Extinction by 2040? (part II) by chrisisall

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Extinction by 2040? (part II)

POSTED BY: CHRISISALL
UPDATED: Friday, April 18, 2014 09:36
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Monday, April 14, 2014 5:24 PM

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
From the "How GM got it wrong" site

Quote:
I am Peter Wadhams, whom you dismiss at various points in your blog as a person with extremist views. Firstly, I would be delighted to send you my list of 300 or so publications in leading journals, which extend over 40 years of continuous involvement in Arctic sea ice research, including six voyages in nuclear submarines to measure ice thickness and leading to my present position as Professor of Ocean Physics in Cambridge University. I say this not to be boastful but to advance the mild suggestion that it might be incumbent on you to examine the basis of my views since I have earned to right to hold them, unlike some of the loonies you rightly dismiss. And, if I were to be rude, unlike you. My prediction that summer (September) sea ice will disappear by 2015 or 2016 is not some alarmist loonie claim, but is based on OBSERVED trends in thickness and area which lead inevitably to that conclusion. You can argue with models but you can’t argue with satellite data and submarine data. And it is also not true that I have no support. The most serious Arctic climate modelling effort by the US Navy, conducted by Prof W Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, agrees with these conclusions.

Also, may I add as a personal observation- I like to study the weather, particularly as something of a game, I like to try and predict where the jet stream will be based on the barograms. (How geeky is THAT?) So I have more than the usual familiarity with the jet stream, and I have to say that in 2013 I've never seen a more abnormal distribution. Okay, maybe it's just me, but I think we're on the precipice of a major change- not heading in planet Venus, but in a 3-5 years' time the effects of climate shift will be obvious to everyone except the most dunder-headed.

OH BTW CHRIS- I watched the Years of Living Dangerously and I have to say the Texas Xtians were scarier than anyone else. They epitomize that group of people who will reject plain and simple data in front of them for a belief system which is sheer nonsense.

Quote:
I'm not sure I agree with Fukushima as an example, though. It was known to be a flawed design, and people were warned about the risk of tsunami, they just chose to go ahead anyway. I suspect that'll be the case with global warming. It's not that people don't know - sure they may only know 90% of it, but they know enough - it's that they'll go ahead with business as usual anyway.

I think it's a perfect analogy. People HAVE been warning about global warming for years, and it's been known that our carbon-based energy is a flawed design anyway. Just as a tsunami was a distinct possibility and everyone knew the reactor design was flawed. But they (we) went ahead anyway.

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Monday, April 14, 2014 5:28 PM

CHRISISALL

Being as safe as possible and following common sense guidelines cuts into profit.

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Monday, April 14, 2014 6:08 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

There are people who catastrophize. My hubby, for example. Love him to death, but all he ever thinks about is how things can go wrong. I have heard about every disaster that hasn't happened (in our time) - the grid-destroying EMP, the Yellowstone supervolcano, the globe-girdling pandemic, the world-destroying meteorite.

There are the people who recognize the obvious: when disaster is imminent, likely, or occurring, they are perceptive as to what is going on. The financial meltdown. The warming earth and the changed weather patterns. Earthquakes, in earthquake country. Superstorms along the coasts. BTW- recognizing a disaster is not as easy as it sounds, especially if it has a slow start. Hubby has been very good at recognizing ongoing problems with potential for catastrophe, Fukushima, for example.

And then there are the people who minimize. They play the odds... nothing has gone wrong along those lines recently, so everything will continue to be OK. It's very hard for them to even SEE an ongoing disaster. Business as usual.

And then there are the woefully ignorant and the deniers.

I'm still trying to get a balanced approach on disaster-thinking. I think there are a couple of tricks to this disaster thing. The first is to realize that there are some disasters you can't prepare for. If the meteor strikes, or the supervolcano blows, our ass is grass. Can't prepare for that, either individually or globally.

Oh, heck, ran out of time.

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Monday, April 14, 2014 6:40 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Oh Signy

Just a comment. You seemed to categorize Fukushima into the unknown unknowns category. I was just saying I didn't think it belonged there. People did know about the risks.

As for its relation to global warming - I agree there are things we have no accounting for - the massive destabilization of the Greenland ice-sheet for example. Could it go at any time? It seems like it might. But then, maybe not. - The effects of an ice free Arctic. Will they be catastrophic? It seems like maybe not. But then, maybe they will.

But there are disasters we know will happen. They are already happening. Yet somehow, we seem to close our eyes and march forward. I'm not sure what that calculation is. Denial? Minimization? Greed? Stupidity?

If people aren't warned off by the known knowns and we march into them anyway, why worry about the unknown unknowns?

To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. - Thomas Paine The American Crisis

OONJERAH - We are too dumb to live and smart enough to wipe ourselves out.

"You, who live in any kind of comfort or convenience, do not know how these people can survive these things, do you? They will endure because there is no immediate escape from endurance. Some will die, the rest must live."

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Monday, April 14, 2014 6:49 PM

CHRISISALL

One thing I found fascinating about The Years Of Living Dangerously was their take on Syria. The war is about food, which in turn is about drought, WHICH IN TURN is about climate change.
Disasters cause more disasters.
The tsunami caused Fukushima.
Fukushima will cause- what (besides the death of the USS Ronald Reagan)?
This is REAL trickle-down...

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Monday, April 14, 2014 7:11 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=57800&p=2

Peter Wadhams, Professor Cambridge
Peter Wadhams ScD, is professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics
Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge.
He is best known for his work on sea ice.

Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist
Professor Peter Wadhams, co-author of new Nature paper on costs of Arctic
warming, explains the danger of inaction
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jul/24/arcti
c-ice-free-methane-economy-catastrophe

"Not everyone agrees that the paper's scenario of a catastrophic
and imminent methane release is plausible. Nasa's Gavin Schmidt
has previously argued that the danger of such a methane release is
low, whereas scientists like Prof Tim Lenton from Exeter University
who specialises in climate tipping points, says the process would
take thousands if not tens of thousands of years, let alone a decade.

"But ..."

https://www.skepticalscience.com/toward-improved-discussions-methane.h
tml

One can argue from a process-based and observations-based approach that we don't understand everything about Arctic methane feedback dynamics, which is fair. Nonetheless, the methane changes on the scale being argued by Whiteman et al. should have been seen in the early Holocene (when Summer Northern Hemispheric solar radiation was about 40 W/m2 higher than today at 60 degrees North, 7000-9000 years ago). Even larger anomalies occurred during the Last Interglacial period between 130,000 to 120,000 years ago, though with complicated regional evolution (Bakker et al., 2013).

Both of these times were marked by warmer Arctic regions in summer without a methane spike. It's also known pretty well (see here) that summertime Arctic sea ice was probably reduced in extent or seasonally free compared to the modern during the early Holocene, offering a suitable test case for the hypothesis of rapid, looming methane release.

It should be noted that Peter Wadhams did offer a response recently to the criticisms of the Whitehead Nature piece (Wadham is a co-author) but did not address why this idea has not been borne out paleoclimatically.

Yesterday, an objection to the paleoclimate comparison cropped up in the Guardian suggesting that the early Holocene or Last Interglacial analogs are not suitable pieces of evidence against rapid methane release. They aren't perfect analogs, but the argument does not seem compelling. The Northeast Siberian shelf regions have been exposed many times to the atmosphere during the Pleistocene when sea levels were lower (and not covered by an ice sheet since at least the Late Saalian, before 130,000 years ago, e.g., here). As mentioned before, when areas such as the Laptev shelf and adjacent lowlands were exposed, ice-rich permafrost sediments were deposited. The deposits become degraded after they are submerged (when sea levels increase again), resulting in local flooding and seabed temperature changes an order of magnitude greater than what is currently happening. Moreover, the permafrost responses have a lag time and are still responding to early Holocene forcing (some overviews in e.g., Romanovskii and Hubberten, 2001; Romanovskii et al., 2004; Nicolsky et al., 2012). A book chapter by Overduin et al., 2007 overviews the history of this region since the Last Glacial Maximum. These texts also suggest that large amounts of submarine permafrost may have existed going back at least 400,000 years. It therefore does not seem likely that the seafloor deposits will be exposed to anything in the coming decades that they haven't seen before.

What about other times in the past? Fairly fast methane changes did occur during the abrupt climate change events embedded within the last deglaciation (e.g., Younger Dryas), just before the Holocene when the climate was still fluctuating around a state colder than today. These CH4 changes were slower than the abrupt climate changes themselves, and have been largely attributed to tropical and boreal wetland responses rather than high latitude hydrate anomalies. Marine hydrate destabilization as a major driver of glacial-interglacial CH4 variations has also been ruled out through the inter-hemispheric gradient in methane and hydrogen isotopes (e.g., Sowers, 2006)

To be fair, we don't have good atmospheric methane estimates during warmer climates that prevailed beyond the ice core record, going back tens of millions of years. Methane is brought up a lot in the context of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, 55 million years ago). During this time, proxy records show global warming at the PETM (similar to what modern models would give for a quadrupling of CO2), extending to the deep ocean and lasting for thousands of years. In addition, there were substantial amounts of carbon released. It may very well be that isotopically light carbon came from a release of some 3,000 GtC of land-based organic carbon, rather than a destabilization of methane hydrates, although this is a topic of debate and ongoing research (see e.g., Zeebe et al., 2009; Dickens et al., 2011).

It's also important to emphasize that any destabilization of oceanic methane hydrates at the PETM, or any other time period, would imply that the carbon release is a feedback to some ocean warming that occurred first- perhaps on the order of 1000 years beforehand. Furthermore, once methane was in the atmosphere, it would oxidize to CO2 on timescales significantly shorter than the PETM itself (decades.) Unfortunately, there is no bullet-proof answer right now for what caused the PETM, but rather several hypotheses that are consistent with proxy interpretation. However, methane cannot be the only story.

To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. - Thomas Paine The American Crisis

OONJERAH - We are too dumb to live and smart enough to wipe ourselves out.

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Tuesday, April 15, 2014 2:22 AM

OONJERAH

Profile for Natalia Shakhova, with a link to her publications.
http://www.iarc.uaf.edu/en/people/nshakhov

"... Dr. Natalia Shakhova leads the Russia-U.S. Methane Study at the
International Arctic Research Center, at the University Alaska Fairbanks
and the Pacific Oceanological Institute, Far Eastern Branch of Russian
Academy of Sciences. ...

"Shakhova received her rank of Doctor of Sciences in Marine Geology
from P.P.Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of Russian Academy of Sciences
in 2010, and Ph.D. in Medical Geography from Orenburg State Medical
University in 1993."

Here is the International Arctic Research Center, should
give us a Who's Who for hot topics about cold places.
http://www.iarc.uaf.edu/

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Tuesday, April 15, 2014 4:30 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

So what I'm getting out of this is that the methane beds have been exposed to similar heating in the past with no catastrophic "methane gun" having been fired. There is some dispute about how closely the situations match each other, but overall methane is not the feedback loop to worry about.

Nonetheless, I think reality tends to flare up in unexpected directions. So it's worth keep an eye open for anomalies, especially those which seem to be attached to positive feedback loops. I guess in that sense, catastrophists like GM are useful because they tend to look into corners that other people don't.

Thanks for checking into this so thoroughly.

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Tuesday, April 15, 2014 4:40 PM

CHRISISALL

What if we take a bunch of nuclear bombs up to high mountain tops where no one lives, drop them in pre-dug fairly deep holes, and set them off... wouldn't that send enough particulates into the atmo to cool us some?
(my inner 9 year old thought that one up)

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Tuesday, April 15, 2014 4:58 PM

OONJERAH

Paul Wignall, prof U of Leeds, UK. Palaeoenvironments
http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/people/p.wignall
"Lectures in palaeontology and sedimentology. His principal research
goal is to understand the origins of mass extinction events."

from The Big Picture RT:

Dr. Paul Wignall on The Permian Extinction

[ I find Thom Hartman to be biased & leading in the interview. As
if plain facts and objectivity cannot carry the message. Annoying
as it is, maybe it's the right approach. My sister has a degree in
geology. She minimizes the GW topic, pushes it away, doesn't have
time for it. College didn't give her objectivity IMO. ]

====================== :>

"I think that I am familiar with the fact that you are going to ignore
this particular problem until it swims up and BITES YOU ON THE ASS!"
~Matt Hooper, Jaws

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Wednesday, April 16, 2014 10:05 AM

CHRISISALL

Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
My sister has a degree in
geology. She minimizes the GW topic, pushes it away, doesn't have
time for it. College didn't give her objectivity IMO.

Brilliance in one field is not necessarily transferable.

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Wednesday, April 16, 2014 3:08 PM

OONJERAH

Dr James Hansen on David Letterman

Hansen is author of Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About The Climate
Catastrophe And Our Last Chance To Save Humanity (2009)

James Edward Hansen is an American adjunct professor in the Department of
Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.

Updating the Climate Science
http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/

TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_hansen_why_i_must_speak_out_about_clima
te_change

<: ===================================== :>

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