Arctic Updates

[stickdog99]

Who said it was OK? I just said we hadn't made a real dent until the last 200 years. And that we are nothing compared to Gaia. IMHO, mass extinctions never spare their progenitors.

[stickdog99]

..Hubris. Humans never made more than the tiniest dent into the very topmost surface of Gaia -- a dent comparable to that of bears and boars -- until the last 200 years at most.

Never heard of mesopotamia then. What about England, apparently it used to be forested. and so did Greece, and Turkey and southern Italy. Must have been those bears eh?

Tell me the number of cubic kilometers that humanity managed to alter before 1800. Now divide this value by Gaia's total number of cubic kilometers. Please get back to me with that number. Seriously. Let's see the number.

On edit: The denominator is approximately 2,000,000,000,000 cubic km.

On second edit: If we assume that humanity transformed the equivalent of the entire continent of Europe for 50 meters in height (10 under the soil line and 40 above) before the year 1800, that's approximately 500,000 cubic kilometers. That's 0.000025% of Gaia's total volume transformed by human activity. As I said, pure hubris.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Science means just "observing what is happening".

That would be very nice if it were true.

Humans lived in balance with the Earth for some couple million years. We have lived off balance (the civilization, city building phase, pyramid culture, hierarchy) for only 8000-10000 years. Thats an anomaly even in the time humans have existed!

For 8000 years, humans have acted like out-of-control bacterial infection on a host species.

Hubris. Humans never made more than the tiniest dent into the very topmost surface of Gaia -- a dent comparable to that of bears and boars -- until the last 200 years at most. It's a blink of an eye. It's taken longer for Gaia to clear the air of its own supervolcanoes than the entire period of humanity's ecologically destructive activity.

I dunno how accurate that actually is. There are some people who claim blackfellas terraformed Australia, unintentially, possibly intentionally. Possibly both in different places. Especially wrt use of fire. Also, how much of a dent have boars and bears actually made on gaia? It would be interesting to really examine that.

I do see your point tho. Its just that not all bacterial infections are deadly tho, some are just a minor irritant. I dunno how much hubris is involved in comparing your species to tinea (yes I know its a fungus).

And slightly OT, I heard from my mum in melbourne that the "Black Saturday" fires of Feb 7th this year have actually destroyed the soil life!!!!

Holy Fucking Shit. That is intense heat. Hot fires can damage some of the soil life nearest the surface, even hot grass fires, but all of it? Shit.

[wintler2]

Tell me the number of cubic kilometers that humanity managed to alter before 1800. Now divide this value by Gaia's total number of cubic kilometers. Please get back to me with that number. Seriously. Let's see the number.
On edit: The denominator is approximately 2,000,000,000,000 cubic km.

Cute, but Gaia is not the entire mass of the planet.

The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth in a preferred homeostasis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia

If you include the lithosphere, ~30km down, then maybe your mass argument might have some much smaller, weaker and trembly legs.

I consider Gaia to be the living earth, the biosphere, on which humans have had and continue to have a major impact. But i'm willing to concede your point if it will get the thread back on topic.

[stickdog99]

Tell me the number of cubic kilometers that humanity managed to alter before 1800. Now divide this value by Gaia's total number of cubic kilometers. Please get back to me with that number. Seriously. Let's see the number.
On edit: The denominator is approximately 2,000,000,000,000 cubic km.

Cute, but Gaia is not the entire mass of the planet.

The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth in a preferred homeostasis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia

If you include the lithosphere, ~30km down, then maybe your mass argument might have some much smaller, weaker and trembly legs.

I consider Gaia to be the living earth, the biosphere, on which humans have had and continue to have a major impact. But i'm willing to concede your point if it will get the thread back on topic.

And just how deep is Gaia's biosphere, pray tell? Have you ever dug to a sterile depth? Has anyone?

Isn't the entire plate tectonic system a living thing? What do you think happens to the conveyor belt of ocean sediment that keeps subducting into the mantle?

[TVC15]

Peguin said:

Ice mass is all that matters. According to the spanish research vessel, the Wilkins shelf collapsed already, into a large amount of 200 meter thick ice sheets now floating free and melting. (linked to before)

If anybody gives a shit, this "Spanish research vessel" story is completely bogus.

But hey, don't let that little fact stop you from repeating it over and over and over and over.......

[wintler2]

And just how deep is Gaia's biosphere, pray tell? Have you ever dug to a sterile depth? Has anyone? Isn't the entire plate tectonic system a living thing? What do you think happens to the conveyor belt of ocean sediment that keeps subducting into the mantle?

.. But i'm willing to concede your point if it will get the thread back on topic.

[wintler2]

If anybody gives a shit, this "Spanish research vessel" story is completely bogus.
But hey, don't let that little fact stop you from repeating it over and over and over and over.......

The official website for Spanish National Research Council has a press release
http://www.csic.es/noticia.do?objectid=0902bf8a800fa155
with great maps and photos of ship and ice shelf, i'd post but its a pdf, see
http://www.csic.es/wi/VisualizarDocumen ... =CSIC_PROD

So what do you base your obscenity on, TVC15? Habit?

[wintler2]

Climate scientists warn of economic pitfalls of inaction
Thursday, 12 March 2009 16:17

The Copenhagen Scientific Climate Congress finds many worst case scenarios have become a reality

New studies presented at the Scientific Climate Congress in Copenhagen today showed the worrying economic cost of climate change.

A study showed that while it will cost up to 128 billion yen (7.72 billion kroner) to secure Japanese harbours against more frequent storms, failure to do so could result in the loss of 1.5 to 3.4 percent of Japan's GDP by 2085 (Japanese GDP in 2007 was 25 trillion kroner). This is due to an increased number of days harbours will be forced to close.

‘Port planners should factor this in when designing port capacities,’ said Miguel Esteban, of the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies. ‘Failure to do so could lead to bottlenecks in the shipments of products and constrain Japanese economic growth.’

Another study released today showed productivity among outdoor labourers in New Delhi, India, had declined by 10 percent since 1980 due to climate change. If the temperature were to rise a further 2 degrees, productivity could be reduced by another 20 percent.

‘Increasing excessive heat exposure affects the daily life, work and health of poor people in tropical countries,’ said Tord Kjellström, of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at Australian National University.

The full conclusions of the three-day congress, attended by more than 2,500 international experts, will be published in June. The preliminary report was presented to Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen today. The full conclusions will be handed to policy makers at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen later this year.

The science team concluded that recent data and observations show that the worst case scenarios of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were being already realised. ‘There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate,’ said a statement from the group today, highlighting climate effects on sea-level, global temperature, ocean acidification and ice-sheet dynamics.

Leading experts warned earlier this week that the latest IPCC report, from 2007, which warned of possible sea-level rise of between 18 and 59cm by 2100, had underestimated the effect of climate change and that levels could rise to more than one metre by the end of the century.

The group also implored policy makers to take effective short-term action with a long-term strategy in mind.

‘Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of crossing tipping points and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult,’ said the preliminary report, released today.
http://www.cphpost.dk/climate/91-climat ... ction.html

[Ben D]

Scientists Claim Earth Is Undergoing Natural Climate Shift

March 15, 2009

UW-Milwaukee Study Could Realign Climate Change Theory

MILWAUKEE -- The bitter cold and record snowfalls from two wicked winters are causing people to ask if the global climate is truly changing.
The climate is known to be variable and, in recent years, more scientific thought and research has been focused on the global temperature and how humanity might be influencing it.

However, a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee could turn the climate change world upside down.

Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.

"Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate," researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.

Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other. Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.

"In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century," Tsonis said. "The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001."

The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000.
Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have?

"But if we don't understand what is natural, I don't think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand -- first the natural variability of climate -- and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural," Tsonis said.
Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

[wintler2]

Ben D, assuming you've read the article, do you have any views on it? Is it significant, if so why? It is a surprise to see you posting an article about a computer model of climate, i thought you said climate was all too mysterious and mystical for that.

[Ben D]

Ben D, assuming you've read the article, do you have any views on it? Is it significant, if so why? It is a surprise to see you posting an article about a computer model of climate, i thought you said climate was all too mysterious and mystical for that.

Hello mr. wintler2, I do hope you don't get into the habit of stalking me as you do slimmouse. I posted this because I had never come across the theory involved in this study before and I considered it significant,... and its findings. Furthermore I assumed others may also be interested.

"In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century," Tsonis said. "The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001."

Other than that, I have nothing else to say to you and ask that you please refrain from your consistent sniping.

[wintler2]

I'm not stalking you Ben D, merely trying to fill you in. I too am very interested in the driving forces of weather and the coupling of atmospheric & ocean cells.

From the conclusion of the 2007 paper rehashed in your 2009 report from CNN affitiate TV station in Wisconsin, home of the university that did the work.

..“Moreover, we caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing.” . . .

“Doing so is vital, as the future evolution of the global mean temperature may hold surprises on both the warm and cold ends of the spectrum due entirely to internal variability that lie well outside the envelope of a steady increasing global mean temperature.”

“Finally, it is vital to note that there is no comfort to be gained by having a climate with a significant degree of internal variability, even if it results in a near-term cessation of global warming. It is straightforward to argue that a climate with significant internal variability is a climate that is very sensitive to applied anthropogenic radiative anomalies. If the role of internal variability in the climate system is as large as this analysis would seem to suggest, warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models, given the propensity of those models to underestimate climate internal variability.”

[Ben D]

I'm not stalking you Ben D, merely trying to fill you in. I too am very interested in the driving forces of weather and the coupling of atmospheric & ocean cells.

From the conclusion of the 2007 paper rehashed in your 2009 report from CNN affitiate TV station in Wisconsin, home of the university that did the work.

..“Moreover, we caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing.”

Those cut and paste pieces from a blog site in your post are not apparent in the actual paper? Here is a PDF document of the study,..note the graphs showing global temperature projected over the next century according to the theory.


http://www.uwm.edu/~aatsonis/2007GL030288.pdf

Conclusions
[13] The above observational and modeling results suggest
the following intrinsic mechanism of the climate
system leading to major climate shifts. First, the major
climate modes tend to synchronize at some coupling
strength. When this synchronous state is followed by an
increase in the coupling strength, the network’s synchronous
state is destroyed and after that climate emerges in a
new state. The whole event marks a significant shift in
climate. It is interesting to speculate on the climate shift
after the 1970s event. The standard explanation for the post
1970s warming is that the radiative effect of greenhouse
gases overcame shortwave reflection effects due to aerosols
[Mann and Emanuel, 2006]. However, comparison of the
2035 event in the 21st century simulation and the 1910s event
in the observations with this event, suggests an alternative
hypothesis, namely that the climate shifted after the 1970s
event to a different state of a warmer climate, which may be
superimposed on an anthropogenic warming trend.

[wintler2]

Thanks for full text pdf.

..note the graphs showing global temperature projected over the next century according to the theory. ..

Why? They vary so much with different model runs. You want me to guess your favourite? My work is done.