Rapid climate changes this century IF GLOBAL WARMING is not abated

[웃 910]

Paleoclimate Record Points Toward Potential Rapid Climate Changes

ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2011)

— New research into Earth's paleoclimate history by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James E. Hansen suggests the potential for rapid climate changes this century, including multiple meters of sea level rise, if global warming is not abated.

By looking at how Earth's climate responded to past natural changes, Hansen sought insight into a fundamental question raised by ongoing human-caused climate change: "What is the dangerous level of global warming?" Some international leaders have suggested a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times in order to avert catastrophic change. But Hansen said at a press briefing at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on Tues, Dec. 6, that warming of 2 degrees Celsius would lead to drastic changes, such as significant ice sheet loss in Greenland and Antarctica.

Based on Hansen's temperature analysis work at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Earth's average global surface temperature has already risen .8 degrees Celsius since 1880, and is now warming at a rate of more than .1 degree Celsius every decade. This warming is largely driven by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide, emitted by the burning of fossil fuels at power plants, in cars and in industry. At the current rate of fossil fuel burning, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have doubled from pre-industrial times by the middle of this century. A doubling of carbon dioxide would cause an eventual warming of several degrees, Hansen said.

In recent research, Hansen and co-author Makiko Sato, also of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, compared the climate of today, the Holocene, with previous similar "interglacial" epochs -- periods when polar ice caps existed but the world was not dominated by glaciers. In studying cores drilled from both ice sheets and deep ocean sediments, Hansen found that global mean temperatures during the Eemian period, which began about 130,000 years ago and lasted about 15,000 years, were less than 1 degree Celsius warmer than today. If temperatures were to rise 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, global mean temperature would far exceed that of the Eemian, when sea level was four to six meters higher than today, Hansen said.

"The paleoclimate record reveals a more sensitive climate than thought, even as of a few years ago. Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient," Hansen said. "It would be a prescription for disaster."

Hansen focused much of his new work on how the polar regions and in particular the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland will react to a warming world.

Two degrees Celsius of warming would make Earth much warmer than during the Eemian, and would move Earth closer to Pliocene-like conditions, when sea level was in the range of 25 meters higher than today, Hansen said. In using Earth's climate history to learn more about the level of sensitivity that governs our planet's response to warming today, Hansen said the paleoclimate record suggests that every degree Celsius of global temperature rise will ultimately equate to 20 meters of sea level rise. However, that sea level increase due to ice sheet loss would be expected to occur over centuries, and large uncertainties remain in predicting how that ice loss would unfold.

Hansen notes that ice sheet disintegration will not be a linear process. This non-linear deterioration has already been seen in vulnerable places such as Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, where the rate of ice mass loss has continued accelerating over the past decade. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite is already consistent with a rate of ice sheet mass loss in Greenland and West Antarctica that doubles every ten years. The GRACE record is too short to confirm this with great certainty; however, the trend in the past few years does not rule it out, Hansen said. This continued rate of ice loss could cause multiple meters of sea level rise by 2100, Hansen said.

Ice and ocean sediment cores from the polar regions indicate that temperatures at the poles during previous epochs -- when sea level was tens of meters higher -- is not too far removed from the temperatures Earth could reach this century on a "business as usual" trajectory.

"We don't have a substantial cushion between today's climate and dangerous warming," Hansen said. "Earth is poised to experience strong amplifying feedbacks in response to moderate additional global warming."

Detailed considerations of a new warming target and how to get there are beyond the scope of this research, Hansen said. But this research is consistent with Hansen's earlier findings that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would need to be rolled back from about 390 parts per million in the atmosphere today to 350 parts per million in order to stabilize the climate in the long term. While leaders continue to discuss a framework for reducing emissions, global carbon dioxide emissions have remained stable or increased in recent years.

Hansen and others noted that while the paleoclimate evidence paints a clear picture of what Earth's earlier climate looked like, but that using it to predict precisely how the climate might change on much smaller timescales in response to human-induced rather than natural climate change remains difficult. But, Hansen noted, the Earth system is already showing signs of responding, even in the cases of "slow feedbacks" such as ice sheet changes.

The human-caused release of increased carbon dioxide into the atmosphere also presents climate scientists with something they've never seen in the 65 million year record of carbon dioxide levels -- a drastic rate of increase that makes it difficult to predict how rapidly Earth will respond. In periods when carbon dioxide has increased due to natural causes, the rate of increase averaged about .0001 parts per million per year -- in other words, one hundred parts per million every million years. Fossil fuel burning is now causing carbon dioxide concentrations to increase at two parts per million per year.

"Humans have overwhelmed the natural, slow changes that occur on geologic timescales," Hansen said.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111208173647.htm

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Is the Sky Really Falling? A Review of Recent Global Warming Scare Stories

...a remarkable amount of disturbing news has been published concerning global warming, largely concentrating on melting of polar ice, tropical storms and hurricanes, and mass extinctions. The sheer volume of these stories appears to be moving the American political process toward some type of policy restricting emissions of carbon dioxide.

It is highly improbable, in a statistical sense, that new information added to any existing forecast is almost always “bad” or “good”; rather, each new finding has an equal probability of making a forecast worse or better. Consequently, the preponderance of bad news almost certainly means that something is missing, both in the process of science itself and in the reporting of science...

Needless to say, the unreported information is usually counter to the bad news. Reports of rapid disintegration of Greenland’s ice ignore the fact that the region was warmer than it is now for several decades in the early 20th century, before humans could have had much influence on climate. Similar stories concerning Antarctica neglect the fact that the net temperature trend in recent decades is negative, or that warming the surrounding ocean can serve only to enhance snowfall, resulting in a gain in ice. Global warming affects hurricanes in both positive and negative fashions, and there is no relationship between the severity of storms and ocean-surface temperature, once a commonly exceeded threshold temperature is reached. Reports of massive species extinction also turn out to be impressively flawed.

This constellation of half-truths and misstatements is a predictable consequence of the way that science is now conducted, where issues compete with each other for public support. Unfortunately, this creates a culture of negativity that is reflected in the recent spate of global warming reports.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6622

Nothing has changed.

[Dakine10 5,452]

Nothing has changed.

Nothing ever changes.

[Captain Oates 911]

There will be winners and losers in climate change

The North West Passage is opening up and could be fought over by Russia and Canada and its US ally

The inability of Bangladesh and Pakistan to feed their spiraling populations will have them moving to the UK which will result in the civil war which is now brewing anyway

The US has thousands of miles of 'flyover' which is populated by straw sucking farmers who have no defense (except their god) against the dust bowl that will result. This will massively damage the US economy and world wheat supplies

Global warming is real, but the only consolation is that the people most affected in the US, will be RWNJ christian farmers and cowboys who drive around in 7 liter trucks and bring it on themselves

I will use my red passport to get a nice cabin in the North of Scotland which will have a similar climate to san tropez

Edited December 9, 2011 by Ashud Cocoa

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

Why has Obama done nothing?

[Captain Oates 911]

Why has Obama done nothing?

the grim repos wont let him blow his nose even

He is paralyzed and blocked

He will remain so

I am going to buy a big mexican hat and a concrete tornado bunker and 5 years dried cat food for me and them

Its like asking why mice don't stop breeding when they are heading for over population and starvation - they cant because they aren't smart enough

We aren't smart enough. For all our smart phones and drones, our animal instincts have hardly moved - if at all. We just cant help ourselves

Nature takes it's course - I just hope the repos die first. As most of the RWCNJ's are in places like Texas and South Carolina and Mississippi, that is likely to be the case

Perhaps there is a god after all

[luckytxn 2,264]

Nothing has changed.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

Obama had two years of absolute rubber stamp control of congress and did nothing.

But this is simple really. We have discovered that Greenland was once actually GREEN and then it froze over and now it is melting again. all we have to do is find out which tax it was that made Greenland freeze over the last time and implement it again!

[Captain Oates 911]

Obama had two years of absolute rubber stamp control of congress and did nothing.

But this is simple really. We have discovered that Greenland was once actually GREEN and then it froze over and now it is melting again. all we have to do is find out which tax it was that made Greenland freeze over the last time and implement it again!

If Obama did nothing in 2 years, then why are all the extreme ring wing thirsting to overturn the main achievement of those first 2 years - the essential steps towards universal health care which will eventually bring the USA into the family of first world nations ?

If you mean climate control, then its clear he had other fish to fry as universal health care is the one glaring deficit that the USA has in the achievements of modern society worldwide

A glance at the science shows that THE RATE of change has never ever been so powerful in the whole history of the world. It is that RATE CHANGE which is different and is so scary

Its also ironic that the christian nut jobs point to Greenland millions of years ago and then say that the earth is 6,000 years old !

They try to have it both ways more often than George Michael

ok let me repeat - it's the RATE of change that has never ever occurred ever before

THE RATE OF CHANGE

Britain used to be south of the equator and Scotland was joined to Maine - but the move was gradual.

Natural changes are gradual

This change is not gradual and is not natural

oh, and the earth is not flat - its round, but we don't fall off coz we are stuck to it by an invisible force - and the earth goes round the sun. The sun looks smaller buts it bigger. Doesn't that sound more stupid than global warming ? but its true - and so is global warming

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