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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (825021)	12/23/2014 11:34:54 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1577381

So you didn't take chemistry while you weren't taking physics. I should have known. 40 Years of Scratching Reveals Ocean Acidification DataPublished: November 18th, 2014 By Brian Kahn As carbon dioxide levels increase due largely to human emissions, the world’s oceans are becoming highly corrosive to a number of organisms that call it home. But the rate of acidification and related changes are anything but uniform. That’s why a new study aims to set a baseline for nearly every patch of saltwater from sea to acidifying sea so that future acidification and its impacts can be better monitored. Rates of ocean acidification ever 10 years since 1800 and projected through 2100. Credit: Tobias Friedrich/University of Hawaii Taro Takahashi, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who authored the new study in Marine Chemistry, said it has been a decades-long process to compile enough data about ocean acidification to effectively set a benchmark. Think of the ocean as a giant scratch ticket and the ships and research stations in Bermuda, Hawaii, Iceland and elsewhere as a coin used to slowly scratch away at the surface, revealing just how much the ticket is worth. It took 40 years of scratching but now there’s finally enough data in Takahashi’s eyes to set an accurate baseline. But while the baseline might be a jackpot for scientific research, it also shows that the changes taking place in the high seas could exact a heavy toll. Human emissions of carbon dioxide are far and away the biggest driver of ocean acidification. Oceans take up roughly a quarter of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities. That might reduce the amount of heat building in the atmosphere, but it’s hardly good news as a series of chemistry processes turns it into acid that can destroy corals, dissolve shells and disrupt marine food webs. Those impacts can, in turn, find their way on shore from lost revenue and jobs to decreased coastal protection from storm surges and high tides.“Without the foundation measurements, we can’t talk about changes,” Takahashi said. He likened it to the Keeling Curve, which has charted the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1957. A recent United Nations’ estimate says that unchecked, ocean acidification could cost the globe $1 trillion annually by 2100. In places such as the coastal waters off Washington state, ocean acidification is already eating away at the region’s oyster industry. Takahashi’s study provides key information that could help improve the accuracy of future loss estimates as well as help plan for how to adapt to changes and reduce the economic toll. Ocean acidification baseline rates in summer and winter of 2005. Credit: Takahashi et al., 2014 The current rate of acidification for the ocean is one unseen in the past 300 million years, but the data reveal important regional and seasonal differences between ocean basins. Ocean acidification hot spots dot the globe at different times of year, particularly the northwest Indian Ocean and areas around the tip of South America in the summer, and the Bering Sea in the winter. Having an accurate look at current seasonality and future expected rates of change provides a stark warning about what the future could look like. According to the study, areas around Bermuda will likely see oceans acidify to levels currently beyond the current seasonal swings in the next 40-50 years, meaning plants and animals will have to adapt to an entirely new environment. Around Hawaii and the eastern Atlantic, that transition will happen even sooner, likely in the next 20-30 years. What that means for the species that inhabit those regions is of utmost important to scientists and natural resource managers. While some of these regional differences in acidity and its impacts are fairly well known, others, such as the Indian Ocean hot spot, are still mysteries waiting to be unraveled. “Anytime you pull on one thing, two other things are moving at the same time so you get this complex set of relationships,” Dwight Gledhill, the deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Ocean Acidification Program, said. Gledhill, who wasn’t involved with the study, said the research provides a good foundation to understanding differences in ocean chemistry in different parts of the world, and helps in monitoring reef health. But he was wary of calling it a baseline. “I tend to steer clear of baseline terms. We missed the baseline about 200 years ago. We’re very much on a moving target here. But that said, you need some reference point to use. It’s an amazing synthesis of data.” climatecentral.org

To: Brumar89 who wrote (825021)

12/23/2014 11:44:35 AM

From: Wharf Rat

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1577381

"Willis Eschenbach tips me to a story by Marita Noon"

ILSHIAPIMP
Willis Eschenbach...Construction Manager at Taunovo Bay Resort in Fiji, Sport Fishing guide in Alaska and more recently as an Accounts/IT Senior Manager with South Pacific Oil.
Credentials

California Massage Certificate, Aames School of Massage, Oakland, CA. (1974).
B.A., Psychology, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA. (1975)

Now there's a well-qualified ex spurt.

Wondering Willis Eschenbach looks for sunlight in the Arctic winter - yeah, really!

Sou | 2:00 AM

Anthony Watts posted a press release from AGU14. That's all the "scientific" reporting he's capable of I'd say. The articles he's written himself are science-free, but he has managed a couple of press releases (he didn't have to go to any AGU meeting to copy and paste a press release).

Anyway, one of the press releases was from NASA, which you can read in full here. Or if you prefer, you can read it on the archive of Anthony's blog here. Here's an extract (my emphasis):
NASA satellite instruments have observed a marked increase in solar radiation absorbed in the Arctic since the year 2000 – a trend that aligns with the steady decrease in Arctic sea ice during the same period. While sea ice is mostly white and reflects the sun’s rays, ocean water is dark and absorbs the sun’s energy at a higher rate. A decline in the region’s albedo – its reflectivity, in effect – has been a key concern among scientists since the summer Arctic sea ice cover began shrinking in recent decades. As more of the sun’s energy is absorbed by the climate system, it enhances ongoing warming in the region, which is more pronounced than anywhere else on the planet. Since the year 2000, the rate of absorbed solar radiation in the Arctic in June, July and August has increased by five percent, said Norman Loeb, of NASA’s Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia. The measurement is made by NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments, which fly on multiple satellites. While a five percent increase may not seem like much, consider that the rate globally has remained essentially flat during that same time. No other region on Earth shows a trend of potential long-term change. When averaged over the entire Arctic Ocean, the increase in the rate of absorbed solar radiation is about 10 Watts per square meter. This is equivalent to an extra 10-watt light bulb shining continuously over every 10.76 square feet of Arctic Ocean for the entire summer. Regionally, the increase is even greater, Loeb said. Areas such as the Beaufort Sea, which has experienced the some of the most pronounced decreases in sea-ice coverage, show a 50 watts per square meter increase in the rate of absorbed solar radiation.

The Arctic Ocean is absorbing more of the sun's energy in recent years as white, reflective sea ice melts and darker ocean waters are exposed. The increased darker surface area during the Arctic summer is responsible for a 5 percent increase in absorbed solar radiation since 2000.
Image Credit: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio/Lori Perkins

Wondering Willis Wonders why they didn't look in winter time
This got perpetual wonderer Willis Eschenbach thinking and he went to his personal store of CERES data to see if he could prove the scientists (who don't know nuffin') wrong. Here is what he said and I quote:
...Now, to start with they’ve done something strange. Rather than look at the changes over the whole year, they’ve only looked at three months of the year, June, July, and August. I disagree strongly with this kind of analysis, for a couple of reasons. The first is because it allows for nearly invisible cherry picking, by simply choosing the months with a particular desired effect. The second is that it makes it hard to determine statistical significance, since there are 12 possible 3-month contiguous chunks that they could choose from … which means that you need to find a much greater effect to claim significance. So I’m not going to follow that plan. I’m looking at what happens over the whole year, since that’s what really matters. ...
I read that and then I read it again. I couldn't really believe what I was reading. I wasn't alone. This is what appeared in the comments:

Rob
December 17, 2014 at 11:47 pm
“Now, to start with they’ve done something strange. Rather than look at the changes over the whole year, they’ve only looked at three months of the year, June, July, and August.” Its dark in the Arctic in winter time. Good luck looking for changes in reflected light in perpetual darkness.

blog.hotwhopper.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (825021)	12/27/2014 8:24:06 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577381

"Certainly, Wallace’s “compelling” analysis is junk." Not pHraud but pHoolishness Posted on 26/12/2014 by richard telford By a curious coincidence, many climate sceptics are also ocean acidification sceptics. Some, for whom a rose by any other name would not smell so sweet, try to hide their rejection of reality behind semantics, arguing that ocean acidification should be called ocean neutralisation or ocean dealkalinisation. Others try to disprove ocean acidification with misremembered school chemistry, and yet others use dubious statistics. There is an outbreak of the latter at WUWT, where Mike Wallace presents an analysis of ocean pH data that the ever gullible Anthony Watts finds “compelling”. Wallace appears to have taken an objection to this figure by Richard Feely which shows atmospheric CO2 concentrations measured at Mauna Loa and ocean CO2 concentrations and pH measured in the nearby ocean. Wallace’s complaint is that this figure omits 80 years of data on ocean pH and that this omission represents “pHraud” that “eclipses even the so-called climategate event.” Wallace proceeds to compile all available ocean pH data from the World Ocean Atlas and calculate annual mean pH over the last century. Wallace’s naïve analysis A global-ocean mean pH: what could possibly go wrong? Consider what would happen if one simply took all available temperature data used this to estimate annual mean temperatures over the last 100 years, rather than calculating anomalies and gridding quality checked data. The result would obviously be nonsense. Changing geographical and seasonal biases in data availability, and incorrect data would corrupt the analysis. Wallace’s analysis suffers from exactly the same problems. Geographical variability in ocean pH is large. Upwelling area have the lowest pH as the water upwelling from the deep oceans has high CO2 concentrations from decomposition of sinking organic matter. The geographical coverage of ocean pH measurement is extremely unlikely to have remained constant over the instrumental period. Any analysis that fails to take this into consideration is doomed. Geographic variability in ocean pH. Apologies for the rainbow scale. Intra-annual variability in pH is also high. Intense photosynthesis during algal blooms can raise pH, and seasonal upwelling can lower it. If the seasonal coverage of ocean pH measurements has not remained constant over time, biases will result. The data Wallace analysed are easily downloaded from the World Ocean Database, and the metadata examined for geographic or seasonal patterns in data availability. I’ve analysed the data on a per-cast basis. Each cast collects data from several different depths. Location of casts by decade. Geographic patterns of data availability vary from decade to decade (and even more on an annual basis). Season of northern extra-tropical casts by decade The seasonal pattern of data availability in the northern extra-tropics (which represent the bulk of the data) also vary over time. The changing geographic and seasonal patterns in data availability means that simply calculating the mean pH for each year will give all sorts of spurious trends in the analysis. Even gridding the pH data would be difficult. They are probably best used to validate model output. Certainly, Wallace’s “compelling” analysis is junk. I hope the rest of his PhD is better than this pHoolishess. quantpalaeo.wordpress.com