Category Archives: Antartica

$535 Trillion To Remove CO2 From The Atmosphere

Posted on July 23, 2017 | Leave a comment

James Hansen, et al have issued a study titled “Young people’s burden: requirement of negative CO2 emissions. The authors say that unless CO2 reduction begins right away and aggressively the next generation and the one after that will have to spend a $535 trillion to make Earth habitable. This $535 trillion is not the $trillions that the warmers want to spend to bring CO2 emissions to a net zero by 2050 or 2100 (depending on which warmer group is talking). The $535 trillion is for removing atmospheric CO2.

The Hansen et al study says the global temperature will melt glaciers and consequently sea level will rise 6 to 9 meters (approximately 20 to 30 feet). Using models, the study determined a temperature rise due to a rise in atmospheric CO2 and then determined that the glaciers will melt which is the big threat. The authors conclude that the current interglacial period would match the Eemian interglacial period which occurred about 125,000 years ago. That period is believed to have experienced a 6 to 9-meter sea level rise. The chart below, from Wikipedia shows the current interglacial period, the Holocene and the Eemian and other interglacial periods. Note that the scale is more or less logarithmic and not linear.

A tangential observation—this chart shows that the Globe’s temperature has been much hotter than at present. Also, the Pleistocene running from about 1 million years ago to about 20 thousand years ago shows glacial and interglacial periods. The peak temperatures are the time of the interglacial and the rest are the times when some part of Earth was covered by advancing glaciers. Were there SUVs and fossil fuel powered plants putting out CO2 that caused the glaciers to melt?

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Will The Global Temperature Begin To Cool Down In The Near Future?

Posted on May 22, 2017 | Leave a comment

The numbers of scientist predicting a drop in global temperature are becoming a large group— ready to challenge the mythical 97%. This blog has posted some of the predictions. The postings have demonstrated that there is not total unanimity as to reason why the temperature will drop. Maybe it is a combination of different things. That is refreshing in light of the warmer’s one size fits all theory that CO2 is essentially raising or will raise global temperature all by itself.

First some discussion that suggests that CO2 is not what the warmers claim.

The warmer’s theory says that atmospheric CO2 molecules intercept low-frequency IR waves radiated from Earth on their way back into space. The exchange warms the atmosphere a little and this causes water to evaporate and move into the atmosphere. Water vapor is a much more significant “greenhouse gas” than CO2. They say that the result is a 3 fold increase in temperature as a result. This is their so-called “climate sensitivity”. This is part of the GIGO that is put into the climate models that the warmers use to predict catastrophic in the future. Let us look and see how well this has turned out for them in the real world versus the computer world.

The chart above was made in June 2013 so it is a little out of date. Next chart will be the latest update.

The important things to know are the following

All those little hair-like lines represent the output from one of the 73 warmer computers. They are all over the place.
The heavy black line aggregates all of the 73 outputs into a single line which represents the “official forecast”.
The blue squares are the actual recorded global temperatures as measured by satellites.
The actual temperature as measured by the weather balloons are shown as black dots.
The balloons and the satellites essentially confirm each other and they are, again, actual measurements.
Every 4 or 5 years, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gathers and produces an analysis of the state of the climate. They then issue a technical report and a summary that is primarily for the politicians of the world. One of the features of the IPCC report is how confident they are that their predictions are spot on.
The red arrows show their level of confidence, at the time of the report, as to how sure they are that the forecasts are correct.
The first report said that they were “confident”. As each new report was issued, they got more confident of their forecasts. The last one being 95% certain. This is all happening as the spread between their forecast temperature readings and the actual temperature readings continued to diverge.

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Ice Cores and Global Climate Part 3–CO2 Follows Temperature

Posted on February 22, 2016 | 2 comments

The previous posting showed that the temperatures in the past have exceeded the current temperature rise giving lie to the assertion that the year 2015 was the hottest year ever.

A cursory examination indicates that the warmers do not dispute the temperature records derived from the ice cores. But looking at the relationship of carbon dioxide (CO2) and temperature rise and fall as indicated by the ice core record, some warmers do not agree with the idea that CO2 follows temperature rise and fall rather than leads. First a look at graphical representations of the ice core data:

To understand this chart, remember, time flow to the right from the past to the present. When examining the blue, temperature, and the red, CO2, the line to the right is later. For example, look at the blue and the red line beginning about 140,000 years ago. The red line is very close to the blue line but it is to the right of the blue line meaning that it is lagging the rise in temperature shown by the blue line. The difference is more apparent if you click on the chart to enlarge it. Note that the thickness of a line on this chart may be the equivalent of 1,000years. The creators of this chart meant to show the CO2 lagging the temperature because that is what their data told them.

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Posted in AGW, Antartica, Climate Alarmism, CO2, glaciers, Greenland, Ice cores, Interglacial periods

Ice Cores and Global Climate Part 2. Are Current Temperatures Highest Ever?

Posted on February 20, 2016 | 5 comments

As discussed in the previous posting, examination of ice cores can provide high quality data about the Earth’s climate from thousands of years in the past. Antarctica’s ice cores cannot be surpassed for the longest age records. Let us look once again at the Vostok ice core drilling. (Click on all the charts to enlarge.)

This illustration reverses the direction of time flow from that of the previous posting’s chart. It does expand the data from about 120,000 years ago to the present.

The chart blue line is the ice core temperature data referenced to the global temperature. The flat red line is the average of global annual temperature means for the period 1998 to 2008. This provides a reference with which to compare the past temperatures. And lastly, the green is the annual mean temperature for 2008. Several things are obvious. First, recent temperatures are not as warm as previous temperatures at their peak. Second, the globe began to exit the last glacial period about 15,000 years ago, and the temperature increased fairly rapidly (of course rapidly on this chart may be several thousand of years). It is not possible to attribute this rise nor really any other rise shown on this chart to something that man has done. The current period has been relatively stable.

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Posted in AGW, Antartica, Climate Alarmism, CO2, glaciers, Global Temperatures, Greenland, Ice cores, Interglacial periods, IPCC, The Pause

Ice Cores And What They Tell Us About Global Climate

Posted on February 18, 2016 | 2 comments

Ice cores provide information about the climate in the past and this allows us to compare it with the current climate to determine how it stacks up. While some of the readers may know a lot about ice cores, this posting provides general knowledge for those of you that are not so familiar with ice cores. The next posting will discuss the results of the information gather at two sites in the Antarctic.

The Vostok location, one of many places where ice cores are drilled, is part of the Antarctic ice cap. At this location the snow falls each year and the temperature doesn’t rise above freezing. In fact this location is called the coldest place on Earth.

This is how the ice sheets are formed. The surface layer of snow contains gaps between the snowflakes containing air. As subsequent season’s experience snow falls, the older snow begins to compress. The compression forms a grainy material (firn) said to resemble the texture of granulated sugar. As the snow above continues to accumulate, the firn eventually densifies and closes off the pores and the air is firmly trapped. The ice sheet now has inclusions which can be analyzed. When the ice is cored out of this ice sheet, large amounts of information can be obtained for analysis. Wiki has this to say about the ice core samples:

“Ice cores contain an abundance of information about climate. Inclusions in the snow of each year remain in the ice, such as wind-blown dust, ash, pollen, bubbles of atmospheric gas and radioactive substances. The variety of climatic proxies is greater than in any other natural recorder of climate, such as tree rings or sediment layers. These include (proxies for) temperature, ocean volume, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity, desert extent and forest fires.

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Posted in AGW, Antartica, CO2, Environment, Global Temperatures, Ice cores, Interglacial periods