Move over Katrina here comes Rita

[nzlegend 1]

The Gulf of America is about to get hammered again - this time by Katrinas bigger sister Rita! already a Cat5 and the currently the 3rd biggest Hurricane ever recorded, 270kph winds 560km wide.

2 days to impact in Texas and its gathering strength out in the Gulf.

The damaged floodwalls in New Orleans cant handle more than a Cat1 storm surge, they may well be inundated again.

Lets hope Team Dubya on the ball this time.

[Fattwins 0]

it looks like the ball is in the right spot. That said its in the home state of the bushes so of course things will be run better.

[Ocean11 0]

It looks like Rita is going to go right over a certain person's ranch in Crawford, TX. That's a shame.

 

These powerful hurricanes certainly seem to love that warm water in the Gulf of Mexico.

[Fattwins 0]

this year they are on a westerly track that is for sure.

[indosnm 0]

Have a look and you will see that there are seven typohhons, tropical depressions and hurricanes on the go at the moment.

[Ocean11 0]

Hawaii and Matsuyama also look set for a bashing. I hope George's is bigger than mine.

[damian 0]

check out the map, looks like it will weaken before hitting land, but at full strength over the oil rigs.

http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/tracking/at200518.html

 

and the interesting spinny thingy:

http://html.nbc5i.com/sh/idi/weather/hurricanes/hurricanetracker.html

[Ocean11 0]

My typhoon has been redirected so as not to rip my roof off. George's hurricane hasn't I see. Could it be because I have gone easy on the fibs recently and George fibs every time he opens his smirky little mouth? As an irreligious person, I'm strongly inclined to interpret it that way.

[Ocean11 0]

It appears some scientists actually think that the increased strength of hurricanes if not their frequency, is caused by global warming. Of course, Americans of that persuasion will no doubt mock anything coming from somebody with \'Sir\' in front of their name.

[Curt 1]

We all know scientists are madmen, of course. Especially British ones.

[viv&kev 0]

Here's an article of interest.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4276242.stm

[soubriquet 0]

What some scientists think is that in order to have a meaningful debate about global warming, it is a very good idea to look at the data.

 

The IPCC report is here:

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/073.htm

 

The time series data used by the IPCC can be found here:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore.html

 

These data can be downloaded, and you can paste it into a spreadsheet and model it if you wish.

 

Here is a diagram showing why everyone needs to be worried. These data support the often repeated but rarely questioned claims about unprecedented temperatures, storms, plagues and pestilence. Note that the time scale is 1,000 years.

 

 

If we take a 25,000 year view the IPCC data show clearly that the Earth has been on a cooling trend over the past 10,000 years, and was clearly warmer than it is now.

 

 

10,000 years is a bit short to really understand climate variability for a 4.7 billion year old planet. It's like taking a strand of hair from someone, and trying to paint their portrait. Fortunately, the ice core records go a bit further back. Here it is for 440,000 years

 

 

Note that the greenhouse gasses CO2 and CH4 track the temperature faithfully, and are not anthropogenic. Note also that the previous four interglacials were all warmer than present. Also that a full glacial/interglacial cycle takes about 110,000 years, and we are fairly close to the end of the current interglacial.

 

We can't get any further back than this with time series, so here is Scotese's reconstruction from geological evidence. It is widely accepted by the geological community, and shows clearly that the Earth's normal state is a greenhouse planet.

 

 

Note that is shows Average Global Temperature as being 10 degrees C hotter than at present. This is the best scientific evidence we have. Climate is dynamic, and change is ever present. High CO2 and CH4 concentrations are the normal state. We happen to be living in rare times: an interglacial excursion during an on-going ice age. No power on Earth will stop the greenhouse, although it seems highly probable that we will see more glacials before conditions return to normal.

[soubriquet 0]

The first rule of lying with statistics is to pick a scale which proves your point. That is the reason why the IPCC uses the 1,000 year time scale. The Vostok data which the IPCC use in their 440,000 year data look like this for the past 20,000 years. Similarly to the Central Greenland ice core (IPCC 25K data), they show higher temperature earlier in the Holocene (wholly recent)

 

 

I've also pulled up the 440K Vostok deuterium, which is very conveniently labeled by Petit et al. in variation from present temperature, which is the 0 C line. I've coloured it at an abitrary -2 C, to show the glacial interglacial cycles.

 

 

The IPCC is being disingenuous by using the 1,000 year cutoff, and undermines the credibility of the greenhouse industry. Claims of "hottest/ worstest/ powerfulest/ everest" are not supported by the IPCC data. Hottest in my own bathtime, might be true, but the 10K+ data show many of the claims of the greenhouse industry to be just as false as the denials of climate change reality.

 

It is also worth examining our climate change values. The palaeoclimatic evidence is perfectly clear about the nature of a glacial. During a glacial, the zones of sub-polar climate expand towards the equator, turning most of currently habitable Europe, North America and Asia into tundra and boreal forest. The great deserts of the world expand as winds become stronger and drier. The ice caps don't generally expand much because the polar air masses are too cold to carry moisture. The actual icy events are relatively short lived, but lead to lowering of sea levels by about 140-180 metres. Deglaciation is catastrophic and almost instantaneous, with sea levels recovering in a few hundred years at most. Interglacials are much more benign (global warming remember), with warmer, calmer and wetter conditions leading to massive increases in plant activity, hence the change in CO2 and methane concentrations. This change is concentrated at higher latitudes, with very little change in equatorial temperatures.

 

Non-ice age conditions are a bit harder to judge, but the our best evidence suggest the greenhouse world sees further expansion of tropical conditions, rather than runaway heating. The BBC series on dinosaurs showed vast animals roaming swampy plains, not desperate creatures clinging to life at the coldest margins of the planet.

[Ocean11 0]

 

Good, they need to walk a bit anyway.

[kintaro 0]

Excellent post Ocean! There are few things more enjoyable in life than to debase and make light of those in troubling situations. Well done, lad!

[Ocean11 0]

Troubling situation? What, like being grossly overweight? There isn't a single person in that random shot who is the right weight. If only I could 'make light' of them.

 

Actually though, there isn't much pleasure in pointing out that the people there have debased themselves. I only hope they draw the right lessons from their experience.

[damian 0]

Soubriquet, You wrote 2 detailed posts and provided some charts. I have seen some of these charts before and some I have not. In amongst your interesting posts you appear to have made some assertions, although I had to sniff them out a little. Quite simply, what is your conclusion? You said a lot without directly saying anything. Or was your role simply to add data to the debate, but not confidently enter the debate yourself? It seems quite a waste of some good chart gathering and the application of big scientific words without one statement that starts: "and so my opinion is this......". What a waste of scientific method (that we all so apparently lack). Actually, without you submitting a clearly stated opinion, your scientific method quickly degenerates into a regurgitation of openly available and often referenced data (although, what the BBC put on their TV about dinsasours is not, in my opinion, useful data).

 

Fat Americans with no fuel: a sign that there are not enough poor uneducated black kids left to fight in Iraq. It is obvious that the scope of recuitment will have to widen. What type of beer do you think middle class Americans prefer? Lager, Pilsner or Draught?

[Ocean11 0]

What the first chart shows is carbon induced warming has been occuring since the start of the industrial age. Nobody is quite sure what it will result in, but given that rather a lot rests on a few degrees here and there for current levels of population, it's not really relevant to take a geological timescale. One theory has it that the first big die-off in the fossil record was as a result of rapid warming.

 

I very much doubt that the IPCC is 'lying' about the risks we're running.

[soubriquet 0]

O11. I've digitised the ice age chart, and added an extinction trace (from van Andel, 1994). It's a bit crude, but it shows that the three major extinction events do not coincide with episodes of global warming.

 

 

I'm not accusing the IPCC of lying, but of being disingenuous, or "economical with the truth" if you prefer. I see no reason to use a 1,000 year cutoff for the historical perspective, other than a) it is a convenient number, and it shows a steadily rising trend. I don't believe it helps to educate or inform.

 

General Circulation Models are used in weather prediction, with patchy success for the next day. I don't buy the results for the 3 month forecast, let alone 50 or 100 years. My knowledge of atmospheric science is too limited for me to criticise GCM's with confidence, but their shortcomings are well known. The major one is that water vapour is ignored because it is too difficult and too unpredictable to model. Water evaporates from the oceans, and if it condenses into cloud, reflects about 70-80% of the incoming radiation back out into space. So if global warming increases cloud cover, then it cuts incoming radiation, leading to a net cooling. Things are more complex than that, but it is a very nice negative feedback loop.

 

BPC. You are correct, the BBC series is not science, but I added the reference as an illustration. The major flaw is the conclusion that the end-Cretaceous extinction was caused by a meteorite impact. Best evidence is that environment change caused by continental drift was the pricipal cause (assertion). Nor is what I wrote science; for that it would have to be more thoroughly researched, properly referenced and peer reviewed. It was an attempt to draw attention to the way that opinion is presented as scientific "fact" by selective presentation of data. An illustration that it is not just the global warming deniers who indulge in this practice.

 

My opinion? I can confidently assert that climate change is inevitable and ongoing. I also believe that industrial age release of greenhouse gasses is contributing to, but not wholly responsible for an underlying trend of global warming since the medieval minimum.

 

I am sceptical of models which predict runaway greenhouse conditions, because I don't think we have a good enough understanding of the feedback loops involved. The geological record lacks any convincing evidence to support such models (assertion). I have no doubt that the Earth's climate will revert to greenhouse conditions, regardless of man's input. I don't believe that this will catastrophic in terms of our species, but it will be very disruptive on a social and individual scale. The effects will be seen at high- rather than mid and low latitudes. I think it is probable that the Earth will see a return to glacial conditions before or despite a switch to greenhouse conditions. If this event occurs, it will neccesitate the evacuation of most of the northern northern-hemisphere populations to the tropics, and this will be far more catastrophic than a greenhouse planet.

 

Change is inevitable, with or without man. Science does not have the answers, because this is not a science, but a social problem. Managing change, not preventing it, is the issue. For this, I hate to say, we will be in the hands of politicians, bureaucrats and, ahem, bankers. Geologists won't be much use, except perhaps for digging holes.

[Yuki's Passion 1]

while Ive only scanned over this thread here, I would say that for a short period, while its relative, maybe 50-200 years, which is less faster than a blink of an eye in the long run, I belive that the end result of global warming will actually be a cooling effect of the planet or an ice-age - leading to more snow and better skiing for all of us...though we will be dust by then.