Climate Change,

[byron78]

9 minutes ago, kzb said:

That has certainly happened in the recent past.  A few thousand years ago, there was a huge meltwater lake on north America, held by an ice wall.  When that wall collapsed the sea level increased by several metres in a few years.

Nothing like that seems to be happening on Greenland though.  All other potential sites are much smaller.   I think we've already had most of the meltwater that we could, coming out the last glaciation. 

In fact, the worry seems to be more about the thermal expansion of the existing seawater.

The reason I posted those plots is because people say sea level increase is accelerating.  You can see for yourself there is no sign of this on the tidal gauge data.

 

 

 

NASA disagree.

But you're probably right...

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2680/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating/

Edited November 1, 2021 by byron78

[byron78]

1 hour ago, Riedquat said:

It's a possibility and I guess it might be the one that the models are showing as most likely but there isn't a binary state of ice in the world, it's varied from none at the poles to lots more. It's not as if all glaciers will suddenly melt at the same time so the question is whether or not a large enough amount of ice is right on the borderline at the moment.

The other issue about tipping points is whether or not there's one where there's a positive feedback mechanism at a certain point for further heating even without additional human contribution; it's hard to imagine that if there is one around where we are that the world wouldn't have already become uninhabitable long before humans appeared.

Did dinosaurs burn a lot of fossil fuels, then?

[kzb]

16 minutes ago, byron78 said:

NASA disagree.

But you're probably right...

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2680/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating/

There is a discrepancy between satellite data and tidal gauge data.  The discrepancy appears exactly at the date NASA replaced the previous satellites.

Also, they add 0.3mm p.a. to the satellite series for "isostasy correction".  This is intended to measure the ocean volume more accurately, but that is not the same thing as sea level.

Anyhow, take your pick.  Tidal gauges which are there on site, or something hundreds of miles up, trying to measure fractions of millimetres on a constantly varying surface.

[byron78]

20 minutes ago, kzb said:

There is a discrepancy between satellite data and tidal gauge data.  The discrepancy appears exactly at the date NASA replaced the previous satellites.

Also, they add 0.3mm p.a. to the satellite series for "isostasy correction".  This is intended to measure the ocean volume more accurately, but that is not the same thing as sea level.

Anyhow, take your pick.  Tidal gauges which are there on site, or something hundreds of miles up, trying to measure fractions of millimetres on a constantly varying surface.

Yes. I doubt NASA thought of that. Silly NASA.

[kzb]

2 hours ago, Riedquat said:

The other issue about tipping points is whether or not there's one where there's a positive feedback mechanism at a certain point for further heating even without additional human contribution; it's hard to imagine that if there is one around where we are that the world wouldn't have already become uninhabitable long before humans appeared.

The planet has been both warmer and colder than it is now.

Is the climate teetering on a knife edge of runaway heat death on one side and frozen solid on the other?  As you say, this is very unlikely, because if true the world would long since have fallen off the knife edge on one side or the other.

[kzb]

2 minutes ago, byron78 said:

Yes. I doubt NASA thought of that. Silly NASA.

So is it really the NOAA who is silly then?

[Riedquat]

44 minutes ago, byron78 said:

Did dinosaurs burn a lot of fossil fuels, then?

What's that got to do with it? Are you denying that temperatures have been higher in Earth's history? So have CO2 levels for that matter, even though we're talking a very long time ago. Doesn't matter where it came from (e.g. volcanic activity) when discussing whether or not it adds up to a self-increasing positive feedback mechanism or not.

The problems involved in burning fossil fuels are the rate of change (and hence the inability for the natural world to adapt , the human impact of that change, and the fact that we're in a situation where the change is one we (theoretically) control.

[Riedquat]

6 minutes ago, kzb said:

The planet has been both warmer and colder than it is now.

Is the climate teetering on a knife edge of runaway heat death on one side and frozen solid on the other?  As you say, this is very unlikely, because if true the world would long since have fallen off the knife edge on one side or the other.

Yes, this is why I roll my eyes at the extreme doom-mongers.

The lack of those wildly implausible extremes though doesn't mean that serious issues aren't a very likely reality.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

32 minutes ago, Riedquat said:

Yes, this is why I roll my eyes at the extreme doom-mongers.

The lack of those wildly implausible extremes though doesn't mean that serious issues aren't a very likely reality.

Human beings clearly survived the last ice age and the Toba super eruption.

So it's going to be quite hard to wipe us out completely.

That said, the world could have been a pretty unpleasant place to live during that time.

[Riedquat]

1 minute ago, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

Human beings clearly survived the last ice age and the Toba super eruption.

So it's going to be quite hard to wipe us out completely.

That said, the world could have been a pretty unpleasant place to live during that time.

This is the distinction that needs to be made. We won't be completely wiped out. The consequences however might well be very unpleasant for a lot. But the most vocal on the situation never appear to be terribly concerned about exactly what consequences they're concerned about - exactly what consequences are they trying to avoid?

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

9 minutes ago, Riedquat said:

This is the distinction that needs to be made. We won't be completely wiped out. The consequences however might well be very unpleasant for a lot. But the most vocal on the situation never appear to be terribly concerned about exactly what consequences they're concerned about - exactly what consequences are they trying to avoid?

It would be kind of ironic if we spent trillions trying to avoid the climate emergency, only to get destroyed by a massive asteroid strike.

I think the question is what is it worth spending more on, a base on Mars that helps reduce the probability that we will be wiped out, or a shedload of cash trying to sustain what is essentially the unsustainable ?

[byron78]

1 hour ago, kzb said:

So is it really the NOAA who is silly then?

Doubtful. 

They show a doubling of rises as well. Perhaps you should email them your data?

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level

[byron78]

1 hour ago, Riedquat said:

What's that got to do with it? Are you denying that temperatures have been higher in Earth's history? So have CO2 levels for that matter, even though we're talking a very long time ago. Doesn't matter where it came from (e.g. volcanic activity) when discussing whether or not it adds up to a self-increasing positive feedback mechanism or not.

The problems involved in burning fossil fuels are the rate of change (and hence the inability for the natural world to adapt , the human impact of that change, and the fact that we're in a situation where the change is one we (theoretically) control.

Nope. Thanks to the clever scientists, we all know it used to be hotter and that much of the CO2 in our ground used to be the atmosphere (they infer the temperature data for the amount of atmospheric CO2 found in old ice cores if I remember rightly).

 

[Riedquat]

17 minutes ago, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

It would be kind of ironic if we spent trillions trying to avoid the climate emergency, only to get destroyed by a massive asteroid strike.

I think the question is what is it worth spending more on, a base on Mars that helps reduce the probability that we will be wiped out, or a shedload of cash trying to sustain what is essentially the unsustainable ?

The likelihood of a massive asteroid strike big enough to wipe us all out is also a an extreme far-fetched scenario - again, big enough to cause serious, massive damage and death - possible. Big enough to wipe out the entire human race - rather less so (high likelihood that it would've been discovered by now).

[Riedquat]

4 minutes ago, byron78 said:

Nope. Thanks to the clever scientists, we all know it used to be hotter and that much of the CO2 in our ground used to be the atmosphere (they infer the temperature data for the amount of atmospheric CO2 found in old ice cores if I remember rightly).

Exactly - the risk of a positive feedback end-of-all tipping point is pretty much zero, because if it wasn't it would've happened long ago.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

24 minutes ago, Riedquat said:

The likelihood of a massive asteroid strike big enough to wipe us all out is also a an extreme far-fetched scenario - again, big enough to cause serious, massive damage and death - possible. Big enough to wipe out the entire human race - rather less so (high likelihood that it would've been discovered by now).

Asteroid strike is just one example.

You can add to the list volcanic super eruptions, solar storms, supernova, killer viruses, alien attacks, grey goo man made nano probes/genetic engineering, nuclear or biological war plus probably a whole load of other crap, much of which we haven't even thought of yet.

 

[byron78]

45 minutes ago, Riedquat said:

Exactly - the risk of a positive feedback end-of-all tipping point is pretty much zero, because if it wasn't it would've happened long ago.

How many extinction events have there been again?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events

Edited November 1, 2021 by byron78

[kzb]

53 minutes ago, byron78 said:

Doubtful. 

They show a doubling of rises as well. Perhaps you should email them your data?

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level

That uses satellite data.  I posted tidal gauge data, which shows little if any acceleration.  You have got to make a judgement at the end of the day.

[byron78]

8 minutes ago, kzb said:

That uses satellite data.  I posted tidal gauge data, which shows little if any acceleration.  You have got to make a judgement at the end of the day.

No, it's the sat and the tidal gauges plotted together by the NOAA (graphed later).

Incidentally, it's pretty much all sats since the 90s. Yes, it's from space but the article I linked to explains the process. It's very very clever.

I would phrase your question differently. 

I would suggest I get to decide whether to listen to professional scientists or the self-declared amateur experts on the internet, who often seem to get funding from the Heartland Institute and other fossil fuel shills.

Gosh. Tough one.

Edited November 1, 2021 by byron78

[kzb]

4 minutes ago, byron78 said:

How many extinction events have there been again?

Asteroid strikes and massive volcanic action are out of scope of climate models.

[byron78]

4 minutes ago, kzb said:

Asteroid strikes and massive volcanic action are out of scope of climate models.

No they're not. Not the historic ones at least. They can see perfectly well what the CO2 concentrations were after historic cataclysmic events.

Actually, that's often all they have.

We only know about a lot of those past events because the CO2 concentrations from the past offer such vivid clues as to what happened to the atmosphere when most of the dinosaurs died out, etc.

Edited November 1, 2021 by byron78

[Social Justice League]

Looks like cop26 is going to be another dud, as no one is going to change our current system of continuous growth and the act of continually consuming products, whether those products are electric cars or bags of coal.  Just a load of old toot imo.

[Brendan110_0]

1 minute ago, Social Justice League said:

Looks like cop26 is going to be another dud, as no one is going to change our current system of continuous growth and the act of continually consuming products, whether those products are electric cars or bags of coal.  Just a load of old toot imo.

Need a repair economy - reuse not re-manufacture. Any kind of planned obsolescence should come with jail sentences for the offending business owner. Make microwaves last 20 years again etc.

[kzb]

2 minutes ago, byron78 said:

Incidentally, it's pretty much all sats since the 90s.

The gauge data goes right up to the present day.

2 minutes ago, byron78 said:

Yes, it's from space but the article I linked to explains the process. It's very very clever.

It's not a measurement, it's a statistic.  In the same way that RPI is a statistic, because what contributes to it changes with time.

...global sea level can fluctuate due to climate patterns such as El Ninos and La Ninos (the opposing phases of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation), which influence ocean temperature and global precipitation patterns.

Nerem and his team used climate models to account for the volcanic effects and other datasets to determine the El Nino/La Nina effects, ultimately uncovering the underlying rate and acceleration of sea level rise over the last quarter century.

Anyone with a decent scientific brain would have a good think about that last paragraph above.  It also says:

Others have used tide gauge data to measure sea level acceleration, but scientists have struggled to pull out other important details from tide-gauge data, such as changes in the last couple of decades due to more active ice sheet melt.

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2680/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating/

BTW, NASA is a human construct staffed by humans.  Need I mention the Hubble mirror?  What was that Mars probe that crashed because NASA hadn't realised the difference between imperial and metric measurements?

This is a contrarian forum.  People on here believe the system and the news media are one machine to keep property prices high and the people poor.  They are very sceptical of official stats as presented to them on the BBC et al.  They don't believe in it all.  Yet when that very same machine tells them they have to be poor because of climate change, many of them swallow it whole.  I don't get it.

 

[kzb]

17 minutes ago, byron78 said:

No they're not. Not the historic ones at least. They can see perfectly well what the CO2 concentrations were after historic cataclysmic events.

Actually, that's often all they have.

We only know about a lot of those past events because the CO2 concentrations from the past offer such vivid clues as to what happened to the atmosphere when most of the dinosaurs died out, etc.

Hang on, it wasn't CO2 that killed the dinosaurs.  Those that survived the initial cataclysm died as a result of global cooling.