The Sheep Look Up

Via Imgur

Papers Find No Change in Rate of Sea Level Rise

A recent paper in JGR-Oceans finds no acceleration in sea-level for the period 1900-2009.

Wenzel and Schröter found an average sea level rise of +1.8 mm/yr for this interval, and up to +6 mm/yr in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean. To determine global acceleration they fit a parabola to the data; the global acceleration was positive but not statistically significant (the error was about twice the acceleration's value of +0.0042 mm/yr²), with some local values around -0.1 mm/yr² in the Indian Ocean to +0.1 mm/yr² in the western tropical Pacific.

They write:

Another paper finds that sea level is rising 1.5 mm/yr due to ocean mass addition (that is, melting of land ice) for 1996–2006, and finds no recent acceleration, saying their results suggest

"...the global trend rate from 1996 to 2006 versus 2003 to 2013 has not changed significantly, or at least not outside our error estimates."

A few weeks ago I looked at Aviso's satellite sea level data, which covers 1993-present, and found a negative acceleration of -0.012 ± 0.010 mm/yr². It was once positive (though barely 20 years long), but got clobbered by the generally La Nina conditions since the mid-2000s. But the acceleration is increasing (becoming less negative), and will probably turn positive in the next 1-2 years:

Collateral Damage in the Climate Wars

@michaelccronin @jpkoch @MichaelEMann take me out of this argument I just like posting photos of Charlemagne
— SalenaZito (@SalenaZitoTrib) December 6, 2014

Wallace

Drive-By Truckers / The Three Great Alabama Icons

"Now Wallace started out as a lawyer and a judge with a very progressive and humanitarian track record for a man of his time, but he lost his first bid for governor in
1958 by hedging on the race issue against a man who spoke out against intergration. Wallace ran again in '62 as a staunch segregationist and won big and for the next decade he spoke out loudly. He accused Kennedy and King of being communist and he was constantly on national news representing "the good people" of Alabama...."

"...and George Wallace died back in '98 and he's in hell now, not because he's a racist. His track record as a judge and his late life quest for redemption make a good argument for his being, at worst, no worse than most white men of his generation, North or South. Because of his blind ambition
and his hunger for votes, he turned a blind eye to the suffering of black America and he became a pawn in the fight against Civil Rights cause.

"...fortunately for him, the devil is also a southerner."

Newsweek's Deceptive Heading (Re: geoengineering)

Newsweek's cover story this week is about geoengineering: "Science to the Rescue: Rebooting the Planet."

That is a very unfortunate headline. Because it's wrong. Because a geoengineered planet, if we do that, would be nothing like the planet we had before AGW.

It is not a "reboot," where the planet comes back as it was before (before the Industrial Revoltion), and we start over. That leaves Newsweek's readers thinking about geoenginnering, not in its realities, but as constructed by the Newsweek authors and editors.

Geoengineering, whether by Solar Radiation Management (SRM) or Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), does not give back the Earth's pre-industrial climate.

If we do Solar Radiation Management (SRM), blocking some of the Sun's rays by injecting aerosols in the upper atmosphere, mimicking a volcanic eruption, we end up with a low-temperature, high-CO2 world that has no parallel in Earth's history. No one really knows what that entails.

Oh yeah -- the ocean still acidifies.

We would commit ourselves, and all future generations, to SRM forever. As soon as it is stopped, the world would very quickly -- in a decade or two -- revert back to its natural state -- warmer as CO2 gets higher. And it may well ruin things like the annual, expected, needed, important monsoon in India. Indians are not going to like that.... and their complaints, whether causally true or not, will be very difficult to dismiss.

Removing CO2 from the atmosphere doesn't really work either. That is, no one has yet demonstrated any idea that would remove more than about 10 percent of the annual CO2 we emit to the atmosphere. Sucking it out is expensive, ~$50 per tonne, at least so far. And then there is the question of where do you put the CO2 you've removed? Pipelines, geology.... And what if it leaks, something like the 1986 CO2 natural outgassing of Lake Nygos in Cameroon that killed 1,700 people?

Do you want to live atop a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide?

So with CDR you have to be very careful, and very, very vigilant.

Neither of these options amounts to a "reboot." They both amount to a mess, and I can't imagine any future generations want this mess dumped in their laps when they turn 18. Welcome to the World!, the world says. You're finally an adult. Now here's what you gotta do. NOW.

CO2 Responsibility By Year of Birth (Honors to 1968)

“Today we face the possibility that the global environment may be 
destroyed, yet no one will be responsible. This is a new problem.”

-- Dale Jamieson

*

So who's responsible? Tough question -- but at least we can calculate how much CO2 you've emitted per year, since you were born. If you're an American. If you were born after 1948. Excluding emissions due to land use changes. And assuming your emissions are average:

Those Americans born in 1968 have the highest per capita emissions per year (though not, of course, the largest cumulative emissions). Assuming they're still alive.

US per capita emissions peaked in 1973, at 22.3 tonnes CO2/yr, and are now (2013) at 17.1 t CO2/yr -- a decrease of 23%. So the record set by 1968 babies will probably never be broken, and,they will go down in history as the most CO2-profligate emitters in history.

Unless someone from Qatar beats them.

Data: US CO2 emissions (from energy consumption, US population

Before You Finger Wag About Ferguson....

Early Climate Blogging

UPDATE 12/3/14: John Fleck wrote to point out his first climate-related blog post was April 2003, and "I almost certainly blogged about climate earlier on my Albuquerque Journal blog, but those archives were lost in one of the newspaper's many computer system overhauls."
--

People have been talking about early climate blogging on Twitter. Stoat tells what he remembers here.

I really don't know if I was the first climate blogger or not. I think I started blogging in 2002, when I was living in rural New Hampshire in a place with a gas stove for heat and 5 times the best view of Lake Winnipesaukee you can possibly imagine. I didn't have a blogging platform; I coded the HTML by hand, over one of those dial-up modems that, when dialing, sounded like a bad bus crash. I took the name "Quark Soup" from the quark-gluon plasma, something I had worked on in graduate school, and a friend made the picture above of a steaming bowl of quark soup. (I left out the gluons.)

I've searched in the Wayback Machine, but sadly haven't yet found any of my blogging from then. This is the first of my pages it finds, just my simple home page from October 1999. (I started freelancing about a year earlier.) At some point I started using the Greymatter blogging platform, which was a significant improvement except it got to the point of taking up to an hour to recompile after I made a change.

I got broadband in 2003 when I moved to less frigid parts of southern Maine and then coastal New Hampshire. Here's the earliest Greymatter page of mine that the Wayback Machine finds, from March 2003. This post was an early complaint about Mark Steyn. The world was setting temperature records back then, too.

McIntyre and McKitrick did a good deal to advance interest in climate blogging. Here's the earliest mention of them that I can find on by blog, from December 1, 2003. I remember the traffic on my little blog ramped up sharply with postings about M&M. It was clear there was a lot of interest from people wanting to know the very latest information that was available, whatever scraps there might be, and for a little while I was inside the loop because there were no other such outlets, and the blogospherecircle hadn't yet polarized. Comments picked up sharply too. I first got to know Michael Mann, went down to the University of Virginia to spend a day with him, and my profile of him appeared in the March 2005 Scientific American.

My blogroll from 2003 lists several other bloggers I knew about and/or liked, but only a few were devoted to science:

A Voyage to Arcturus, Calpundit, Cosmic Log (Alan Boyle), Dan Kennedy, Gawker, h20boro lib blog, Matthew Yglesias, Maxspeak, Ted Barlow, Thinking It Through, Three River Tech Review, Wampum

Can't believe I once liked Gawker, but blogging -- even Gawker -- was then still novel and innocent.

In May 2006 I moved to Blogger, which made blogging life much easier. I got a job blogging for Technology Review for about six months, but didn't surf the blogging wave going forward and didn't head up its power law distribution. I've never been sure why; maybe the things I'm interested in or my style of writing just doesn't make the grade to popular or payable blogging. Or maybe too many pictures of my cats etc.. I'm not so interested anymore in covering the inside baseball of the climate blogosphere, because it's takes too much time to keep up with it all, I try to spend most of my attention on understanding the science better, and plenty of others are doing a fine job of it anyway. What I liked about early blogging was its almost Twitter-like atmosphere -- you could put up a short post just to say you found some article or paper interesting. Now Twitter fills that need, and writing a thorough blog post often requires research and fact-checking, same as my day job. And my nephew and niece now play in a lot of sports leagues.

Added 12/7/14: A commenter found this post from October 2003 titled "Global Warming debate heats up again," and recalls McIntyre's 11/18/2003 presentation on Capitol Hill....  

The Growth in Ocean Dead Zones

Ocean dead zones -- warmer regions that hold less oxygen -- are increasing worldwide. This summer the Gulf of Mexico dead zone was 5,000 square miles along the Louisiana coast, and it's estimated to cost $82 million in lost tourism and lost fish catch. The second largest US dead zone is off the coast of Oregon -- low-oxygen water that's been appearing every summer since 2002, perhaps tied to global warming.

There are 166 dead zones in US waters alone.The number is rising worldwide, according to a great article about them, "Devil in the Deep Blue Sea" by Brian Palmer:

[Those are decades along the horizontal axis, and "cumulative number of systems" along the vertical axis. Lots more interesting information in the article.]

Dead zones are caused by runoff of agricultural fertilizers, sewage around Africa and South America, and airborne nitrogen, the latter coming from cars, trucks, and coal-burning power plants in the Midwest. These particularly affect Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound. Chesapeake Bay has several dead zones, each where a river drains into the Bay.

Don't miss reading about London's Great Stink of 1858, which brought the city to a standstill.

More from the article:

A Blog Post of Mine as an Essay Suggestion at Univ of Hawaii

Hey, someone is using a blog post of mine as essay material for their university class on Global Environmental Change.

I've had professors use (with pay) some articles I've written for magazines -- mostly from Scientific American. But never a blog post (that I know about). That makes my day (except for the not getting paid part; not that I'm expecting that here).

It's Never Been About the Science....

Rarely do you see the opposition to climate science expressed as openly and succinctly as in this comment on Keith Kloor's blog:

In other words, it's not about the science at all -- and never has been. A spot-on reply came later in the comments:

Court Filing: Tim Ball Not an "Authority on Global Warming"

Tim Ball's now infamous rant at WUWT seems to me to be pure desperation. Like he's so frustrated that he's nothing more than a mosquito in the scientific world, that no one who matters takes him seriously, that he's on the verge of giving up, so he finally went full Nazi and pulled the ultimate pin.

Well, penultimate. The only comparison left is to Satan.

By the way, Tim Ball is hardly a climate science expert, and this has been stated in a court of law.

After the Calgary Herald published an op-ed by Ball on April 19, 2006, whom the newspaper identified as the first climatology PhD in Canada and a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years, they published a letter on April 23, 2006 from Dr. Dan Johnson, a professor at the University of Lethbridge, who pointed out that neither of those descriptions is true; that Dr. Ball's credentials were being seriously overstated. Ball later threatened Johnson and the Herald and ultimately sued for defamation.

In their Statement of Defense filed in Court, the Calgary Herald submitted the following:

"...that the Plaintiff (Ball) never held a reputation in the scientific community as a noted climatologist and authority on global warming....

"The Plaintiff has never published any research in any peer-reviewed scientific journal which addressed the topic of human contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming;

"The Plaintiff has published no papers on climatology in academically recognized peer-reviewed scientific journals since his retirement as a Professor in 1996;

"The Plaintiff's credentials and credibility as an expert on the issue of global warming have been repeatedly disparaged in the media; and

"The Plaintiff is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist."

Ball dropped his lawsuit.

Source: The Calgary Herald, Statement of Defense – paragraph 50, Dr Tim Ball v The Calgary Herald, In the Court of the Queen’s Bench of Alberta Judicial District of Calgary, Dec 7, 2006 (http://is.gd/brO4uO).

More at:
http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-vs-dan-johnson-update-0
http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-vs-dan-johnson-lawsuit-documents
http://www.desmogblog.com/ball-bails-on-johnson-lawsuit

Where's the Economic Damage From Environmental Regulations?

Pasting this here because it will come in handy. It's from Peter Gleick on Twitter.

Third Quarter Ocean Warming is 200% above Trendline

The ocean heat content numbers are in for the third quarter -- and they again show big increases.

For the 0-700 meter region, the change from a year ago is 0.59 W/m² (the area being the total Earth's surface).

That's over twice as large as its trend over the last 15 years, which is 0.28 W/m².

For the 0-2000 m region, the change from a year ago is 1.73 W/m², whereas its trend since its data started in 2005 is 0.58 W/m².

The top half of the ocean gained 200% more heat than it has on average.

For the top 2000 meters, a quadratic fit is again better than a linear fit, with the acceleration being 0.07 W/m² per year.

When Just a Littllllllllle More Heat Goes Into the Ocean (Re: Hiatus)

There's an nice article in NCSE Reports by John Abraham, John Fasullo and Greg Laden, titled "Continued Global Warming in the Midst of Natural Climate Fluctuations," about the hiatus and all that. It's not very technical and would be a good thing for those who think the hiatus means no more global warming to read.

The first figure in the article (right) reminded me of something I've been wondering -- how sensitive are atmospheric trends to changes in the 93.4% number for the percentage of heat that goes into the ocean?

I think I can estimate it with some simplications. The answer is, if I'm right: surface and tropospheric temperature trends are very sensitive to changes in ocean heating. Answer below (in red), using some very basic physics that is a bit pedantic.

Let Q_in be the amount of heat coming into the Earth over some period of time. (So the units of Q_in are energy per unit time, whereas the symbol Q is usually used for just energy.) Let's assume in all goes either into the ocean or into the troposphere, so Q_in = Q_O + Q_t, where Q_O is the amount of the heat that goes into the ocean, and Q_t the amount into the troposphere.

Now consider two scenarios. In the first, the one we're living in, a fraction f1 (= 0.934) of the heat goes into the ocean, and in the second, a fraction f2 goes into the ocean.

So

Q_O,1 = f1Q_in and Q_O,2 = f2Q_in.

By assumption, the total amount of heat going into the Earth is the same, so

Q_in = Q_O,1+ Q_t,1 = Q_O,2 + Q_t,2

where "t" stands for troposphere. A dash of rearranging and a smidgen of algebra gives

(f1-f2)Q_in = Q_t,2 - Q_t,1

What is Q_in? It's Q_O,1/f1. We know what f1 is: 0.934, from the figure. If we assume all the heat coming into the ocean goes into the 0-2000 m region (that's the top half of the ocean -- and not a bad assumption), then Q_O,1 can be estimated from 10-years worth of Argo data for that region. When I do that I get 0.93e22 J/yr.

That finishes the ocean part. For the troposphere

Q₁ = m_tc_tΔT₁ and Q₂ = m_tc_t ΔT₂,

where ΔT is the amount of temperature change from whatever the baseline is:  ΔT₁ = T₁ - T_base and likewise for scenario 2. (Strictly speaking it's the change of temperature with time, viz. a trend, but as with Q above I'll just call it T.) Then


Q_t,2 - Q_t,1 =  m_tc_t (T₂ - T₁)
where we want to calculate the temperature difference as a function of f2. 

Putting this all together then gives

T₂-T₁ = (1-f₂/f₁)Q_O,1/m_tc_t

All this would surely look better if (1) I knew more HTML, and (2) I was using Wordpress, which has an equation-maker plug-in, but I don't and I'm not.

Now, what's the mass of the troposphere? About 80% of the total atmospheric mass, or 4.1e18 kg. 

(Interestingly, you can calculate the atmosphere's mass without leaving your chair: m = P_sA/g, where P_s is the surface pressure, A is the Earth's area, and g the acceleration due to gravity at the surface. Of course, g varies with altitude, but that's a small effect.)

Here c_t is the troposphere's specific heat. I'll assume the troposphere is homogeneous throughout, and approximate its specific heat by the specific heat of air at typical room conditions and 40% humidity, which is 1,012 J/kgK.

Now we just calculate. If f2 = 0.935 -- that is, it's just 0.1 percentage points above f1 -- I find the difference in trends is

T₂-T₁ = -0.024°C/decade

which seems like it could be in the ball park. At least, it doesn't seem ridiculous. And the sign is right: more heat into the ocean means heat taken out of the troposphere, which lowers its temperature.

So a very small change in how much heat goes into the ocean can lead to noticeable changes in the temperature trends. If f2 is 0.5 percentage points above f1, then 

T₂-T₁ = -0.12°C/decade

which could well put a damper on the greenhouse warming of a decade or two. So just a little more heat going into the ocean (relatively little -- it's still a huge number of Joules) can noticeably cool the troposphere. Or even more noticeably for the surface, which holds even less heat then the troposphere (for, say, the top 2 meters of air above the surface).

That's what I suspected, and the rough numbers seem to support that.

When U Thant Was Overly Dramatic

"I do not wish to seem overdramatic, but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me, that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control."

-- U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, 1969, from the Introduction to The Limits to Growth (pg 14).

The authors then give this projection, and we're at the apex about now:

On the other hand, they were remarkably accuate with their CO2 projection; the atmospheric CO2 value for January 2000 at Mauna Loa was 369 ppm:

As Wikipedia says, "the book continues to generate fervent debate...," and I'll leave it at that.

Kim Kardashian and the Laws of Physics

#kimkardashian

Excuse me, but this picture of Kim Kardashian, impressive though it may be, violates the laws of physics. (And no, I don't mean her posterior projection, I mean the trajectory of the champagne stream. Though maybe her derriere is photoshopped too.)

GISS Gallop

NASA GISS's global temperature anomaly last month was the highest October in their records, and the 7th-warmest month ever, tied with last month.

That's the third month in a row it's set a record, for that month. (Since they're anomalies, any month can be compared to any other month, regardless of whether it has the same name, but comparing them by month is (1) fun, (2) a reminder that it's still warming.)

Here's how 2014 compares to the commodious capacious big 1997-98 El Nino. The Nino3.4 index is finally increasing, but still way behind the Big One. Yet the surface temperatures for the year-so-far are much higher, an average of 0.24 C higher. (So since it's 17 years later, a crude estimate of the trend from then to now would be 0.24°C/17 years = +0.14°C/decade.)

Here's the warming from any given year to today. The total warming according to GISS is now +0.88°C, which rounds to 0.9°C, instead of the "0.8°C" you usually see quoted. Update your vocabulary.

Veteran's Day

Climate Scientists Get Their Own Lawyer

From the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund:

To all our supporters,

“After years of attacks, I am thrilled that there is a world class litigator whose full time job is to stand up for scientists.” –Dr. Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund is excited to announce the hiring of Lauren Kurtz as its first Executive Director. Thank you to everyone who donated money to the fund and made this possible. Her first day is today and feel free to reach out to her with thoughts, ideas and words of encouragement as she takes on the important job of defending the scientific community from politically motivated attacks. She can be reached at lkurtz[at]climatesciencedefensefund.org

Lauren is joining CSLDF from Dechert LLP, a top tier law firm after a multi-month hiring process. At Dechert she served as project manager on a high-profile $3 billion litigation initiative and she represented commercial and individual clients on cases involving FOIA requests and litigation over FOIA requests, discovery disputes, and defamation claims. Prior to working at Dechert, she held legal and policy positions at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She has a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a master's in Environmental Policy from the University of Pennsylvania. She will be based in NYC working in an office generously provided by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School.

Thank you again for all your support,

The Climate Science Legal
Defense Fund Board of Directors
www.climatesciencedefensefund.org

Here are some profiles of Lauren Kurtz: Linked In, Law360, State Bar of California, I hope she is prepared for an onslaught by the crazies.

Does any other scientific field have its own lawyer(s)?