Since people are wanting to talk about the latest events on the Antarctic Peninsula, this is a post for that discussion.
The imagery from ESA (animation here) tells the recent story quite clearly – the last sliver of ice between the main Wilkins ice shelf and Charcot Island is currently collapsing in a very interesting way (from a materials science point of view). For some of the history of the collapse, see our previous post. This is the tenth major ice shelf to collapse in recent times.
Maybe we can get some updates and discussion of potential implications from the people working on this in the comments….?
Chris Dunford (497) — It seems that the two bottle experiment is demonstrating some else in part; optical/IR properties of glass. There are two comments with links on this thread to better (but more complex) setups which come quite a bit closer to actual atmospheric properties.
@ Walt Bennett
Snip
“I have been, for over a year now, calling for allocation of resources into mitigation, adaptation and geo-engineering pursuits.”
snip
I fear you have the short-sightedness of the American right liberal free market philosphy. (That’s “One Dollar – One Vote”).
Many in this world don’t have the money to “mitigate and adapt” and geo-engineering will be for the benefit of those who have the money to do it. That’s what the free market _insists_.
Theo H
David B. Benson wrote in 499:
I realize you are much more of an expert in this area than I am, but I hope you won’t mind if I put together what I can regarding this…
I can’t speak to the CO2 concentrations prior to 1,000,000 years Before Present, however, I notice that with the Columbia River Basalt Group we are speaking of flood basalt with an area of 163,700 km2 and volume of 174,300 km3.
From the text:
Comparing this to the Deccan Traps in India, it appears that the Columbia River Basalt Group is only one tenth the area and one third or less the volume.
Please see:
And the Siberian Traps appear to have greatly dwarfed both:
However, size isn’t everything: there is also the question of location. Looking at the map provided for the Columbia River Basalt Group it would seem clear that little of the coastline was exposed. Perhaps 150 km. I may be wrong, but this suggests to me that not much lava made it to the ocean. The Deccan Traps? The lava flows appear to have been half the size of India, suggesting that a much larger portion of the coastline was exposed. The Siberian Traps? A map is provided, and the exposed coastline appears a little shy of 3000 km, about twenty times the length of exposed coastline in the case of the Columbia River Basalt Group.
According to the calculations, presumably the carbon dioxide from the flood basalt lava (and burning of forests) wasn’t enough to cause the Permian-Triassic. You needed shallow-water methane hydrates along the continental shelves. Likewise, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum presumably cannot be explained soley the carbon isotope excursion, assuming that it consisted of carbon dioxide, nor even methane if one simply assumes the half-life that it currently has as the result of present day atmospheric chemistry.
Instead it would appear that OH-radicals which are normally responsible for the breakdown of methane into carbon dioxide would have to be depleted as the result of the system being overwhelmed by the volume of methane being released.
Please see:
Atmospheric composition, radiative forcing, and climate change as a consequence of a massive methane release from gas hydrates
Gavin A. Schmidt and Drew T. Shindell
Paleoceanography, Vol. 18, NO. 1, 1004, doi:10.1029/2002PA000757, 2003
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2003/Schmidt_Shindell.html
Once one takes into account the changes in atmospheric chemistry, it appears that the carbon excursion for PETM was more than enough to bring about those changes in atmospheric chemistry as well as the changes in climate temperature. The same I would assume applies to the Permian-Triassic. But given both the magnitude of the Columbia River Basalt Group and the limited exposure of the coastline, it isn’t that odd that we see no similar event around that time.
PS to 503…
Actually these eruptions:
… this disruption:
… appear to have been at roughly the same time. And looking more closely, there is an ascending staircase of spikes in the projected temperature based on benthic δ18O equivilent to perhaps 2°C over that period.
Please see the chart given by David B. Benson in 499:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
Johm P. Reisman #485
[edit]
I am particularly interested in a couple of climate problems
I am interested in what climatic factors stopped the rise in the Earths temperature much earlier in the Holocene, after they had reached higher levels than today, given the premise that the Earths response to increased temperature is to warm even further. I would then like to know what drove the temperatures down and then drove them back up again.
I attach a graph to show the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
I would also like you to explain to me what climatic factors drove a warming rise trend 75 times the current observed trend 12000 years ago. Details attached.
http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/archive_articles/090216_Nature_dryas_haug/index_EN
Please don’t refer to me various hypothesis. As you have a good view of the settled science I would be grateful if you could be specific as to all the significant feedbacks and give a good estimate of the strength of their forcing effects as clearly atmospheric CO2 is not involved.
[edit]
If you are on a roll you can perhaps also finally explain and describe how the Milankovitch cycles causes the observed glaciation cycles. Scientists, including Milankovitch himself, have been unable to square this particular circle as the estimated changes appear to be too small to have this effect directly. No problem for you however sir I am sure.
Anyway thanks Mr John P. Reisman
[edit]
Alan
Responding to Walt Bennett, Theo Hopkins wrote in 502:
You may have lost more than half your American audience right there. To them, “liberals” are generally those who believe in some government intervention in the economy. What you are describing is what they would call either a “libertarian” or “conservative,” although it might also fit in with what their history books refer to as “classical liberals,” the fellows who founded their country, deists who they will sometimes confuse with their more far more theocratically-minded predecessors, the pilgrims.
In the US, “conservatives” are those who want to generally avoid government intervention in the economic sphere but would have it bear some responsibility for insuring standards in the social and particularly moral spheres. Libertarians, on the otherhand, view government intervention in either sphere as something to be avoided pretty much at all costs.
However, if libertarians had to choose, they would appear to regard economic freedom as having precedence over other forms of freedom — given the fact that they are generally willing to go along with their more theocratic-minded “conservative” brethren in the pursuance of a lock-step “conservative” agenda. But this is presumably in exchange for “moral conservatives” cooperating where it comes to a defense of the free market — which is ok with them so long as it doesn’t interfere with their plans for the Rapture.
I know all of this has been covered before, but I thought I might give it one more go.
Walt Bennett #487
How about you take some advice from this, and start out your next foray with something that acknowledges the integrity of the audience you are trying to address?
sidd #500:
The classic case of this was the tobacco industry, that ended years of denial and obfuscation with blaming its own customers for believing what they had been told.
Walt, perhaps you could add something constructive here by explaining exactly why mitigation and geo-engineering will work whereas emissions reduction won’t. Either way, you need massive government intervention in the economy to cover expenses that are unproductive except as offset against externalities, which will offend the political sensibilities of some, but they should have thought of that before supporting obfuscation of the issues when smaller interventions would have stood some chance of working.
We are currently seeing massive government interventions to bail out failing banks and auto makers (whose stupidity is a direct part of the problem), and you have to wonder at the mentality of people who find that acceptable whereas saving the planet is contrary to the free market, therefore we should all carry on as normal and hope mainstream climate scientists are all wrong.
Timothy Chase (503, 504) — The Columbia flood basalts made it to the ocean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Coast_Range#Geology
but I rather doubt much connection with the Mid-Miocene events; the Wikipedia article lists some other possiblities. In any case, note
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miocene#Oceans
Alan Millar says of explaining glacial-interglacial cycles in terms of Milankovich cycles: “Scientists, including Milankovitch himself, have been unable to square this particular circle as the estimated changes appear to be too small to have this effect directly.”
Uh, dude, you do realize that you are arguing FOR strong feedback here, right? And that strong feedback means MORE WARMING per doubling of CO2, right? Sure you want to go down that road?
Are there any opinions on the *pace* of ice shelf breakage as an implication of a Rapid Climate Change Event? It is my understanding that we are at present embedded in a cooling RCCE, the Little Ice Age, and have been for roughly 600 years. Given the GISP record from the Arctic for an approximate 1,000+ year trend (Mayewski et. al.) I wonder what kind of feedback we have generated that could trump (a more temperature-unstable troposphere) the general natural static within a RCCE (a cool troposphere with general storminess in atmospheric circulation)? Also, as noted by Petit et. al. (in Nature vol. 399 p433) the Vostok record shows CO2 and CH4 concentrations as positive feedbacks to orbital forcing and albedo. My inclination is to say that in the context of half-million year records and rates of change, we’re seeing effects of inextricably linked GW and AGW that is forcing instability in a complex system. Hence, long term stability lost in ice shelves. Yes?…(I’d appreciate refutation, where necessary, with scientific literature)
Re: #505 – “The Ice Chronicles” by Paul Mayewski and Frank White gives an enjoyable account of Holocene climate change factors (including the Younger Dryas, the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming Period) from the Greenland Ice Core Project. It covers the Polar Circulation index, Solar & Celestial cycles, Ice Sheet Dynamics, and Ocean Oscillations. Lots of visual aids too, not just the highly complex science.
Pettit interviewed here, with links.
This paper? (Petit JR, et al., Nature 399[6735]: 429-36, 3 June 1999)
http://in-cites.com/papers/Jean-RobertPetit.html
—excerpt follows—
Q: In this paper, one of your concluding remarks is that “Present-day atmospheric burdens of these two important greenhouse gases [carbon dioxide and methane] seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years.” Would you please elaborate on the implications of this statement?
A: With industrial development and anthropologic activity, massive burning of fossil carbon as well as intensification of agriculture released exponential amounts of CO2 and CH4 over the last 150 years. Present atmospheric composition well surpasses all maximum concentrations from the ice records over the last 420 kyrs (30% more CO2, 300% more CH4).
Re: #507
Philip,
There is currently no plan which has any hope of working. There is no geo-engineering solution in place, there is no viable CCS technology, and there is no political will to halt CO2 emissions in any near-term time frame. And you will never get the political will as long as the cost remains prohibitive. One may argue that the cost of fossil fuel is artificially low because it does not tax carbon in relation to carbon’s effect on climate. How has that argument been selling?
I’d like to know if anybody actually believes we will emit less CO2 into the atmosphere in 10 years than we do today. Then remember that the goal is to emit less carbon in 10 years than we did in 1990. Then remember that developing nations are insisting on even deeper cuts.
Does anybody believe that will happen?
CO2 is going to continue to enter the atmosphere. We are probably already past the ice-stability tipping point, and we surely will be before CO2 emissions stabilize. So, who wants to explain to me why that is still the grand strategy?
“But Walt,” you say in response, “surely if the amount we have up there now is BAD, then more of it will be WORSE.”
Yes, of course. But the real question is, so what? Once the ice sheets are destabilized, we are in for a rough ride no matter how much warmer it gets. Does anybody want to assure me that it is worth the cost to prevent the planet from warming even more, once we pass that point? Does anybody want to assure me that we wouldn’t be better off investing those resources in strategies which will allow us to adapt to the changes that are “already in the pipeline”?
What I continue to not understand is how anybody with a firm grasp of the science can go to sleep at night, sure in the belief that, if we can only get a meaningful climate treaty, we will save the planet.
a) Such a thing is still a long way off;
b) It’s probably already too late;
c) We will need to adapt to climate change; we already need to do so;
d) Mitigation strategies must of course include reducing CO2 emissions, but it is politically infeasible to reduce them drastically in the near term, therefore OTHER mitigation strategies will also be needed, and some amount of public resources must be invested in those areas as well.
That’s my case.
Re: #500
Sid,
What if #3 is actually true?
Timothy @ 506
American *liberal* free market
Oscar Wilde once talked about (America, England) “Two nations devided by a common language”.
“Once the ice sheets are destabilized, we are in for a rough ride no matter how much warmer it gets. Does anybody want to assure me that it is worth the cost to prevent the planet from warming even more, once we pass that point?” – Walt Bennett
Yes. The greater and more rapid the temperature increase, the greater the chances that disastrous events will be triggered. To give one example of each:
1) If temperatures rise high enough, reduction in the temperature equator-pole gradient could slow ocean currents enough to render much of the deep sea anoxic, with resulting blooms of anaerobic bacteria, some of which produce large quantities of hydrogen sulphide.
2) The faster the ice melts, the faster sea levels will rise. The faster sea levels rise, the harder it will be to relocate people and infrastructure in time.
Similar points could be made with regard to shifting agriculture and/or producing new crop varieties to cope with changed conditions, the possible triggering of positive feedbacks such as the permafrost melting or release of methane from seabed clathrates, biodiversity loss, and so on pretty much ad infinitum. The more time we have before reaching each temperature, and the lower we can keep the maximum, the better chance we will have of avoiding complete disaster. This is so obvious, it strains credulity to believe you really can’t see it. Then of course there is ocean acidification, always ignored by denialists and – oh, what a coincidence – by Walt Bennett.
“Does anybody want to assure me that we wouldn’t be better off investing those resources in strategies which will allow us to adapt to the changes that are “already in the pipeline”?” – Walt Bennett
Mitigation and adaptation are, of course, both essential. I know of no advocate of reducing emissions arguing the contrary. You have been arguing strenuously that it is politically impossible to get emissions reductions (while of course doing your best to ensure that this remains so). What makes you think putting resources into adaptation to what is “in the pipeline”, i.e. hasn’t happened yet, is going to be any easier? Particularly if those arguing for it are also saying “but we’re going to let the problem get worse without any serious attempt to stop it or even slow it down”. How is that line “selling”? Who have you managed to convince? Not the denialists. Not those here who accept the scientific evidence. Who, other than yourself?
“Mitigation strategies must of course include reducing CO2 emissions”
And yet you’ve been arguing strenuously against any attempt to do so. Maybe you should get your “case” straight before accusing others of insularity, failure to understand you, etc. etc.
“What I continue to not understand is how anybody with a firm grasp of the science can go to sleep at night, sure in the belief that, if we can only get a meaningful climate treaty, we will save the planet.”
– Walt Bennett
Can you actually point to an example of anyone saying that? Do you understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition?
walt #513
It will never be finally true. There’s always worse to come. Such is the logic of exponentiality. If you thought three degrees was bad — consider six degrees. And if you thought six degrees was bad… no, forget that. Then we’re heading for civilization collapse, another logic of exponentiality. Then you are definitely, finally correct. But then we won’t need adaptation either.
BTW how are you going to convince folks reluctant to invest in mitigation, to put money on the table for adaptation? Shouldn’t they first be made to see that there is a problem? Once you succeed in that, there will be money for both (and both are needed, cf. IPCC). Yes, it is frustratingly hard, but it’s the only way. The earlier we succeed, the smaller the damage. Defeatists like you should just get out of the way.
To me (who thought these things through already in the 1970’s) your thinking on this appears very, very muddled.
“Uh, dude, you do realize that you are arguing FOR strong feedback here, right? And that strong feedback means MORE WARMING per doubling of CO2, right? Sure you want to go down that road?”
Ray, you’re labouring under the misapprehension that Allan Millar (we will not yet you go… sorry, got into a bit of a rhapsody there.) has a theory. He doesn’t. He merely wants people to believe scientists don’t know what’s going on.
Anything that says “scientists do not know what’s going on” is sufficient. For those who are credulous, this is all that is needed.
Ray Ladbury #509
Alan Millar says of explaining glacial-interglacial cycles in terms of Milankovich cycles: “Scientists, including Milankovitch himself, have been unable to square this particular circle as the estimated changes appear to be too small to have this effect directly.”
Uh, dude, you do realize that you are arguing FOR strong feedback here, right? And that strong feedback means MORE WARMING per doubling of CO2, right? Sure you want to go down that road?
Comment by Ray Ladbury”
Well I agree that the Earth would seem to have to have a high sensitivity to some climatic factor to cause sufficient warming to bring it out of glaciation.
However, due to the recorded time lag in its changes it is clearly not CO2 as this is not involved in this process whatever its role is later in the interglacial.
Perhaps the Earth is more sensitive to changes in Solar influx than is currently postulated or modeled.
Anyway I am waiting for that recognised (by himself at least) expert Mr John P. Reisman to solve the mystery.
Alan
Walt Bennett writes:
The problem is carbon emissions. The way to start to fix the problem is to reduce carbon emissions. What don’t you understand there?
Alan,
The Milankovic cycle effects due to redistribution of sunlight over the Earth’s surface are not enough to cause the swings of the ice ages, but they work if you amplify them with carbon dioxide feedback.
Alan, you’re reposting stuff from the Western Fuels lobbying scripts.
Either you haven’t read the responses to others who’ve done the same or you’re doing what Mark suggests, repeating anything suggesting uncertainty — without noticing that half the uncertainty points to higher climate sensitivity.
“Perhaps” isn’t scientific argument, it’s just the next one on the list.
You don’t need to go through the whole list — it’s recreational typing to echo it: http://www.grist.org/article/series/skeptics
Ok, you like “writing” but don’t like reading about climate.
Would you watch a little movie?
http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/NorthH264.mp4
Re: Nick and Bart,
You want to talk about “necessary”. I am talking about possible, about feasible. I am trying to have the exact same conversation you are: how to “save the planet” (defined as, keep it looking much the way it has for the last 10,000 years).
The problem as I see it is that your ideas will not accomplish that, and I have patiently explained why (read the 3 posts at my blog for a better understanding).
I think the real problem is that too many AGWers are wedded to emissions reduction, and if they imagine backing off of that, they start worrying about being seen as denialist tools because of the state of the rhetoric these days.
We have a theory; we have a lot of ancillary science which informs theory to some extent, possibly not to the extent we may think; and we have solutions proposals based on the first two items.
Now all we need is a rational discussion of where we’re at with those things.
#505 Alan Millar
Alan, I am not an expert, I am not a scientist. I’m going to make an arrogant assumption about you. You are intentionally (though possibly unintentionally due to naiveté) attempting to build a straw-man in this post. You want me to say I don’t know what specifically the exact precise forcings were in the early holocene without using any hypothesis. I can assure you I was not present during the early Holocene, there fore I can not answer your question.
As with many denialists, you would then take my answer and say all the scientists are wrong because John P. Reisman was not present in the early Holocene to make precise satellite measurements to deduce the forcings of the time.
Your statements:
Certainly natural variation is at play within the earth climate system and possibly external forces as in solar or x-factor.
I take it your a we don’t know what we don’t know kinda guy so you can not be satisfied due to your religious beliefs about the unsettled science.
It is rather clear your are most likely getting your confirmation bias from junk science web sites.
Junk science is bad for your health. If you eat too much of it you will get fat headed with junk.
In general, instead of studying junk science arguments, study science arguments and consider the ‘known’ and ‘reasonably understood’ contexts.
So for clarity, I can’t answer your questions with the specificity you desire, because I was not there, and even if I had been there, I don’t know if I could have explained it with cave paintings. There are likely some scientists studying the forcings in that period, try google scholar.
Oh and stop building straw man arguments, they burn down to easily.
#519 Alan Millar
Just study the Milankovitch cycles. Go here and then read a little,
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/milankovitch-cycles
then scroll down to the bottom and check out the links from NASA/EO, IPSS/UCAR, NCDC/NOAA, etc.
Do you really need your hand held, probably
Try this, Go to the search box on realclmate and type in Milankovitch, then read a lot.
You might like
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/
to help you understand Co2 lag
and feel free tow wander around
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths
where I do some short summaries on the subjects you seem to lack understanding in.
If you spend too much time on junk science rather than with relevant science you are bound to end up with the somewhat odd you seem to be taking.
– Do you believe in Richard Lindzen’s magic cloud albedo?
– Do you believe that science really does not understand the forcing capacity of the various trace gases in our atmosphere at least pretty well.
– Are you waiting for the magic science fairy to tell you who is more right or more wrong on these issues?
Be reasonable and read the well reasoned science. There are some very knowledgeable people here scientists and non scientists alike. They don’t believe in magic when it comes to climate, they found there perspectives on evidence and models that adjust for errors. There is nothing perfect about it and it will never be perfect.
here read this, it may help you get some perspective on what I am attempting to communicate
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/what-we-dont-know
“The problem as I see it is that your ideas will not accomplish that, and I have patiently explained why (read the 3 posts at my blog for a better understanding).” – Walt Bennett
No, you have repeatedly asserted your claims; you have not justified them. In addition, you have not explained what forms of mitigation you favour, you have not explained how you will persuade people to spend money and effort on a strategy that leaves out the most obvious approach – viz, to reduce emissions, you have not answered any of the points made, and you have spouted paranoid rubbish about the left. I conclude that you’re not really interested in a rational discussion.
#512 Walt says:”CO2 is going to continue to enter the atmosphere. We are probably already past the ice-stability tipping point, and we surely will be before CO2 emissions stabilize. So, who wants to explain to me why that is still the grand strategy?”
Walt, there are factors other than ice shelves, and you must know it. How could you not? Do the words ‘coral reefs’ or ‘ocean acidification’ mean anything to you? What about the term ‘sea level rise’? The latter takes place not when shelf ice melts. This ice is already in the water, and won’t cause a rise. It’s the ice on the land masses of Greenland and West Antarctica that you seem to have ignored.
In an earlier post you refer to a ‘power grab’ by the political left. Heaven forbid! The radical right who’ve occpied the White House for the past 8 years,and gave us two unwinnable wars and a depression,among other things, is what this nation really needs.(Not!)
This is in response to Alan Millar, comments 505 and 519
Bipolarity and Antipodes, Part I of II
Alan Millar wrote in 505:
Positive feedback does not necessarily mean runaway feedback. Lets say that you have an initial change which prior to feedback results in an increase in temperature of 1 °C. Now lets say that the initial feedback (prior to the feedback to the feedback) is 0.5 °C. And lets say that each subsequent feedback to the feedback before it is half its size. Then we will have a convergent series where the initial (k=0) increase in temperature was 1 °C, and at each subsequent step k, the “running total” increase in temperature is 2-2-k — which converges at 2°C once you have included all of the feedback, that is, where k→∞.
*
Alan Millar wrote in 505:
What drove them down? Well, the earth emitted thermal radiation, cooled off like a hot iron. But somehow I suspect you knew that already.
*
Alan Millar wrote in 505:
That particular chart?
Well, I am no expert — simply someone who is willing to learn, even when it means setting aside my political leanings. However, I suspect part of the problem is resolution. It’s not like we can set thermometers to measure temperatures in different time periods. We have to rely upon natural thermometers in one form or another, and no matter what we choose, they won’t be evenly distributed through time or space. Likewise, there may be changes in ocean circulation, resulting in one region becoming cooler, another warmer. It is factors like that which probably explain the little wiggles. Certainly worth investigating, but wouldn’t you prefer to see the big picture?
I mean, take a look at this bigger chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon-dioxide-temperature-plot.svg
Your chart goes only from present to 12,000 years before present. My chart, on the other hand, goes from the present to 650,000 years before present. It is more than fifty times the size of the smaller chart, so it gives you a very big picture. It includes more things, too. Which might be useful.
*
In any case, now that we have the big picture a far more interesting question — at least for me — springs to mind: Why did it take so long for the earth to cool down after the temperature initially goes up?
… and like the big chart, this is a fairly big question.
I mean look at it: there is definitely a pattern here. The temperature rises quite rapidly, perhaps taking only 10,000 years to go from the depths of an ice age to the peak of an interglacial, but then takes perhaps 110,000 years to fall back down to the depths of a glacial.
With simple orbital variations one would expect the chart to show temperatures falling as quickly as they rise. But they don’t.
Why not? The answer is of course feedback, but in this case “slow feedback.”
For example, with warmer temperatures, it doesn’t take long for ice sheets to disappear, at least not on a geological time scale of say 10,000 years. But it does take quite a while for them to build back up. When they are in place, they reflect much of the sunlight back into space, before it has a chance to be absorbed, but once they melt due to higher temperatures, more sunlight is absorbed, resulting in still higher temperatures. Thus even once you remove the initial cause of the warming (e.g., increased solar irradiation due to the orbit of the earth changing the angle at which sunlight hits the current distribution of the continents), for a long time the earth will tend to remain warmer than it was prior to the initial increase in temperature, and it will only gradually cool down with the equally gradual process of ice sheet accumulation.
Likewise, with warmer water, it doesn’t take long for the ocean to give up some of its carbon dioxide. Roughly on the order of 800 years, not long on geological scales. Warmer temperatures reduce the ocean’s ability to hold gases. But the ocean doesn’t warm up all at the same time. But by human standards it takes a while for the heat to become distributed throughout all the various layers, roughly on the order of 1,000 years. As it warms, it gives up its “fizz” like a can of warm soda (actually the carbon dioxide which it can no longer retain due to the increase in oceanic partial pressure of carbon dioxide), and once the carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, it absorbs thermal radiation, reducing the rate at which the earth is able to radiate thermal radiation to space even as it receives radiation at the same rate as before the initial increase in temperature.
Why?
Because carbon dioxide is opaque to thermal radiation. While it absorbs thermal radiation from the surface, it radiates thermal radiation as a function of its own temperature — in all directions, much of which makes it back to the surface. Therefore it reduces the rate at which thermal radiation makes it to space.
There are infrared images of it doing exactly this over western and eastern seaboards of the US due to higher population density, traffic and carbon dioxide emissions. In fact you can see it in this image:
Aqua/AIRS Global Carbon Dioxide
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003400/a003440/index.html
The dark orange off the east and west coasts of the United States? That is carbon dioxide at roughly 8 km altitude — infrared at 15 μm in wavelength has been absorbed and emitted at lower levels of the atmosphere, but this is where it gets emitted for the last time before escaping to space — and as such the brightness temperature at that wavelength reflects the cooler temperature at that altitude.
More carbon dioxide reduces the rate with which radiation will carries energy out of the climate system. Given that energy continues to enter the system at the same rate (or at least roughly so — since the early 1950s — if one omits the ups and downs of the solar cycle) but escapes the atmosphere at a reduced rate, the temperature of the climate system must rise until the temperature to the power of four (thermal emission of radiation in accordance with Planck’s law) rises enough to compensate for the increased opacity of the atmosphere to infrared radiation, and the rate at which energy leaves the system is equal to the rate at which energy enters the system.
This basically follows from the conservation of energy. So in this case — what we predominantly see in the paleoclimate record — the increased solar insulation is the forcing, carbon dioxide the feedback — and we would not be able to explain the extent to which the temperature rose simply by means of the increased solar insulation alone. And we wouldn’t be able to explain the extent to which it rose and the length of time it took for it fall if we didn’t include both the slow feedback of the ice sheets and the slow feedback of carbon dioxide.
Gavin—-from the link you referred Dawn to:
Going to the original doesn’t clarify much. The following quotes from the article mention all the back and forth about the bad data—and triumphantly report that it was corrected, and then everything started to match up—but it’s all very vague about exactly what was wrong with the XBTs, and how it was ‘fixed’—exactly how they fortuitously got rid of the apparent cooling.
If such vague and emotive narratives on such breakthroughs are supposed to allay any suspicions that data and findings are being forced into a fit, then they don’t really work—it leaves the reader wondering why Willis could find it useful and necessary to mention what he said to his wife, and his own feelings on the mismatch, but not to mention just what was wrong with the XBTs, and how the correction was made, and whether there was any dissent to those methods.
His explanation:
‘ “Basically, I used the sea level data as a bridge to the in situ [ocean-based] data,” explains Willis, comparing them to one another figuring out where they didn’t agree. “First, I identified some new Argo floats that were giving bad data; they were too cool compared to other sources of data during the time period. It wasn’t a large number of floats, but the data were bad enough, so that when I tossed them, most of the cooling went away. But there was still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging.’”
The digging led him to the data from the expendable temperature sensors, the XBTs. A month before, Willis had seen a paper by Viktor Gouretski and Peter Koltermann that showed a comparison of XBT data collected over the past few decades to temperatures obtained in the same ocean areas by more accurate techniques, such as bottled water samples collected during research cruises. Compared to more accurate observations, the XBTs were too warm. The problem was more pronounced at some points in time than others.
The Gouretski paper hadn’t rung any alarm bells right away, explains Willis, “because I knew from the earlier analysis that there was a big cooling signal in Argo all by itself. It was there even if I didn’t use the XBT data. That’s part of the reason that we thought it was real in the first place,” explains Willis.
But when he factored the too-warm XBT measurements into his ocean warming time series, the last of the ocean cooling went away. Later, Willis teamed up with Susan Wijffels of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organization (CSIRO) and other ocean scientists to diagnose the XBT problems in detail and come up with a way to correct them
“So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis. The February evening he discovered the mistake, he says, is “burned into my memory.” He was supposed to fly to Colorado that weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.
The first payoff for finding and fixing the XBT errors was that it allowed scientists to reconcile a stubborn and puzzling mismatch between climate model simulations of ocean warming for the past half century and observations. The second was that it helped explain why sea level rise between 1961-2003 was larger than scientists had previously been able to account for.
On another part of the mismatch problem:
‘What wasn’t consistent was several large bumps in the graph of heat content over time.
Smoothing the Bumps
In mid-2008, however, a team of scientists led by Catia Domingues and John Church from Australia’s CSIRO, and Peter Gleckler, from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, revised long-term estimates of ocean warming based on the corrected XBT data. Since the revision, says Willis, the bumps in the graph have largely disappeared, which means the observations and the models are in much better agreement. “That makes everyone happier,” Willis says.’
Bipolarity and Antipodes, Part II of II
Alan Millar wrote in 505:
Ah, back to the smaller picture. Well, perhaps not that small.
Those would be Dansgaard-Oeschger events, often preceded by Heinrich events. Scientifically speaking, they are very good reasons for not upsetting the climate system. Heinrich events are where ice sheets calved into vast armadas of icebergs from the Laurentide ice sheet which as they melted appear to have dumped sufficient cold, fresh water into the ocean to alter ocean circulation.
“Currently,” places like the East Coast and Western Europe are kept warm by the Gulf Stream. Likewise, the Japanese Current flows past the Phillipines and warms much of the Pacific Northwest. Both bring warmer waters to what would otherwise be colder climates.
But ocean circulation is “deeply” affected by deep water formation where the higher density of cold, saline water causes the water to sink, circulating water to the ocean’s depths. If you reduce ocean salinity where deep water formation has been taking taking place, it may cease to form there and end up forming elsewhere. And as a result, ocean circulation changes, and places that were warm before suddenly become cooler, and places that were cooler suddenly become warmer.
And there are your Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Generally speaking, the evidence strongly points towards a bi-polarity (mentioned in the above link — consisting of a detailed comparison of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica) where temperatures in Greenland would warm while temperatures in Antarctica would fall and vice versa. Quite unlike the current situation where both hemispheres are warming, and both Greenland and Antarctica are losing their glaciers. While the rate of warming during a Dansgaard-Oeschger event is certainly severe, it is localized, affecting the two hemispheres oppositely and a given hemisphere unevenly, and as such cannot be compared to global warming — where as far as the rate of extinctions are concerned there is no place to run.
*
Alan Millar wrote in 505:
Very little regarding a Dansgaard-Oeschger event has anything to do with “forcing” — which is roughly defined as “the change in net irradiance at the tropopause, where ‘Net irradiance’ is the difference between the incoming radiation energy and the outgoing radiation energy in a given climate system and is thus measured in Watts per square meter.” Forcing represents a change in the rate of the net flow of energy across tropopause. On the other hand, a Dansgaard-Oeschger event represents the redistribution of heat within the climate system as the result of changes in deep water formation and consequent changes in ocean circulation.
And yes, much of climate science is settled — at least in terms of the basics. Greenhouse gases absorb thermal radiation. We can measure it in terms of their spectra. We can observe it from space. Raising the temperature of the ocean will increase the rate of evaporation and the absolute humidity, roughly doubling the rate of evaporation and the level of absolute humidity for every 10°C. And large body of evidence points to a climate sensitivity of between 2-4.5°C. Mechanics, chemistry, gravitational theory, fluid dynamics, radiation transfer theory — these are all fairly well established sciences, and they form the foundation of climatology.
*
Alan Millar wrote in 505:
The initial forcing appears to have been the result of periodic changes in the orbit of the earth resulting in an increase or decrease in the amount radiation reaching the major landmasses — given their positions on the earth at the time and the tilt of the earth’s axis. The rest was feedback. Please see above.
*
Responding to Alan Millar’s 505, Ray Ladbury wrote in 509
Responding to Ray Ladbury, Alan Millar writes in 519:
If you are speaking of climate sensitivity, it pretty much has to be the same regardless of the forcing. A forcing raises the temperature of the surface by means of radiation. Whether that radiation comes from the backradiation due to higher levels of carbon dioxide or from increased solar irradiance, to a first approximation, the climate system pretty much doesn’t care. The surface has to warm up until the rate at which energy leaves the top of the atmosphere is equal to the rate at which it enters the atmosphere.
But there are some differences. “Fingerprints,” if you will.
Increased solar irradiance would warm both the troposphere and the stratosphere. Increased opacity of the atmosphere to the earth’s longwave, thermal radiation will warm the troposphere but initially cool the stratosphere. We have witnessed a cooling of the stratosphere while the troposphere has warmed. The trends have been in opposite directions.
Increased solar irradiance would warm the days more rapidly than the nights. Increased opacity of the atmosphere to the earth’s thermal radiation will warm the nights more than the days. We have witnessed the nights warming more rapidly than the days. Increased solar irradiance would warm the the tropics more rapidly than the higher latitudes. We have witnessed the opposite. And all three were predicted effects of enhanced global warming.
*
Alan Millar writes in 519:
True — there has been a lag of perhaps 800 years — for the past 650,000 years — where temperature went up first, only to be followed by carbon dioxide some time later. But it hasn’t always been that way.
Low isotope carbon excursions occured at the time that a supervolcano errupted in India, forming the Deccan Traps. From what we can tell, the flood basalt lava resulted in the release of methane from shallow water methane hydrates along the continental shelf. Carbon dioxide went up first, followed by temperature — resulting in Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 55.8 million years ago and mass extinctions.
But perhaps the best example is from 251 million years ago with the eruption of a siberian supervolcano. This raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to around 3000 ppm, driving up the temperatures, and the result was the greatest extinction found in the paleoclimate record, wiping out perhaps 96% of all marine species and 70% of all land species. In fact, by the time in was finished, the good majority of the biosphere had been converted to atmospheric carbon.
This is what is known as the Permian-Triassic Extinction, but sometimes it will simply be referred to as the Great Dying. For a while the dominant life form on land appears to have been fungus. Even among surviving species, generally more than 99% of their populations were wiped out. The biosphere didn’t really begin to recover for several million years.
*
Alan Millar writes in 519:
A high climate sensitivity to solar irradiation will almost certainly imply an equally high climate sensitivity to the carbon dioxide. Either way, there is an imbalance between radiation entering the atmosphere and radiation leaving the atmosphere — and when the imbalance is due to less radiation leaving the top of the atmosphere than is entering it, the only way that this can be corrected is for the surface to warm until it emits enough thermal radiation to compensate for the forcing. Moreover, but for the usual quasi-periodic solar cycle, solar irradiation has been flat since about 1950. This cannot explain the beginning of the modern era of global warming at about 1975. And it can’t explain the fingerprints of an enhanced greenhouse effect. (See above.)
Like me, John Reisman is no expert. He is however someone who chose to learn despite his political leanings. He chose to out of his adherence to the principle that identification precedes evaluation — and the recognition of the often devastating consequences of doing otherwise.
Walt Bennett writes:
If emissions reduction is not possible, is not feasible, then WE’RE ALL SCREWED. Got it? We have to make it possible, because WE HAVE NOTHING ELSE. We have to start massively reducing fossil fuel use NOW. RIGHT NOW. If we aren’t emitting less CO2 than we are now ten years from now, we are in deep, deep feces.
We are very close to tripping the geophysical feedbacks that will make global warming much, much worse than it already is, and it is already bad — ask the French, ask the Australians. Everyone on this blog is probably used to being able to walk into a store, if you have the money, and emerge with food — junk food, fast food, groceries. To eating in restaurants, at least once in a while. Do you understand that within your lifetime it may become next to impossible to do that any more? That news stands will no longer sell candy, McDonald’s will be out of business, and groceries will be rationed?
That’s what we’re heading for if we don’t control global warming, and we can’t control global warming if we don’t reduce CO2 emissions. If you’re right and we can’t convince the population to support emission reductions, our civilization will be destroyed.
I don’t want that to happen. I think it probably will happen, but I’m going to go down fighting, even though you and the rest of the go-on-burning-oil-and-coal-at-all-costs will very likely win.
Walt Bennet (523) — Over on the “Spring” thread I have some comments pertaining to mitigating excess CO2 via biochar sequestration. You may wish to review these to discover the scale that would be required if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rates.
Timothy Chase (528) — Regarding the cryrosphere transitions, hysteresis is sometimes invoked, as in Ray Pierrehumbert’s
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/ClimateBook/ClimateBook.html
Alan, the point is that you don’t seem to realize that your own example would seem to imply a higher CO2 sensitivity. Nobody has said CO2 is responsible for the onset of warming at the end of an ice age, nor even for the feedback. The changes in insolation also change albedo and eventually cause outgassing of CH4 and CO2, prolonging and intensifying the warming.
Likewise, denialists who insist on a global medieval warm period do not seem to realize that they are also arguing for a more sensitive climate.
When will you guys realize that ignorance is not your friend–hell, it’s not anybody’s friend. The known threats posed by climate change are daunting enough. If the scientists are right, we may just barely get by with only slightly more cost and effort than would be needed to transition from a petroleum-based economy. If they are wrong–and the odds favor their being wrong on the conservative side rather than the catastrophist–we could be utterly screwed.
Anyway, I just wanted to say: Nice own-goal, dude!
Timothy Chase @ #528
Thank you, Timothy, for your extensive response to my posts.
I feel that your approach and attitude is to be applauded and should be what this site is all about.
I will respond later as I am still recovering from the Masters golf and an excess of the ‘Good Stuff’!!!
Cheers
Alan
‘truth’, fill in the information in the article you read.
Take the key words you want to learn more about;
paste them into Google, and into Google Scholar.
Compare and contrast what you get; lean toward the science:
http://www.google.com/search?q=willis+XBT+cooling+data
From the first page of hits on that from Google:
In Situ Data and Ocean Heat Content Estimates
File Format: Microsoft Powerpoint
A correction to “recent cooling”. Ocean Heat Content from 2004 to 2006. From Willis et al., GRL, in prep. XBT data is biased warm. from Wijffels et al., …
http://www.clivar.org/organization/gsop/synthesis/mit/talks/willis.ppt
Ocean Cooling: A Science Lesson …
When Willis removed the data from the bad floats most, but not all, of the cooling went away. Next he looked at the XBT data. It turned out that when one …
http://www.celsias.com/article/ocean-cooling-science-lesson-denialistsdelayers/
Jennifer Marohasy
Nov 13, 2008 … Apologies to Josh Willis: Correcting Global Cooling (Part 3) … “The XBT data were not changed to fit the models. …
jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/11/apologies-to-josh-willis-correcting-ocean-cooling-part-3/
Look on further down to see the usual denial sites still repeating the claim Marohasy is apologizing for making.
Then do the search in Google Scholar. Well, look at that–the first two hits are to “junkscience” and they have dozens and dozens of citations.
Anyone at Google know the difference between junkscience and science?
Hello?
David B. Benson wrote in 532:
Hysteresis — Bi- or multi-stability? Seems like it would have to be the case.
Stefan Rahmstorf has also looked into it in:
Rahmstorf et al, (2005) Thermohaline circulation hysteresis: A model intercomparison, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 32, L23605
However, I find it interesting that there is apparently a 1,500 year quasi-cycle to the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Reminds me of the quasi-periodic behavior of “The Chaotic Dripping Faucet.” Or the bi-state, quasi-cyclical behavior you find in various climate oscillations. Or the way that nearly evenly spaced storm fronts will sometimes sweep though one after another. Self-organization under far from equilibrium conditions, organization through space and time, or so it would seem.
In any case I will check it out. Thank you for the suggestion.
Lawrence Brown Says (12 April 2009 at 6:34 PM):
“The radical right who’ve occpied the White House for the past 8 years,and gave us two unwinnable wars…”
Despite the temptation, I’ll avoid digressing into political subjects such as the difference between giving and receiving, and just point out that the concepts of basic arithmetic, such as the distinction between one and two, can help bring clarity to all sorts of discussions :-)
“The Early Eocene Arctic Ocean Basin was largely enclosed following uplift of the Greenland Mantle Plume, with elevated temperatures, evaporation and precipitation leading to increased runoff and the development of extensive surface freshwater layers. These were colonised in the earliest Middle Eocene by floating mats of the opportunistic freshwater fern Azolla, which persisted for up to 800,000 years as a series of repeated cyclical events. Modern Azolla is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet and draws down large quantities of carbon and nitrogen. Calculations of carbon drawdown combined with the large potential areas of Azolla development in the Arctic, plus the 800,000 year time frame indicate levels of CO2 sequestration that are easily sufficient to shift the world from Mesozoic-to-Early Eocene greenhouse towards the modern icehouse world.
The model also indicates the deposition of potentially widespread petroleum source rocks across the Arctic due to the massive carbon drawdown.”
Dr. Jonathan Bujak, presentation at the Houston Geological Society North American & International Joint Dinner Meeting Monday 28-Apr-08
http://www.hgs.org/en/cev/?838
“This year, ice older than two years accounted for less than 10% of the (Arctic Ocean) ice cover at the end of February. From 1981 through 2000, such older ice made up an average of 30% of the total sea ice cover at this time of the year.” http://www.nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
I apologize for posting off topic (at least it’s about ice melting – some wags might say “polar opposite” &;;>) but I was wondering if some of those “widespread petroleum source rocks” might have contributed to larger methane hydrate reserves than are fully known in areas vulnerable to melting ice like the East Siberian Shelf? I’m sorta thinking that the Azolla blooms may have concentrated carbon into the arctic basin in forms that make it more vulnerable to warming today. It’s postulated that CO2 emitted by the Greenland Mantle Plume, heat from the plume that decomposed biogenic carbon sediments releasing more CO2, climate feedbacks shifted the balance of biospheric processes toward the release of more CO2, and methane hydrates that were decomposed by warming (climatologic or volcanic) caused the rapid spike in temperature at the PETM. (Beyond methane: Towards a theory for the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum John A. Higgins and Daniel P. Schrag Earth and Planetary Science Letters May 2006). Given that methane is a very potent GHG, if a small (~5%?) amount of the atmospheric CO2 from the PETM has been converted to methane and sequestered as hydrates in the arctic, we may be closer to a big tipping point than we know. Just a thought, with no evidence (or modeling) to support it.
I have a picture in my mind of (surviving) Republicans at their 2080 convention sitting in the restaurant at the Halliburton/Exxon/Mobil Holiday Inn Tropical Resort and Drilling Platform in the Barrow Archipelago, Alaska, enjoying dwarf Angus steaks from the Cheney Ranch in the Yukon(“The oldest known fossils of most of the modern orders of mammals appear in a brief period during the Early Eocene. At the beginning of the Eocene … Dwarf forms reigned.” http://www.palaeos.org/Eocene), watching the sunlight highlighting the famous Arctic red tides (“Taken together these observations point to environment very similar to modern red tides, when wide distribution of dinoflagellates, including toxic ones, caused extremely unfavorable conditions for other organisms.” MICROFOSSIL AND SEDIMENTOLOGICAL CHANGES ACROSS THE PALEOCENE/EOCENE BOUNDARY IN THE NE PERI-TETHYS, E. Shcherbinina, Geophysical Research Abstracts, Vol. 6, 01355, 2004) and saying to each other “We knew global warming wouldn’t be a disaster – too bad the India-Pakistan water wars went nuclear, though. Bet the Greens & Democrats try to pin that on us.”
(“No sense of humor; no sense of irony; no sense of cuation; no sense of balance.” Really?)
#528 Timothy
Well done. Good effort.
In response to Allan’s question, “I am interested in what climatic factors stopped the rise in the Earth’s temperature much earlier in the Holocene” it is worth bearing in mind that levels of atmospheric CO2 during all of that time, and indeed during at least the previous 800,000 years (probably much longer), never exceeded 300ppmv. During the depths of glaciations levels were as low as 180ppmv.
CO2 is currently c.387ppmv. Hansen (Target CO2) recommends a level of 350ppmv, but no-one is suggesting that we need to get it below 300ppmv because no-one considers that the kind of runaway warming to which Allan appears to allude will occur with CO2 at that level.
In other words, increases in CO2 during warmer periods (from 180 to nearly 300ppmv) in the previous 800,000 years were enough to augment warming somewhat, but never high enough to constitute a risk of runaway warming.
David B. Benson Says:
Yes, I saw those. They are indeed more complex to set up (and probably beyond the capabilities of most middle school science classes!), but they still seem to come down to “see what happens when light shines on CO2 in a bottle”. If that is a valid analog of how GHGs affect atmospheric temperatures, then it seems to me that the original, very simple experiment must be generally illustrative, if not something that one could use to make numeric estimates. You could conclude “The CO2 gets hotter,” but not “The CO2 gets N times hotter.”
Anyone here want to talk about Wilkin’s Shelf. Has there ever been a study in the area measuring the glacial flow rate vs the calving rate? Anyone have any data on the ice sheets feeding it?
There are new images up for the 11th and 12th.
http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMYBBSTGOF_index_0.html
Chris Dunford Says:
13 April 2009 at 6:20 AM
David B. Benson Says:
“It seems that the two bottle experiment is demonstrating some else in part; optical/IR properties of glass. There are two comments with links on this thread to better (but more complex) setups which come quite a bit closer to actual atmospheric properties.”
Yes, I saw those. They are indeed more complex to set up (and probably beyond the capabilities of most middle school science classes!), but they still seem to come down to “see what happens when light shines on CO2 in a bottle”. If that is a valid analog of how GHGs affect atmospheric temperatures, then it seems to me that the original, very simple experiment must be generally illustrative, if not something that one could use to make numeric estimates. You could conclude “The CO2 gets hotter,” but not “The CO2 gets N times hotter.”
The trouble is that these high school experiments all work in the visible and near IR which is not the GH effect. To do it properly you need a container transparent to IR out to ~20μm, i.e. Irtran and do it at night, no longer a HS expt. (expensive).
“The trouble is that these high school experiments all work in the visible and near IR which is not the GH effect. To do it properly you need a container transparent to IR out to ~20μm, i.e. Irtran and do it at night, no longer a HS expt. (expensive).”
It does, however, prove the greenhouse effect.
In much the same way as rolling a log proves both rotational inertia and classical newtonian laws of motion.
Then you can discuss why that near IR is causing it.
It is merely then an obvious result that any other part of the spectrum will elicit the same response under similar conditions.
Rather like mathematical proofs prove that function F holds for one value of x, therefore it holds for all values of x.
To whom it my concern, look at the daily bases photos for Wilkins, you can see the last few days, the day it broke and how it is happening.
http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMWZS5DHNF_index_0.html
Re: #531
Bart, we should probably move this to the Spring thread, but let me just say I love your passion, truly. Going down fighting is a succinct way to put it.
Let’s assume your pessimism is justified. My point is, don’t be afraid to stare at that reality, because that’s your rational mind at work. You are almost certainly correct: emissions reduction is a failed strategy for preserving ice sheet stability.
Just take that one next step: where does that leave us? As you put it, “in deep feces”. So what do we do about it? Start digging.
We must have other, better solutions than the ones we have today. We must have recognition of this at the highest levels of government, because they control the priorities and the purse strings.
You with me on that?
P.S.
I’m starting to feel a little like Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men”.
:-)
@541
Eric said -in a delightflly short post:
“Anyone here want to talk about Wilkin’s Shelf. Has there ever been a study in the area measuring the glacial flow rate vs the calving rate? Anyone have any data on the ice sheets feeding it?”
(I’m as happy as anyone else to go off topic) but the question in my pea-sized non-scientist brain come back to the basic ones:
1. Is the split-off of the Wilkins Ice Shelf something that is expected of ice shelves, or this particular one, at this moment in time in view of past behviour?
2. Or is it something that is unexpected?
3. And if unexpected, what does this tell us about (A)GW, or is it to do with something else?
4. If it is to do with (A)GW, then how do scientists reject the other plausible reasons?
5. And as a layman, how would I write about the Wilkins split-off as evidence of (A)GW in a 400 word letter to a local/regional newspaper? (Or is the word count too short for something of such complexity?)
Theo H
Right now, 120 environmental acivists have been arrested in Nottingham, UK.
It seems like they wanted to close down a coal-fired power station.
I think this will bring a lot of media attention to the Wilkins Ice Shelf as their defence in UK law will be – roughly – “one can commit a minor offence to stop a disaster or major offence”. So, eg, one can smash the window of a building (“criminal damage” in UK law) to enter it to, say, stop a murder. So Wilkins Ice Shelf is evidence of the greater problem than, criminally, closing a power station.
Theo H
(And it’s not your usual “rent-a-mob activists on welfare” – today is a public holiday in the UK)
Jsmes you say in part: “I’ll avoid digressing into political subjects such as the difference between giving and receiving..”
Harry Truman had a sign on his desk, that said-“The buck stops here.” Where does it stop during Junior’s watch? I hope not with me- I had nothing to do with the preemptive strike on Iraq. :>)