Greenland ice sheet melting faster than previously thought. PLEASE RECYCLE!

donkey lips wrote:

I use more paper towels than I need, just because of this thread.

I only use one square of toilet paper just like Sheryl Crow told me to.

I hate to admit it, but I actually used 2 squares last week when I had diarrhea!

No Way wrote:We just gave you a bunch of good peer reviewed science showing that as CO2 concentrations increase, so does temperature.

Well, unless I'm mistaken, among all the references circulated on this thread, so far I've only seen one peer-reviewed paper, the one about Antarctic ie core samples from Nature. Everything else has been produced by somebody or an entity with a specific agenda.

Beats me how the US Energy Department, the Japanese trade ministry, the UK government, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and BP all have "an agenda".

New figures released by the Department of Energy show that the world is emitting carbon dioxide at a rate much faster than scientists had predicted. Global CO2 emissions reached 10 billion tons in 2010, the Oak Ridge National Lab reports, about 564 million tons or 6 percent more than emitted in 2009.

Japan's emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fuel rose 4.4 percent in the year that ended in March from the previous year to 1.122 billion tonnes, the trade ministry said Friday, as a recovery in the economy and an unusually hot summer boosted the use of energy.

The dramatic fall in the UK's greenhouse gas emissions caused by the recession has proved to be a blip, with national emissions rising 3.1% in 2010. The new energy and climate change secretary, Ed Davey, attributed the rise, the first in almost a decade, to increased home heating during a cold winter and shutdowns at nuclear power stations after technical problems.

In a report entitled “Long-term trend in global CO2 emissions” prepared by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, it has been found that global emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) have increased by 45% between 1990 and 2010 and reached an all-time high of 33 billion tonnes by 2010, all despite increased energy efficiency, nuclear energy and a growing renewable energy industry.

China's carbon dioxide emissions rose 10.4 percent in 2010 compared with the previous year, as global emissions rose at their fastest rate for more than four decades, data released by BP on Wednesday showed.

No Way wrote:We just gave you a bunch of good peer reviewed science showing that as CO2 concentrations increase, so does temperature.

rose colored glasses? wrote:

Well, unless I'm mistaken, among all the references circulated on this thread, so far I've only seen one peer-reviewed paper, the one about Antarctic ie core samples from Nature. Everything else has been produced by somebody or an entity with a specific agenda.

If all you've seen is one peer-reviewed paper you haven't been trying very hard. If I recall correctly, the IPCC report which I've pointed you to repeatedly cites something like 1600 peer-reviewed papers. I could be mistaken with that number but I'm reasonably certain the number is larger than one.

Whether or not any particular entity has a real or alleged agenda is irrelevant if the observational data is reasonably correct and it does not contradict the theory. The scientific process still works as long as there are knowledgeable entities with other agendas seeking observational data to disprove the theory. Eventually it all works out and Galileo is vindicated in the end.

Everyone has an agenda. You've claimed yours as neutral observer or curious student of the topic. Count me as a skeptic on that front.

I used to work for a company that saved things customers brought in to be taken to be recycled. We would diligently take the things from the front of our business to the back for the middle man to pick up and take to be recycled. One day, we saw him take our bin, and go straight to our dumpster and throw all of it in there. naturally, we watched again. Guess what? He did not take it the next time, either. When confronted, he stated that most of what was being sent to be recycled could not really be recycled.

Recycling is not viable for many things. People feel good for trying, but in reality, it all ends up in a landfill somewhere. Like the other guy said, why not just throw it into the trash and keep one more truck off the roads?

Citizen Runner wrote:Everyone has an agenda. You've claimed yours as neutral observer or curious student of the topic. Count me as a skeptic on that front.

No Way wrote:Are you looking for the actual technique used and why it works?

http://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8343.full.pdf

Funny story, if only to me... Yesterday I had a paper accepted into a journal in my field (completely unrelated to climate - don't worry I won't claim any expertise), second in a series of two papers that challenge a widely accepted notion in my field (I tend to be a skeptic). Anyway, an important brakthrough in that work happened several years ago when reading about something similar (but generally held to be cmpletely different) in a nearly completely different field, dealing with snow and ice. Interestingly (again, assuredly only to me), the paper you just linked to me has a couple of very interesting pieces that are of direct relevance to some work I'm doing at the moment, but tha I hadn't considered (having forgotten the connection from several years back).

So while we have been debating climate, and I still admit to being a climate dummy, you've just inadvertently given me some very useful help in ongoing research, which I think will strengthen a paper I'm in the middle of. Much like an unsuspecting French masters student in Norway "accidently" gave me a great idea years ago.

OK, "interesting" aside over, back to climate... :-)

No Way wrote:

We don't have time to wait 10 years and see what happens. If we wait 10 years, we will experience massive food shortages for the reasons I explained earlier.

You can't expect people to take you seriously with such fear mongering. This is exactly the problem with the environmental movement and why there are so many skeptics.

OK so I have started reading these two papers:

No Way wrote:http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap01/Image18.gif

http://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8343.full.pdf

I have not yet fully digested them, not by any stretch. But if you have, perhaps you can tackle a couple of questions that pop up on first skim (of the 2nd paper):

- I have a great deal of trouble with the way they've developed the reference timeline. It's apparently anchored at a couple of fixed points based on some sort of dating technique (all of which contain significant uncertainties), but otherwise based on a physical model, which they state has no relation to climate assumptions. Any such physical model MUST take climate into consideration in some form, either directly or indirectly, as the growth and flow of the glacier is completely controlled by climate. That said, the accuracy of the time scale is likely of limited importance relative to their climate conclusions, but the claimed uncertainties (+/- a few kY) lead me to suspect they are a little overconfident about their interpretations in general

- I have to admit I'm a little shocked there's only ~ 400,000 years of ice in the profile. I wonder if that means that part of Antarctica was ice-free (and hence warmer?) prior? Their period of relatively confident data extends ~ 350,000 years, which is still only a blink of the eye in the complete geological record > 4 billion years

- my bigger issues are with the interpretation of atmospheric chemistry. The basic assumption is that the chemical signatures of the air bubbles trapped in the ice retain an unaltered record of atmospheric conditions at the time the bubbles were trapped. I have significant doubts that this is a valid assumption. There must be some chemical interaction between the trapped gas and the surrounding ice crystals, and I think there must necessarily be some transport of both gas and supercooled fluids within the ice over that kind of time period. I would expect to see some "averaging" of chemical properties through diffusion and other processes that would soften (filter out) high frequency peaks and valleys, such as the apparent peak we are reportedly entering presently

Anyway, I don't pretend to have absorbed all (or even most) of the paper(s), but if you have any immediate rebuttal to these comments I would like to hear it so I can mull it over.

adfeaf wrote:

No Way wrote:

We don't have time to wait 10 years and see what happens. If we wait 10 years, we will experience massive food shortages for the reasons I explained earlier.

You can't expect people to take you seriously with such fear mongering. This is exactly the problem with the environmental movement and why there are so many skeptics.

There's a lot of truth in that. Fear mongering is not very helpful.

I think that some of the fear mongering is born of frustration. The issue of global warming was brought up more than one hundred years ago. More than 50 years ago atmospheric CO2 levels were being measured and their rapid rise was confirmed. The whole issue has been in the public eye now for over 20 years. And we have mountains of evidence gathered over decades that confirm that CO2 levels are rising to levels not seen in at least hundreds of thousands of years, that global temperatures are indeed rising, and that confirm and strengthen the scientific understanding of all this.

How long do we wait to act? What exactly are we waiting for?

BP say that rising CO2 levels have no impact on Climate Change.

They would say that though wouldn't they?

Nevermind, I've found an answer to my question:

rose colored glasses? wrote:- my bigger issues are with the interpretation of atmospheric chemistry. The basic assumption is that the chemical signatures of the air bubbles trapped in the ice retain an unaltered record of atmospheric conditions at the time the bubbles were trapped. I have significant doubts that this is a valid assumption. There must be some chemical interaction between the trapped gas and the surrounding ice crystals, and I think there must necessarily be some transport of both gas and supercooled fluids within the ice over that kind of time period. I would expect to see some "averaging" of chemical properties through diffusion and other processes that would soften (filter out) high frequency peaks and valleys, such as the apparent peak we are reportedly entering presently

looking at the NATURE paper (Petit et al, 1999), I reference the caption to Figure 3, which presents the guts of their findings, and is the basis for the alarming blue graph mentioned earlier, the one with the sharp hockeystick trajectory of CO2 concentration starting in 1950-ish.

"The mean resolution of the CO2 (CH4) profile is about 1500 (950) years. It goes up to about 6000 years for the CO2 in the fractured zones and in the bottom part of the record, whereas the CH4 time resolution ranges between a few tens of years to 4500 years"

Readers with a scientific background should understand right away that this means each datapoint in the ice core plot represents an average value over some time on the order of ~ 1000 years. Hence high frequency fluctuations would certainly be filtered out. Their basic claim that "present day atmospheric burdns of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years" seems, to me, entirely unfounded. One cannot compare a single annual value, or even decade-average or century average, to astring of data based on a 1000-year moving average.

rose colored glasses? wrote:

Readers with a scientific background should understand right away that this means each datapoint in the ice core plot represents an average value over some time on the order of ~ 1000 years. Hence high frequency fluctuations would certainly be filtered out. Their basic claim that "present day atmospheric burdns of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years" seems, to me, entirely unfounded. One cannot compare a single annual value, or even decade-average or century average, to astring of data based on a 1000-year moving average.

Cool.

Identify a plausible mechanism for high frequency fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 and you'll get published. I'm especially interested in how you deal with atmospheric CO2 lifetime to get these rapid fluctuations.

Will you credit LetsRun.com in your paper?

There's no need to identify any specific mechanism. Any data point representing a 1000-5000-ish year moving average will be masking (having averaged) peaks and valleys on all shorter time scales. The magnitude of such fluctuations is unknown, but can be inferred to some degree from the longer time scale structure of the data.

The point I'm trying to make is we need to compare apples and apples. So if the ice core data are 1000 year moving averages (roughly) we should be looking at a 1000 year moving average to represent current conditions.

Assuming levels have been ~ 80 ppm higher than in 1950 over the past 60 years (and overconservative simplification), then this would have the effect of adding about 5 ppm (80 x 60 / 1000) to the moving average. So instead of a sharp uptick, we should be looking at a fuzzier end point maybe like this:

I understand the mathematics, it's the physics I'm having trouble with.

To have rapid fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 you need a source to make it rise and you need a mechanism to make it fall. Moreover this needs to happen with a period of a few centuries, that is significantly faster than your averaging window. Current theory is that elevated atmospheric CO2 doesn't fall very fast, due mostly to ocean buffering. That is the accepted physics don't allow your postulated mathematics to occur.

Citizen Runner wrote:Current theory is that elevated atmospheric CO2 doesn't fall very fast, ....

Can it rise very fast?

The data at the heart of our current discussion show a very rapid fluctuation in CO2, if we are to believe the graph. Ergo, very rapid fluctuations are possible.

My understanding is that the buffering mechanisms are relatively slow. The inference is that a rapid rise is possible if there is a source, such as the postulated rise due to fossil fuel consumption. One model for decrease, the so called Bern model, is an exponential decay with a longest timeline on the order of a couple hundred years.

Keep in mind also that there are other indicators, independent of the ice core data, that the current rise in atmospheric CO2 is significantly due to fossil fuel use, notably the carbon isotope ratios versus ratios determined from tree ring data with data going back thousands of years with very annual resolution. Even if your "rapid fluctuation" hypothesis were correct and weakened the "unprecedented rise in CO2" premise (and I don't think it does) there are still indications that we're not in the midst of a purely natural cycle.

Throw me a good paper on that?