"Are you accepting his ideas or not? "
Sure. What Gore said is that "some of the models show....". They do.
In case you haven't noticed, the arctic is getting pretty low on ice at the end of the annual melt season.
"Al Gore says" is political science; this is climate science...
BTW, there's another heat wave up north.
Severe Weather Europe posts on FB these maps map from climatereanalyzer: temps in Greenland about 15C-20C above normal this week. This will expose large areas of the GIS to air temps above 0C/32F.
This is borne out by current temps on the Weather Network for Narsarsuaq, which will hit 10C tomorrow.
Scorching temperature anomalies over Greenland early next week expected, with temperatures 15-20 °C above average or more. Significant parts of the ice sheet will be above 0 °C.
Map: Climatereanalyzer.org
The "pause" idea relies somewhat on cherry picking, but so do some of the charts and numbers supporting strong recent warming). "
The trend hasn't still hasn't changed; 2015 and most likely '16 will be above the line, and someday temps will fall below again, prolly with the next La Nina, which should be warmer than her predecessor.
zmescience.com
Chart of the temperature anomalies for 1950-2014, also showing the phase of the El Niño-La Niña cycle. (Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Earth Observatory, NASA/GISS)>
+ Download PDF of chart
giss.nasa.gov
" they aren't enough for "existential threat"
We've only gone up by a degree C so far. We've "only" raised CO2 by 40%. It's not that Hansen has the most accurate model so far, it's that so far Hansen has the most accurate model. American exceptionalism at work....
Three Categories of Runaway Warming
The above scenario isn’t science fiction. According to some hard science done by the world’s top climate scientists, it is entirely likely if Republican burn, baby burn policy and the fossil fuel companies that push it survive in their current forms for much longer.
Hansen’s new paper is a more in depth study of Earth Systems Climate Sensitivity to a given level of CO2 forcing. The study looks, with greater detail, into both how much Earth will warm, long term, given a certain level of CO2 emission and how much of this emission is required to set off one of three categories of a runaway greenhouse.
In a less than ideal scenario, Hansen investigates what will happen if we burn all or nearly all the fossil fuels currently included in the unconventional reserves. All, or nearly all, according to Hansen represents between 5,000 to 10,000 gigatons of carbon equivalent fuels. Chillingly, if we tap the most extreme sources, such as methane hydrates, that number could rocket to 20,000 gigatons or more. So even Hansen’s study isn’t an extreme worst case.
Category 1: The Mini-Runaway
The Hansen paper finds that burning between 3,500 and 6,500 gigatons of carbon based fuels is enough to raise world CO2 levels to between 800 and 1200 parts per million. This level of CO2 would set up climate conditions similar to those experienced during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) in which temperatures were between 10 and 12 degrees Celsius hotter (average) than today.
Hansen finds that this level renders much of the Earth mostly uninhabitable for humans. Hansen notes:
Earth was 10-12 °C warmer than today in the early Eocene and at the peak of the PETM (Fig. 4). How did mammals survive that warmth? Some mammals have higher internal temperatures than humans and there is evidence of evolution of surface-area-to-mass ratio to aid heat dissipation, e.g., transient dwarfing of mammals (Alroy et al., 2000) and even soil fauna (Smith et al., 2004)during the PETM warming. However, human-made warming will occur in a few centuries, as opposed to several millennia in the PETM, thus providing little opportunity for evolutionary dwarfism to alleviate impacts of global warming. We conclude that the large climate change from burning all fossil fuels would threaten the biological health and survival of humanity, making policies that rely substantially on adaptation inadequate.
It is also worth noting that much of the world’s land masses would experience average summer temperatures above the mammal-killing level of 35 degrees Celsius (wet bulb) in a PETM-like world. The added heat of this regime would swiftly soften and obliterate any ice on the planet. But given the killing heat and a hydrological cycle driving droughts and rainfall events that are 80% more extreme, a rapid sea level rise of 200+ feet would likely come as a harsh afterthought. (To this point, it is worth mentioning that most planetary ice disappears when CO2 levels hit and maintain between 500 and 620 parts per million over a number of centuries).
Nearly all climate scientists agree that a return to PETM conditions and CO2 levels, especially on so short a time-scale would be a mass extinction event on the land and in the ocean. Which is why policies that extend the burning of fossil fuels combine the travesties of ecocide, genocide, and suicide in equal measures and to ever greater degrees as time moves forward.
robertscribbler.com |
