What it is clear to me is that, even if you do not want to acknowledge it, your message is to just not do much of anything in controlling emissions; but that is betting not just the farm but many states, that could get an increase in hurricanes (and for sure an increase in their intensity) and then to lose a lot of money. Those costs could be added to the costs that many other states or nations will have to face most likely: such as an increase in droughts, loss of land thanks to ocean rise and the loss of resources thanks to ocean acidification and changes in precipitation.
Here is once again the explanation from Jennifer Frances at Rutgers University that it is clear you skipped many, many times in the past, were she explains why is that a reduction of the wind speeds in the upper atmosphere is not a reason to expect less extreme weather events:
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A short review of how the jetstream and Rossby waves work, and some emerging indications that the dynamics may be changing in a warming world.
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Longer explanation about the connection that has with extreme weather events:
With the political turn to fantasy and increased CO2 emissions, it looks like the “clathrate gun” could go off in the next 12 years or so. At least rapid flooding due to subsiding land in the world’s major cities, combined with rolling droughts and heatwaves, will lead to deaths in the hundreds of millions. Maybe if the death toll from catastrophe and accidental environmental genocide hits two billion, this will take a little strain off a planet swiftly losing room for mankind.
Wow, compared to the probable chaos of disappearing nations and a few billion refugeesand that’s just the human costneutron bombs are starting to look relatively friendly!
Ocean is not static, and the 1 m is the average worldwide. Depending on local shape of the coast and shelf, it can be much more.
Oceans have tides, which, depending on local conditions, mean that you Need much more than a 1m sea wall.
Steel-reinforced concrete “doesn’t grow on trees”: worldwide, the right Kind of sand is getting scarce (see the GQ thread on Daytona Beach for links), which means that concrete will either be shoddier or very expensive.
And steel is made from iron using a lot of heat = energy.
Ocean is not static: waves Keep battering at some parts, eating away natural shorelines and coasts (see e.g. parts of the British coast in danger of collapse that are cleared by the govt.) In Addition, rising temps. lead to higher water temp. in the ocean, leads to more warm vapour-laden air, leads to more and violent hurricanes and so on.
Also, water expanding as it warms (aside from melted ice adding water volume) means that Tide flows will be more violent.
So it’s not a case of “we build one seawall and are safe”, it’s a case of “concrete is getting scarce, we Need a seawall much higher than 1 m (and even then water will get over it quite often with spring Tide and hurricanes and storms) and we will Need to repair it (with concrete getting scarcer in the future) regularly.”
The Money spent on ads denying global warming and Lobbying politicans could be spent much better in investing solar and wind to shut down coal, for a start, or improve infrastructure so less cars are necessary.
Hundreds of Huge Craters Discovered in the Arctic Ocean
The potentially ominous depressions in the sea floor formed after ice sheets melted, letting trapped methane blow out.
One of many factors that, once the 2-3 C mark is stepped over, will dramatically increase the Speed of warming from the current linear pace to a sharper angle: in this case, melting ice Releases methane which Speeds up global warming. (Plus less ice = less refraction of sunlight, more absorbtion => further temp. increase).
Liquids conform to the shape of the container, even local average sea level is unaffected by the shape of the coast lines … “Water seeks it’s own level” is based on the surface having equal gravitational potential … thus any difference must have another force acting on the water … what you seem to be describing is a hydraulic bore and so you’ll need to specify what force would be causing this … and why this force was unavailable these past several million years …
Kitchen counter science … half fill the sink with water and let the turbulence dampen down … now pour a glass of water into the sink … see how the surface level universally increases … the water doesn’t “build up” where it was poured in (except of course when you’re actually pouring the water in) … use oobleck (corn starch + water) instead of water, the process is the same but it happens much much slower … eventually the mound will sink until the surface is level …
Note The Master specified 1 m sea level increase and a 1 m land subsidence for His 2 m total … land subsidence is unrelated to CO[sub]2[/sub] in the atmosphere … Washington DC is a GREAT example of this, but The Master’s article is about what bad things will happen … Washington DC sinking below the ocean’s waves may actually be a good thing …
The tidal force is a component of the Moon’s gravity on the Earth … global warming isn’t increasing the mass of the Moon nor is it causing the Moon to orbit closer to the Earth … the 1 m average sea level increase means high tide will be 1 m higher, and no more … if a community is already being flooded by tides, the community has bigger problems than global warming … go look how high the tide gets this January 2nd, 2018, add 1 m … that will be the highest tide in a century … underwhelming isn’t it?
I’ve never heard of this “critical shortage of aggregate” … I don’t mean to be insulting here, but this idea is really scraping the bottom of the barrel as it were … pressure wash a railroad coal car and it’ll be completely suitable for hauling sand and gravel … and if you are right, then we’ve a serious argument against building commercial nuclear power plants … not sure wood is an effective substitute material for building cooling towers or containment structures …
Cement production has a rather large carbon footprint … heating limestone up to 1,000ºC in a kiln requires burning a shitload of fossil fuels … and at those temperatures, any mercury in the limestone matrix is vaporized and released to the environment … I agree the cost of concrete will be increasing at a profound rate, but this has nothing to do with a national shortage of rocks … just saying …
There’s a general misunderstanding about how much absolute humidity affects hurricanes … with higher air temperatures, the air can hold more water vapor and it’s 2.2 J/g of latent heat of evaporation … but this extra energy doesn’t do anything as long as it’s contained in the water vapor … far far far more important is relative humidity, and there’s nothing in the physics here that says average relative humidity is changing over climatic time periods … either your air mass is 100% relative humidity, or it’s not; there’s no in-between here … and the air has to be 100% relative humidity before it will release it’s latent heat, no matter the absolute humidity … as long as the need to transport energy from the equator to the poles remains the same, then hurricane frequency/intensity will remain the same …
My argument is that if the need to move this energy is less, then all the turbulence caused by this movement will be less …
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1] I agree the Earth is warming
2] I agree man-kind’s activities contribute to this effect
3] Only the hyperbole is bad, what’s most likely in our future is (at best) … an inconvenience …
There are better reasons to stop burning fossil fuels …
It is actually more underwhelming when it is clear that you are ignoring the evidence. (Already posted here; so your point here is double underwhelming) when one looks at the rate of cap ice loss it is clear that the ocean rise will be higher than that.
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And still ignoring what the polar experts told us. I will have to add here that you are ignoring that the increase in heat on the polar regions is making the temperature differences from the poles to the mid latitudes to be less, but the changes are not what you need to avoid extreme weather events.
As for the point that we can disregard humidity, it seems that it comes from the evidence that shows less of an increase over land, but this ignore that over the oceans the increase is observed, this is just another version of a favorite contrarian argument of looking at an specific area to discount the whole.
Nope, you are ignoring plenty of evidence that tell us that we need to do more to make it an inconvenience. You are indeed just pushing for not doing much about this.
It is clear that your comprehension of climate dynamics is even more tenuous than that on the use of punctuation but I’ll spend a few moments to address your more egregious misapprehensions.
First of all, I’ll reiterate that the rise in average sea level and erosion of low lying areas is about the least of the dramatic issues with climate change. Nonetheless, the notion that even the most wealthy nations with protect thousands of miles of coastline and river deltas with water control and flood abatement systems at a construction and maintenance cost that isn’t going to be prohibitive is pure fantasy. Such structures not only have to cope with the increase in average high tide level but storm surges, increasingly aggressive tropical and mid-latitude cyclones, flooding due to excessively heavy rainfall, and backups in delta structures due to storm surges and flooding. Such events can wipe out entire port cities and devastate regions as both the occupants of New Orleans and citizens of the Netherlands can attest to despite extensive efforts to protect those areas. In poorer nations with large low laying areas prone to flooding, relocation of the population (or just letting them suffer through devastating storms) is the only option.
You misconstrue the hazard to currently fertile agricultural regions as desertification; while this is a concern in the long run as tropical and temperate zones shift poleward and there is more difficulty maintaining temperate wetlands, but the more immediate impacts are high fluctuations in rainfall, and subsequent depletion of fertile topsoil from both flooding and drought-induced dust storms. We’ve already seen clear indications if abnormal seasonal cycles due to changes in the stability of normal seasonal hydrological cycles. This will place an even greater burden on so-called “fossil water” aquifers such as the Ogallala Aquifer, and further competition for upstream water rights in regions such as the Indus Basin.
The release of methane from benthic clathrates is not the “magical property” you sardonically castigate, but instead releases methane into the atmosphere where it acts as a potent greenhouse gas, capturing infrared radiation escaping from the Earth at a rate eighty-six times as effectively as carbon dioxide. Unlike carbon dioxide, methane eventually breaks down; unfortunately, it does so as carbon dioxide and water vapor, further increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the upper atmosphere.
Your “simple application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics” to climate dynamics and the assumption that rising temperatures in the polar and temperate regions will result in less climate activity as the Earth comes to some kind of equilibrium are risible to an extreme. The Earth’s climate is not an equilibrium system, and if the amount of energy it retains from solar incidence increases and is not stabilized through natural heat sinks (e.g. the polar ice caps, circulation of lower temperature water) then the response has to be more energetic just, to use your “kitchen counter science” as water in a heated pot will boil with increasing turbulence. You are correct in one sense that as the ocean heats up and the polar regions lose ice the ocean currents will suffer reduced mean flow, resulting in a stratification. This will not result in your claimed “less extreme events and they will be less powerful (on average)”, a point you would understand had you actually bothered to read the link at the bottom of the very article you cited: NASA Earth Observatory: “In a Warming World, Storms May Be Fewer but Stronger”.
Please learn something of actual climatology before trying to make authoritative claims about climate dynamics. And also get yourself a copy of Strunk & White and learn how to form sentences and paragraphs instead of this vomiting ellipsis stream-of-consciousness.
Tough talk … kinda thin on science … as long as you insist that methane can move from its solid state into its gaseous state without the addition of energy, I’m going to question your understanding of thermodynamics … which is saying something because my own understanding of such is rudimentary at best … I’d suggest a textbook on physics, but I think you’d be better off with a textbook on chemistry … the information about change-in-state is the same but the math isn’t quite as thick …
If all you have is hyperbole … you should maybe stick to criticizing other people’s written English skills … something you know a little about …
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The NWS is reporting (Public Advisory #20) that Ocean Springs, MS received 18.74" of rain from Tropical Storm Cindy these past couple of days … not hyperbole, just routine … climate change not required …
…Without additional energy? Um… buddy… The whole point is that there is a ton of additional energy going into the ocean! I’m rather confused as to your confusion here. The water gets warmer, and therefore solid gases melt. What’s so complex about that?
Critiquing my posts as “kind of thin on science” is pretty farcical from a poster who hasn’t even read the links he cites and introduces counterfactual speculation bordering on fantasy, e.g. by retaining more thermal energy the atmosphere will come to some kind of equilibrium where storms are less energetic, which belies any comprehension of how storm systems form and evolve. I’m not going to attempt a survey of fundamental atmospheric science in the length of a message board post, but if you actually want to understand the subject you are attempting to pontificate over, a good place to start is Wallace and Hobbes Atmospheric Science, Second Edition: An Introductory Survey. To understand it you’re going to need a more comprehensive grasp on atmospheric thermodynamics (Chapter 3) but the areas salient to this discussion are atmospheric dynamics (Chapter 7), weather systems (Chapter 8), interactions between the atmosphere and ocean and terrestrial surface of the plaet (Chapter 9), and the parameters that lead to variability in local climate dynamics (Chapter 10, Sections 2 and 3). While the book is an introductory survey that does not delve deeply into upper atmosphere dynamics and long term predictive climate models, it does have a section on the effects of greenhouse gases (Chapter 10, Section 4) that serves as a basic primer for what is known.
As for “…methane can move from its solid state into its gaseous state without the addition of energy…” that energy comes from heat retained by excessive atmospheric carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere and being transferred to the ocean, mostly by convection. With dramatic reductions in sea ice minimums based on upon satellite observations from 1980, the stability of temperatures in arctic zones which accumulate methane clathrates, as well as regions which nominally receive cold water currents stabilizing temperatures where clathrates form in temperate and near-equatorial benthic regions, the release of methane from methane clathrate ice is speculated with some circumstantial evidence, although it is unclear how much of the methane makes it to the ocean surface and transfers to the atmosphere. However, even a modest exchange of methane from clathrate reserves to the atmosphere may act as a significant accelerant to greenhouse warming processes in a shorter term than carbon dioxide released by combustion processes and escape of carbon dioxide sequestered in permafrost. We have no historical examples of this occurring and only sparse circumstantial data that this may have occurred in the past leading to dramatic shifts in climate behavior and global average temperature, but climate models indicate that this “clathrate gun hypothesis” is plausible and would create an open feedback loop should it occur. If you actually want to learn something about methane clathrate distribution, concentration, and potential action the United States Geological Survey has and entire program dedicated to the study of subsea methane clathrates.
On the other hand, if you just want to throw out thinly veiled invective in the form of labelling any response you don’t like as “hyperbole”, please continue with your fact-free regurgitation of barely connected thoughts.
1] There exists a temperature inversion in the oceans … it gets colder as we descend … this inhibits convection … adding energy to the surface just increases this temperature inversion … we’re left with conducting this energy down the water column … and conduction is a notoriously slow process …
2] Water is densest at 4ºC, thus this is the temperature at the bottom of the ocean …
These two complexities together are going to make an extremely s-l-o-w process to bring this extra energy down to the bottom of the ocean where we are trying to melt the methane … I’ll even go as far as saying we first have to melt every last ice crystal at or near the ocean surface first, where we’re applying our extra energy … if you remember, the liquid water from ice melt is 0ºC, and that’s buoyant in the water column … a 2ºC temperature increase due to global warming over the next hundred years still keeps this ice melt buoyant …
I’m not saying this doesn’t happen, just the amounts of methane reaching the atmosphere with this mechanic is trivial compared to even natural seepage … which in turn is trivial compared to a horrifically leaky natural gas infrastructure … good luck getting the rate-payers to spend all the extra money to fix that particular problem …
All of this is very complex … and everything affects everything else … it just takes one parameter to be uncertain to cast all the projections into uncertainty … really the only thing we can say is for certain is the cost of energy is going to rise … conserve or pay, your choice … and we knew this way way back during the Carter administration …
This is really silly, the parameter you are talking here is yet another one of the specific ones that groups like the IPCC have not dealt with much because it is indeed uncertain, the gross simplification you are going for ignores that most of the numbers used in the projections for many other factors have been studied, you are thinking with magic here, because it looks as if you do think that minimizing what Budget Player Cadet then minimizes everything else. Wrong, wrong wrong.
The very, very basic point you are missing here is that the calthrate releasing methane would be very bad if it comes later as a result of continuous warming, a warming that that does not need that extra carbon to see it increase. In other words, this is just your ongoing mantra of trying to pretend that the uncertainty of things like hurricanes, for example, will not increase in a warming world.
Many of the cost projections I see are based on the likelihood of different factors taking place in a warming world. The problem for you is that you are somehow thinking that telling us that the effect of the less likely things such as the calthrate gun are being added to the projections right now. That is wrong. (It can point to even worse scenarios, but that is, once again in addition to the ones that are already more likely to take place)
BTW what I did point early was about the methane stored in the permafrost, that is indeed a bit different than the calthrate that Budget Player Cadet was going about.
The point is that conservative groups like the IPCC are already missing a lot about how fast the poles are melting, and that leads to things that were more uncertain as the release of methane from the permafrost to become more likely. In your attempt at making this to be just a nuisance you are indeed ignoring that what science groups have warned us mostly about it are things that are the most likely to happen in a warming world. Things that are already not likely to be “just a nuisance”.
So, the methane release from the permafrost is becoming more likely, issues like the Clathrate gun (not really the same thing, but related to methane anyhow) are becoming plausible, and the warming that will cause will increase the level of ocean rise, number of droughts, etc. But those last 2 items and others were investigated early, continue to be investigated; and in the case of the loss of cap ice, the early projections are showing to be inadequate already. It is worse than expected and so it will the ocean rise.
As mentioned many times before, your point of this becoming just “a nuisance” does ignore first that many science groups do not add factors nilly Willy. Factors that are more likely to come are but there remains a frustration from many researchers that find evidence that we will have to add to the already bad levels of increase worse numbers than were predicted. However when I remember the history of this is that the new research will eventually be added the new reports. And so it will also lead to the likely increase on the costs that we still have to deal with the issue in the near and far future.
Items like what calthrate methane would do in a warming world (and again, do not forget that methane in the permafrost is more likely to become a problem first), what hurricanes and tornadoes would do in the same, are issues that depend on when we control the issue ahead of the time those nasty factors may take place. Again, trying to tell others that we should gamble and assume with even less evidence that those items will never be added to the items that already the experts expect that will increase our costs is really reckless.
It’s always risky to make long period predictions based on short period data sets … too much uncertainty … and it’s not like the middle ground between the two extremes isn’t enough to curtail fossil fuel burning … and to both sides of this debate: “It’d be foolish to make such [claims] now.”
I think that as Peter Hadfield would say, the deniers out there in this case too are just copying and pasting what one or few denier blogs misunderstood or missing:
The other issue is that wile we humans are living in the troposphere the temperature of it is not surface temperature, were humans, the oceans and the cap ice are located.
I was forgetting another issue, the problem here is with the modeling of the tropospheric temperatures. As noted, most of the modeling has been close to the real world at the surface of the planet, where we live and the oceans and cap ice are located (of course the biggest issue has been with the modeling of cap ice loss but then again it is a different area than atmospheric modeling). And it is not just computer modeling what is telling us how sensitive the atmosphere reacts to the increase of CO2. Here one should remember that deniers attempt to use the less reliable tropospheric temperatures (that are really not surface temperatures) in a dumb attempt to even discredit more direct methods of recording the actual temperatures. (And it is really sad that it has to be pointed here that those are not modeled temperatures, that is what the record shows)
Really watchwolf49, it is when the deniers report that we should be distrustful of the science the time when we all should be skeptic about them based on the well documented acts of misleading and disinformation recorded many, many times; so no, the default should not be that “both sides are doing the same”, they are not. You are reaching for the fallacy of the middle ground. The issues with tropospheric measurements and modeling have been noted and reported for years.
What the study did was to make us understand the climate better and the reasons why models were not getting the troposphere right (in this case the point can be made that the deniers are the ones that are deeper in the hole for depending on the troposphere as a way to justify their denial of what is happening with surface temperatures).
