An argument regularly advanced by alarmists is – can we afford to take the chance? This argument is often associated with a claim that a rise in global temperature greater than 2°C would be catastrophic – a theory backed by authoritative sounding computer simulations which suggest dangerous ocean acidification, deadly heat, and extreme weather.
It is all very well to simulate these scary possibilities, but at the end of the day a computer simulation is just an educated guess – it is no substitute for observation.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to actually observe what a warmer world would actually be like? What if it were possible to create a parallel Earth, dial up the CO2 level, and actually see what really happens? Would anyone bother running a computer simulation, if we could observe the reality?
We can’t create a new planet, but there is a way we can observe the effects of elevated levels of CO2, and higher global temperatures, without relying on computer simulations – because these are the conditions which prevailed during the Cretaceous Period, the age of the dinosaurs.
According to Wikipedia,
“The Cretaceous was a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high eustatic sea levels and creating numerous shallow inland seas. These oceans and seas were populated with now-extinct marine reptiles, ammonites and rudists, while dinosaurs continued to dominate on land. At the same time, new groups of mammals and birds, as well as flowering plants, appeared. The Cretaceous ended with a large mass extinction, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, in which many groups, including non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs and large marine reptiles, died out. The end of the Cretaceous is defined by the K–Pg boundary, a geologic signature associated with the mass extinction which lies between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras.”
According to Wikipedia, the mean global temperature during the Cretaceous was 18c, 4c higher than today’s global temperature. The CO2 level in the Cretaceous was around 1700ppm, over 4x higher than today’s 400ppm.
Was the Cretaceous too warm for Earth’s diverse species? Absolutely not – the Cretaceous hosted a bounty of life and biodiversity, the emergence of the first flowering plants, the first appearance of our mammal ancestors. The Dinosaurs dominated the warm Cretaceous for 80 million years, a long period during which life flourished.
The event which finally brought this golden age of bounty and biodiversity to an end was the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. This event had nothing to do with prevailing CO2 levels, the extinction event was a gigantic meteor impact, the site of which is believed to be a location in the Gulf of Mexico, an impact which produced a crater over 100 miles across, and blotted out the sun, spreading a thin layer of Iridium dust across the entire World.
What can we learn from the the Cretaceous? In my opinion, the lesson from the Cretaceous is – we have nothing to fear from CO2. And if our civilisation has any money to spare on preparations for possible disasters, we should be spending that money on building meteor defences, not on trying to curb harmless CO2 emissions.
“dial up the CO2 level, and actually see what really happens? ”
this “experiment” has already been observed in real life over the last 18 years..
There s too much confounding of inputs for valid conclusions
Every large scale commercial greenhouse operator knows the answer to that (up to 1000ppm even). The result? excellent growth, and not a bad place to work in…
Earth’s biosphere LOVES warmer climates- warmer than right now- and higher CO2 levels.
Nothing to fear.
BUT DON’T FORGET:
Higher CO2 levels will lead to malnutrition:
This explains quite obviously why T-Rex and his friends were such tiny weaklings and couldn’t survive that little asteroid crash in Mexico… 🙂
I would imagine the size of these dinosaurs illustrated how bountiful the planet was.
Quite – an elephant, which normally weighs around 5 tons (African Bush Elephant), needs around a ton of food per week. Compare that to giant herbivorous dinosaurs, such as Argentinosaurus – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentinosaurus – at around 80 – 100 tons, and you can see how ridiculously fast plant life in the Cretaceous must have been replenishing itself, to sustain such a monster.
Speaking of elephants.. the one in the room here is the *rate of temperature change*. We can all agree that the life abounded in the high temperatures of the Cretaceous but the issue is what happens if the climate reaches those temperatures within the next couple of centuries. Can life adapt that quickly? The geological record would suggest many species may not (consider e.g the mass extinction event triggered by the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum).
Or possibly there were just fewer of them. Thats the problem with predicting the future with intuition and political bias alone.
Joel Pedro, the temperature went from 13C to 24C in just the last few hours. And I’m still alive!!!! And you say we have centuries to prepare for a 2C change? If you think that’s a problem, what on earth are you smoking?
JoNovace, there probably weren’t many 100 ton dinosaurs, compared to say rats, but each of them needed abundant plant life in the area it could move around in while constantly munching, so it must have been pretty lush.
See 4C temperature increase in 60 years. You could say there WERE unprecedented changes before 1800.
“But its no help to e.g. the Great Barrier Reef or tropical rain forest ecosystems”
no the Coral is damage from land pollution ( see coral at Bikini atoll where there is no land pollution) Tropical rain forest is being cut down, though secondary growth is quick to grow back.
Joel – what makes you think there will be any temperature change? There has been none for the last 18 years and there is no sign that this will change anytime soon. The only people who believe in temperature increase are those pseudo-scientists playing with climate models they don’t understand. They never did since Hansen introduced models in 1988. He used an IBM mainframe but today they have multi-million dollar supercomputers running codes of one million lines for each prediction. Hansen’s temperature predictions were way off the mark– much higher than actual temperature turned out to be. They have had 26 years to get their hhouse in order but it hasn’t helped. It is hard to believe this is by pure chance alone. Particularly worthless are those predictions peddled by CMIP5 that pretend the hiatus does not even exist and then show a bundle of threads, all waving up in the air during the last 18 years when we know there was no warming then. The modelling, if this is what it it is, is totally worthless and should be shut down.
True enough but remember oxygen levels were also higher, and some studies suggest today’s level is too low for animals like T Rex. We can’t increase O unless we have more vegetation …. Oh wait….
Surely we can pinch one O from the all that terrible CO2 in the atmosphere?
The rate of temperature change just before the current Holocene was on the order of tens of degrees, within only a decade or two:
Pretty big elephant, eh? And since we came out of it OK, I would say we adapted pretty well.
The temperature change Richard Alley is taking about there is on the Greenland ice sheet (where there is not a lot of biodiversity). Around the rest of the world the *total* warming between the Last Glacial Maximum ca. 22,0000 years ago to the onset of the Holocene 11,700 years ago was more like 2 to 3 degrees C (see e.g Schmittner et al., Science, 2011; DOI: 10.1126/science.1203513). So the projected global rates of change are one or two orders of magnitude slower than during the last glacial to interglacial transition.
The point that climate can change more abruptly in some regions than in others is an important one all the same. Its why people like Wally Broecker, who knows a lot about these things, says we shouldn’t go poking the climate beast with sticks.
Joel Pedo see above
Wildlife had adapted very quickly to living in cities where the temps can be up to 10-20 degrees higher than the surrounding countryside. All this in an alien world of bricks, mortar, concrete , glass and tarmac.
Congratulations on noticing its colder at night than during the day. Now go and learn the difference between diurnal temperature variation, weather and climate.
Shifts in the mean state of the climate are critical for biodiversity. E.g. Corals bleach with an increase in average summer temperature of >1–2C above the historical summer average (http://www.reef.edu.au/ohg/res-pic/hg%20papers/hoegh-guldberg%201999.pdf).
Thanks for the link. Thats comforting for quite a number of species who can get along in our cities. But its no help to e.g. the Great Barrier Reef or tropical rain forest ecosystems.
But why listen to biodiversity experts when we have people like Ron who can work it all out just by noticing the diurnal temperature difference.
The +2 C target is not +2 from today, but from the end of LIA. If one trusts the claim that the world has become ca. 0,8 C warmer since then, there is ca. 1,2 C left before the limit is reached.
The admission of the political background for the 2 degree target, by its inventor Schellnhuber, is always a good read:
The temperature target is irrelevant. The CO2 is how they “expect” to “control” it. There is no support in geological data for the notion. The article above is actually a very mild discussion that understates what is known regarding the period. Other analysis of geological data over the span of the Phanerozoic indicates that there is a plateau that global temperature exceeds only once. That plateau is roughly 20-deg C (ca. 68-deg F). This compares with a current estimated global average of about 15-deg C (59-deg F). That latter estimate may vary some among different sources. Plotted against CO2 levels over the same ca. 600,000,000-year span, there is either no correlation between temperature and CO2 or a very weak one that appears when temperature (or CO2) drops below a certain level. This happened only twice over the Phanerozoic, once in the Permian at the time of the Permian extinction event and again, at the present. The Permian and and The Pleistocene are the two COLDEST periods in the last 600-500 million years.
The warmists make it sound like we’re headed to the crusty-aceous period.
I’m also a fan of bivalves.
The Cretinaceous Period, methinks
…and we got to live in it! Hopefully through it.
Well, Bob, The Cretaceous is named after……Chalk. Coccolith Ooze. White Cliffs of Dover. And not surprisingly, a huge carbon sink. But you knew that….. 😉 All that nasty ocean-acidifying Carbonic acid magically found a Quicklime partner and set about precipitating calcium CARBONate in its two forms, Aragonite & Calcite….and buffering away to a comfy alkalinity…..
Another example showing that one reason Mother Earth is so homeostatic is that she is home to such an abundance of life.
Just a thought – is the word cretaceous etymolgogically somehow related to cretin?
It seems to me a better connection than extra CO2 and DOOM!
Cretaceous is derived from the latin creta = chalk. It’s named for thick Northern European deposits of limestone built mostly from coccolith shells deposited during the Cretaceous period. e.g. the white cliffs at Dover, England
“White cliffs of Dover!
Are the bluebirds safe from all that CO2?
“Are the bluebirds safe from all that CO2?”
No, because CO2 causes climate insanity, which causes humans to erect windmills and solar concentrators, which shred and fry the little critters.
No bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover or anywhere else in the UK.
However there were carbonate reefs as big as the Great Barrier Reef in the Devonian when atmospheric CO2 was present at levels as high as 4000ppm.
See above. Sorry to disappoint.
Why doesn’t anybody talk about therapsids anymore?
Or the fact that, just like those dinosaurs, we are getting bigger and fatter as aCO2 rises. The correlation is uncanny.
The therapsids are still here, in plentitude. Everyone reading these comments is among them. Somehow we survived and thrived in climates both colder and hotter than now, let alone a mere two degrees warmer.
Individually, we can see what a +2C world would be like by looking a bit south of where we live (or north, for those in the southern hemisphere). You can pull out the temperature maps, find where you live, and then look for a place that has a climate +2C above yours. You want to find out what a +2C world would be like for you, individually, on the ground, relatively close to where you live? Easy. Get in the car and drive for a few hours.
For many of us, a +2C world would mean moving closer to Florida, or San Diego, or Cancun, or the Hawaiian Islands. Not too scary. Indeed, most of us save up money during the year so we can go spend a week or two in such locales.
Which is why a +2C ‘tipping point’ is simply not believable.
Try going into a bar in Minnesota or North Dakota in February and explaining that +2C is going to be the end of their civilization.
Good luck with that.
Exactly, I was looking to see if anyone took that tack. I doubt if one would need to go much more than 500 miles closer to the equator to experience 2°C of temperature change.
2C is roughly 400 miles closer to the equator. And the IPCC wants us to believe 1 step further than that, and the world will come to an end.
“2C is roughly 400 miles closer to the equator. And the IPCC wants us to believe 1 step further than that, and the world will come to an end.”
Perhaps not just one step, but if you keep heading South past the equator you might end up in Australia.
Also the +2°C average is not that all maximum and minimum temperatures will increase by 2°C around the globe. A more humid atmosphere means higher minimum temperatures and lower maximum temperatures in dryer areas. There should also be greater warming of the poles than the tropics.
So the tropics will be just as pleasant and the colder areas will not get so cold at night (Ooops! Forgot about the polar vortex).
So instead of – 10 C in the winter, it would get to a balmy – 8 where i live ? doesnt sound like Hawaii to me. big deal
Thank you Robert B for the reminder. It bears repeating. CAGW tells us that warming would be felt more as you head away from the tropics and towards the poles. I can see catastrophic farming in Canada, Siberia, northern Europe et al.
If you move from Scotland to England you get about a 2C warming.
Obviously living in Scotland I would say that if Scotland looked like England it would be a total absolutely catastrophic disaster of the worst possible kind.
However, I suspect the English don’t see it that way.
I visit family down in England sometimes particularly in Autumn or Spring you can tell that the leaves are greener in England than Scotland. That’s the kind of disaster that they are warning about – more green things
And of course, I would have to say that if we English were to become as unhealthy as the Scots, then that would be disaster. Scots wouldn’t want the urbanisation that has happened to England, though we still possess wonderful scenery in the Lake District, Yorkshire, Devon and Cornwall. And we in England don’t have to put up with storm force winds and 2-metre drifts of snow. There are times when the TV national weather comes on and you see minus something in Scotland, and plus ten here in England. I know where I’d rather be!
and you both would sound funny….
“I know where I’d rather be!”
And we don’t have anywhere near as many of those dreadful wind farms strung across the magnificent scenery.
While the Cretaceous does show the beneficial effects of higher CO2 & warmer temperatures, it’s not an ideal simulacrum for AD 2100 under the fantasy scenarios of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Alarmists. Sea level was so much higher primarily because of thermal expansion from more active submarine volcanism, as the continents spread rapidly apart. However, ocean temperatures were a lot higher than the supposed overall global tropospheric average of 4 degrees C above now. Also, that’s the low end of the estimated range, with 10 degrees C higher than the 1960-90 average at the top end.
A better match for a two degree C warmer world would be the Pliocene, roughly five to three million years ago. The main difference between that world and ours is an open Central American Seaway, which is why it was free of major NH glaciation. Then the Arctic Ocean was surrounded by boreal forest, but lacked the polar crocodilians of the Cretaceous. Of course, any warming effect from human CO2 emissions would be short-lived, at most 1000 years, before natural sinks restored whatever air-ocean-land balance underlying conditions dictated. So the Greenland Ice Sheet would not have time to melt nor extensive forests and tundra to replace it.
Earth was also briefly that warm as recently as the Eemian, 130 to 114 thousand years ago, the interglacial preceding the current Holocene. It didn’t last long enough to melt the southern dome of the Greenland Ice Sheet completely, and neither would elevated temperatures from man-made GHGs, if that effect ever occurred.
Abundant Cretaceous and early Cenozoic (Paleocene/Eocene) vegetation allowed animals to reach enormous size. Human society would also flourish under and where needed adapt to warmer conditions. Unfortunately, the good times wouldn’t last long.
Sea level was much higher primarily because of thermal expansion from more active submarine volcanism.#######
Actually, no. Sea levels rose because of continental drift. As the continents spread apart, deeper seas were replaced by shallow crust newly formed at the rifts. This new, shallow crust eventually sank to the abyssal levels of the present Atlantic oceans. Thermal expansion had a role but the primary cause was replacement of abyssal ocean crust with shallow, newly formed crust.
“Continental drift” is caused by seafloor spreading, so your statement is a distinction without a difference.
Your non-sequitor falls short, thank you.
What support can you muster for your imagined Central American Seaway?
I asked you this question previously and you responded with abuse and insults. Let’s see if you have any support. And Sturgis, no links please, but cite the support yourself like a competent scientist, if you can.
You initialed the insults, referring to those stating objective reality as “fuzzy thinkers”. Your assertion of no support from me and others is nothing short of insane. Others and I gave you study after study, all coming to the same conclusion. You OTOH produced not a single scrap of actual evidence to support your fantasy. All the evidence in the world supports the view that the CAS didn’t close until after three million years ago, and even then was open again at least twice during the Pleistocene.
Back around 2000 a paper came out, IIRC, which suggested that the CAS might have been temporarily closed ~10 million years ago, but this hypothesis was almost immediately showed false. Recent research has concentrated on discovering the actual geography and geology of the CAS during the Late Miocene and Pliocene, ie whether there was a long peninsula and a few islands or an archipelago at various times, along with trying to determine its depth and breadth. You somehow misinterpreted these studies as supporting your delusion, which could only mean that you didn’t actually read them.
The CAS got generally shallower with time of course, so began affecting oceanic circulation before its final closure.
I’m amazed that you dare to comment on this topic, after making such a laughing stock of yourself. First you claimed that warm currents only go toward the poles. When it was pointed out to you that east-west portions of the five oceanic gyres don’t and more relevantly that the equatorial currents, which flowed through the CAS, don’t either, you dropped that absurd false claim. Same with your false assertion that plants in the families found on Miocene islands don’t island-hop. A quick Internet search would have shown that baseless assertion ludicrous.
You repeatedly ignored requests to offer an explanation for the Great American Biotic Interchange, which occurred after the rise of the Isthmus of Panama. Nor to the presence of sharks in the CAS at the time you imagine it closed. Nor to evolution of marine organisms after the formation of the Isthmus, the timing of which coincides with South American volcanism. Every relevant discipline–biology, geology, oceanography–leads to the same conclusion. As you were showed over and over again. Yet you couldn’t produce a single shred of supporting evidence for closure in the Miocene.
I invite anyone interested to read the discussion in comments on the post linked below and come to his or her own conclusions. Everyone who did realized that you have not a leg upon which to stand:
Clearly you didn’t bother to read commenters’ responses to your delusions nor the links within them.
Another non sequitor from Sturgis,this time in the form if a rant replete with insults, but still, no support for your Isthmian hypothesis (not theory)of the Pleistocene.
I have presented incontrovertable stratigraphic evidence that the center of the Isthmus was there at the beginning of the Miocene, some twenty-two million years ago. At this, you get angry.
But forget about that. My point is that the Isthmian hypothesis for the start of the Pleistocene is a chain of unsupported assumptions:
Posited seaway—->posited proto-GulfStream flowing through posited seaway—>posited closure of posited seaway —-> posited redirection of posited proto Gulf Stream to the Arctic, —-> posited subsequent increase in snowfall —-> posited beginning of the Pleistocene.
Not what I call scientific rigor.
You have presented nothing at all. Your “stratigraphic” evidence is non-existent. If you imagine it exists, please post it hear for everyone to laugh at all over again. You keep asserting it but never showing it. Let’s see it here, once and for all, so that I can point out how laughably lame it must be.
Your ignorance of reality is why so many have gotten so frustrated with your adherence to total fantasy, calling us names instead of producing a shred of evidence, about which you lie.
It is an observable fact that the Isthmus did not exist 20 million years ago, nor ten. No other conclusion can be drawn from the evidence from biology, geology and oceanography. You continue ignoring all the abundant, indeed overwhelming evidence against your totally baseless conjecture.
Why do you keep dodging direct questions? I’ll try again. Please explain the American Interchange at 2.7 Ma. Please explain why sharks swam over the future isthmus 10 Ma. Please explain the speciation burst among marine organisms after 2.7 Ma on both sides of the emergent Isthmus. Please explain the change in ocean circulation then as well. Please admit finally that you outright lied about island-hopping plant families and warm current circulation. For starters.
The fact of CAS closure after three million years ago, which initiated the Pleistocene glaciations is supported by every possible line of inquiry. That the change in circulation the closure occasioned can also be and has been repeatedly demonstrated by ocean sediment cores, organism evolution and ecosystem development, stratigraphy, etc. All those papers you refuse to read would educate you to reality, but obviously you can’t handle the truth.
All anyone need do to see what a crackpot mpainter is on this issue is to read the comments in the “Ocean Circulation” post. ( I use that disparaging term since he followed me to another post to spew it at me for daring to point out with evidence of Miocene islands, not an isthmus, in the Seaway how out to lunch he is.)
On other topics, he has commented intelligently, even quasi-humorously, but for whatever reason, he’s impervious to objective reality on the subject of the CAS, the best attested feature of the Miocene & Pliocene ocean current system. His childlike faith has forced him to make ridiculous claims, such as that plants found natively on islands that have always been islands don’t island-hop & that warm currents only move poleward. This is cloud cuckoo land.
If there was no Central American seaway, what kept North American and South American animals apart for all those mikllions of years?
While we keep answering mpainter’s questions, he still refuses to reply to ours. No surprise that he ignores your repeated dispositive query along with everyone else’s, such as about the Miocene shark nursery at Gatun, the speciation on either side of the Isthmus from about three million years ago, the sediment cores showing current changes, or any of it. And where is that alleged stratigraphic evidence he claims to have trotted out?
Instead of realizing that a fossil log showed where an island had been, he lies about the ability of its species to hop islands. Still no reply on the incontrovertible fact that warm currents travel east & west, not just poleward. No amount of evidence will change a true believer with a fixed idea’s mind.
He’ll keep ignoring reality & other commenters’ questions.
Are there any geologists here that are interested in the question?
Because if you are, then I can refer you to a study conducted by a team of researchers, geologists, adressing the age of the Panamanian Isthmus. This study, published in the GSA Bulletin in 2012 dates the isthmus to the Eocene and they have radiometric dates of basement rocks dating from the Paleocene. The study was comprehensive and thorough and involved the efforts of fifteen geologists, and was funded by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute of Panama. The study puts an end to all the arm-waving over an imagined seaway through that part of the world.:
C. Montes et all. 2012, GSA Bulletin:
“Evidence for a Middle Eocene and Younger Land Emergence in Central Panama: Implications for Isthmian Closure”
Wading through all the vituperation, I came out with there being a dispute as to when the seaway closed. Regnant theory appears to support sturgishooper, while mpainter appears to favor other theories. If all can agree on that short synopsis, maybe the disputants can agree to disagree, and move on.
Still waiting for the stratigraphic study mpainter keeps promoting. Here is a recent paper aiming to settle a stratigraphic question in the Panama Canal Zone:
Lower Miocene Stratigraphy along the Panama Canal and Its Bearing on the Central American Peninsula
Michael Xavier Kirby, Douglas S. Jones, Bruce J. MacFadden
While arguing for a Miocene peninsula stretching to the Zone, among its conclusions is this:
“Of course, the Central American Seaway (also called the Atrato Seaway), located between Central and South America, remained open until the final formation of the Isthmus of Panama by 3 Ma –. The lack of any South American land mammals in the Cucaracha Formation indicates that such a seaway must have existed in the early to middle Miocene , . The Central American Seaway was, therefore, the ultimate barrier to the migration of North American land mammals into South America, not the ephemeral straits that may have formed intermittently across the Central American Peninsula through the Neogene.”
No wonder you didn’t provide a link to the paper you cite, since it doesn’t support your baseless assertion:
Its conclusion does just the opposite, as do all other papers in this century, at least:
“This paleogeographic conﬁgu-ration greatly restricts the width of the seaway separating the Paciﬁc and Caribbean waters since early Miocene times.”
Nowhere does it claim as you assert without a shred of evidence that the seaway was closed in the Miocene. The width & depth of the seaway during the Pliocene is under study, but its existence is not in doubt. Why do you keep spewing this falsehood?
After all this time spent by so many commenters trying to drag a reference out of mpainter kicking and screaming, why am I not surprised that when the crackpot finally does, it destroys his cherished delusion?
Also, still waiting for answers to all those questions your scientific betters asked but which you won’t or can’t answer, mpainter, such as tty’s about the timing of the Great American Biotic Interchange, etc.
Is all the trash talk really necessary? Funny, given some of the dust-ups I have engaged in here, some would no doubt say. But, from the outside looking in, it really doesn’t add anything for anyone else viewing the discussion.
You’ll see where it comes from if you go back to the original far more lengthy than needed discussion in comments on the ocean circulation post.
Mpainter was utterly destroyed in detail, point by point, to which destruction he responded by calling names. Frustrated, those responding to his lies, while he refused to answer questions put to him, replied in kind.
All he had to do was admit the obvious, that he was totally wrong about everything and lying to try to save face. A real scientist would have admitted his mistake, and a sane person unwilling to do so would at least have shut up. Instead he followed those who dared to show him up as a fool around to other comment sections, calling them names there.
A brief summary. On the basis of a single fossil log found in the area of the CAS, mpainter jumped to the conclusion that the whole seaway had to have been closed ten or 20 million years ago. When it was pointed out to him that the log could have been on a peninsula or an island, he lied, saying that the species involved didn’t island hop, despite the fact that members of its family still exist on islands that have always been islands and are related to or of the same species as those on neighboring continents.
Then he claimed that the theory of Pleistocene NH glaciation had to be wrong, since warm currents always travel toward the poles, he lied again, I guess hoping that no one would notice. When shown the many currents of which this is not true, including those known to have flowed through the CAS, he changed his tune and claimed that there was stratigraphic evidence for closure in the Miocene. He was repeatedly asked for evidence to that effect. When he finally at long last produced a single study, its last sentence in conclusion stated exactly what his opponents had been saying all along, ie that he was wrong as wrong could be.
Besides which, he ignored the reams of evidence presented against his fictional belief and refused to answer many questions from others, such as how he explained the GABI from 2.7 million years ago, the speciation of marine organisms on both sides of the new Isthmus from the same time, the evidence of paleo-currents and study after study finding final closure only at the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary. And that’s just the once over lightly review.
Is it little wonder then that some of those engaged in these discussion grew harsher in their comments as the discourse went on way too long?
Miocene sharks and whales in the Central American Seaway at the time mpainter imagines it was closed:
Formation of the Isthmus during the Pliocene:
Strange how mpainter calls those who follow not just the preponderance, but all the evidence “crackpots”, while he, who has no evidence whatsoever to support his lunatic ravings, and indeed whose only reference supports his opponents, considers himself a “scientist” with “gear”.
Whackadoodle, as they say in DC.
Amusingly, the very study upon which mpainter drew such a warped conclusion, the one with the fossil log, concluded that the CAS was about 250 miles wide at the time of the log’s deposition & at least 700 feet deep. As pointed out dozens of comments ago.
The fool neglected to read the whole paper.
But IMO we’ve beaten up on the pathetic loser enough, unless he chooses voluntarily to subject himself to more such humiliation. All readers here know who is the fuzzy crackpot and who the scientifically literate commenters.
Central American Seaway ?
You might have a look here…
Besides your comments — which are accurate, in the Cretaceous, there was a seaway up the center of North America, so presumably the Gulf Stream (if any) flowed directly North into the Arctic Ocean. That would likely have substantially affected climates worldwide irregardless of CO2 levels. see http://www.scotese.com/lcretcli.htm
In the Late Maastrichtian, after the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway closed at its northern end, there does indeed appear to have been a paleo-Gulf Stream along the Atlantic coast of North America.
What currents were like when the the WIS was open from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean is less clear. They changed over time, but currents apparently entered the WIS from both the north and south. A warm, Gulf Stream-like current from the south existed, but whether at any point it dominated remains unresolved, at least as per my last study of the issue.
The Cretaceous was 6.0C to 9.0C warmer than today.
Sea Level was 265 metres higher than today. Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the centre of North America from Texas to Inuvik was covered by shallow ocean.
The last time Global Temperatures were +2.0C higher than today was just 130,000 years ago during the Eemian interglacial. Temps were this high for at least several thousand years.
Now comes milodonharlani and still no support for the Isthmian theory and who calls me a crackpot as did sturgis hooper on the previous thread because I require that the rank conjecture known as the Isthmian hypothesis be supported. Scientific rigor? Not in sight. If it should be conceded that a seaway through the isthmus (only for the sake of argument) what evidence is there
1. that a proto Gulfstream flowed into the tropical Pacific prior to the Pleistocene through the hypothesized Panamanian seaway.
2. That this current was redirected by closure of the Isthmus to the Arctic Ocean, its present course.
3. That this brought an increase in snowfall in the NH that brought about the Pleistocene era.
If any can justify this conjecture with support, and without stinking up the thread with insults, I would like to see it.
I am familiar with Cretaceous stratigraphy of Texas and there was several thousand feet of Cretaceous sediments and a lacuna in the middle of this (an erosional unconformity).
The figure 265 meters seems so nice and precise but I have to wonder.
You have been repeatedly shown conclusive evidence against all the drivel you spout & in support of reality. How many times do we have to keep showing it to you before you’ll actually read it?
1) How out of whack can you get, even after all the effort expended in educating you, to harbor such an elementary misconception?
The paleo-Gulf Stream did not flow into the Pacific. There was a weak Gulf Stream in the Miocene & Pliocene flowing roughly where it does now, ie along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, thence east across the Atlantic as part of the North Atlantic gyre (another of those warm currents not flowing towards the pole as you so crazily imagine). This existing current was strengthened by the closure of the CAS to create the modern, powerful GS.
As you’ve been shown over & over again, the currents that flowed through the CAS were the same as those which now circle the globe near the equator, except where interrupted by continents, namely the east to west flowing North Equatorial Current & South EC & the weaker, wind-driven west-east Equatorial Counter Current, as commenters have been trying to educate you for so long now. (Note all these flow east or west, not toward the poles as you so ignorantly & baselessly imagined.)
Please read the many references you’ve been provided, then get back to us.
2) The Gulf Stream was not redirected. As above, it was strengthened by the addition of the diverted equatorial current in that region. Please read the Woods Hole reference & many others provided you already in comments to the other post.
3) That precipitation increased when warm waters of the stronger GS reached higher latitudes via its spin-off the North Atlantic Drift shows up in the sediment cores & every other possible source of information. That the North Atlantic Deep Water production greatly increased is also in evidence, as study upon study shown you demonstrate. The NADW process might have begun at the time of the Carbonate Collapse (Late Miocene), but was enhanced by the closure of both shallow & deep channels through the CAS.
These are not conjectures. As you’ve been showed time & again, they are observed facts. Feel free not to accept the overwhelming evidence, but I’m not going to post again so many studies that you have already ignored.
Please read just this one, for starters, since it summarizes the closure process based upon evidence of many kinds, although we know more now than when it was published. Also feel free to ignore its modeling of the change in currents, if you want, reading only the summary of physical evidence. IIRC, it was one of the first papers provided you, but typically you ignored it:
The Micropalaeontological Society, Special Publications. The Geological Society, London, 2007
FWIW, my understanding is that conventional wisdom has been that there was no permanent ice during the Cretaceous, but couple of years ago someone identified a probable substantial change in sea level in the Cretaceous deposits in/offshore of New Jersey. I don’t recall any of the details. Yes, there may be some evidence for substantial transfer of water from sea to/from land (presumably ice?) during the Cretaceous.
I fully agree with your propositions on the Gulf Stream. It starts in the equatorial Atlantic and it would have stayed as close to the equator as it could (flowing West) until it encountered enough landmass to stop it. A good ocean current needs about 250 metres of depth to flow properly so there would have been a point before 3.0 million years ago when the Isthmus was too shallow and the flow got redirected northward.
The Cretaceous sea level stand at 265 metres is generally agreed on. I have a database of all the estimates. There are a few lower ones but there is no way the extent of continental flooding that did occur, could have happened at a lower number.
This animation shows, first, that the Gulf Stream starts next to Africa at the equator. It is exactly the same as the ENSO current, being driven to the West by the Trade Winds (which have always existed on our rotating planet and have always blown East to West. The Winds literally blow, push or drag the currents along).
The current Gulf Stream gets redirected northward because of the Panama Isthmus. It is actually being pushed by the Trade Winds at the equator and all that water piling up on the South American coast. It follows the ocean depth, wherever it is at least 250 metres deep, all the way into the north Atlantic.
Before the Isthmus closed (or more accurately before it became less deep than 250 metres deep), the Gulf Stream flowed over the top of South America, into the Pacific where it joined the ENSO current at the equator and made it all the way across the Pacific to Indonesia, or even Africa, if the Indonesian Flowthrough would have allowed enough current flow.
When the Isthmus closed and became shallow, the current got redirected toward the Gulf of Mexico, did its Loop (because the Gulf of Mexico is old, deep ocean crust that may have even existed during Pangea times), and flowed around Florida. There may have been times when the ocean was too shallow next to Florida and it would have went around the Caribbean Islands to their East.
This is all driven by the Trade Winds, the rotation of the Earth and the general confinement of the continental shelves above 250 metres depth. They have always existed and have always driven an equatorial east to west current wherever there was enough ocean and this is the strongest current on the planet.
Does anyone here have enough gear to understand the implications of basement granitoids from the middle of the Panamanian Isthmus that are dated to the Paleocene? Anyone?
Replying to mpainter @ granite,
There is lots of Paleocene granite strewn about the western US and Mexico so it is no great surprise that there be some in Panama. Laboratory experiments show that granite can be formed from just about any parent material if it is nuked enough.
Why the granite is there is another matter but I agree with you that the isthmus was way too constricted way too early to account for northern hemisphere glaciation. The best case for the Miocene early Pliocene would be like Indonesia today where some water leaks through but it is plenty of restriction to bounce back the oceanic reaction waves and redirect the Kuroshio current north.
The presence Paleocene granitic plutons at the center of the Isthmus of Panama is conclusive, in my estimation. This is from a 3 km sequence of basement rock exposed at the lowest and thinnest part of the isthmus. Atop this are slightly deformed late Eocene and Oligocene nearshore deposits. This precludes any possibility of a posited Central American Seaway instead of an isthmus.Doubtless, the implications of this will escape the insult-spluttering types who comment here, as have the implications of other geologic evidence previosly presented.
November 5, 2014 at 2:54 am
That old rock exists under younger rock means nothing. What matters is that late Miocene and Pliocene rocks in Panama are from marine layers. The evidence of an open seaway then is indisputable. The only issues are its width and depth. The last study I saw said 400 km and at least 250 m, IIRC, possibly with an island in it, but of course it changed over the course of millions of years. Also, it reopened at least twice during the Pleistocene, but more shallow.
November 4, 2014 at 4:54 pm
You are as usual (I’d say always but haven’t read all you’ve written) you are correct.
Among mpainter’s many failings is not understanding ocean currents, as shown by his unfounded assertion that warm currents always and only move toward the poles. No wonder he is so confused about the effect of the isthmus on NH glaciation.
November 4, 2014 at 9:48 pm
You are mistaken about the Central American Seaway resembling Indonesia now. Even in the Pliocene it was a lot deeper than, for instance, today’s Strait of Malacca, the waters of which rarely exceed ~37 meters in depth and are usually only about 27 meters.
I advise you not to reply to Ronconi, who is the third member of a foul mannered trio; sturgishooper and milidonharlani being the other two. What they lack in understanding they try to compensate for in vituperative abuse. A reply will merely prompt them to heap abuse on you, as they have on me.
This from the evidence free loon who first called his betters “fuzzy thinkers”, then “crackpots”.
Pot, meet kettle.
I notice you have nothing to say about yet again being publicly humiliated by your continuing inability to support a single strain of your complex delusions, but keep on making stuff up.
Have you noticed that nobody here buys the lies you’re selling?
The Makkasar Strait, OTOH, is deep and allows the Indonesia Throughflow to pass from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, as part of the globe-circling equatorial currents.
This deep strait separates the two biozones on either side of the Wallace Line, so important in the early history of evolutionary theory.
Nice graphic on the ocean currents…being visually oriented, it really help conceptualize the discussion, which, sorry to say, was completely new to me. In fact, to be honest, I’m still wondering how this is relevant to the climate discussion. Or is it merely an unrelated side discussion?
Anyway, is that main ocean current the one that Nemo’s dad rode in on the back of the sea turtles? Cuz that was pretty sweet! 🙂
It stems from fuzzy-thinking crackpot mpainter’s assertion that warm currents only flow toward the poles and that the paleo-Gulf Stream could not have been diverted by the Isthmus of Panama, which of course it wasn’t. The equatorial currents that had flowed through the Central American Seaway until about three million years ago were diverted to reinforce the weak GS and make it stronger, which carried more warm water to high latitudes and also increased the production of Atlantic Deep Water.
He jumped on a comment here relevant to the 2 degree C warming, about the Pliocene as a model for a future warmer world. Already destroyed in the ocean current post comments, he won’t let well enough alone, but follows those who pointed out the problems with his fantasy around to other comment sections to keep up the losing fight.
A whack job, IOW.
Thanks…reading through everything again with context and it finally clicks (he can be taught!)
– Pliocene better analogue for 21st century…
– Main difference is modern lack of CAS
– CAS during Pliocene ensured warmer NH (?)
– Potential implication that closure of CAS resulted in eventual temperature drop (?)
– Lack of CAS today likely results in short term temp gains
– Thus, no full roll-back of NH ice (like Greenland) before temps recede and restabilize
– So, no steamy dinosaur paradise for us…although, according to some admissions below, some people are really doing their best to live up to the large beasts’ examples
That about it?
Actually the strengthened GS and ADW led to a wetter NH and ultimately a much colder one, thanks to ice sheet formation and albedo, at the same time that Milankovitch Cycles were favorable to cooler conditions.
Please see the Woods Hole link I posted.
Afraid the big dinos, pterosaurs, giant croc-relatives, marine reptiles and other amazing Mesozoic creatures aren’t coming back again no matter how balmy earth becomes. We’re stuck with the dinos we have. Thank goodness so many of them are so good to eat, like quail, ducks, geese, chickens and turkeys.
Oh, that makes more sense. I was wondering how the CAS could warm the NH…glad to know it was a faulty understanding on my part.
That link helped a lot too…nice to see a plausible explanation for something that, on the surface, seemed counter-intuitive, i.e. that the warm GS would induce glaciation. The eventual glaciation due to the arctic freezer and copious quantities of moisture seems logical.
It would also seem to lend support to the theory that the retreat of ice caps is due to deforestation and a subsequent loss of moisture transfer, rather than temp increases. (Ready access to moisture being the primary driver for ice creation and sustenance.)
As for the return of the dinos, I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I saw a documentary on that…or maybe it was movie, but it was TV, so…
Anyway, thanks again for your patience.
“Abundant Cretaceous and early Cenozoic (Paleocene/Eocene) vegetation allowed animals to reach enormous size.”
I regret to say that I have already reached enormous size even under present conditions of climate.
I agree there are plenty of ages to choose from, but I like providing the Cretaceous as an example, because everyone knows about the dinosaurs – its pretty difficult to claim the natural world was suffering heat stress when there were dinosaur scale creatures lumbering around, an age of giants, supported by lush vegetation on a scale unknown to the modern age.
Oh, nooooo! Giant cats and rats! They’ll chomp down on our added adipose tissue!
Is that a hockey stick at the Holocene end? I thought its a fraud? or do you believe the proxy temperatures only when it suits you?
The proxy temperatures did not, in fact, show a “hockey stick”. That is why they had to “hide the decline”. You really should change your handle to “JoNovice”.
You’re missing the point – it’s not (just) the temperature, it’s the unprecedented rapidity of the change that’s going to take us down. When farmland becomes desert, or suffers from constant flooding, when cities are underwater, when plants and animals can’t migrate quickly enough to survive, and all in less than a century, then our ecosystem is not going to support 7 or 8 billion humans. And that’s a problem.
The warming from 1910-1940 was the same as that from 1970-2000. The warming from 1910-1940 was natural, so it is extremely likely that such changes in temperature has been seen almost in every century since this planet was formed.
Indeed, if we look at the Central England Temperature record we see the 20th century change is quite par for the course, and that the biggest warming occurred after 1690 and the climate famines in Scotland.
So, far from being unprecedented, the evidence strongly suggest that the 20th century climate change is the normal climate change we should expect.
Yes, but those two distinct variations will be lost when using a 1,000 year reference. It is that easy to skew the data.
Everything I’ve seen suggests that the early 20th century warming was at most 2/3 of that from 1975 to 2005 (and that’s assuming accuracy; temperature records from the time are far less comprehensive). And now we’re starting from a much higher baseline temperature.
My point is that we’ve adapted to the current climate in such a way that it optimizes our use of the planet to support a large human population.While we can adapt in some measure to a warmer world, the California vegetable patch, the Aussie wheat fields, and areas of Asia whose water supplies are vanishing (80+ % of glaciers are in retreat) will not be replaced by new agricultural areas in Siberia anytime soon.
Actually, early 20th century warming was about 0.6 deg C, almost precisely the same as the latest bout. There has been no change to the underlying trend of about 0.75 deg C/century, which has been with us since the end of the LIA, before CO2 could have affected it. You can see the cyclical up-and-down around that trend here.
Only in the fevered imaginations of diehard Warmists. Which is a problem for them.
Relax, it is not going to happen. But even if it did think of all the farmland opening up in Canada, Siberia and Greenland. That will give us more then enough land, growing conditions will be much better too. Finally we can farm where the Vikings were farming.
The weather was supposedly very benign then. Quite likely that all that will come back. And that is based on something that has happened in the near past instead of computer GIGO future projections.
A lot of the problems we see and have been labelled as ‘Climate Change Catastrophes’ (TM, presumably) are down to unforseen events from mankinds changing land use. Given that the base of a food chain pyramid is point- and area-producing plantlife, increasing the CO2 will increase plants and all forms of life above them – surely this is nothing but a good thing?
You fail to notice that it has stopped warming. Climate changes rapidly naturally. There is nothing at all unusual in the mild warming of c. 1977-96, which followed the mild cooling of c. 1945-76, which followed the mild warming of c. 1918-44. These natural fluctuations are caused by shifts in the PDO & AMO, so there’s no cause for alarm. We’re in a flat to cooling phase again now, as during the 1950s to ’70s.
If you want to see climate change more rapid and larger in magnitude than the late 20th century, look at the early 18th century, coming out of the depths of the Little Ice Age during the Maunder Minimum.
Should the world be lucky enough to enjoy two degrees warmer average temperature at some future time, it will be able to support more people, not fewer. Humans will adapt to whatever change might occur from having higher levels of plant food in the air. Then nature will adapt. The planet is self-regulating.
Amen to that. I don’t know why people panic about our greening biosphere and more farmland opening up in the future. World food production was recently reported to be at record levels. All this in the face of global warming and more co2.
There has been no warming in 18 years. What rapid changes are you referring to? What’s unprecedented? Just because this was your first belief doesn’t mean it has to be your only conclusion. Instead of assuming man is evil and the cause of every event, maybe learn to think for yourself and draw your own conclusions rather than regurgitating what your kindergarten teacher told you.
Temperatures above 30 deg Latitude in most locations vary by over 30C from winter to summer and nature handles that just fine. Do you really believe less than 10% of that rise spread over a much longer period will not be adaptable?
If warming resumes more arable land will be created not less. The measured greening of the planet will continue with plants becoming more drought resistant.
Try not to let the alarmists get to you. They would have you wetting your britches in fright, if they could.
Here is some advice:
Relax, take a deep breath, sit down and have a beer or some sherry. Think pleasant thoughts. Say to yourself ” I shall not let them frighten me”. Say this several times a day, with conviction, and soon you will feel better, I promise.
You say unprecedented. You should spend more time reading papers than reading the tabloids. the The period 1950 to 2014 is 64 years. Keep that in mind. Keep also the 2C limit in mind. Now see THIS.
Almost half the modern day warming happened before 1940 and is not largely blamed on man’s greenhouse gases. This really is a much ado about nothing.
Is it possible that Rupert Affen has read the replies to his concerns and is beginning to look for himself? Was he aware of the evidence presented to him before he commented? Only Rupert Affen can tell us.
Rupert, you obviously forgot the /sarc tag on your post.
The reality is the linkage between pCO2 and any “greenhouse” warming is weak. Climate sensitivity to pCO2 doubling is likely on the order of 0.4(+/- 0.2) deg C. Which puts the effects of CO2 effectively in the noise of natural variations of the current interglacial, which has routinely excursion +/- 1.5 deg C over the millenia since the beginning of the Holocene.
So no worries. even if CO2 gets to 800 ppm. Warmer is far better than colder.
We live in a glacial world, we just happen to be in an interglacial temporary warm period now. Colder, i.e. -1.5 deg C, can happen much quicker than warming. Cooling happens in a few decades, killing billions. Warming is slower and takes centuries, and that greens the Earth and enhances crop production.
CO2 is our friend. It will save our butt.
If I see that word “unprecedented” again, I am going to throw up. There is very little in this world, including climate, that is unprecedented. In fact, if we look closer into DNA, I have a feeling that even I am not unprecedented. However, I may have looked a little different than I do today.
Your parade of horribles needs to account for human responses.
Animals that migrate, can migrate very quickly. They do it every year.
We can move plants. Backhoes. Trucks
Plants change their ranges rapidly, too.
The same species that used to line the shores of the Arctic Ocean now thrive in the Lower 48 states. The tree line moves north & south with climatic changes on much shorter time scales than that, of course.
Changes in pollen help us reconstruct past climates. Coming out of glacial phases (big ice ages), the climate warms a lot more rapidly than it has since the Little Ice Age.
Any change as you describe could not happen due to man, especially with CO2, and in the unlikely event of an “unprecedented ” change of the type you suggest would be beyond human control anyway. I suggest you find something more realistic to worry about.
Ice-cores don’t indicate that. Interglacials seem to be a temp “plateau” that doesn’t get exceeded — the only way out is down. Colder, mid-glacial periods are subject to very fast excursions both up and down (D/O and Heinrich events), and the lowest glacial temps like 20kya seem like a bottom plateau for temps where glaciers have advanced equatorward to their limit (warm season has too strong a sun to allow glacial advance).
So CO2 warming, even if it happened, would be gentle.
Earthquakes… a terrible flood… locusts! Oh, my!
Take a pill and calm down. There are far graver threats to humanity than atmospheric CO2, which really presents no threat at all.
Based on the geological past and science with regards to creatures/life on this planet.
Warm is Good and Cold is Bad
CO2 is Good and Pollution is Bad
We have redefined the above based on:
1. A flawed theory
2. Cognitive bias and lack of scientific method by many otherwise, very smart and well intentioned scientists.
3. An agenda by groups that arrogantly assume they know what’s best for our planet/humans and their end/objective justifies the means to accomplish.
So now we have:
Warm=Bad and No Change/1 Degree Colder=Good
CO2=Pollution and Good=Bad(based on pre-warming alarmist era… as recently as the 1970’s)
Here is powerful evidence that Good(before)= Bad(now)
Let’s take catalytic convertors, the most ingenious pollution cutting device ever. One car in the 1960’s for instance, produced as much pollution as something like 25 cars today, with catalytic convertors responsible for much of the pollution cutting.
Here are the chemical reactions for a 3 way catalytic convertor:
2CO +O2 yields 2CO2
2C2H6 + 7O2 yields 4CO2 +6H2O
2NO +2CO yields N2 +2CO2
We embraced catalytic convertors in the 1960’s/70’s which turned the real pollutants above into harmless/beneficial CO2 and H2O.
Now, based on the EPA and many others new definition, CO2=pollution, so we have Good=Bad.
I’m not against developing a astroid/meteroid defense capability as even a smallish rock will cause plently of death and destruction. But for something that made a crater 100 miles across there is no defense we could mount that would keep it from it’s course. All mankind could do is try to make it to the otherside, however long that takes.
My belief is that if CO2 is the mechanism counted on for that temperature rise, any predictions of continuing high levels of CO2 emissions involving time scales of any length are very unlikely. The production of electricity via cheaper nuclear power technologies (specifically molten salt reactors) , coupled with widespread practical electric vehicles, would more or less eliminate any concerns in that regard. The world is NOT moving in the direction of increased carbon emissions, quite the opposite.
Nuclear power is not cheaper, all things considered. That is why power companies have abandoned nuclear power.
Do you like nuclear power? Tell that to the power companies and see where it gets you.
And now, with cheap natural gas available, fat chance you will see experimental molten salt reactors being built.
Natural Gas is only cheap in the US. There are other places y’know.
Shall I catalogue the shale gas deposits throughout the globe, as yet unexploited? The UK is said to have several hundred years potential reserves.
But, those are mostly artificial costs. The EROI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) on nuclear power is enormous. That means that, whatever the dispersal of the benefits may be, society as a whole gains substantially.
The barriers to natural gas fracking in Europe are to a large extent government-imposed:
What would it be like when the earth warmth 2 degrees c? That’s a nice thing to look at. But how you ask!
Opening your eyes would be a good starting point. Going back to school would be a nice starter. WI go back to school? Ye you could learn about the planet and that there is a region that’s cal d the tropics, its warm out there.
But that would bee the easy way. The hard way is to go to places where man made structures where it is hot.
And yes those are excising in the world.
Here in Holland we have greenhouses yes the ones from CO2 the greenhousegas. You know that greenhouses use industrial CO2 to help plant grow up to about 45% more then whiteout? And yes its hot and moist inside.
In Arnhem there is the Burgers ZOO. Yes a zoo whit animals but also a tropical dome. Its hot and moist inside and guess what plans grow there whiteout any problem.
Then those idiots who call it greenhousegas should go to the UK there is a garden of Eden in a biosphere also warm and moist and living there is…. well a garden of Eden.
History tells us also that the hot periods like the medieval period was a nicer time to live then today.
It was warmer and there was more food.
So ye for me 6degrees warming and 1000 ppm more CO2 would be nice.
But sadly the Eden Project is run by Green Fundamentalists.
The Eemian interglacial period, which peaked around 125,000 years ago, was 3 C warmer than it is today. We have no record of anyone complaining about catastrophic warming back then. Right? It was during the last 100,000 years of glaciation prior to the Holocene in which we currently live when the mass extinction of mega fauna occurred, or, at least during the ups and downs of the transition.
The environment during that time period also had millions of years to adjust to to gradual changes in CO2 levels.
Science in politics:
Commercial growers use greenhouses with CO2 jacked up to 1,000 ppm. Plants thrive wonderfully there. Your ” adjustment” does not seem necessary.
Plants thrive wonderfully in a greenhouse. Move into the greenhouse yourself and see if you thrive too?
Do they also change the amount of water they give the plants over time? In some areas of the greenhouse, do they increase water distribution, and take away precipitation away from other parts? (analogous to mid latitude precipitation increase and subtropic precipitation decrease). A couple of generations from now, are they going to dunk some of the plants underwater?
No. There are positive byproducts (short-term increase in crop yields in some places, slight recovery in ozone), and there are negative ones to climate change. It’s not good for the Earth to abruptly change climate, although I’ll concede a bigger problem might be some of the extinctions we’ve caused that don’t relate to climate change.
Ah, forgot to even mention ocean acidification.
Humans suffer no adverse effects from breathing air with 1000 ppm CO2. Some people might get headaches, but even that’s unclear. Many indoor environments reach that level now, to say nothing of submarines, in which CO2 concentration can exceed 10,000 ppm, although the target maximum level is 8000. They are almost always well above 1000 ppm, however.
Pay no attention to Mr Political science. He stated that he has posted verifiable measurements of AGW on another thread — but when I challenged him to show me, he tucked tail and ran. Now he’s cluttering up this thread with his globaloney.
You are correct about plants. They have already adjusted to higher CO2 levels. A century ago they were starved of it, but now they are growing like crazy due to the added airborne carbon.
Yeah, they reduce it. Plants need less water with increased CO2.
The Eemian interglacial lasted about 15,000 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian) and is not tied to CO2 levels but the earth’s orbit (Milankovitch cycles).
Yeah, milankovitch cycles happen over periods of 22,000, 44,000, and 100k years. Exactly my point
Science in politics:
The point is that the Eemian resulted from Milankovitch Cycles, but it lasted “only” 16,000 years. Yet, despite all those thousands of years at temperatures warmer than now (hippos swam in the Thames at the site of London, for instance), the southern dome of the Greenland Ice Sheet only partially melted (maybe a fourth at most, for a small fraction of the whole thing). Sea level was higher, but obviously did not rise catastrophically rapidly.
Any man-made increase in CO2 will disappear from the atmosphere in hundreds of years to 1000 at most, not 16,000. Greenland ice is safe.
Pay no attention to Pol-sci. He stated that he has posted measurements of AGW, but when I challenged him to show me, he tucked tail and ran.
He’s just cluttering up threads with his globaloney.
Huh? No millions of years not CO2 build up to adjust to. Are you sure you understood what you wrote, because I don’t think that means what you think it means. Did you learn your numbers from Al Gore?
Studies show conclusively that the response of plants and that of our booming biosphere is very positive. The planet is greening up from the rapid increase in CO2.
Why is it required that CO2 increases like this must take millions of years in order to bestow the many benefits?
Because that’s how it happened before?
CO2 may be increasing faster because of humans but if the effect is positive, where is the problem?
Improved agriculture in high latitudes
Increased growing season in greenland
Ice free northwest passage
Decrease in human water supply, increased fire frequency, declining rice yields, expanded deserts, encroachment of shrubs into grassland, loss of polar bear population, increased fatal heat waves compared to less cold snaps, spread in mosquito borne diseases, disruption to marine ecosystems through ocean acidification, problems for 60 million people who depend on glaciers for water, inhibiting plankton development, damage to public infrastructure, increased risk of conflict, human displacement. Im not saying we cant adapt. Im just saying its going to cost money and damage ecosystems
Pay no attention to Pol-sci. He stated that he has posted measurements of AGW, but when I challenged him to show me, he tucked tail and ran.
He’s just cluttering up threads with his globaloney.
A suggestion: google: “WAIS Divide CO2 and CH4 data”. Climate Science™ has finally realized that there is something called “diffusion”. Natural CO2 changes are not nearly as slow as you think.
That’s an interesting list. There are actually plenty of studies/papers that support these notions. The thing that most have in common is that they start with the assumptions that come with increasing carbon dioxide leading to catastrophic global warming. The evidence for this of course, comes from global climate model projections based on a theory that is broken.
At the same time, no weight is given to the realities of the world we live in.
You know, the place where we actually live(not theory-land). Where we grow crops. The one where plants grow faster and the biosphere is booming. The one in which animals are flourishing and have more food.
The one where CO2 is doing what CO2 does as a beneficial gas. Whether it’s a CO2 molecule that came about from humans burning fossil fuels or from nature, it still acts the same way.
Funny, how CO2 from nature was beneficial, then all of a sudden, when humans emitted a bunch of the same stuff, with the same benefits, it was redefined as pollution.
Too much of anything can become harmful of course, even CO2. Atmospheric CO2 has increased from 280 ppm to 400 ppm since the Industrial Revolution.
Not until we get well above 1,000 ppm will I be worried as positives will continue to swamp negatives.
Since CO2 started this rapid increase, how many people or animals have died as a direct result of breathing average ambient/atmospheric levels of CO2?
What is a reasonable estimate for animals/humans that have had severe negative consequences from breathing average ambient/atmospheric CO2?
We have done plenty of things to harm our planet and continuing to reverse those things and/or addressing them aggressively should be our focus. However,At 280 ppm our world had a severe deficiency of CO2……..based on authentic science. At 400 ppm, we have helped our planet. It needs more of this type of help. Go after real pollution and let humans continue to help cure the CO2 deficiency.
yes, but another heat seeking meteor will target us for extinction just like before …
All you commenters above, in examining the conditions of the Cretaceous, seem to have missed the essential catastrophic point: if temperatures go back to those of the Cretaceous then the dinosaurs will return and gobble us up!
Naw, Chicken Little will neuroticize them all to death before they can make a foot hold.
“…the dinosaurs will return and gobble us up”
I say bring em on, those Bronto legs that the Flinstones ate always looked good to me.
I could probably justify a larger caliber rifle too,
Without effective curbs on CO2 emissions, we will be eaten by velociraptors and such. How can this not be obvious based on the scientific record? Tyrannosaurus Rex will come down your street and consume you and your dog. You have been warmed… er., warned.
I would prefer to sweat as opposed to shivering. Give me 3 degrees and more availability to food any day of the week. Except this weekend with the Polar Vortex coming to town again! Burrrr!
“can we afford to take the chance?”
We have no choice. There is more evidence for the catastrophe that would occur from drastically cutting fossil fuels than there is for what might occur from the continued use of fossil fuels. In fact, there may feedbacks, like increased vegetation, that could limit the negatives effects of CO2 and actually make the world a better place. If you take fossil fuels away from the masses without providing equivalent energy sources, they are not going to quietly starve or freeze without putting up a fight to survive. They will burn whatever they can find, including the alarmists who caused their problems. The environment will suffer much more under such a policy than allowing the continued use of fossil fuels and adapting to whatever changes occur as a result. That is the only chance we can afford to take.
This article brings to mind something that I’ve never quite understood about the CAGW argument. Ok, so the CAGW theory holds that the burning of fossil fuels by man is releasing carbon into the environment. This carbon is in excess of what the ecology/environment/climate (whatever) can withstand, thus the CO2 levels rise, yada yada yada, global warming and we all die.
What I don’t understand is how this man-released carbon can be considered separately from other “natural” sources. The reality is that we are merely returning to active use the carbon that had, at some point in the past, already been a part of our ecosystem and climate. The fact that it’s been locked up in the earth’s crust (for however long) shouldn’t automatically render it “bad” or “new”.
In fact, if you consider it in economic terms, it’s more like a capital infusion in the market…where the source of the capital was a chest of cash sitting under someone’s bed. It wasn’t doing any good sitting in the chest, but once released it can fuel tremendous growth. (Side note: It would be interesting to see what results we could get if we built a climate model off an economic one…with variables changed from things like currency and money velocity, climate-relevant ones like CO2 levels and TSI.)
In fact, when you really think about, it’s an incredible boon to mankind that huge amounts of carbon were locked up in the crust. We get to take advantage of the fact that natural forces (heat, pressure, etc) have increased the value of this carbon “investment” by turning it into coal and crude and etc. We now have a highly condensed and energy-rich source of fuel to tap for betterment of mankind…instead of mere organic material with a relatively low energy density.
Anyway, I guess I drifted a little bit there, but essentially I just don’t understand how we got to the point where using a completely natural source of energy, which was at one point a part of our environment, is a bad thing.
Sorry for all the typos…was trying to type while eating a hamburger…
No eating in class, unless you brought enough for everyone! 🙂
Most of us can see what kind of climatic change 2 degrees represents simply by driving or flying a few hundred miles toward the equator. In fact, many of us do exactly that almost every year. We even have a special word for this kind of investigative experiment: vacation!
OK, how come you can figure that out, Mike Smith, but so many of the general public cannot?
Maybe someone reading and contributing to WUWT can explain in simple terms why adherents to CAGW believe (i.e., how they reason), that 2 degrees C (or even 4 degrees C) is a problem, aside from sea level rising. (and without all the unfounded BS about more extreme weather). Preferably a CAGW believer.
Not a believer, but I too have wondered what supposed catastrophes could actually occur. Hansen says we’re on the Venus Express, but even the Team doesn’t go that far.
As per your comment, extreme WX can be excluded. A warmer world is less stormy than a colder one. The engine of WX is the difference in temperature between the poles and equator. With less difference comes fewer and weaker storms, whether tropical cyclones or tornadoes over land.
Sea level rise from a two degree increase would take decades if not centuries to become a problem, so can be easily adapted to (I know that’s a preposition). During the Eemian, two degrees or warmer lasted thousands of years and still the GIS only melted a little. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet maybe some as well. No big deal.
Lately ocean “acidification” has been added to the list, but that’ also a non-starter, since the seas have been much less basic in the past with no worries.
The IPCC still clings to three to 4.5 degrees by AD 2100, but that becomes less and less likely the longer the “pause” continues. Clearly, earth at present is much less sensitive to CO2 doublings than imagined by the IPCC scary fiction writers, so even two degrees higher than AD 1850 seems improbable by AD 2100 (assuming a doubling from “pre-industrial” 280 ppm to 560 ppm by then) at equilibrium. And about 0.7 degree of that has already occurred, if the “adjusted” record is to be believed.
The problem is that they don’t reason. They believe what they have been told without question. Their reality has been constructed for them by the media and they seem to be incapable of accepting factual information that counters what they have unwittingly accepted as truth. Success in our educational system depends on how well what you are told can be repeated. The sad truth is that the majority of the population can be controlled by what information they expose themselves to and accept.
Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detector should be taught to middleschoolers, or some form of critical thinking anyway. The worst thing to do is tell students that any science is “settled”. Kids are taught not to question certain authority and as adults often retain this programming. It really can make life easier when someone tells you what the correct opinions are, so independent study and reasoning are not required.
While we’re fantasizing about a +2°C warmer world, it might do to contemplate the far-more likely scenario of -2°C, and what that might look like. During the Dalton Minimum, from 1790 to 1830 a 2°C cooling occurred in the space of 20 years. And cooling, as anyone with half a brain knows is far, far more deadly to all life, including humans.
Meteor defenses, got just the man for the job.
Winter is coming.
2 degrees warmer, most of it in the winter… oh horror! Instead of cosy -15C I would have to endure… I dont know -10C, -12C ? Or even -5C?
But I guess if I tried really hard I could maybe adapt.
Yes, you guys have it tough, having to adjust from freezing your nuts off in -15C to freezing you nuts off in -13C. Do you think over the next 100 years or so you will be able to make the leap? 🙂
I find it amazing the warmists gold standard for the just-right global temperature seems to be the end of the LIttle Ice Age when glaciers were swallowing Alpine villages and trees in the Urals could not grow. And millions in tax money are spent on bogus climate-engineering to deliver us back to those “Good O Days”
To make the LIA sound good, they gotta push all these climate horror stories that are mere fearful speculation about a warmer earth.
The problem is, the best and cheapest way to deflect meteors are H-bombs. But the left HATES those! We haven’t even exploded a single one in space yet to study the effects. It’s illegal!
Thanks jim for bringing on some reality. Here is are some more details about the Little Ice Age. The perfect, safe temperature.
The effects of the Little Ice Age on humanity from the literature. In short we had crop failures, hunger, mass migration, epidemics, great storms in the North Atlantic, Europe wide witch hunts, endemic Malaria in England & part of the Arctic Circle, higher wildfire frequency in circumboreal forests, strong droughts in central Africa (1400–1750), social unrest in China, dead Central American coral reef, century-scale droughts in East Africa, large increases in flood magnitude (upper Mississippi tributaries), environmental and economic deterioration in Norway, decline in average height of Northern European men, climate became drier on the Yucatan Peninsula, sudden and catastrophic end of the Norse Western Settlement in Greenland, River Thames freeze-overs, agro-ecological, socioeconomic, and demographic catastrophes, leading to the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century.
The last flyby inside of one lunar distance was discovered about 24+ hours before its closest encounter with Earth.
And apparently, according to wik, Robert McNaught had his funding cut. He has spotted dozens and dozens of asteroids and comets, including the recent Comet Siding Spring which flew by Mars.
Instead, NASA wants to count molecules with OCO-2, and spy on human activity, looking for Almighty Tipping Points in the Anthropocene Age Paradigm. Global Warming is just a subcomponent of this scientific paradigm shift. Hippy horsemanure, I say!
So 24 hours is not a lot of time to prepare for an asteroid. The Russians however are claiming that their SS-18 Satan will be fitted to hit asteroids. Great.
ref: Wik R-36 Missile
NASA own words , no bucks no buck Rogers and right now the bucks are the CO2 scare
Anthony is correct as usual. The current climate is on the cold side. A couple of degrees warmer would be wonderful.
I also agree a couple of degrees warmer would be a good thing, but at the current rate of global warming we’re never going to get it.
“we have nothing to fear from CO2” – that in the context of an article focusing on a 2C, then a 4C warmer world.
Not even the rise in sea level a 4C warming would result in ?
That would not only melt most, if not all of the Greenland ice cap, it would melt some of the Antarctic ice sheets.
So minimum 7m, probably much more sea level rise.
That’s a lot of cities that would each need billions spent on sea defences, plus the huge areas of low lying non-urban land across the world that would have to be abandoned to the sea – unless of course we are going to be told a warmer world won’t increase sea level.
King Canute all is forgiven.
More like 40 m sea level rise with 4 degrees. The inundated coastlines would be more than made up for with new arable and habitable land at high latitudes.
Consider the opposite, that is much more likely to happen, a glacial period. A drop in sea level that would leave most coastal cities without usable harbors, so they would need rebuilt anyway. Deserts would be much more widespread and much less land arable. And then you have the 2 km thick glaciers that would cover much of North America, Europe, and Asia which would leave almost all of the high latitudes completely uninhabitable.
“More like 40 m sea level rise with 4 degrees.”
That requires that all ice in Greenland, all ice in West Antarctica and about half of the ice in East Antarctica melts. That means that a 4 degree rise will cause ice to melt in areas where the temperature never reaches -4 degrees.
Even at a four degree C rise, it would take thousands of years at least to melt the GIS. Not that an increase of four degrees from human activity is remotely possible, since IPCC only gets there by making unsupported feedback assumptions.
Even the Father of Global Warming, Wallace Broecker, says that man-made CO2 would be worked out of the atmosphere within 1000 years.
You can’t help yourself, can you? You just have to wring your mitts in front of the world.
In fact, atmospheric CO2 is entirely beneficial. Sea levels are not rising, temperatures are about to fall as the next ice age cometh. We will all die of cold and hunger. There now, feel better?
“Sea levels are not rising”
How do you explain this?
That is a fabrication. See NOAA Mean Sea Level Trends for the truth.
And Juan, please don’t bring anymore of your alarmist junk science to me.
Yup….I like what NOAA says about Global Sea Level Trends.
“Additionally, a steady increase in global atmospheric temperature creates an expansion of saline sea water (i.e., salt water) molecules (called thermal expansion), thereby increasing ocean volume. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report estimates that the global sea level rise was approximately 1.7-1.8 millimeters per year (mm/yr) over the past century (IPCC, 2007), based on tide station measurements around the world”
Thank you for pointing out an additional resource.
juan, you reference thermal expansion, here is something you may have missed.
Here is a bonus.
It was about 8 degrees warmer in Greenland during the Eemian interglacial, and most of the ice certainly didn’t melt then (in all the ice.cores that have been taken on the main ice-cap none shows ice-free conditions during the Eemian). At the NEEM site the ice was actually slightly thicker than today.
Relatively little of the Greenland Ice Sheet melting during the Eemian, warmer & longer than the Holocene. A fraction of its Southern Dome did melt. But at the cooler temperature of the Holocene, even with the man-made warming assumed but not in evidence, it would take thousands of years more of interglacial now than then to produce even that small reduction in the ice sheet.
If, as some argue, the Holocene were to last twice as long as it has already, the natural melt wouldn’t be catastrophic. And whatever effect human GHGs might have would last less than 1000 years.
And what happened during the catastrophic melt of the Greenland ice sheet during the Eemian interglacial? 4C warming or more and here are the results of the ice stuck in a bowl.
Reminder: During the Eemian hippos splashed in the Thames and Rhine rivers. Hippos today live primarily in sub-saharan Africa in the tropical savannah climate. How warm did south east England get?
“STOP GLOBAL WHINNING!”
There will be a number of Mediterranean towns, and no doubt others, that were ports ages ago that will be ports again.
But then CO2 is not driving the slight increase in temp. or sea level.
The comments from fear mongers, possibly with a hidden agenda, are driving the drivel. That drivel by itself, according to my predictive computer model, can cause a sea level increase of 5 metres.
A benign AGW is still AGW by any cut.
Even M. Mann is clearly showing that he does not really believe in the AGW anymore.
You see… at 450ppm there is no any chance of a sign of AGW….already at 420ppm and no sign of AGW…the very main problem the AGW has with the reality, but still Mann claims a possible collapse of modern civilization and the modern way of life. Funny isn’t it!
Is like saying we would’t be able to see or experience any AGW because our modern way of life will collapse well before any chance for it.
At least he is covering all the possible grounds, and technically can’t be found wrong, as far as he is concerned, because he believes that no AGW means a much more danger.
I somehow understand that and to a degree accept it as a possible argument from a man like M. Mann… …but what I fail to understand is……how could a benign AGW could not be AGW…and why should it be acceptable as possible now, at this very point, for as long as it is not dangerous!
To me that seems a very foul approach. It simply helps the suppression of any scientific opposition to AGW by the sience itself.
While M. Mann’s last move seems to add more force towards that suppression….. your kinda of the “benign AGW” approach helps further the suppression.
So hilarious not to see this.
If you have any problem with the CO2 emissions interpretation in regard to climate and atmospheric changes….. and what that could mean….I will say you better start sticking to and supporting the AGW science, as the case of showing no any real danger or any immediate need to worry about CO2 emissions it is a very easy indeed case.
But I have to say that it would not be a support for better science, but incontrary will be a suppression of it.
from the wiki link –
co2 was 6 x pre-industrials levels @ 1700
temperature was 4°C above modern level
so climate sensitivity = 2 x co2 = 0.67°C
Except that in reality it is the climate that controls the amount of CO2 in the air, not the other way around. That’s why our CO2 quickly absorbs into the oceans, we are in an ice age climate.
Well unfortunately we will never enjoy the comfort of a world climate like the Cretaceous. Plate tectonics’ control on the oceans and atmosphere are the first order control on Earth climate, not CO2. We will be lucky if we can make the next glacial period warmer for future generations.
Robert W Turner
November 4, 2014 at 12:07 pm
“We will be lucky if we can make the next glacial period warmer for future generations.”
Please do allow me to make once more a point that I always try to “push” through.
Don’t get my reply to you the wrong way please.
But is really hard for people to really move away from an ACC-AGW mentality even in the case of someone like you.
You see, we making the next glaciation period warmer, we impacting climate to a degree of causing a new climate equilibrim, We making the Next Climate Equilibrium to be a New Climate Equilibrium, is a basic ACC-AGW claim.
That is achieved only if ACC-AGW probable,no matter to what extent or when and exactly how.
In natural terms the next climate equilibrium it will be exactly when and as supposes to be, a Next Climate Equilibrium.
There only two possibilities, either is going a be ACC-AGW, or a natural climate change, regardless what our current understanding about the CO2 emissions role in it all.
Even contemplaiting the possibility of any kinda of “hybrid” climatic outcome, for the sake of the argument, still that “hybrid” will be an anthropogenic one and not natural. 🙂
hope you get the point I am trying a make.
Robert, I agree with what you say except your support of the idea that man somehow is not natural . Maybe the aliens caused the climate change and they are us.
An educated guess? I do not agree, it is even worse than a SWAG, (Super Wild Ass Guess), it is biased speculation using models to give the impression it is not speculation.
It similar to the speculation during the cold war space race, great advances made in technology and landing on the moon led to speculation as to when we would have colonies on Mars. Speculating on Mars colonies is fine, speculating as to our civiliaztion in 1000 years or the planets biosphere in a hundred years is fine. It is a travesty to dress up speculation as fact, hard evidence or proven theory.
This article fails to take into account a major breakthrough in geological history:
Once, we thought the Earth was flat and God had made it in six days. The Earth IS flat over a modest distance when you travel by foot. Eventually, mankind noticed the curves of the Earth and we got a spherical concept. This was refined as we measured the Earth. It is a bit flattened at the poles.
A child can look at a globe and see that Africa was once next to the Americas. Wegener did that in the early 20th century and came up with his Continental Drift theory. This theory was not accepted for decades until a subduction zone was found off Japan and a believable mechanism was found. That mechanism was incorrect as was totally proven by examination of sea-floor spreading. We are going to have to come up with new mechanisms.
I laughed out loud.
Sorry, but that is the most ridiculous gibberish I’ve ever seen posted on this blog. And our host is pretty liberal when it comes to gibberish.
Where do you suppose the water came from to fill the ocean basins after the earth “expanded”?
Where is the geological evidence for the continental connections you imagine within the past 200 million years? To take but one example, how about China & Australia/New Guinea?
The reason that plants & animals around the Arctic Ocean are similar is because they can spread from North America to Eurasia over ice or frequent land bridges. They can’t however get from Iceland to Norway.
Going farther back, plant & animal species show how the continents actually were conjoined in the past. Here, based upon actual scientific evidence, is how the world looked 195 million years ago, contrary to your baseless fiction:
While we’re fantasizing about a +2°C warmer world, it might do to contemplate the far-more likely scenario of -2°C, and what that might look like. During the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1830 a 2°C cooling occurred in the space of 20 years. And cooling, as anyone with half a brain knows is far, far more deadly to all life, including humans.
‘at the end of the day a computer simulation is just an educated guess – it is no substitute for observation.’
Well that is your struck down by the most holy ’cause ‘ then , as you can get no worse a heretic then to defame the most sacred ‘models’
Meanwhile take a close look at your skin you will see lots of little holes , their for sweat because human evolved in a warm climate , on the other hand without clothes human life would be virtual impossible on large parts of the planet. Now which is worse for humans , heat or cold ?
On the other hand when I take a look at my skin – doesn’t even have to be a close one – I see those hairs… YMMV!
So ~4x CO2 and ~4 deg C warmer. ECS =~1C.
2 C? (2 doublings x 2C = 4C)
2C. One doubling (2xCO2) gives 1C. Two doublings (4xCO2) give 2C. Three doublings (8xCO2) give 3C.
If it were true that CO2 caused warming with an ECS of 1C, which it doesn’t.
So we all learned that about the Cretaceous period many years ago. Maybe we need 31,000 scientists to send a letter CNN, TWC, etc… Overwhelm them with truth!!
Al Gore and Michael Mann in mankinis? We’re all gonna die!!!!!!
Has anyone else noticed the subtle change in rhetoric of the IPCC recently? Just like they moved from global warming to climate change they have now gone from 2C rise to 2C ABOVE PRE INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. So now the “threat” they are talking about in 85 years time is just 1.2C above today’s levels! Pathetic really.
Has anyone else noticed the subtle change in rhetoric of the IPCC recently? Just like they moved from global warming to climate change they have now gone from 2C rise to 2C ABOVE PRE INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. So now the “threat” they are talking about in 85 years time is just 1.2C above today’s levels! Pathetic really.
I suppose the real question should be
We have already experience the 0.8C and life is wonderful. The rest of the Warmists’ complains are about bad weather and nothing else. Screaming about extreme weather doesn’t cut it.
Arctic death spiral has ‘paused’? Antarctica sea ice extent at record levels. The biosphere is greening. Agricultural production recently reported to be at record levels. The 50 million climate refugees can’t be found. Most coral island atolls have risen with sea level rise since the 1960s. Snowfalls are a thing of the present. Sea level rise has decelerated and so on……………. Bring on the +1.2°C rise.
Nothing to fear you say? How about writhing in agony in the jaws of T-Rex! Or all that extra CO2 painting a great big “hit me” target for comets to see from all the way out in the Oorte cloud!
Einstein once said “God does not play dice with the universe”. Are you suggesting that God plays boules? 🙂
Eric: Einstein may have said that but someone else said in reference to Einstein’s statement, (paraphrasing here) But He sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen
I usually tune out when I see the phrase, “According to Wikipedia”
Whether a 2 degree warmer world would be much better or worse, partly depends on where most of the land mass is. If most land is near the poles it is actually better for life if it is a but warmer. (such as now).
In the Cretaceous, Australian and Antarctica were joined, and India was also joined with Africa.
North and South America were apart from Eurasia and Africa, but not by as much as they are now.
It may have been warmer back then due to different ocean circulation, more circulation from equator to poles would increase average temperatures by reducing excessive ice build up and also methane capture near the poles.
“And if our civilisation has any money to spare on preparations for possible disasters, we should be spending that money on building meteor defences, not on trying to curb harmless CO2 emissions”
I don’t think meteor defences would work, but earthquake preparedness and building codes in developing countries is my pick. Volcanoes can be predicted and people evacuated, earthquakes and tsunamis not so much.
mpainter: I am a geologist. and the phrase “….the implications of basement granitoids from the middle of the Panamanian Isthmus that are dated to the Paleocene?” simply tells me that there were basement rocks being emplaced in the isthmus at that time. It does not say anything about the isthmus being closed closed at that time. From the paper by Montes et al…”These ﬁndings are interpreted to show that the SanBlas Range, as a single tectonic unit east of theCanal Basin (Fig. 1), was emergent above sealevel starting in late Eocene time through Oligo-cene and Miocene time, becoming a peninsula of North America since early Miocene time(Whitmore and Stewart, 1965; Kirby and Mac-Fadden, 2005). This paleogeographic conﬁgu-ration greatly restricts the width of the seaway [approx 200 km] separating the Paciﬁc and Caribbean waters since early Miocene times.” (My bold)
Now are you still going to insist that the isthmus was closed before 2.7 my?
It appears that no amount of evidence will disabuse mpainter of his anti-scientific fiction attachment.
Just for the record mpainter; the quote above is from the conclusions of the Monteset al paper which you chose to use as support for your contention that the seaway did not exist.
Thanks. I’m not a geologist, but obviously you have the real “gear” that our resident loon imagines he has.
Global warming is not in the league of giant meteors. AGW is in the league of intestinal worms. According to eminent economists surveyed by Bjorn Lomborg, deworming of schoolchildren is more urgent than global warming.
The greatest blooming of life in earth’s history is the Cambrian explosion when CO2 was 7,000 ppm and temperature was 22 C. If we want biodiversity explosion, keep pumping that life gas.
Why would economists be equipped to judge AGW risks? And a climate and attendant ecosystem suitable for an explosion of trilobites isn’t necessarily ideal for a large human population.
Also, if Wikipedia is the be believed, “The later half of Cambrian was surprisingly barren and show evidence of several rapid extinction events”. That would be the hot part of the Cambrian.
I suggest you look farther than Wiki before leaping to conclusions. Three main extinction events are recognized in the Cambrian, generally attributed to the breakup of supercontinent Rodinia. Please explain how you imagine these events were related to global warming. Thanks.
Catherine – I don’t imagine those extinction events had anything to do with warming; and I don’t think the earlier explosion of (marine) life did either. That was kind of the point.
Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Warming was arguably responsible for the Cambrian Explosion of larger animals with hard body parts. Before that, during the previous Snowball Earth episode and its still cold followup, organisms were small and soft-bodied.
Throughout geologic time, warming has generally been good for life and cold worse. High levels of CO2 are also usually better for living things. Most plants get near to starving during ice ages.
“Why would economists be equipped to judge AGW risks?”
Because unlike you, they can do a credible cost-benefit analysis. Stalling economic growth will kill more poor people than climate change.
“And a climate and attendant ecosystem suitable for an explosion of trilobites isn’t necessarily ideal for a large human population.”
Yeah sure because trilobites can’t build air-conditioners. Isn’t it too hot in Dubai? Why are the Arabs still alive?
“Also, if Wikipedia is the be believed, “The later half of Cambrian was surprisingly barren and show evidence of several rapid extinction events”. That would be the hot part of the Cambrian.”
The temperature in Cambrian period was almost constant at 22 C but CO2 went down to below 5,000 ppm in the later half, so the extinctions. Plants and animals didn’t like low CO2.
Modeling is a [poorly] educated guess. The real conclusion of climate science today sounds like Donald Rumsfeld.: We know that there are so many known and unknown knowns that it’s impossible to know. You know?
PS 4X today’s CO2? Even less reason to worry, since all the CO2 ever spewed by mankind has been unable to produce even half of one doubling from a lower starting point. We have until beyond 2200 to develop energy answers if CO2 is even revealed to be a concern by then.
The arrangement of the continents was a lot different during the cretaceous as well. Which meant different ocean currents, Antarctica wasn’t at the south pole so there was no mile thick ice sheet lowering sea levels.
I had a number of replies to my semi-trolling, so I’m just going post a new comment. My ideas are not fixed, I read this site specifically to get different views on a topic that I think is important. I’ve been interested in AGW since the late 90s, and while far from a scientist, I’ve spent considerable time researching it and the evidence in favour is overwhelming.Every major scientific organization on the planet agrees, as does the Pentagon, the insurance industry, the World Bank, and even major oil companies (if you believe their websites). Cherry-picking denialist chunks of data out of context doesn’t change that.
Claims that warming has stopped is simply untrue. 2010 was the warmest year on record, and it seems likely that 2014 will beat it, even without El Nino. I’ve seen climate change in the city where I live in the last 2 decades, and it has not been beneficial.
I acknowledge that there is much uncertainty around outcomes as the temperature rises, but since changes will be largely irreversible in any time frame that has meaning to humans, it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing we should be making bets on.
Anyway, you seem like a relatively civilized bunch compared to some sites, and I plan to keep coming here, because I want to believe that everything is going to be fine (I have a young son.) However, I’ll need more compelling evidence than what I’ve seen thus far.
And I believe I will have that beer now….
Rupert Affen, you made a lot of claims without references. Bad teddy!
Agreeing does not make you right! Let’s look at the insurance industry. What are the big, globally spread re-insurers saying? Why would they say the following? Have you sat back to think about it? Reality strikes you between the eyes between what they say about the future and what they observe.
The Pentagon is under orders to fight “climate change”. Whatever its “opinion” is now will change when & if the C-in-C changes.
The pleeeeeeeeeeease gather up the courage and tell the following climate scientists. They can be found HERE. Here is small recent sample just covering this year. The link I gave you covers pre-2014.
I’ll see your articles and raise you these:
““Climate change is likely to be one of the global mega-trends impacting sovereign creditworthiness, in most cases negatively,” says S&P, in its report. It’s a view generally supported by Lloyd’s of London, which just said that climate-associated risks must be considered when underwriting policies.”
says Robert Muir-Wood, the chief scientist of Risk Management Solutions (RMS), a company that creates software models to allow insurance companies to calculate risk. “In the past, when making these assessments, we looked to history. But in fact, we’ve now realized that that’s no longer a safe assumption—we can see, with certain phenomena in certain parts of the world, that the activity today is not simply the average of history.”
This pronounced shift can be seen in extreme rainfall events, heat waves and wind storms. The underlying reason, he says, is climate change, driven by rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Rupert Affen, you quoted Forbes business magazine:
It’s based on future speculation! Please read between the lines. What I gave you was what the insurance industry actually evaluated as current.
Here are words to be wary of in the global warming glossary book.
Could, might, may, likely, possible, future, likelihood etc. Put down the Kool Aid my friend. READ BETWEEN THE LINES.
Then you carry on as usual quoting industry instead of the peer reviewed literature.
Really! Where is their data? Why in CERTAIN PARTS OF THE WORLD. You did say we cherry pick!!! Was this conclusion peer reviewed???? Average is where you have been had. You are being lulled by the weather and not climate. Open your eyes, 30 years is climate and not 10 years or 15 years.
First, which city do you live in? It’s all right, I don’t want to know which house you live in :-). But I’d like to know of the bad climatic effects you refer to.
Second, if you think that 2014 will be the warmest year globally, do you wonder why temperature series like HadCRUT3 have been discontinued? It is because they would have refuted that. Likewise, the satellite measurements refute it. But even if 2014 turns out to be an epsilon warmer than 1998 and 2010, it still may not be enough to stop a linear trend from 1997 pointing slightly downwards. All you could say would be “well, it isn’t provably cooling yet”.
Toronto.The specific effects I’m talking about are brief but very intense rainstorms that have caused serious flooding a couple of times over the last couple of years. While I’m sure that many on this site wouldn’t attribute these storms to climate change, it’s something that didn’t used to happen (I’ve been here 30 years) and it fits the pattern predicted in an analysis of potential climate change impacts on the city.
Rupert, THERE YOU GO AGAIN. Where is your evidence??? You seem to be obsessed with the weather. Ask the British, they have been obsessed with the weather for 100’s of years.
Yet Rupert accuses us of cherry picking. The climate and weather are not steady and stable. Where are you coming from? Here is stable weather for you. READ and remember.
1935 climate change events???
1936 climate change events???
You decide Rupert. How odd do those CATASTROPHIC weather events sound like. It never happened in the last 30 years they said, but they felt it.
Was 2010 warmer than 1998? Please provide at least 3 references from the relevant weather / climate agencies showing the data that shows that “2010 was the warmest year on record”?
Without knowing the city I cannot rebut your claim. Maybe you are suffering from the effects of too much heat via UHI. Take a cool drink and relax. Turn on the air conditioning and enjoy the energy. If its too cold then blame global warming too. It’s win win.
Really? Look back through the geologic record and repeat your claim about “changes will be largely irreversible”. You know you will not get away with such a claim. Find out how the White Cliffs of Dover got there.
As for your AD HOM on cherry pick, it seems you have decided to cherry pick. Look back up this page and call ALL MY REFERENCES as cherry picks. The PETM is not a cherry pick it’s a fact. The Eemian interglacial is a fact. The termination of the last glaciation is a fact. Facts for which I gave you references. Attack those references and don’t attack me.
You talk about the Pentagon. Please read this from the past.
November 5, 2014 at 1:08 pm
“Toronto.The specific effects I’m talking about are brief but very intense rainstorms that have caused serious flooding a couple of times over the last couple of years. it’s something that didn’t used to happen (I’ve been here 30 years) and it fits the pattern predicted in an analysis of potential climate change impacts on the city.”
Rupert, the media are trying to program the masses into seeing every anomalous weather event as proof of climate change. Because anomalous weather events are common people can be easily confused by this programming. Weather is not climate.
I live above a flood plain and the first 5 years I lived here we had 3 hundred year floods, leading me to believe the local climate was changing. The last 16 years there has been only mild to no flooding.
Weather and climate are cyclical and unpredictable.That is what makes the subjects so interesting. Individual events are only proof of internal variability.
Dear Rupert Affen —
Claims that warming has stopped is simply untrue.‘
Don’t tell us folks here, honey. Go tell the global warming climate scientists like Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth — the very same ones whose work gives your “every major scientific organization” and Pentagon et al the idea that there is a warming problem at all — that they are wasting their time trying to explain the, yes, lack of warming. Tell THEM the World Bank understands climate better than they who have built their climatology careers on global warming.
They are actual climatologists, actual warmist climatologists. And THEY are looking for mechanisms that may cause “lag times” (Phil Jones) or the “missing heat” (Trenberth’s phrase, not mine) to maybe be going into the deep ocean instead of the air. Who are you, to tell them they are wasting their time (and funding)?
“The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warming, and it is a travesty that we cannot.” K. Trenberth, 2009. (emphasis added)
“My ideas are not fixed, I read this site specifically to get different views on a topic that I think is important.”
Then, you should decease with perjoratives (“denialist”) until you have made a decision. Given your inflammatory rhetoric, it appears likely you already have, and are concern-trolling.
“…the evidence in favour is overwhelming.”
“Every major scientific organization on the planet agrees, as does the Pentagon, the insurance industry, the World Bank, and even major oil companies (if you believe their websites).”
I.e., every organization which stands to gain. Cui bono?
“Cherry-picking denialist chunks of data out of context doesn’t change that.”
Cherry-picking cultist chunks of data out of context doesn’t work, either.
“Claims that warming has stopped is simply untrue.”
At negligible levels. Far, far below what was projected by the IPCC, and not at a level to be of concern. Indeed, it is clear that the approximately 60 year cycle is repeating, and we will be in for a lull for perhaps 20 more years. The long term trend of about 0.75 deg C/century is unchanged since the LIA, before CO2 could have initiated it, and it is not a particularly alarming pace.
“…since changes will be largely irreversible in any time frame that has meaning to humans…”
This is an article of faith. But, given that they got the projections so badly wrong, why would anyone have faith that any other part of the narrative is necessarily true?
“desist” – spell check
Bart, is that really you? You’ve changed msn.
I may not be the Bart you are thinking of. It’s a common name.
Troposphere temperature isn’t the sole measure of warming. Recent evidence suggests that the oceans, which absorb 90% of the excess heat, are heating much faster than previously believed. Your thoughts? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mystery-of-ocean-heat-deepens-as-climate-changes/
The deep oceans, where Kevin imagines the missing heat to be hiding, appear to have cooled instead: