from simple.
What to do about it even more difficult.

The start point in dealing with a problem is acknowledging it's existence.
Your denial in the face of the world science community is nothing short of

:dl: ...hubris writ large.
 
Saggy said:
So, it's an elaborate procedure with measurements, models, etc., etc., with the definitive description here...

A Pan-Arctic Ice-Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) is used for this project. PIOMAS is a coupled Parallel Ocean and sea Ice Model (POIM, Zhang and Rothrock 2003) with capabilities of assimilating ice concentration and velocity data. It is formulated in a generalized orthogonal curvilinear coordinate (GOCC) system and designed to run on computers with a single processor or massively parallel processors. PIOMAS couples the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) with a thickness and enthalpy distribution (TED) sea-ice model. The POP model is developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The TED sea-ice model is a dynamic thermodynamic model that also explicitly simulates sea-ice ridging. The model originates from the Thorndike et al. (1975) thickness distribution theory and is recently enriched by enthalpy distribution theory (Zhang and Rothrock, 2001). It has 12 categories each for ice thickness, ice enthalpy, and snow ((Zhang et al., 2000). This multicategory TED model consists of seven main components: a viscous-plastic ice rheology that determines the relationship between ice internal stress and ice deformation (Hibler 1979), a mechanical redistribution function that determines ice ridging (Thorndike et al. 1975; Rothrock, 1975; Hibler, 1980), a momentum equation that determines ice motion, a heat equation that determines ice growth/decay and ice temperature, an ice thickness distribution equation that conserves ice mass (Thorndike et al. 1975; Hibler, 1980), an ice enthalpy distribution equation that conserves ice thermal energy (Zhang and Rothrock, 2001), and a snow thickness distribution equation that conserves snow mass (Flato and Hibler, 1995). The ice momentum equation is solved using Zhang and Hibler's (1997) ice dynamics model that employs a line successive relaxation technique with a tridiagonal matrix solver, which has been found to be particularly useful for parallel computing (Zhang and Rothrock, 2003). The heat equation is solved over each ice thickness category using a modified three-layer thermodynamic model (Winton, 2000). The configuration of the finite-difference grid of PIOMAS is shown below.
Click to expand...


...OK, so how many people on the planet understand the above?
Click to expand...


Seems there are a number of posters on this thread who do understand the above. But, I am with you, I don't understand it either, except in broad outline after looking up the meaning of several terms used. :o
But that is why we have experts!

So, does it boil down to - Do you trust Jinlun Zhang, or not?
Click to expand...


Short of becoming an expert yourself, you actually have no choice.
Either that or believe what the non-experts say. :rolleyes:

And you can't become an expert yourself.
These guys have been working in their field for decades and have become the top experts in their field. Accepting for the moment that we are capable of understanding all this stuff, you and I just don't have that sort of time and, even if we did, we might become one of the "also rans" rather than one of the top experts in the field.

In other words we really have no choice but trust the experts.
...provided, of course, that what they say has gone through furnace of the peer review process,

Even after peer review, there remains the possiblity that the experts have got it wrong and, again, we no choice but trust that the methodology of science will bring that out in the long run. As far as AGW is concerned, however, I think we have reached "the long run" and probably did so about 5-10 years ago.

The thing that has reinforced the reality of AGW for me is looking at the arguments of the climate deniers and then looking at the responses provided by the climate experts. The climate deniers make all sorts of mistakes incuding the misreading of data, misinterpretation of the language used, misquoting as well as sometimes actually lying and they never seem to be willing to correct their errors even when they been pointed out on many occasions. On the other hand, the experts seem only too happy to recognise errors and correct them.

There are also climate scientists who are climate sceptics (as opposed to climate deniers). We need to keep listening to their arguments whilst, at the same time, remembering that the general consensus view of the all the climate scientists combined is much more likely to be correct. Interestingly that percentage is about 97% v 3% of top climate scientists who agree with AGW. Where do you place your bets with these sort of odds?
 
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