I’m a citizen disappointed by the shallowness of our media and lack of honest examination of today’s deeper challenges. Such as coming to grips with what society has done to our Earth’s biosphere (life support system). I realize no one likes bad news, but faith-based denial isn’t going to do our children any good either.
~ ~ ~ Thus I’ve taken to writing what I'd like to see more of and to sharing selected writings of others.
~ ~ ~ feel free to copy and pass along any of the following.
Sometimes it may seem as though the global warming dialogue is my only interest. But, that impression would be wrong. To mix it up a little - here is an article I wrote for the May issue of the Four Corners Free Press out of Cortez, Colorado. Although, come to think of it, the specter of global warming does hang over this phenomena... there's just no getting away from it. In any event, this article is the culmination of a day listening in on the "San Juan Bark Beetles and Watersheds Workshop" {which was organized by the Western Water Assessment and Mountain Studies Institute} plus discussions with some participants.
In particular, I thank Mike Blakeman from the Rio Grande National Forest. Although Mike was a spectator, he has a scientific background and has a long standing familiarity with the developing scientific understanding. He spent a good deal of time clarifying and offering further details, not all of which made it into this essay.
Of course, any errors are mine alone and I will gladly fix any that are pointed out to me. At the end of this essay I include links to authoritative information sources.
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Have you ever driven over Wolf Creek Pass, the one in southern Colorado straddling the Great Divide? At 10,857 ft. elevation, it's an example of America at its most magnificent; with high mountains and spruce forests stretching out in every direction.
Here's another series of videos. These were produced by netNebraska.org and are an introduction to the ANDRILL project in Antarctica. These folks set up fifty tons worth of drill rig, pipe, field station and people on a floating Ice Sheet 20 to 26 feet thick, then go through 900 feet of ocean, before hitting bedrock and starting to drill rock cores. It is an amazing technical and scientific achievement.
The videos include some beautiful footage of Antarctica; a few excellent cross-section schematics of Glaciers and Ice Sheets; also, various aspects of the research teams preparations and work. If you've never heard of the ANDRILL project you may be as amazed by the technical achievement as by the scientific opportunity. These videos also convey the current understanding and research goals for the ANDRILL project.
Antarctica's Climate Secrets:
Antarctica's Ice on the Move - Antarctica's Climate Secret
Reading Antarctica's Rock Cores
Tiny Clues to Antarctica's Past
Decoding Antarctica's Climate History
Antarctica Today
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Antarctica's Ice on the Move - Antarctica's Climate Secret
The following is another lecture that is worth sharing. Professor Mitrovica has a fascinating lesson about what has been learned regarding our global sea levels over these past few decades. I include notes for reference and I've also added a few links to sources that Prof. Mitrovica shared, and to others that I felt were appropriate supporting and background information.
Ancient Eclipses, Roman Fish Tanks and the Enigma of Global Sea Level Rise
Professor Jerry X. Mitrovica, Ph.D. Uploaded on Aug 17, 2010 | DistinctiveVoicesBS
What do ancient eclipse records kept by Babylonian, Chinese, Arabic and Greek
scholars, and fish tanks, built by wealthy Romans during100BC-100AD, contribute to our understanding of modern climate change? Dr. Jerry X. Mitrovica will describe the important role these archaeological treasures have played in the understanding of sea-level rise and how they help scientists both "fingerprint" sources of recent sea level changes and make more accurate projections of future sea levels.
Jerry X. Mitrovica, Ph.D., is a Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and the Director of the Earth Systems Evolution Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. A 2007 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, he is also the recipient of the Rutherford Memorial Medal from the Royal Society of Canada and the Augustus Love Medal from the European Geosciences Union.
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In Search of Lost Time:
Ancient Eclipses, Roman Fish Tanks and the Enigma of Global Sea Level Rise -
10:10 - Globally averaged tide gauge data graph - conclusion sea level is rising, trend is about 2/2.5 mm per year. During twentieth century sea level has risen on average an inch a decade.
11:00 - Here's where the skeptics come in.
20th Century Sea Level Rise: The Skeptics
* 2mm/yr is not anomalous - sea level has been rising at this rate for a thousand years.
* Sea level change varies dramatically from place to place - melting ice sheets cannot be the culprit.
* Regardless 2mm/yr is small and stable ... it won't change.
13:00 - Examining the claim: "2mm/yr is not anomalous - sea level has been rising at this rate for a thousand years."
And these things are endemic throughout the equatorial regions.
But 2mm/yr rise would put those corals 10 meters under sea level today.
A very strong indicator sea level hasn't been rising past many thousands of years.
15:00 - We even know why those corals have dropped by a couple meters in the past 5± thousand years. Isostatic rebound from last ice age (5± thousand years ago)
15:50 - Archeological evidence.
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"Sea level in Roman time in the Central Mediterranean and implications for recent change"
Many Roman fish tanks along the west coast of Italy built during 2nd and 1st century BC. These are built at a precise level in relation to the high tide... sluice gate at 20cm below high tide.
20:45 - Lambeck measured around 15 tanks all along the west coast of Italy...
... on average these tanks are now a meter under sea level.
21:15 - Segues into glacial melt and isostatic rebound considerations.
21:50 - Taking these considerations into account...
22:00 - What it tells us is that from what we know, that is the ice age (glacial weight) effect - these fish tanks are pretty much at current sea level.
Lambeck et al. concluded that in the past 2,000 years sea level hasn't been doing much at all.
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Abstract
Instrumental records indicate that ocean volumes during the 20th century have increased so as to raise eustatic sea level by f 1 – 2 mm/year and the few available records suggest that this is higher than for the previous century. Geological data indicate that ocean volumes have increased since the main phase of deglaciation about 7000 years ago but whether this continued into the recent past remains unclear.
Yet, this is important for establishing whether the recent rise is associated with global warming or is part of a longer duration non-anthropogenic signal. Here, we present results for sea-level change in the central Mediterranean basin for the Roman Period using new archaeological evidence. These data provide a precise measure of local sea level of 1.35 F 0.07 m at 2000 years ago. Part of this change is the result of ongoing glacio-hydro isostatic adjustment of the crust subsequent to the last deglaciation.
When corrected for this, using geologically constrained model predictions, the change in eustatic sea level since the Roman Period is 0.13 F 0.09 m. A comparison with tide-gauge records from nearby locations and with geologically constrained model predictions of the glacio-isostatic contributions establishes that the onset of modern sea-level rise occurred in recent time at f 100 F 53 years before present.
The skeptical claim that sea level rise has been rising for past thousands of years at present rate - would mean that these fish tank from two thousand years ago would be found at 3 to 4 meters under sea level, but they are actually about 1 meter under sea level.
What does it mean?
That the sea level rise of the past century is anomalous !
Philosophical Transactions: Physical Sciences and Engineering, F.R. Stephenson and L.V. Morrison | Volume 351, Issue 1695, pp. 165-202
"Records of solar and lunar eclipses in the period 700 BC to AD 1600, originating from the ancient and medieval civilizations of Babylon, China, Europe and the Arab world, are amassed and critically appraised for their usefulness in answering questions about the long-term variability of the Earth's rate of rotation. Results from previous analyses of lunar occultations in the period AD 1600-1955.5, and from high-precision data in AD 1955.5-1990, are included in the dataset considered in this paper. Using the ..."{Here it get's complicated}
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23:10 - A quick historic overview of ancient astronomers and their focus on tracking eclipse records, in order to be able to predict future eclipses.
25:20 - Stephenson and Morrison results in graph form...
... explanation of what they were doing... comparing the calculated times for past eclipses (using today's rotation rate) with selected ancient - but precise - observational records from around the world.
25:55 - The mis-fit . . . Earth's rotation is slowing.
26:30 - In two thousand years Earth's rotation slowed by four hours
26:50 - Further details...
27:35 - What do tides matter?
28:35 - How do we know dissipation is occurring?
29:00 - Considering the role of the Conservation of Momentum.
26:00 - The moon... recession rate... mirrors on the moon
31:10 - ... further thoughts including respect and awe for the skill of ancient astronomers and the accuracy of their observations... science in action...
31:30 - Considering potential observational pitfalls and mistakes.
32:00 - Tidal Regression... BUT, there's a problem...
32:30 - Walter Monk's contribution... first, another physics lesson
geophysical thought experiment: arctic, antarctic ice masses, those masses leave the land and enter the ocean... gravity shifts {a UCTV lecture regarding sea level by Dr. Monk}
33:00 - conservation of momentum...
33:30 - (some lost audio here) If taken for a given that sea level has been rising at current rate for past centuries - than OK lets do a calculation.
33:50 - Bottom-line: There is no way that what we have witnessed this past century has been going on for the past two thousand years.
* Five millennia old corals say no;
* Two millennia old Roman fish tanks say no;
* Even eclipses recorded by ancient astronomers (Babylonians, Chinese, Greeks) say no.
34:00 - Then, the next "skeptical" argument comes along:
"Sea level change varies dramatically from place to place -
37:10 - The implicit assumption has been that sea level rises like when you fill a bathtub...
37:30 - "Now I been working in sea level for two decades now, or two inches of sea level rise. And what I am going to show you now is the most counter-intuitive result I've ever come across... but it is incontrovertibly true."
38:15 - When a glacier melts it does not raise the sea level uniformly... ... ice sheet, just like earth exerts a gravitation pull on water.
39:50 - "... turns out that if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to collapse, the sea level around the peninsula would drop 100 feet.
40:00 - What does it mean to have a "gravitational hinge point" of 2,000 kilometers from the ice sheet?
40:20 - Global Sea Level Fingerprints - illustrating different scenarios.
46:20 - Here's what the satellites are telling us... current rise is 3.5mm/yr.
46:40 - So when people say "it's only 2.2mm/yr, NOPE ! That's already gone... ... the change translates to current rate of SL rise that's one and a half times larger than it was during the twentieth century average.
47:30 - What the IPCC projected compared to what's happening
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Contrary to Contrarian Claims, IPCC Temperature Projections Have Been Exceptionally Accurate
“The typical estimate of the sea-level change is five metres, a value arrived at by taking the total volume of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, converting it to water and spreading it evenly across the oceans, says Mitrovica. “However, this estimate is far too simplified because it ignores three significant effects:
when an ice sheet melts, its gravitational pull on the ocean is reduced and water moves away from it. The net effect is that the sea level actually falls within 2,000 km of a melting ice sheet, and rises progressively further away from it. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses, sea level will fall close to the Antarctic and will rise much more than the expected estimate in the northern hemisphere because of this gravitational effect;
the depression in the Antarctic bedrock that currently sits under the weight of the ice sheet will become filled with water if the ice sheet collapses. However, the size of this hole will shrink as the region rebounds after the ice disappears, pushing some of the water out into the ocean, and this effect will further contribute to the sea-level rise;
the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will actually cause the Earth’s rotation axis to shift rather dramatically – approximately 500 metres from its present position if the entire ice sheet melts. This shift will move water from the southern Atlantic and Pacific oceans northward toward North America and into the southern Indian Ocean.
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59:50 - So that's it: * 2mm/yr sea level rise IS anomalous. * Dramatic geographic sea level differences ARE understood - glacial gravity impact. * Sea level is NOW rising one and half times faster than 20th century average.
The following is a lecture given by Kevin Trenberth explaining the ocean climate connection. Following the video I've made notes that are, for the most part, based on the well organized slides that accompanied his talk. I have also taken the liberty of inserting many links that seemed to me appropriate for those who were curious for further details.
Here is another interesting lesson for those who have a sincere interest in understanding what we are doing to our global heat distribution engine, aka climate.
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Kevin Trenberth: The Role of the Oceans in Climate
Kevin Trenberth: Senior Scientist and Head of the Climate Analysis Section
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado.
This lecture is part of SFU's 2011 global warming seminar series "Global Warming: A Science Perspective".
Regardless of one's perspective the effects of global warming are a quantifiable set of environmental results. That is why the SFU Dean of Science Office invited some of the world's leading scientists to present results of their research in this six-part series of talks.
The series is designed to speak to a general audience of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from across the Faculty of Science and the University and interested members of the public.
For more information, visit http://at.sfu.ca/YKVBxv
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Kevin Trenberth: The Role of the Oceans in Climate - lecture notes
This lecture is a review of past predictions made by climatologists and how they have faired in light of the passing decades. Including some basic notes, mainly for orientation.
Andy Robinson has been creating some excellent visualizations of Arctic ice loss data and I figured it's about time I feature some of his best work over here:
This letter of clarification from Dr. James Hansen seems to me a public document; one that will probably be widely misrepresented in short order, by folks who go to any length to distract from our real challenges. While there is no denying that some respectable experts have their disagreements with Dr. Hansen's assessment. That dialogue is continuing with scientific study, papers, peer review and much discussion among the community of experts. It should be seen as the science being alive and well. The serious debate continues healthy as ever, among the serious experts - and every year brings a bit more clarity. Through all this we the people need to understand, that scientific debate revolves around nuances that are dwarfed by all climatologists do understand... supported by all that's been observed these past decades. Below I have copied and reposted the complete text from James Hansen's April 15, 2013 statement.
{ http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdf } Making Things Clearer: Exaggeration, Jumping the Gun,
and The Venus Syndrome
