Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => The Environment => Topic started by: alancalverd on 20/04/2017 23:29:45
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I heard a radio program last night on how rising sea levels due to global warming had drowned significant areas of he Solomon Islands. Shock, horror, doom, loss of traditional and indigenous etcetera. No figures were given but there was a strong implication that the mean sea level had risen at least 60 cm in 50 years.
Now AFAIK all the oceans are connected, and water flows. So if the South Pacific has risen by two feet in a lifetime, so has the Mediterranean (much easier to measure as it is almost tideless). Has it? I think not.
There was just one tiny hint of a flaw in the strongly implied Global Warming is Killing Everything hypothesis. The reporter mentioned that the Solomons are volcanic islands. Yep, right on the Pacific ridge. Here today and gone (geologically speaking) tomorrow.
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Oh, yes.
Never put into the mix anything other than Global warming or the message will be lost. Rember we are all doomed!
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The patterns of sea level change involve many local factors:
- Apparently, Scotland is rising out of the sea, as it rebounds from its heavy load of ice in the last ice age. The land is rising faster than the sea level is rising. Unfortunately for southerners, the UK is tipping as a block, which means that sea level on the Thames is rising faster than the ocean is rising.
- I heard a recent interview with some archaeologists studying an island off the Canadian coast as a potential stopping point for humans entering North America via the Bering Straight. They were interested in this island because it was on the balance point between sea level rise from melting glaciers and the gravitational attraction of large masses of ice on land. So it had been surrounded by water without being flooded during and since the last ice age.
- Fortunately, satellites are now able to obtain global measurements, free from these local anomalies
- The current global estimate is 2-3 mm/year.
- The factor that will affect people in the most dramatic way is storm surges. With a tidal range of over 1m in many oceans, a couple of millimeters change in the average is not noticeable. However, during a storm, considerable water is driven inland, and a small change in height makes a big difference to the amount of damage.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
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Do you think that the storm surge amount will alter over the coming century?
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There is one thing to consider - and I regret that I cannot locate the reference this precise second - but the huge mass of ice aggregated over Antarctica, which is not floating and hence not displacing any water - exerts a considerable gravitational effect on surrounding seawater, meaning that there is a circumpolar water bulge; if the ice melts then that water redistributes, causing a greater rise in sea level than just the ice melting alone.
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We can't do a lot about the height of the Solomon Islands. (A fairly cheap GPS system would answer that actual question you pose but I presume that you don't really care about that, since you seem to be seeking to make some sort of rhetorical point)
But we can stop making things worse for them by not raising global temperatures and thereby melting the antarctic ice.
So, lets try and focus on that.
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The problem is there is no real reference datum. Satellite measurements show something, but even there an average will give you just that, an average. Not going to say all is rising, just that some parts are changing relative to others, which is really all they can show. All you can say for sure is that ice caps in some areas are retreating, some might be growing, and that the climate is changing, with a contribution from man made CO2, and also a much bigger change from the water vapour in the air.
Pretty much all the satellite data shows is that Everest is growing above the local sea level by a few centimetres a year, and that weathering of the rock is not as much, so it keeps on growing.
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The problem is there is no real reference datum.
Satellites let you use the centre of gravity of the Earth as a datum.
From our point of view, that's going nowhere.
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Centre yes, but that is also going to change as a result of motion of the rock in the core. The orbit of the satellites will change as a result, and thus the height data is not going to be an exact reproducible measurement. All the measurements will be relative, just choose a reference datum for it.
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Centre yes, but that is also going to change as a result of motion of the rock in the core. The orbit of the satellites will change as a result, and thus the height data is not going to be an exact reproducible measurement. All the measurements will be relative, just choose a reference datum for it.
You do know that the centre of gravity of the Earth can't move unless we get hit by something external, don't you?
The land can't go down everywhere simultaneously. So the average of "where all the rock is" stays in the same place.
The point is that you can measure the height of, for example, the Solomon Islands from that CoG and the water finds its own level wrt that same CoG.
We also know where the Satellites orbits are WRT each other so we can use their effective CoG as a reference. There's nothing out there to move them so they will provide a very stable reference framework too.
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If you look at the earth, its gravitational field is not symmetrical. It is actually asymmetrical. The asymmetry allows the ocean to rise in some places and sink on other places. Below is a representation of the earth as a function of surface gravity.
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goce-projektbuero.de%2Fmediadb%2F9345%2F9347%2FWebansicht%2520Normal.jpg&hash=7eb91963dbd22392026868f77c19efa7)
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If you look at the earth, its gravitational field is not symmetrical. It is actually asymmetrical. The asymmetry allows the ocean to rise in some places and sink on other places. Below is a representation of the earth as a function of surface gravity.
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goce-projektbuero.de%2Fmediadb%2F9345%2F9347%2FWebansicht%2520Normal.jpg&hash=7eb91963dbd22392026868f77c19efa7)
So?
It's very pretty, but it shows that the field is almost constant (within about 50ppm).
The GPS satellites are high enough to see the average of all that (Don't forget that they are attracted by the gravity from stuff on the "far side" of the earth too.)
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But surely the asymmetry won't have changed much in 50 years? If it has, then Some of Us Are Doomed.
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I heard a radio program last night on how rising sea levels due to global warming had drowned significant areas of he Solomon Islands. Shock, horror, doom, loss of traditional and indigenous etcetera. No figures were given but there was a strong implication that the mean sea level had risen at least 60 cm in 50 years.
Now AFAIK all the oceans are connected, and water flows. So if the South Pacific has risen by two feet in a lifetime, so has the Mediterranean (much easier to measure as it is almost tideless). Has it? I think not.
There was just one tiny hint of a flaw in the strongly implied Global Warming is Killing Everything hypothesis. The reporter mentioned that the Solomons are volcanic islands. Yep, right on the Pacific ridge. Here today and gone (geologically speaking) tomorrow.
Yeah. I'm not surprised that a global warming denier is coming here with some supposedly vaguely remembered program (not named, no citation whatsoever) that supposedly delivers a straw man argument against global warming.
This, and the repeated anti-Catholic bigotry, really reflect well on the moderation here and on the naked scientists in general.
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We can't do a lot about the height of the Solomon Islands. (A fairly cheap GPS system would answer that actual question you pose but I presume that you don't really care about that, since you seem to be seeking to make some sort of rhetorical point)
But we can stop making things worse for them by not raising global temperatures and thereby melting the antarctic ice.
So, lets try and focus on that.
Plenty could indeed be done about the Solomon Islands if anyone thought the matter sufficiently important, and the problem was indeed due to climate change - vast areas of Holland were directly claimed from the sea and a substantial part of East Anglia would be under water if our ancestors hadn't built dams and pumps.
I care about honest reporting, and the effect of simplistic or dishonest reporting on human motivation. Since climate change is inevitable, wrongly blaming any inconvenience on climate change is demoralising, demotivating, and playing into the hands of politicians and pseudoscientists who make their living from telling you it's all your fault.
Humanity can probably cope with a few millimeters of sea level rise per year until the next ice age, but I don't see any practical means of preventing volcanic islands from disappearing almost as fast as they appear.
One might have hoped for better from Radio 4 ("Costing the Earth" BBC R4, 2100BST, 19/4/17).
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Plenty could indeed be done about the Solomon Islands
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but I don't see any practical means of preventing volcanic islands from disappearing almost as fast as they appear.
Feel free to make up your mind.
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the height data is not going to be an exact reproducible measurement
All scientific experiments have some experimental error - the challenge is to design your experiment so that the experimental error is much less than the thing you are trying to measure - in this case, a change in sea surface level of a couple of millimeters per year, superimposed on a daily (or twice-daily) tidal swing of a meter or more, and variation of a meter or more every few seconds from waves.
In the case of the GPS satellites, there is continual measurement, calibration and correction, with several carefully-surveyed monitoring sites around the world.
But sea-level is best monitored by radar reflections from the sea surface., eg See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Surface_Topography_Mission
It seems that President Trump has his own plan to prevent sea-level rise: remove funding from any project that is attempting to measure it.
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There is one thing to consider - and I regret that I cannot locate the reference this precise second - but the huge mass of ice aggregated over Antarctica, which is not floating and hence not displacing any water - exerts a considerable gravitational effect on surrounding seawater, meaning that there is a circumpolar water bulge; if the ice melts then that water redistributes, causing a greater rise in sea level than just the ice melting alone.
Do you think that this is at all possible within the next 5,000 years given the very low temperatures of Antarctica?
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We can't do a lot about the height of the Solomon Islands. (A fairly cheap GPS system would answer that actual question you pose but I presume that you don't really care about that, since you seem to be seeking to make some sort of rhetorical point)
But we can stop making things worse for them by not raising global temperatures and thereby melting the antarctic ice.
So, lets try and focus on that.
Again, do you really think that Antarctic ice is at all in danger of melting?
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https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum
The editor's note should be read first. This article indicates the variety of changes that can be expected in a chaotic system. The fact that it is chaotic means unexpected things will happen. It is not easy to plan for the unexpected. Since it could be a positive or negative change from our viewpoint.
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Global warming is in affect that is being measured. However, just because we can measure a temperature increase, does not mean it is manmade. These global warming and manmade are two different things, that may or may not be related. It is like saying, the sun will rise tomorrow, due to manmade affects. If you deny the sun will rise tomorrow you are a denier. These are two unrelated things, being combined into a type of political magic trick. If you repeat things long enough you program the naive to see the magic.
If you look a long term global temperature data; over 500 millions years, the earth has heated and cooled many times before, even before there were humans. There is hard proof that global warming can happen naturally. The idea of manmade global warming is all based on theory. It lacks the same level of hard data as the natural cycles.
If we assume manmade is occurring, for the sake of argument, this would be the first time ever in the history of the earth. Nobody is saying that man made has happened before. There is no precedent; second data point in time, to draw a proper line; The result is none of the models are able to predict, accurately. That is the problem with one data point. The manmade assumptions, connected to this cycle, don't properly add to reality.
The analogy is like putting the first person on the moon. Everyone who is behind this goal is full of public confidence and expectations, but nobody really knows what to expect. This is part of the bull crap stage of solicitation. The current over confidence, is driven by fear, and not tangible proof of concept that comes with accurate predictions.
Global warming is a fat cow for science jobs. These jobs are a big part of the sales dynamics; union mentality. Trump, by cutting back, is going to put the theory to the test. If this is really manmade, and everyone is so convinced, you don't need a lot of funding, just apply the proof you have. It is really about the toys. The change will be, that it will not be about majority rule, when the majority is on the payroll. There is conflict of interest in the present schema.
Say we are in a cycle of global warming, but it is natural and not manmade. If it was natural, all the observations can also be extrapolated to same the doom and gloom, like rising oceans. What would be the impact of handicapping industry and culture, with a manmade assumption, when this approach will not so any good against a natural mechanism? If anything, this approach toward world socialism, could make it much harder to deal with changes that may occur, since industry is much better at practical adaptation than bloated government.
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Firstly, and most importantly, you need your data to be accurate.
https://m.phys.org/news/2016-03-revamped-satellite-global.html
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The idea of manmade global warming is all based on theory. It lacks the same level of hard data as the natural cycles.
I would say that:
- The day/night cycle is well established, and well considered in scientific models and by the public
- The 12-month cycle is also well established.
- However, the effect of many natural cycles are not so obvious:
- The El Nino Southern Oscillation is quite erratic, and yet has a measurable impact on climate in countries bordering the Pacific Ocean, from South America to India
- The 11/22 year solar cycle is somewhat erratic. It is easy to measure, but its impact on the climate is debateable
- The Milankovitch cycles are driven by the physics of the orbiting planets and the Moon. So the cycle is quite predictable, but its affect on the climate is not so obvious, as glaciations don't seem to be directly tied to these cycles.
- Over all of this, the weather is an erratic factor which is so chaotic that it could not really be called a cycle.
So many of the natural cycles are not based on hard data, but are obscured by the interaction of different cycles, the positive feedback effects that occurs with the gain or loss of snow cover, and the time lags inherent in the ocean as a big heat sink.
I think that "Natural Cycles" is a vague excuse that some politicians have used to ignore the issue, without pointing our which cycles and providing the climate modelling to show that these cycles are indeed the cause.
If we assume manmade is occurring, for the sake of argument, this would be the first time ever in the history of the earth. Nobody is saying that man made has happened before.
When the human population was under a 100,000 worldwide, it could not have had a major impact on the climate.
- But it was enough to cause the extinction of megafauna in every continent man has visited, even in small populations.
- And starting with the introduction of agriculture, humans have impacted the world climate in an exponentially growing rate.
- Today, with human population over 7 billion, humans have a far larger footprint on the world than ever before
- And the signs of that footprint are unmistakable in the form of increased CO2 and other compounds in the atmosphere and sea
- unlike the vague appeal to "Natural Cycles"
Where the debate does involve politicians is to decide what to do about it, how much to spend on it, and how to compensate the many people who will inevitably be disadvantaged no matter what we do (even if we do nothing).
- The appeal to "Natural Cycles" is an excuse for not thinking about it - just gloss over it for 1 or 2 terms in office, and leave it for someone else to deal with.
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Global warming is a fat cow for science jobs.
That (or similar) is an argument you often hear. Interestingly you never hear that ignoring the possibility and its applications of man made climate change is a "fat cow" for economy. Somehow this side of the coin seems so much less convincing for deniers.
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Global warming is a fat cow for science jobs.
That (or similar) is an argument you often hear. Interestingly you never hear that ignoring the possibility and its applications of man made climate change is a "fat cow" for economy. Somehow this side of the coin seems so much less convincing for deniers.
Well, yes ignoring the none existant actually backed up by anything like science and a real threat of the big bad doom will allow us to florish whist the back to the stone age Maoism of the greens will kill even more than it is doing so far.
My guess is 20 million per year from the artificailly boosted price of basic foods due to the bio-fuel industry using vast quantities of food for fuel to nobodies gain other than already rich farmers plus a hundred or two thousand of deaths from diesel fumes that are down to the obsession with removing CO2, a harmless plant food. At present. More to come.
So on balance, the economoic damage from all this green crap is potentially vast. Currently slight, only a couple of tens of millions per year dying and a big drag on the economic deveopment of the world's poor.
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Global warming is a fat cow for science jobs.
That (or similar) is an argument you often hear. Interestingly you never hear that ignoring the possibility and its applications of man made climate change is a "fat cow" for economy. Somehow this side of the coin seems so much less convincing for deniers.
Can't speak for deniers, but there's more money to be made per unit electricity produced (or indeed not produced) from windmills than coal, so the smart money is in windmills, even if the smart engineering isn't. Biofuels likewise. Everyone likes a government subsidy, however much harm it does to the environment. Or even to the government - witness the recent stupidity in Northern Ireland where the criminals in Stormont subsidised wood pellet furnaces to the point that folk were just burning the pellets to make money!
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Global warming is a fat cow for science jobs.
To exactly the extent that conservationist groups are able to pay better than the oil industry.
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Global warming is a fat cow for science jobs.
To exactly the extent that conservationist groups are able to pay better than the oil industry.
But you have to actually be useful to get a job in the oil industry whilst anybody who can sound good has a chance in the ecco-industry.
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Global warming is a fat cow for science jobs.
To exactly the extent that conservationist groups are able to pay better than the oil industry.
But you have to actually be useful to get a job in the oil industry whilst anybody who can sound good has a chance in the ecco-industry.
No, that is actually the opposite of true in this context. Look up Fred SInger.
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Global warming is a fat cow for science jobs.
To exactly the extent that conservationist groups are able to pay better than the oil industry.
But you have to actually be useful to get a job in the oil industry whilst anybody who can sound good has a chance in the ecco-industry.
There's no such thing as the "eco industry" but there is a world of academic research.
Your assertion is loosely equivalent to claiming that it's the ones who aren't any good at the subject who go on to get PhDs and professorships.
Are you really sure about that?
It's not what happened when I was a student.
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Global warming is a fat cow for science jobs.
To exactly the extent that conservationist groups are able to pay better than the oil industry.
But you have to actually be useful to get a job in the oil industry whilst anybody who can sound good has a chance in the ecco-industry.
There's no such thing as the "eco industry" but there is a world of academic research.
Your assertion is loosely equivalent to claiming that it's the ones who aren't any good at the subject who go on to get PhDs and professorships.
Are you really sure about that?
It's not what happened when I was a student.
You did chemistry.
To do that you passed your A levels.
You were not particularly into physics and did not get an A in it. So you could not have done metorology if you had even wanted to.
But you could have got a D in maths and easily been accepted into Norwich Polly for their climate science course. That's the Climate Research Unit now of course.
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You did chemistry.
To do that you passed your A levels.
You were not particularly into physics and did not get an A in it. So you could not have done metorology if you had even wanted to.
But you could have got a D in maths and easily been accepted into Norwich Polly for their climate science course. That's the Climate Research Unit now of course.
I did do chemistry
Well done!
I did physics, not only did I get an A in the A level I got a grade 2 in the S level. In fact, at A level I did better at physics than Chemistry. So, you got that wrong
I'm fairly sure that meteorology wasn't available as a first degree subject when I went to uni - in which case it's true that I couldn't have studied it if I'd wanted to- but the statement is meaningless.
It's like saying I couldn't have studied Vulcan literature.
I did get a D in maths- so you are wrong in thinking it's a matter of I "could have".
However I still got into Oxford to study Chemistry.
I imagine that I could have studied climate at Norwich.
So what?
OK
So, you were largely wrong about the facts.
But that's not the problem. The problem is that you are (badly) measuring the qualifications of people at the wrong end of their university career.
Government backed research is not done by undergraduates who have just done their A levels.
It's done by post grads and PhDs who- you may be surprised to know, actually have degrees and further qualifications in the fields they are researching.
Why would their A levels matter?
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You did chemistry.
To do that you passed your A levels.
You were not particularly into physics and did not get an A in it. So you could not have done metorology if you had even wanted to.
But you could have got a D in maths and easily been accepted into Norwich Polly for their climate science course. That's the Climate Research Unit now of course.
I did do chemistry
Well done!
I did physics, not only did I get an A in the A level I got a grade 2 in the S level. In fact, at A level I did better at physics than Chemistry. So, you got that wrong
I'm fairly sure that meteorology wasn't available as a first degree subject when I went to uni - in which case it's true that I couldn't have studied it if I'd wanted to- but the statement is meaningless.
It's like saying I couldn't have studied Vulcan literature.
I did get a D in maths- so you are wrong in thinking it's a matter of I "could have".
However I still got into Oxford to study Chemistry.
I imagine that I could have studied climate at Norwich.
So what?
OK
So, you were largely wrong about the facts.
But that's not the problem. The problem is that you are (badly) measuring the qualifications of people at the wrong end of their university career.
Government backed research is not done by undergraduates who have just done their A levels.
It's done by post grads and PhDs who- you may be surprised to know, actually have degrees and further qualifications in the fields they are researching.
Why would their A levels matter?
I was pointing out that the climate research unit at Norwich polly was not one of the most prestigious places to do your accademic carrer and thus presumably did not attract the best minds in the world.
Given that you went to one of the best universties I expect you are ne of the cleverest. Why then do you accept without challeng the results of those who did a degree through the notoriously not very rigorous at all geography department of Norwich polly? I am happy to accept that they can have got it right and be the best in the world without going to Oxbridge but the lack of scrutiny that their results gets from you is very odd.
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I was pointing out that the climate research unit at Norwich polly was not one of the most prestigious places to do your accademic carrer and thus presumably did not attract the best minds in the world.
Given that you went to one of the best universties I expect you are ne of the cleverest. Why then do you accept without challeng the results of those who did a degree through the notoriously not very rigorous at all geography department of Norwich polly? I am happy to accept that they can have got it right and be the best in the world without going to Oxbridge but the lack of scrutiny that their results gets from you is very odd.
Do you really think that all the world's climate researchers, and all their data come from a rather small University in Norwich?
I'm actually quite good at scrutinising things.
That's why I am able to point out that you keep posting nonsense.
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I'm fairly sure that meteorology wasn't available as a first degree subject when I went to uni
Not that it is relevant, but I think Reading offered meteorology at least as a final year subject back in the 1950s.
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I'm fairly sure that meteorology wasn't available as a first degree subject when I went to uni - in which case it's true that I couldn't have studied it if I'd wanted to- but the statement is meaningless.
It's like saying I couldn't have studied Vulcan literature.
Meteorology was studied and taught as part of Chemistry, Natural Philosophy and Natural History at Edinburgh University throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth century. A separate Department of Meteorology was created in 1964.
You have to wonder why climate science did not come out of the Meteorology departments but out of the geography departments.
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Because meteorology is about weather, climatology is about politics.
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Because meteorology is about weather, climatology is about politics.
I'm sure we are all looking forward to you providing some evidence to go with that assertion.
Then you can see if you can show some pathway by which it's relevant.
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Just look at our discussions! Every instance I have quoted to suggest that climate change is (a) inevitable and (b) not significantly driven by anthropogenic CO2, you have dismissed as "weather"! ;)
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Just look at our discussions! Every instance I have quoted to suggest that climate change is (a) inevitable and (b) not significantly driven by anthropogenic CO2, you have dismissed as "weather"! ;)
Really?