Suppose for a moment that you could bioengineer a thin membrane between ocean and atmosphere — covering 70 percent of Earth’s surface — and control the interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere.
The sea-surface microlayer is the boundary interface between the atmosphere and ocean, covering about 70% of the Earth’s surface. With a typical thickness of 40-100 μm, the microlayer has physicochemical and biological properties that are measurably distinct from underlying waters. Because of its unique position at the air-sea interface, the microlayer is central to a range of global biogeochemical and climate-related processes. Recent findings indicate that the microlayer controls globally the interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere. The redeveloped SML paradigm pushes the SML into a new and wider context that is relevant to the ocean and climate science.
For example, recent studies show that the SML is an aggregate-enriched biofilm environment with distinct microbial communities. A biofilm environment at the air-water interface opens new directions in research on organic-rich aerosols, potentially affecting the formation of cloud condensation nuclei. Moreover, the microlayer is a diffusion layer and slows down the air-sea exchange of climate-relevant gases and heat. The question remains how organisms in the SML might additionally affect these exchange processes.
Although it was thought that the SML is not relevant at typical oceanic conditions, recent studies now indicate that the microlayer covers the ocean to a significant extent. Breaking waves, intuitively thought to be disruptive, promote the formation of a microlayer through ascending air bubble plumes carrying molecules, particles and microbes back to the surface…..
hat tip to Metafilter
Thomassays
John @46. You pretty much answered your question. The amount of expansion per unit of seawater heating is directly proportional to the expansion coefficient. Heating of the warmer water near the surface counts for more than the heating of deep cold water.
Several studies have pointed to an unexpected and significant rise in methane emissions in the United States. These emissions are temporally coincident with the US shale gas ‘boom’ of the past decade. Miller et al. (2013) find that methane emissions in the US are much higher than previously reported; and methane emissions in the US geographically correlated with “fossil fuel extraction and refining.” Nisbet et al. (2014) identify a “strong growth” in US methane emissions since 2007:
There is much to suggest that emissions from human activities have also increased since 2007. In the United States, which has overtaken Russia as the largest gas producer (12), hydraulic fracturing is increasingly important. In Utah, fracking may locally leak 6 to 12% of gas production to the air (13). A full understanding of the greenhouse impact of fracking requires monitoring over the gas-well lifetime and analysis of the transport distribution system. Link (Page 4)
Chuck Hughessays
This comes across as hyperventilating and exaggeration for no reason. People like Neil DeGrase Tyson and even Bill Nye deliver the goods every day they speak. And Michael Mann is superb.
Comment by Dan S. — 8 Apr 2015 @ 4:07 PM
> Could you ask for a more deadpan delivery than this one?
Any more excited and he’d be dismissed as alarmist, you know. There’s no pleasing everybody.
Comment by Hank Roberts — 8 Apr 2015
You missed my point entirely but that’s okay. I’ll try again….
I’m going to point back to Joe Romm again because he has the RIGHT IDEA. He enlisted concerned celebrities such as Harrison Ford and featured them in his first episode of “Years of Living Dangerously” but it was played to a limited audience who subscribed to Showtime I believe. We’re talking about a general population who thinks “Duck Dynasty” is great television and BELIEVE it’s real. I don’t think most people in the scientific community realize what they’re up against when it comes to communicating to the FOXBots of the world.
Tyson and Nye are indeed helpful, especially Tyson but you’re talking about two guys vs. an entire RW Media backed by billions of dollars. It’s no secret that Journalism as it existed in the first half of the 20th Century is D-E-A-D. Dr. Peter Ward himself has said several times that if you want to get through to today’s youth you have to do it in the form of a video game. Mull that over for a bit.
It’s all about communication and you’re not about to bring the general public up to your level. Sorry. It ain’t gonna happen. You have to go where your audience is and they’re not reading Real Climate or any of the other excellent Climate Science Blogs. They’re stuck on Reality TV. Okay, so meet them there. I can’t think of anything more realistic than the Climate situation we’re in now. The Weather Channel is full of dramatic storms and floods but they’re not drawing the connection between those events and Climate Change. Somebody has to do it or you’ll never reach the masses. That’s the reality of the situation. And…. you have to get it on prime time TV. I don’t know how to do all that myself but there are plenty of people out there who do. They have to be recruited and utilized.
When Bill Clinton first ran for President, he enlisted Hollywood producers to create an image and it worked. This is a political fight and a P.R. fight we’re in and you have to approach it from that angle. If we can’t compete on that level all the science in the world won’t save us. All it takes for the other side to get attention is have James Inhofe toss a snowball on the Senate floor. What does Inhofe understand that we don’t????
“We have found that the oceans 252 million years ago experienced dramatic acidification and that this coincided with a significant rise in carbon dioxide levels. The data is compelling and we really should be worried in term of what is happening today,” Professor Wood said.
The Great Dying marked the end of the Permian and beginning of the Triassic period, which is why it is also known at the P-T extinction. It was the biggest of the five mass extinctions on Earth, killing off 51 per cent of all marine families, 82 per cent of all genera and between 93 and 97 per cent of all species.
Although the oceans suffered badly – reef-building corals for instance went extinct – it also affected terrestrial life-forms, such as insects, which suffered the only mass extinction in their long history, and primordial forests, which virtually disappeared from the surface of the Pangaea supercontinent that stretched from pole to pole.
My question is where is the support and effort to do the concrete forming?
Killiansays
#55 Geoff Beacon said, Is this article in today’s Independent climate p-o-r-n or serious?
Not sure how published science – published in “Science” – would be considered climate p-o-r-n. First study to directly tie CO2 to the mass extinction. And at rates of emissions similar to current rates.
My question is where is the support and effort to do the concrete forming?
An incredibly stupid, pointless thing to do. It’s like carbon capture: It WILL escape at some point. The heat will come back out at some point. Absolutely, incredulously dumb.
Principle: Natural before mechanical/technical.
We can store carbon in soils and plant matter, so why do stupid stuff like this?
I grow tired of non-systemic B.S. We cannot keep things the way they are because it’s not just climate, and temporary actually means temporary.
Russellsays
Does this mean George Church may get to bring back the ammonites ?
You can search by satellite — but look at the pixel size for GOSAT — you can see Four Corners and you can see the Canadian tar sands — the only two red squares out of all the world. But you can’t tell leaky wells from leaky pipes from gas coming out of the ground all over the area. All are known possible.
It’s going to take aircraft and ground sampling to get higher resolution, along the lines of that ground based work by EDF
They’re retargeting GOSAT and others to focus on that methane hotspot — and will be able to do that from orbit around the whole world. Big coarse pixels though. Better data will be needed each time a hotspot is detected anywhere, higher resolution data, to see where the greenhouse gas is leaking into the atmosphere.
At least we know it’s not the Arctic Ocean, as of now.
Or, of course, stop using all fossil fuels anywhere, I know, mission accomplished assuming that happens. But that’s too easy for most people.
Dr. Peter Ward himself has said several times that if you want to get through to today’s youth you have to do it in the form of a video game.
FYI: The current hype is all about “survival games”, such as H1Z1, or Day Z. Those are rather manageable projects, can be create with a low budget to some extent. There are even tutorials to follow (C++) https://github.com/tomlooman/EpicSurvivalGameSeries
Jim Baird points to his article about OTEC deserving immediate deployment.
See also: Journal Reference:
Lester Kwiatkowski, Katharine L Ricke and Ken Caldeira. Atmospheric consequences of disruption of the ocean thermocline. Environmental Research Letters, 2015 DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/034016
News coverage:
“Geoengineering proposal may backfire: Ocean pipes ‘not cool,’ would end up warming climate. ScienceDaily, 19 March 2015. </a
Thomassays
Geoff @55,56
It looks like a serious paper -at least it is published in Science, which usually implies high quality.
In any case we have known about the P-T extinction for decades, and CO2 release has long been suspected. Another mechanism that has been proposed is by ocean stratification, caused by near global warmth shutting off the source of cold bottom waters. That leads to anoxic conditions, and hydrogen sulfide generating bacteria.
Supposedly the massive eruptions (over a million KM**3 of basalt) erupted through thick coal deposits adding to the CO2 release.
Thomas O'Reillysays
2C & Keep it in the ground & Divestment
“The problem with this story is… it’s so big, and it doesn’t change much from day to day. Journalism is brilliant at capturing momentum, or changes, or things that are unusual. If it’s basically the same every day, every week, every year, I think journalists lose heart.” Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief (retiring from The Guardian)
The editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger calls the team to arms and challenges them: can they find a new way to report on climate change? He outlines why this is the most important story in the world and why most of the fossil fuels we already know about need to be kept in the ground. Given six months, can they succeed to engage readers in a new way? http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015/mar/16/the-biggest-story-in-the-world
Includes Bill McKibben comments info, and from others
Thomas O'Reillysays
#54 Chuck said
“Dr. Peter Ward himself has said several times that if you want to get through to today’s youth you have to do it in the form of a video game. Mull that over for a bit. It’s ALL ABOUT COMMUNICATION and you’re not about to bring the general public up to your level. Sorry. It ain’t gonna happen. You have to go where your audience is and they’re not reading Real Climate or any of the other excellent Climate Science Blogs.”
Correct and True.
#56 Geoff asks “Is this article in today’s Independent climate p-o-r-n or serious?”
The science is real and valid. Research Dr Peter Ward papers and lectures on youtube.
[Response: Peter Ward is not a reliable source for climate or indeed any other science. – gavin]
[ Update: Sorry! I got my Peter Ward’s confused. I was thinking of Peter L. Ward, who is an ex-USGS guy with some crazy ideas about ozone depletion, climate change and dark matter (google if you need to). He is of course distinct from Peter Ward at U. Washington. – gavin]
The problem with people not accepting scientific information on climate change isn’t necessarily “denial”. It **could be** assuming that societies and their economies make decisions using the same information as scientific equations use.
I published a paper basically proving the point four years ago, “Systems Energy Assessment”, showing that our usual method of reporting climate impacts tells businesses nothing at all about the profitability to society of their business and investment decisions. The fact that in four years I’ve also been unable to get scientists to take an interest in that can be discounted lots of ways, but it’s a fact still, that I can’t find scientists interested in giving economic decision maker the kind of information they’d need to make decisions in our common self interests.
Of course there’s natural institutional resistance to changing habits of thinking, but it certainly proves that scientists actually don’t quite understand what make economies tick, and what kind of signaling the economy responds to for changing directions. It’s absolutely critical that we give the public, investors, business, government, and scientists themselves too of course, some high quality profit and loss information on which to base the decisions we have to make.
The link isn’t to that paper, but to the proposal based on the same science, that I made to the UN’s Open Working Group on sustainable development goals last year. It proposes a simple way to aggregate all the best available information on measurable costs to our future, liabilities of future societies for what business is doing today, and attribute the most likely individual shares of the totals that individual businesses are responsible for. Those shares of global impacts could be presented as business ESG balance sheets, side by side with business financial balance sheets, to put the whole picture in front of decision makers for everyone to see.
Decision making wouldn’t turn over night. If actually done with the best current scientific and economic assessments, as an understanding of our rapidly mounting global profit and loss problem, decision making and markets would at least have the information on what is in our best interests, and their fiduciary duties would make them obligated to use it. Once you have that honest and complete profit and loss information then people at least would see what they need to make decisions about.
Granted, that information may not match what scientists need in their equations, but it’s what economies need to steer a course toward optimal profitability in the future.
Steve Fishsays
FactCheck.org asked me to vote for them for a Webby. When I went to the website to vote I found FactCheck but couldn’t find RealClimate.org. How do we vote for RC.
Small increases in radon track natural gas development with fracking in Pennsylvania
Our data showed that summer radon levels on the first floor of buildings within 20 kilometers of drilled wells had higher levels the closer they were located to unconventional drilling. We also did see radon levels begin to rise statewide in 2004, near the time the fracking began, and that levels rose more quickly in counties with more drilling.
Radon is a chemical element with symbol Rn and atomic number 86. It is a radioactive, colorless, odorless, tasteless[2] noble gas, occurring naturally as an indirect decay product of uranium or thorium. Its most stable isotope, 222Rn, has a half-life of 3.8 days. Radon is one of the densest substances that remains a gas under normal conditions. It is also the only gas under normal conditions that only has radioactive isotopes, and is considered a health hazard due to its radioactivity. Intense radioactivity has also hindered chemical studies of radon and only a few compounds are known.
Chuck Hughes said: “It’s all about communication and you’re not about to bring the general public up to your level. Sorry. It ain’t gonna happen. You have to go where your audience is and they’re not reading Real Climate or any of the other excellent Climate Science Blogs. They’re stuck on Reality TV”
Right general idea, but WRONG AUDIENCE. What has not happened to communicate the climate science is to translate the physics into economics. I’ve made good progress on it, but that idea seems so alien to scientists, seriously, I can’t get the least response to my peer reviewed paper on a quite credible way to do it…..
We have a “language problem”, in that climate scientists feel they only need to talk their language, to each other, and converting it into $ is treated as alien to their view of the universe. What will move the giant pools of money in the end will be WHAT THEY PERCEIVE AS PROFITABLE and nothing else, really. So what climate scientists need to do is take an interest in how to translate.
Once over the hump, it ends up being one of the most fun things you can imagine is another bonus.
He has acknowledged his study has extremely little relevance to ocean thermal energy conversion and that “it would be great to investigate climatic effects of OTEC more carefully. If someone can provide me with a great postdoctoral research candidate who could do this, I would be most appreciative.”
The study starts from a premise the surface of the world’s oceans are cooled 8.31 °C. The Carnegie researchers “make no assumptions about how this process would be energetically driven” but vertical diffusivity in the top 1000m of the water column to 60 cm2 s−1 would apparently be required.
Wikipedia says the oceans cover approximately 72% of the planet’s surface (~3.6×108 km2) which I make to be 2.6×108 km2 which if moved 60 cm every second would mean movement of 1.56 x105 km3 or 1.56 x1015m3 of water.
Luis Vega points out in his OTEC primer every MW of OTEC power requires approximately 4 m3 s-1 of warm seawater and 2 m3 s-1 of cold seawater. So 1.56 x1015m3 of upwelled cold water should produce 780*1,000,000 or 78,000,000 TW of electrical energy?
Gerard Nihous of the University of Hawaii estimates the maximum steady-state OTEC electrical potential is about 14 TW (Terawatts) so the Carnegie Institute study is using data that is at least 5,500,000 times greater than anything remotely realistic.
Another way of looking at this is: 60 cm2 s−1 would mean the entire volume of the ocean, which averages 4267 in depth, would turn over every two hours. Surely in that circumstance there would be such a release of dissolved CO2, no one would be around in 2069 to prove or disprove the result of the study.
A NOAA study estimated in 2010 the oceans were accumulating about 330 terawatts worth of heat continuously. We would be lucky if we could convert and move just that amount of heat into the deep with the result we would produce about the amount of energy currently derived from fossil fuels.
This would simply maintain sea surface temperatures near what they are today with the result there should be little to not impact on land or ocean cloud formations and it is the disruption of cloud formation over the ocean that leads to the detrimental impact in the Carnegie model.
The Caldeira team started from the premise that diluting surface waters would be an effective way to cool the Earth for centuries. Unfortunately however they used a model with totally unrealistic parameters to come to a different conclusion. They also seem to have been unaware of, or at least disregarded, the second law of thermodynamics, which says heat can be converted to work by moving it through a heat engine from a hot area to a cold one. It does not say you should dilute the hot reservoir with the cold (with no economic or heat to energy conversion benefit), which is the proposition presented by their paper.
Further this is exactly what Nature has done to bring about the hiatus.
Of course the heat will return. Munk however estimates the upwelling of the Pacific is about 1cm/day or about 4 meters/year.(Caldeira used 60cm/sec?) At that rate heat moved to 1000 meters would take 250 years to return, which gives the atmosphere that much time to disgorge CO2 since you have replaced all fossil fuels with the energy produced by this process. When that heat does reach the surface again it can be driven back down with the same process if necessary.
Since global warming is 93% ocean warming, the conversion of as much of this heat to productive use is the only way it can be dealt with. The inefficiency of the process means you have to move at least 20 times more heat into the abyss as energy produced but this too is an environmental bonus.
[In 2015] America’s CO2 emissions… are expected to fall to their lowest levels since 1994. Emissions will drop 15.4% below 2005 levels, going a long way to helping the US meet their pledge of cutting CO2 emissions by 28% by 2025.
Talk about a limited sample from which to claim which scientists do and don’t agree ….
wilisays
gavin wrote in response to #66: “Peter Ward is not a reliable source for climate or indeed any other science.”
Wow. That’s a harsher assessment of Dr. Ward than I’ve heard before. Not saying that it’s wrong, but could you point us in some directions (sites, reviews…) that indicate where he’s been unreliable on climate and other science?
Thanks ahead of time. As a teacher I want to be careful not to recommend students to sources that are less than reliable.
[Response: Case of mistaken identity. See update above. Sorry! – gavin]
Re Gavin’s comment in #66: Gavin, is paleontology not a science? Or are you claiming Ward lacks expertise in paleontology, and if so on what grounds? He may hold a minority position on the PT extinction but that doesn’t make him unreliable, just unproven. -Chris
> OTEC
Good response re Caldeira, a link to that should appear with the original story.
I’d also suggest linking to discussion of problems to date with OTEC installations; it’s been a while since I saw a review article but the early efforts had discovered much that needed attention (not unique to OTEC, any new technology has its gotchas to be found and fixed). Things like clogging of the pipes by organisms colonizing bare surfaces, which has affected all the ocean power/cooling systems now that tributyltin paint is deprecated.
“America’s CO2 emissions . . . are expected to fall . . .”
While methane emissions continue to climb due to increasing leakage from fracking and conversion to Nat Gas generation …. win some, lose some.
Chuck Hughessays
[Response: Peter Ward is not a reliable source for climate or indeed any other science. – gavin]
With all due respect, I’m not trying to start a debate or create conflict, I’m just a little surprised to ‘hear’ you say that. Of course, what do I know. I’m just a curious individual and everybody on here is smarter than me. Can you point me toward anything in Dr. Ward’s work that invalidates his position on Climate Change or any other scientific findings? I realize that Dr. Ward is paleontologist which is a different discipline from actual Climate Science but everything I’ve read or heard from him concerning Sea Level Rise and the melting ice caps seems to agree with much of what is published here at Real Climate.
[Response: Case of mistaken identity. See update above. Sorry! – gavin]
For the record, Dr. Ward has said that scientists who publish books for general consumption are looked down on in the scientific community as being “not serious” or words to that effect. They also don’t tend to get hired by Universities, according to him. I guess that’s true.
In Dr. Ward’s defense I would have to agree that communication, whether it be via popular books, movies, TV, video games or any other media is essential to educating the public. I personally wish more scientists would take the time to educate and encourage science teachers to tell the facts and not back away from controversial findings i.e. Climate Change, Evolution and the like. Forget something as basic as sex education. As a teacher I can tell you that there are topics that science teachers absolutely will not discuss in the science classroom, either out of fear of retribution or absurd beliefs on the part of the teachers themselves. It’s a scary predicament we’re in. That scientists tend to not agree with each other anyway makes it even harder.
Thanks
Miguelitosays
@69 (Chris Machens):
The paper’s conclusions about radon and fracking aren’t warranted.
Look at their figure 4 and the red line (the one that represents areas with high levels of activity in the Marcellus Shale). The levels of radon are quickly rising until 2008, then they flatten out.
Then look at their figure 3, which shows that activity in the Marcellus didn’t really start until 2009 and only took off in 2010.
In other words, fracking is almost certainly not responsible for the rise in radon prior to 2009, because there was virtually no activity. Meanwhile, there’s no rise in radon after 2008 when Marcellus activity started to rapidly grow.
In fact, a more appropriate conclusion would be that there is no apparent link between fracturing and levels of radon.
This is one of those things that makes me wonder how that paper got through peer review with that conclusion intact. Otherwise, it’s a pretty neat look at radon data to see how things have changed over time.
‘The global climate system is composed of a number of subsystems — atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere — each
of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’ Michael Ghil
Climate is a complex and dynamic system that exhibits more or less extreme bifurcations at multi-decadal intervals. It is the source of unforced variation.
AMOC is a relatively important component – btw – and is measured by the 26 degree north array since 2004. No lottery win required.
Miguilito, the overall conclusion, from your link:
Geologic unit, well water, community, weather and unconventional natural gas development were associated with indoor radon concentrations. Future studies should include direct environmental measurement of radon, and building features unavailable for this analysis.
Another related study
Once you have a release of fracking fluid into the environment, you end up with a radioactive legacy
[Response: Peter Ward is not a reliable source for climate or indeed any other science. – gavin]
A sweeping statement. Have you some credible cites or arguments to back up your opinion of this man there Gavin? I’m all ears.
[Response: Case of mistaken identity. See update above. Sorry! – gavin]
Thomas O'Reillysays
#56 Geoff try this and other related/cited papers listed in Google scholar
Episodic photic zone euxinia in the northeastern Panthalassic Ocean during the end-Triassic extinction – Abstract
Severe changes in ocean redox, nutrient cycling, and marine productivity accompanied most Phanerozoic mass extinctions. However, evidence for marine photic zone euxinia (PZE) as a globally important extinction mechanism for the end-Triassic extinction (ETE) is currently lacking. Fossil molecular (biomarker) and nitrogen isotopic records from a sedimentary sequence in western Canada provide the first conclusive evidence of PZE and disrupted biogeochemistry in neritic waters of the Panthalassic Ocean during the end Triassic. Increasing water-column stratification and deoxygenation across the ETE led to PZE in the Early Jurassic, paralleled by a perturbed nitrogen cycle and ecological turnovers among noncalcifying groups, including eukaryotic algae and prokaryotic plankton. If such conditions developed widely in the Panthalassic Ocean, PZE might have been a potent mechanism for the ETE.
Miguelito and others, feel free to share your opinion on the science, over at ClimateState, i thought to make a small post on radioactivity and fracking.
#71 Jessie, I had a browse through your links… good luck with it. Not too many ears up for listening to different approaches – yet.
I really liked this line:
— “If the numbers aren’t right the decisions won’t be” —
Can’t deny that simple observation in climate science, the energy use, or the economics.
A reminder of a few “numbers” — Last time the atmosphere had a CO2 level of 400 ppm was in the Late Pliocene about 3 million year ago.
During the ice ages of the last 800,000 years levels varied between 180 ppm (glacial periods) and 280 ppm (interglacial periods).
Views vary regarding the upper stability threshold of the Antarctic ice sheet – in most views being approximately 500 ppm CO2, according to some others it is higher possibly 1000 ppm.
The rate of ice melt depends on both temperature level and the rate of temperature rise.
Current CO2 rise rates exceed 2 ppm/year, faster than recorded since 55 Ma. Projected FF energy use to 2040 suggest rising to 3 ppm/year within a decade on BAU economic growth and practices.
zebrasays
#79 Rob Ellison,
“No lottery win required.”
Perfect, thank you. Now, let’s see if we can use that reference to understand my question:
“Maidens et al. (2013) noted that the anomalous conditions were predicted by long-range forecasts several months in advance. Using an ensemble of hindcasts, Maidens et al. (2013) concluded that the factor that led to the predictability of this winter was the anomalous upper-ocean heat content and SST. This suggests that the monitoring AMOC at 26◦N can provide valuable information for seasonal prediction.”
So when do you guys replace the Farmer’s Almanac? You have all the tools you need, and I could leave the money to my cat if I had one, right?
I’m trying to get at the difference between what serves a sophisticated but somewhat parochial academic community and the kind of effort that gets covered in the news and mentioned by the weather-readers. It isn’t, as some suggest, about creating propaganda or video games, but rather making the (real) work both relevant and accessible to the public. Somehow the LHC and space probes, which *aren’t* all that relevant if you think about it, get press. It might just be a fail on my part, but I follow this subject, and I missed the morning-news pictures of those buoys being placed, whenever it happened.
My ‘PR sense’, for what it’s worth, is that the public is forgiving of imperfection if it is engaged, and feels some ownership of the process. Everyone complains about the snowfall and hurricane predictions, but everyone listens.
The question again– at what point, on a non-geologic time scale, will this data source provide enough confidence to really ‘go public’ (rather than producing interesting but equivocal academic papers?) If that’s too long to be of any use, what can we do to speed it up?
How about some other areas of study? The point, contrary to Killian, is not to find worst-er case scenarios, but to change and normalize the perception of the discipline itself. You don’t have to do it with everything; you need some examples that people can relate to.
That quote applies to the power sector only. Is the US, like the UK, ignoring the carbon emissions we export to China? (i.e. we get the Chinese to use the power to make goods we import from them?)
In the UK the carbon footprint assigned to consumption is going up but because many of our consumption emissions happen overseas our production emissions are going down. In December 2012 Professor Sir Bob Watson discussed the UK’s rising carbon footprint. At that time he was Chief Scientific Adviser to a government department (but not now!).
Most of the problems associated with OTEC stem from the massive movement of cold water to the surface to condense the working fluid. This is the only approach that has been tried so far and is along the lines of the Caldeira study. First this water contains CO2 under pressure that is released as it approaches the surface. Their are impingement and entrainment issues associated with marine life and the biofouling you point to. If you move the heat instead to the deep with a heat pipe, using the phase changes of the working fluid instead of the sensible heat of water, you avoid most of these issues. The hot and cold waters remain where they are thus no CO2 is released and in the cold water at 1000 meters biofouling of the condenser isn’t much of an issue. Fouling of the evaporator can be addressed with ozonation or chlorination, both of which are byproducts of the electrolysis process.
Some people panic more about climate change than others.
I would like to find a measure that can give us individual panic scores.
I recognise this is an unclear question. (Can it be made clearer?) but …
1. Assume we will have capitalist markets for this century.
2. Assume climate change mitigation is driven by a carbon price.
3. Assume it’s returned to individuals as in Hansen’s carbon fee with dividend.
What price would you choose?
Use your own personal circumstances and your own knowledge of economics, climate, international relations … and your own vision of how humanity should guide the future.
I would guess/choose at £1000 ($1460) per tonne of CO2e?
I think that suggests I panic quite a lot but have residual hope.
For Miguelito: you point to a chart of predictors, not of measurement, and your claim doesn’t match the text. Rather than eyeballing charts, they did the arithmetic.
That’s why statistics:
We observed fluctuating radon concentrations throughout the study period; low Marcellus activity counties consistently had lower radon concentrations than both high and no Marcellus activity counties, before and after drilling began.
Then from 2005-2013 the high activity counties had higher basement radon levels than both low and no Marcellus activity counties with confidence intervals that did not overlap, and there was evidence of a significant upward trend.
Remember, when you go looking of patterns in pictures:
Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations—and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars ….
— Peter Watts
Miguelitosays
Chris Machens:
“Miguilito, the overall conclusion, from your link:”
The problem is that the conclusion isn’t remotely supported by the evidence they gathered. According to their Figures 3 and 4, radon levels are growing pretty quickly when there’s hardly any fracking. Then when fracking really picks up post-2008, levels of radon completely flatten off.
Unless the radon is being sent back in time, I don’t know how it’s possible to conclude there’s a link between the two.
”
Climate is a complex and dynamic system that exhibits more or less extreme bifurcations at multi-decadal intervals. It is the source of unforced variation.
“
That opinion is terribly misinformed. Just because scientists may have difficulty predicting what the climate excursions should be at any particular point in time doesn’t mean that the climate is intractably unpredictable.
For example, it is becoming more apparent that a climate behavior such as ENSO is showing definite signs of determinism. This is determinism based on forcing factors such as the more predictable QBO.
Google for the paper “Sloshing Model for ENSO” on ARXIV
Chuck Hughessays
Thank you Dr. Gavin. You had me worried there for a minute. I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to science but I try to maintain the integrity of my sources so I don’t end up sounding like a complete fool. As an aside to the other topics at hand, I would like to emphasize that I have been teaching for about 30 years now, mostly in public schools but I also have a college gig and have taught at other Universities but my area is music. I got into the Physics of things when I saw all the direct relationships between sound, light and astronomy. I am a “science consumer” I guess but I have tried to broach the topic of Climate with a few science teachers and they basically recoil and start in on Al Gore. It really is a bad situation for the students when they’re not equipped with basic knowledge because someone who is charged with the responsibility of teaching them either holds absurd beliefs or is in possession of bad information. Texas politicians are attacking textbook publishers and trying to rewrite curriculum. This has to stop. Now we’re faced with a life threatening challenge and nobody’s allowed to discuss it.
I would like to make a humble request of you and your colleagues here at RealClimate…. is there any way to make you more visible to the general public? I’ve seen your presentation on TED Talks and a few other media outlets but I think our science teachers need more encouragement (if that’s the right term) to speak out and cover their topics without fear. Fear leads to ignorance which tends to get passed on to the next generation.
I understand the work load involved in what you’re already doing and simply maintaining this blog is time consuming. I understand that, but these kids really need help. It’s their future on the line and they’re not being informed. With all the available technology and instant communication we now have I can easily see some sort of Skype workshop on Climate Change being broadcast to the various educational institutions around the country. Even if it’s just demonstrating what you already do and how you do it.
Perfect, thank you. Now, let’s see if we can use that reference to understand my question:
“Maidens et al. (2013) noted that the anomalous conditions were predicted by long-range forecasts several months in advance. Using an ensemble of hindcasts, Maidens et al. (2013) concluded that the factor that led to the predictability of this winter was the anomalous upper-ocean heat content and SST. This suggests that the monitoring AMOC at 26◦N can provide valuable information for seasonal prediction.”
So when do you guys replace the Farmer’s Almanac? You have all the tools you need, and I could leave the money to my cat if I had one, right?
zebra @ 96
A bit all over the place? A climate system abruptly shifting every 20 to 30 years is impossible to predict. Attempts to do so are profoundly uninteresting.
More relevant is understanding how these ocean and atmospheric patterns influence regional rainfall, snowfall and temperature. Here’s Figure 7 from the Smeed et al reference.
In the context of an abruptly shifting climate and ecological systems – greenhouse gas emissions are potentially problematic. These emissions go well beyond electricity generation – which is some 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The solutions are diverse – needing new technology, land use changes, restoration of agricultural soils, conservation and restoration of ecosystems and multiple gas and aerosol strategies.
For example, it is becoming more apparent that a climate behavior such as ENSO is showing definite signs of determinism. This is determinism based on forcing factors such as the more predictable QBO.
‘Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic. The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change…
The richness of the El Nino behaviour, decade by decade and century by century, testifies to the fundamentally chaotic nature of the system that we are attempting to predict. It challenges the way in which we evaluate models and emphasizes the importance of continuing to focus on observing and understanding processes and phenomena in the climate system. It is also a classic demonstration of the need for ensemble prediction systems on all time scales in order to sample the range of possible outcomes that even the real world could produce. Nothing is certain.’ http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751
It is all deterministic as Julia Slingo and Tim Palmer attest. It is also clear that science says something other than what webby claims on the basis of harmonic equations for standing waves in constant depth elliptical bathtubs (the ‘sloshing’ (sic) effect) even as modulated by the QBO. [edit]
Suppose for a moment that you could bioengineer a thin membrane between ocean and atmosphere — covering 70 percent of Earth’s surface — and control the interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere.
hat tip to Metafilter
John @46. You pretty much answered your question. The amount of expansion per unit of seawater heating is directly proportional to the expansion coefficient. Heating of the warmer water near the surface counts for more than the heating of deep cold water.
Re Nick #11
This comes across as hyperventilating and exaggeration for no reason. People like Neil DeGrase Tyson and even Bill Nye deliver the goods every day they speak. And Michael Mann is superb.
Comment by Dan S. — 8 Apr 2015 @ 4:07 PM
> Could you ask for a more deadpan delivery than this one?
Any more excited and he’d be dismissed as alarmist, you know. There’s no pleasing everybody.
Comment by Hank Roberts — 8 Apr 2015
You missed my point entirely but that’s okay. I’ll try again….
I’m going to point back to Joe Romm again because he has the RIGHT IDEA. He enlisted concerned celebrities such as Harrison Ford and featured them in his first episode of “Years of Living Dangerously” but it was played to a limited audience who subscribed to Showtime I believe. We’re talking about a general population who thinks “Duck Dynasty” is great television and BELIEVE it’s real. I don’t think most people in the scientific community realize what they’re up against when it comes to communicating to the FOXBots of the world.
Tyson and Nye are indeed helpful, especially Tyson but you’re talking about two guys vs. an entire RW Media backed by billions of dollars. It’s no secret that Journalism as it existed in the first half of the 20th Century is D-E-A-D. Dr. Peter Ward himself has said several times that if you want to get through to today’s youth you have to do it in the form of a video game. Mull that over for a bit.
It’s all about communication and you’re not about to bring the general public up to your level. Sorry. It ain’t gonna happen. You have to go where your audience is and they’re not reading Real Climate or any of the other excellent Climate Science Blogs. They’re stuck on Reality TV. Okay, so meet them there. I can’t think of anything more realistic than the Climate situation we’re in now. The Weather Channel is full of dramatic storms and floods but they’re not drawing the connection between those events and Climate Change. Somebody has to do it or you’ll never reach the masses. That’s the reality of the situation. And…. you have to get it on prime time TV. I don’t know how to do all that myself but there are plenty of people out there who do. They have to be recruited and utilized.
When Bill Clinton first ran for President, he enlisted Hollywood producers to create an image and it worked. This is a political fight and a P.R. fight we’re in and you have to approach it from that angle. If we can’t compete on that level all the science in the world won’t save us. All it takes for the other side to get attention is have James Inhofe toss a snowball on the Senate floor. What does Inhofe understand that we don’t????
I’ll give you a hint… it’s NOT the science.
Is this article in today’s Independent climate p-o-r-n or serious?
Ocean acidification killed off more than 90 per cent of marine life 252 million years ago, scientists believe
That Independent article says:
48 Zebra
A concrete project to address the problem. http://theenergycollective.com/jim-baird/2186591/lowest-cost-renewable-energy-comes-2000-percent-environmental-payback
My question is where is the support and effort to do the concrete forming?
#55 Geoff Beacon said, Is this article in today’s Independent climate p-o-r-n or serious?
Not sure how published science – published in “Science” – would be considered climate p-o-r-n. First study to directly tie CO2 to the mass extinction. And at rates of emissions similar to current rates.
#57 Jim Baird said, 48 Zebra
A concrete project to address the problem. http://theenergycollective.com/jim-baird/2186591/lowest-cost-renewable-energy-comes-2000-percent-environmental-payback
My question is where is the support and effort to do the concrete forming?
An incredibly stupid, pointless thing to do. It’s like carbon capture: It WILL escape at some point. The heat will come back out at some point. Absolutely, incredulously dumb.
Principle: Natural before mechanical/technical.
We can store carbon in soils and plant matter, so why do stupid stuff like this?
I grow tired of non-systemic B.S. We cannot keep things the way they are because it’s not just climate, and temporary actually means temporary.
Does this mean George Church may get to bring back the ammonites ?
Imagine for example that you wanted to know the origins — specifically, locally — of greenhouse gases.
You can search block by block: http://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps
You can search by satellite — but look at the pixel size for GOSAT — you can see Four Corners and you can see the Canadian tar sands — the only two red squares out of all the world. But you can’t tell leaky wells from leaky pipes from gas coming out of the ground all over the area. All are known possible.
What do you fix? Look at the pixel size we have now:
https://i1.wp.com/www.gosat.nies.go.jp/eng/img/XCO2_L2_201308010831average_v02_21.png
from http://www.gosat.nies.go.jp/index_e.html
It’s going to take aircraft and ground sampling to get higher resolution, along the lines of that ground based work by EDF
They’re retargeting GOSAT and others to focus on that methane hotspot — and will be able to do that from orbit around the whole world. Big coarse pixels though. Better data will be needed each time a hotspot is detected anywhere, higher resolution data, to see where the greenhouse gas is leaking into the atmosphere.
At least we know it’s not the Arctic Ocean, as of now.
Or, of course, stop using all fossil fuels anywhere, I know, mission accomplished assuming that happens. But that’s too easy for most people.
FYI: The current hype is all about “survival games”, such as H1Z1, or Day Z. Those are rather manageable projects, can be create with a low budget to some extent. There are even tutorials to follow (C++) https://github.com/tomlooman/EpicSurvivalGameSeries
Jim Baird points to his article about OTEC deserving immediate deployment.
See also: Journal Reference:
Lester Kwiatkowski, Katharine L Ricke and Ken Caldeira. Atmospheric consequences of disruption of the ocean thermocline. Environmental Research Letters, 2015 DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/034016
News coverage:
“Geoengineering proposal may backfire: Ocean pipes ‘not cool,’ would end up warming climate. ScienceDaily, 19 March 2015. </a
Geoff @55,56
It looks like a serious paper -at least it is published in Science, which usually implies high quality.
In any case we have known about the P-T extinction for decades, and CO2 release has long been suspected. Another mechanism that has been proposed is by ocean stratification, caused by near global warmth shutting off the source of cold bottom waters. That leads to anoxic conditions, and hydrogen sulfide generating bacteria.
Supposedly the massive eruptions (over a million KM**3 of basalt) erupted through thick coal deposits adding to the CO2 release.
2C & Keep it in the ground & Divestment
“The problem with this story is… it’s so big, and it doesn’t change much from day to day. Journalism is brilliant at capturing momentum, or changes, or things that are unusual. If it’s basically the same every day, every week, every year, I think journalists lose heart.” Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief (retiring from The Guardian)
The editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger calls the team to arms and challenges them: can they find a new way to report on climate change? He outlines why this is the most important story in the world and why most of the fossil fuels we already know about need to be kept in the ground. Given six months, can they succeed to engage readers in a new way?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015/mar/16/the-biggest-story-in-the-world
Includes Bill McKibben comments info, and from others
#54 Chuck said
“Dr. Peter Ward himself has said several times that if you want to get through to today’s youth you have to do it in the form of a video game. Mull that over for a bit. It’s ALL ABOUT COMMUNICATION and you’re not about to bring the general public up to your level. Sorry. It ain’t gonna happen. You have to go where your audience is and they’re not reading Real Climate or any of the other excellent Climate Science Blogs.”
Correct and True.
#56 Geoff asks “Is this article in today’s Independent climate p-o-r-n or serious?”
The science is real and valid. Research Dr Peter Ward papers and lectures on youtube.
[Response: Peter Ward is not a reliable source for climate or indeed any other science. – gavin]
[ Update: Sorry! I got my Peter Ward’s confused. I was thinking of Peter L. Ward, who is an ex-USGS guy with some crazy ideas about ozone depletion, climate change and dark matter (google if you need to). He is of course distinct from Peter Ward at U. Washington. – gavin]
The problem with people not accepting scientific information on climate change isn’t necessarily “denial”. It **could be** assuming that societies and their economies make decisions using the same information as scientific equations use.
I published a paper basically proving the point four years ago, “Systems Energy Assessment”, showing that our usual method of reporting climate impacts tells businesses nothing at all about the profitability to society of their business and investment decisions. The fact that in four years I’ve also been unable to get scientists to take an interest in that can be discounted lots of ways, but it’s a fact still, that I can’t find scientists interested in giving economic decision maker the kind of information they’d need to make decisions in our common self interests.
Of course there’s natural institutional resistance to changing habits of thinking, but it certainly proves that scientists actually don’t quite understand what make economies tick, and what kind of signaling the economy responds to for changing directions. It’s absolutely critical that we give the public, investors, business, government, and scientists themselves too of course, some high quality profit and loss information on which to base the decisions we have to make.
The link isn’t to that paper, but to the proposal based on the same science, that I made to the UN’s Open Working Group on sustainable development goals last year. It proposes a simple way to aggregate all the best available information on measurable costs to our future, liabilities of future societies for what business is doing today, and attribute the most likely individual shares of the totals that individual businesses are responsible for. Those shares of global impacts could be presented as business ESG balance sheets, side by side with business financial balance sheets, to put the whole picture in front of decision makers for everyone to see.
Decision making wouldn’t turn over night. If actually done with the best current scientific and economic assessments, as an understanding of our rapidly mounting global profit and loss problem, decision making and markets would at least have the information on what is in our best interests, and their fiduciary duties would make them obligated to use it. Once you have that honest and complete profit and loss information then people at least would see what they need to make decisions about.
Granted, that information may not match what scientists need in their equations, but it’s what economies need to steer a course toward optimal profitability in the future.
FactCheck.org asked me to vote for them for a Webby. When I went to the website to vote I found FactCheck but couldn’t find RealClimate.org. How do we vote for RC.
Steve
Small increases in radon track natural gas development with fracking in Pennsylvania
http://theconversation.com/small-increases-in-radon-track-natural-gas-development-with-fracking-in-pennsylvania-39991
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon
#55–Geoff, it’s consistent with a lot of previous knowledge:
http://doc-snow.hubpages.com/hub/Mark-Lynass-Six-Degrees-A-Summary-Review
http://doc-snow.hubpages.com/hub/The-Five-Degree-World
The new piece seems to be the direct evidence of ocean acidification.
Chuck Hughes said: “It’s all about communication and you’re not about to bring the general public up to your level. Sorry. It ain’t gonna happen. You have to go where your audience is and they’re not reading Real Climate or any of the other excellent Climate Science Blogs. They’re stuck on Reality TV”
Right general idea, but WRONG AUDIENCE. What has not happened to communicate the climate science is to translate the physics into economics. I’ve made good progress on it, but that idea seems so alien to scientists, seriously, I can’t get the least response to my peer reviewed paper on a quite credible way to do it…..
We have a “language problem”, in that climate scientists feel they only need to talk their language, to each other, and converting it into $ is treated as alien to their view of the universe. What will move the giant pools of money in the end will be WHAT THEY PERCEIVE AS PROFITABLE and nothing else, really. So what climate scientists need to do is take an interest in how to translate.
Once over the hump, it ends up being one of the most fun things you can imagine is another bonus.
http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1908/
http://www.synapse9.com/SEA
http://www.synapse9.com/jlhpub.htm
Hank Roberts 63
The rebuttal to the Caldeira article is offered here: http://theenergycollective.com/jim-baird/2211281/research-climate-change-placebo
He has acknowledged his study has extremely little relevance to ocean thermal energy conversion and that “it would be great to investigate climatic effects of OTEC more carefully. If someone can provide me with a great postdoctoral research candidate who could do this, I would be most appreciative.”
The study starts from a premise the surface of the world’s oceans are cooled 8.31 °C. The Carnegie researchers “make no assumptions about how this process would be energetically driven” but vertical diffusivity in the top 1000m of the water column to 60 cm2 s−1 would apparently be required.
Wikipedia says the oceans cover approximately 72% of the planet’s surface (~3.6×108 km2) which I make to be 2.6×108 km2 which if moved 60 cm every second would mean movement of 1.56 x105 km3 or 1.56 x1015m3 of water.
Luis Vega points out in his OTEC primer every MW of OTEC power requires approximately 4 m3 s-1 of warm seawater and 2 m3 s-1 of cold seawater. So 1.56 x1015m3 of upwelled cold water should produce 780*1,000,000 or 78,000,000 TW of electrical energy?
Gerard Nihous of the University of Hawaii estimates the maximum steady-state OTEC electrical potential is about 14 TW (Terawatts) so the Carnegie Institute study is using data that is at least 5,500,000 times greater than anything remotely realistic.
Another way of looking at this is: 60 cm2 s−1 would mean the entire volume of the ocean, which averages 4267 in depth, would turn over every two hours. Surely in that circumstance there would be such a release of dissolved CO2, no one would be around in 2069 to prove or disprove the result of the study.
A NOAA study estimated in 2010 the oceans were accumulating about 330 terawatts worth of heat continuously. We would be lucky if we could convert and move just that amount of heat into the deep with the result we would produce about the amount of energy currently derived from fossil fuels.
This would simply maintain sea surface temperatures near what they are today with the result there should be little to not impact on land or ocean cloud formations and it is the disruption of cloud formation over the ocean that leads to the detrimental impact in the Carnegie model.
Killian 59
See remarks to Hank Roberts above.
The Caldeira team started from the premise that diluting surface waters would be an effective way to cool the Earth for centuries. Unfortunately however they used a model with totally unrealistic parameters to come to a different conclusion. They also seem to have been unaware of, or at least disregarded, the second law of thermodynamics, which says heat can be converted to work by moving it through a heat engine from a hot area to a cold one. It does not say you should dilute the hot reservoir with the cold (with no economic or heat to energy conversion benefit), which is the proposition presented by their paper.
Further this is exactly what Nature has done to bring about the hiatus.
Of course the heat will return. Munk however estimates the upwelling of the Pacific is about 1cm/day or about 4 meters/year.(Caldeira used 60cm/sec?) At that rate heat moved to 1000 meters would take 250 years to return, which gives the atmosphere that much time to disgorge CO2 since you have replaced all fossil fuels with the energy produced by this process. When that heat does reach the surface again it can be driven back down with the same process if necessary.
Since global warming is 93% ocean warming, the conversion of as much of this heat to productive use is the only way it can be dealt with. The inefficiency of the process means you have to move at least 20 times more heat into the abyss as energy produced but this too is an environmental bonus.
Some relatively cheerful news, for a change:
ok, this is just too weird:
http://www.takeonit.com/expert/412.aspx
Talk about a limited sample from which to claim which scientists do and don’t agree ….
gavin wrote in response to #66: “Peter Ward is not a reliable source for climate or indeed any other science.”
Wow. That’s a harsher assessment of Dr. Ward than I’ve heard before. Not saying that it’s wrong, but could you point us in some directions (sites, reviews…) that indicate where he’s been unreliable on climate and other science?
Thanks ahead of time. As a teacher I want to be careful not to recommend students to sources that are less than reliable.
[Response: Case of mistaken identity. See update above. Sorry! – gavin]
Re Gavin’s comment in #66: Gavin, is paleontology not a science? Or are you claiming Ward lacks expertise in paleontology, and if so on what grounds? He may hold a minority position on the PT extinction but that doesn’t make him unreliable, just unproven. -Chris
> OTEC
Good response re Caldeira, a link to that should appear with the original story.
I’d also suggest linking to discussion of problems to date with OTEC installations; it’s been a while since I saw a review article but the early efforts had discovered much that needed attention (not unique to OTEC, any new technology has its gotchas to be found and fixed). Things like clogging of the pipes by organisms colonizing bare surfaces, which has affected all the ocean power/cooling systems now that tributyltin paint is deprecated.
Has anyone done numbers for the similar approach set out in William Calvin’s 20-year emergency CO2 drawdown?
“America’s CO2 emissions . . . are expected to fall . . .”
While methane emissions continue to climb due to increasing leakage from fracking and conversion to Nat Gas generation …. win some, lose some.
[Response: Peter Ward is not a reliable source for climate or indeed any other science. – gavin]
With all due respect, I’m not trying to start a debate or create conflict, I’m just a little surprised to ‘hear’ you say that. Of course, what do I know. I’m just a curious individual and everybody on here is smarter than me. Can you point me toward anything in Dr. Ward’s work that invalidates his position on Climate Change or any other scientific findings? I realize that Dr. Ward is paleontologist which is a different discipline from actual Climate Science but everything I’ve read or heard from him concerning Sea Level Rise and the melting ice caps seems to agree with much of what is published here at Real Climate.
[Response: Case of mistaken identity. See update above. Sorry! – gavin]
For the record, Dr. Ward has said that scientists who publish books for general consumption are looked down on in the scientific community as being “not serious” or words to that effect. They also don’t tend to get hired by Universities, according to him. I guess that’s true.
In Dr. Ward’s defense I would have to agree that communication, whether it be via popular books, movies, TV, video games or any other media is essential to educating the public. I personally wish more scientists would take the time to educate and encourage science teachers to tell the facts and not back away from controversial findings i.e. Climate Change, Evolution and the like. Forget something as basic as sex education. As a teacher I can tell you that there are topics that science teachers absolutely will not discuss in the science classroom, either out of fear of retribution or absurd beliefs on the part of the teachers themselves. It’s a scary predicament we’re in. That scientists tend to not agree with each other anyway makes it even harder.
Thanks
@69 (Chris Machens):
The paper’s conclusions about radon and fracking aren’t warranted.
Here is the paper.
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1409014/
Look at their figure 4 and the red line (the one that represents areas with high levels of activity in the Marcellus Shale). The levels of radon are quickly rising until 2008, then they flatten out.
Then look at their figure 3, which shows that activity in the Marcellus didn’t really start until 2009 and only took off in 2010.
In other words, fracking is almost certainly not responsible for the rise in radon prior to 2009, because there was virtually no activity. Meanwhile, there’s no rise in radon after 2008 when Marcellus activity started to rapidly grow.
In fact, a more appropriate conclusion would be that there is no apparent link between fracturing and levels of radon.
This is one of those things that makes me wonder how that paper got through peer review with that conclusion intact. Otherwise, it’s a pretty neat look at radon data to see how things have changed over time.
‘The global climate system is composed of a number of subsystems — atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere — each
of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’ Michael Ghil
Climate is a complex and dynamic system that exhibits more or less extreme bifurcations at multi-decadal intervals. It is the source of unforced variation.
AMOC is a relatively important component – btw – and is measured by the 26 degree north array since 2004. No lottery win required.
http://www.ocean-sci.net/10/29/2014/os-10-29-2014.pdf
Miguilito, the overall conclusion, from your link:
Another related study
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/122-a50/
[Response: Peter Ward is not a reliable source for climate or indeed any other science. – gavin]
A sweeping statement. Have you some credible cites or arguments to back up your opinion of this man there Gavin? I’m all ears.
[Response: Case of mistaken identity. See update above. Sorry! – gavin]
#56 Geoff try this and other related/cited papers listed in Google scholar
Episodic photic zone euxinia in the northeastern Panthalassic Ocean during the end-Triassic extinction – Abstract
Severe changes in ocean redox, nutrient cycling, and marine productivity accompanied most Phanerozoic mass extinctions. However, evidence for marine photic zone euxinia (PZE) as a globally important extinction mechanism for the end-Triassic extinction (ETE) is currently lacking. Fossil molecular (biomarker) and nitrogen isotopic records from a sedimentary sequence in western Canada provide the first conclusive evidence of PZE and disrupted biogeochemistry in neritic waters of the Panthalassic Ocean during the end Triassic. Increasing water-column stratification and deoxygenation across the ETE led to PZE in the Early Jurassic, paralleled by a perturbed nitrogen cycle and ecological turnovers among noncalcifying groups, including eukaryotic algae and prokaryotic plankton. If such conditions developed widely in the Panthalassic Ocean, PZE might have been a potent mechanism for the ETE.
Received 20 October 2014.
Revision received 12 January 2015.
Accepted 22 January 2015.
© 2015 Geological Society of America
Miguelito and others, feel free to share your opinion on the science, over at ClimateState, i thought to make a small post on radioactivity and fracking.
Once you have a release of fracking fluid into the environment, you end up with a radioactive legacy http://climatestate.com/2015/04/12/once-you-have-a-release-of-fracking-fluid-into-the-environment-you-end-up-with-a-radioactive-legacy/
sorry url
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/43/4/307
and perhaps if time permits browse thru
http://cci.anu.edu.au/researchers/view/andrew_glikson/
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00338-008-0381-8#page-1
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150401084049.htm
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/308/5720/398.short
http://uahost.uantwerpen.be/funmorph/raoul/fylsyst/Berner2006.pdf
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/31/9/741.short
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/11/18/rspb.2009.1845.short
Abrupt Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future
#71 Jessie, I had a browse through your links… good luck with it. Not too many ears up for listening to different approaches – yet.
I really liked this line:
— “If the numbers aren’t right the decisions won’t be” —
Can’t deny that simple observation in climate science, the energy use, or the economics.
A reminder of a few “numbers” — Last time the atmosphere had a CO2 level of 400 ppm was in the Late Pliocene about 3 million year ago.
During the ice ages of the last 800,000 years levels varied between 180 ppm (glacial periods) and 280 ppm (interglacial periods).
Views vary regarding the upper stability threshold of the Antarctic ice sheet – in most views being approximately 500 ppm CO2, according to some others it is higher possibly 1000 ppm.
The rate of ice melt depends on both temperature level and the rate of temperature rise.
Current CO2 rise rates exceed 2 ppm/year, faster than recorded since 55 Ma. Projected FF energy use to 2040 suggest rising to 3 ppm/year within a decade on BAU economic growth and practices.
#79 Rob Ellison,
“No lottery win required.”
Perfect, thank you. Now, let’s see if we can use that reference to understand my question:
“Maidens et al. (2013) noted that the anomalous conditions were predicted by long-range forecasts several months in advance. Using an ensemble of hindcasts, Maidens et al. (2013) concluded that the factor that led to the predictability of this winter was the anomalous upper-ocean heat content and SST. This suggests that the monitoring AMOC at 26◦N can provide valuable information for seasonal prediction.”
So when do you guys replace the Farmer’s Almanac? You have all the tools you need, and I could leave the money to my cat if I had one, right?
I’m trying to get at the difference between what serves a sophisticated but somewhat parochial academic community and the kind of effort that gets covered in the news and mentioned by the weather-readers. It isn’t, as some suggest, about creating propaganda or video games, but rather making the (real) work both relevant and accessible to the public. Somehow the LHC and space probes, which *aren’t* all that relevant if you think about it, get press. It might just be a fail on my part, but I follow this subject, and I missed the morning-news pictures of those buoys being placed, whenever it happened.
My ‘PR sense’, for what it’s worth, is that the public is forgiving of imperfection if it is engaged, and feels some ownership of the process. Everyone complains about the snowfall and hurricane predictions, but everyone listens.
The question again– at what point, on a non-geologic time scale, will this data source provide enough confidence to really ‘go public’ (rather than producing interesting but equivocal academic papers?) If that’s too long to be of any use, what can we do to speed it up?
How about some other areas of study? The point, contrary to Killian, is not to find worst-er case scenarios, but to change and normalize the perception of the discipline itself. You don’t have to do it with everything; you need some examples that people can relate to.
Kevin McKinney
That quote applies to the power sector only. Is the US, like the UK, ignoring the carbon emissions we export to China? (i.e. we get the Chinese to use the power to make goods we import from them?)
In the UK the carbon footprint assigned to consumption is going up but because many of our consumption emissions happen overseas our production emissions are going down. In December 2012 Professor Sir Bob Watson discussed the UK’s rising carbon footprint. At that time he was Chief Scientific Adviser to a government department (but not now!).
Are these US figures similarly misleading?
Hank Roberts 77
Most of the problems associated with OTEC stem from the massive movement of cold water to the surface to condense the working fluid. This is the only approach that has been tried so far and is along the lines of the Caldeira study. First this water contains CO2 under pressure that is released as it approaches the surface. Their are impingement and entrainment issues associated with marine life and the biofouling you point to. If you move the heat instead to the deep with a heat pipe, using the phase changes of the working fluid instead of the sensible heat of water, you avoid most of these issues. The hot and cold waters remain where they are thus no CO2 is released and in the cold water at 1000 meters biofouling of the condenser isn’t much of an issue. Fouling of the evaporator can be addressed with ozonation or chlorination, both of which are byproducts of the electrolysis process.
CAN WE QUANTIFY OUR PANIC LEVEL?
Some people panic more about climate change than others.
I would like to find a measure that can give us individual panic scores.
I recognise this is an unclear question. (Can it be made clearer?) but …
1. Assume we will have capitalist markets for this century.
2. Assume climate change mitigation is driven by a carbon price.
3. Assume it’s returned to individuals as in Hansen’s carbon fee with dividend.
What price would you choose?
Use your own personal circumstances and your own knowledge of economics, climate, international relations … and your own vision of how humanity should guide the future.
I would guess/choose at £1000 ($1460) per tonne of CO2e?
I think that suggests I panic quite a lot but have residual hope.
Anyone else willing to have a go?
For Miguelito: you point to a chart of predictors, not of measurement, and your claim doesn’t match the text. Rather than eyeballing charts, they did the arithmetic.
That’s why statistics:
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/advpub/2015/4/ehp.1409014.acco.pdf at p.16
Remember, when you go looking of patterns in pictures:
Chris Machens:
“Miguilito, the overall conclusion, from your link:”
The problem is that the conclusion isn’t remotely supported by the evidence they gathered. According to their Figures 3 and 4, radon levels are growing pretty quickly when there’s hardly any fracking. Then when fracking really picks up post-2008, levels of radon completely flatten off.
Unless the radon is being sent back in time, I don’t know how it’s possible to conclude there’s a link between the two.
Rob Ellison said:
That opinion is terribly misinformed. Just because scientists may have difficulty predicting what the climate excursions should be at any particular point in time doesn’t mean that the climate is intractably unpredictable.
For example, it is becoming more apparent that a climate behavior such as ENSO is showing definite signs of determinism. This is determinism based on forcing factors such as the more predictable QBO.
Google for the paper “Sloshing Model for ENSO” on ARXIV
Thank you Dr. Gavin. You had me worried there for a minute. I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to science but I try to maintain the integrity of my sources so I don’t end up sounding like a complete fool. As an aside to the other topics at hand, I would like to emphasize that I have been teaching for about 30 years now, mostly in public schools but I also have a college gig and have taught at other Universities but my area is music. I got into the Physics of things when I saw all the direct relationships between sound, light and astronomy. I am a “science consumer” I guess but I have tried to broach the topic of Climate with a few science teachers and they basically recoil and start in on Al Gore. It really is a bad situation for the students when they’re not equipped with basic knowledge because someone who is charged with the responsibility of teaching them either holds absurd beliefs or is in possession of bad information. Texas politicians are attacking textbook publishers and trying to rewrite curriculum. This has to stop. Now we’re faced with a life threatening challenge and nobody’s allowed to discuss it.
I would like to make a humble request of you and your colleagues here at RealClimate…. is there any way to make you more visible to the general public? I’ve seen your presentation on TED Talks and a few other media outlets but I think our science teachers need more encouragement (if that’s the right term) to speak out and cover their topics without fear. Fear leads to ignorance which tends to get passed on to the next generation.
I understand the work load involved in what you’re already doing and simply maintaining this blog is time consuming. I understand that, but these kids really need help. It’s their future on the line and they’re not being informed. With all the available technology and instant communication we now have I can easily see some sort of Skype workshop on Climate Change being broadcast to the various educational institutions around the country. Even if it’s just demonstrating what you already do and how you do it.
Reporting from the front lines…
Thanks
#79 Rob Ellison,
“No lottery win required.”
Perfect, thank you. Now, let’s see if we can use that reference to understand my question:
“Maidens et al. (2013) noted that the anomalous conditions were predicted by long-range forecasts several months in advance. Using an ensemble of hindcasts, Maidens et al. (2013) concluded that the factor that led to the predictability of this winter was the anomalous upper-ocean heat content and SST. This suggests that the monitoring AMOC at 26◦N can provide valuable information for seasonal prediction.”
So when do you guys replace the Farmer’s Almanac? You have all the tools you need, and I could leave the money to my cat if I had one, right?
zebra @ 96
A bit all over the place? A climate system abruptly shifting every 20 to 30 years is impossible to predict. Attempts to do so are profoundly uninteresting.
More relevant is understanding how these ocean and atmospheric patterns influence regional rainfall, snowfall and temperature. Here’s Figure 7 from the Smeed et al reference.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/smeed-fig-71.png
Even over such a short period of the 26 degree north array – it has some interesting implications for decadal variability.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/smeed-fig-71.png
At this stage the best that can be done in terms of predictability is probabilistic forecasting based on the state of the ocean.
e.g. – https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/usdrought_zps2629bb8c.jpg
In the context of an abruptly shifting climate and ecological systems – greenhouse gas emissions are potentially problematic. These emissions go well beyond electricity generation – which is some 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The solutions are diverse – needing new technology, land use changes, restoration of agricultural soils, conservation and restoration of ecosystems and multiple gas and aerosol strategies.
webby @ 96
‘Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic. The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change…
The richness of the El Nino behaviour, decade by decade and century by century, testifies to the fundamentally chaotic nature of the system that we are attempting to predict. It challenges the way in which we evaluate models and emphasizes the importance of continuing to focus on observing and understanding processes and phenomena in the climate system. It is also a classic demonstration of the need for ensemble prediction systems on all time scales in order to sample the range of possible outcomes that even the real world could produce. Nothing is certain.’ http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751
It is all deterministic as Julia Slingo and Tim Palmer attest. It is also clear that science says something other than what webby claims on the basis of harmonic equations for standing waves in constant depth elliptical bathtubs (the ‘sloshing’ (sic) effect) even as modulated by the QBO. [edit]
#91–Good question, phil. Don’t really know, but probably, given this:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=Ndw
However, the US reduction is still both practically significant and politically important.
Interestingly, the most recent Economist suggested that Chinese ‘peak steel’ may have already arrived, though that’s not a consensus position yet.