Why would you take the fact that ice sheets are disintegrating much faster than models predict to be evidence that there is no change happening?!? That makes no sense at all.
Yeah, Blake seems to be arguing here that if a particular model under-predicts the extent of an expected effect, then we have to throw out all the models relating to a particular theory and all the conclusions derived from observations in light of those models.
This seems kind of silly. I may think, for example, that current uncertainties about the nature and behavior of “dark energy” indicate that more work has to be done in cosmology to come up with some more satisfactory answers. But that doesn’t mean that I have to toss out, say, the whole theory of general relativity and assume that it’s worthless as a model of how gravity works. Baby/bathwater, folks.
re: the OP
Perhaps NASA’s PR dept were just trying to keep an under-informed official from embarassing the agency by contributing needlessly to the apocalyptic hysteria. They may have been trying to get him to read some alternative analyses:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=021706G
(This article addresses the paper in Science that Hansen may have used as a reference. I didn’t feel like subscribing to the Independent, and I didn’t find his entire piece posted elswhere, so I’m making the assumption.)
Furthermore, the jury still seems to be out on the entire issue of drawing conclusions about global climate change from glacial mass.:
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/subject/g/summaries/glaciers.jsp
Perhaps those attempting to do so could (and I’m using the same causality-linkage that Dr. Michaels did, between hurricanes and Arctic glaciers) take a lesson from those studying the link between hurricanes and global warming:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000723consensus_statement_.html
(Upshot: “We don’t know.”)
Maybe not, but I do:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/clim/2004/00000063/F0020001/05140445
(This relates to the 60+ year cooling trend around Greenland’s coastline, another piece Hansen could stand to read.)
Not exactly:
(The last paragraph discusses a survey of climatologists which found at “a quarter of respondents still question whether human activity is responsible for the most recent climatic changes”.)
And besides, who’s to say that sea level rise by glacial melt isn’t being offset by preciptation elasewhere:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/308/5730/1898
Just for fun, here’s the survey of Greenland’s ice sheet interior. I believe this is the survey that Dr. Michaels observes was pointedly ignored in the most recent Science paper.
Whoops, left off the final link:
would the James Glassman listed as editor of your “technology and science newsletter” (which actually does not exist as a “letter”, meaning ink on paper) be this James Glassman? (if .so, he is my kind of optimist–let’s all party like it’s nineteen ninety-nine…)
“Actually, conditions don’t have to get a lot better to justify Dow 36,000, say James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett in Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. They argue that the market already merits 36K, and that stock prices will advance toward that target over the next 3 to 5 years as investors come to that conclusion, too.” September ,1999
http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:ojHqU7yDJrIJ:www.businessweek.com/1999/99_39/b3648125.htm+dow+36,000&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=8&client=opera
Your link in this case is to an article by Patrick Michaels, a well-known “climate change skeptic”. And his article doesn’t seem to make any meaningful point. The research cited by Hansen, AFAICT, discusses unexpectedly large losses in ice volume from the Greenland glaciers because they’re melting and calving much faster than they were ten years ago. The Johannessen paper mentioned by Michaels, on the other hand, talks about the glaciers accumulating ice due to increased snowfall. Michaels says that if you combine these two effects, the net loss of glacier volume is much smaller.
IANAClimatologist, but ISTM that that’s completely irrelevant. The question is not whether glaciers are getting replenished by snowfall, but how much glacier ice is melting into the sea and thus forcing a rise in sea level. I don’t care (so much) how much new ice is getting dumped on top of the remaining glaciers, I care how much of their old ice is sliding into the sea and melting.
Well, the “jury” you’re looking at in this case is the organization “Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change”, a collaborator of the pro-warming “Greening Earth Society” and a recipient of ExxonMobil funding. I don’t know that I’d call those folks the most impartial jury around.
Everybody knows that it’s still uncertain whether currently observed increases in hurricane activity are directly linked to climate change. And AFAICT Hansen made no attempt to claim otherwise.
Like your first link, though, this seems to be basically irrelevant to the issue of whether Greenland glaciers are currently observed to be melting much faster than expected.
However, there is no identification of what that alleged “survey among some 500 international climate researchers” actually is, and the attached link simply goes to another general article by climate change skeptics. If the “survey” in question is the “international survey of 500 climate scientists” mentioned here, it’s misrepresented:
That article (abstract, really) says nothing about “offsetting” sea level rise—just that precipitation could slow it to some extent. Could still be significant cause for concern.
Yes, and again, there seems to be nothing in it that contradicts the recent results about how much ice is actually melting into the ocean:
So, just as I said, it appears that the Ice Sheet can indeed be accumulating more interior mass from precipitation, and thus decreasing or reversing its net ice loss, while still losing lots of ice into the ocean around its edges. Which, again, is potentially cause for concern.
To sum up, nothing that you’ve posted or linked to here constitutes convincing evidence, AFAICT, that Hansen is being “under-informed” or “hysterical”.
Here is some information on how that “survey” was actually conducted. Needless to say, there are severe methodological questions with it. One is much better off to rely on this recent joint statement issued by 11 National Academies of Science, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences or the summaries of the field by the IPCC and NAS…or this statement by the council of the American Geophysical Union or this statement by the council of the American Meteorological Association.
As for the rest of your links, yes it is true that Patrick Michaels (fellow at the Cato Institute and recipient of funding from the coal conglomerate Western Fuels Association), Tech Central Station (funded in part by Exxon), and Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change [aka., CO2science.org] (with funding ties to both Exxon and Western Fuels Association) deny the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change. Tell us something that we don’t already know.
That being said, it is true that there has not yet been a definitive separation made between the cyclical and anthropogenic global warming (AGW) effects on the intensity of hurricanes. One estimate is that they are contributing roughly equally to the recent rise in intensity (see also here). (AGW is not currently predicted to have a significant effect on the number of hurricanes that form, just their intensity.)
And, the science on ice sheet dynamics is still evolving. AGW is expected to cause two counterbalancing effects: an increase in ice sheet melting on the one hand and an increase in snowfall on the ice sheets on the other. The IPCC estimate is that in the next hundred years, these two effects will roughly cancel. (Almost all of the net predicted sea level rise by the IPCC is due simply to the thermal expansion of water.) However, two important things to recognize are
(1) Hansen’s point that ice sheet disintegration is a highly nonlinear process (involving lubrication of the sheets by water seeping underneath and such). Therefore, he and some other believe…and some evidence seems to support…that it can happen a lot more quickly than the IPCC forecass are assuming.
(2) Ice sheet melting will continue for a long time (many centuries) after CO2 levels are stabilized in the atmosphere. Thus, it would probably be wise to look beyond just 2100.