Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Unprecedented In A Thousand Years

Fig. 1 What goes up NASA / Guardian
Some quotes from "Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies" and the Guardian:
The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa’s top climate scientist.
...
“In the last 30 years we’ve really moved into exceptional territory,” Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. “It’s unprecedented in 1,000 years. There’s no period that has the trend seen in the 20th century in terms of the inclination (of temperatures).”

“Maintaining temperatures below the 1.5C guardrail requires significant and very rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions or co-ordinated geo-engineering. That is very unlikely. We are not even yet making emissions cuts commensurate with keeping warming below 2C.”

Schmidt repeated his previous prediction that there is a 99% chance that 2016 will be the warmest year on record, with around 20% of the heat attributed to a strong El Niño climatic event. Last year is currently the warmest year on record, itself beating a landmark set in 2014.

“It’s the long-term trend we have to worry about though and there’s no evidence it’s going away and lots of reasons to think it’s here to stay,” Schmidt said. “There’s no pause or hiatus in temperature increase. People who think this is over are viewing the world through rose-tinted spectacles. This is a chronic problem for society for the next 100 years.”
(Earth is warming at a pace 'unprecedented in 1,000 years', emphasis added). Some 93% (estimates vary a bit) of the heat increase, like the plastic garbage, finds its way into the oceans.

The heat and garbage have an impact on the five garbage gyres in the oceans of the world.
Fig. 2 Five Zeros For Civilization

In a recent post I focused on one of those five gyres (On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction - 5, cf. New Continent Found - Garbage Gyre II - 9).

I did so because, among other things, various oceanographers were perplexed by what they call "the blob," which is an unusually warm spot in the eastern portion of the pacific ocean gyre area (could the garbage cause a darker albedo?).

Today, let's look at the other four garbage gyres, and specifically let's look under the covers with the World Ocean Database (WOD).

Compare Fig. 2 with Fig. 7 to locate the garbage gyres and the WOD zones.

Then view Fig. 3 - Fig. 6 to see what is happening with the temperatures from the ocean surface down into the depths.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Fig. 7 Sampled WOD Zones



7 comments:

  1. Killing ourselves and most all life on the planet via our hydra-headed pollution problem: radiation, CO2, water vapor (plus methane and hydrogen sulfide, as the Earth reacts), plastic, unrecycled trash, toxic chemicals, and on and on.

    Tom

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good stuff Dredd!
    Many thanks!
    ..dovetailing your work.

    "Glacial Isostatic Adjustment"

    SLC / Mitrovica / polar wandering / earthquakes / volcanos



    "You may not know it, but the Last Ice Age is still quietly transforming the Earth’s surface and affecting everything from the length of our days to the topography of our countries."

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/melting-glaciers-are-wreaking-havoc-earths-crust-180960226/?no-ist

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Scientists are still trying to create an accurate model of glacial isostatic adjustment, says Richard Snay, the lead author of the most recent study in the Journal of Geophysical Research." -Mark's link

      Yep, its is tough to model something that does not exist.

      They, in effect, misquote Mitrovica "In 2015, Harvard geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica published a study" by not mentioning that he explains the sea level drop in that area is due to ice-mass loss which equates to gravitational pull loss, thus releasing the water along the S.E. Alaska coast to relocate toward the equator.

      Your link is to a deceptive piece Mark, providing no evidence: "Scientists are still trying to create an accurate model of glacial isostatic adjustment", says Richard Snay, the lead author ... “There’s been such software since the early '90s for longitude and latitude measurements but vertical measurements have always been difficult” (they don't even have an accurate model for their unscientific assertions - "Got Eugenics?").

      In other words "we can talk about it but can't measure it."

      This old myth, like the "thermal expansion being the main cause of sea level rise" myth, is due to myopic specialization.

      Meanwhile, and to the contrary, the GRACE satellite program provides abundant evidence to show the gravity loss associated with the ice-mass loss IN REAL TIME.

      Maybe these anti-gravity folks, who like the high priests of science back then, wanted to burn people like Newton because he was a "hippy" of sorts (The Warming Science Commentariat - 3).

      Their myth will have a difficult time explaining the actual data, unlike the scientifically sound explanation (e.g. Proof of Concept - 3).

      Delete
  3. from Scribbler's comments section (hat tip to Erik):

    Melting Ice, Rising Seas (Part Four) - Prof Rob DeConto, University of Massachusetts

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK_8Pfo6wRk

    Tom

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tom,

      That video perpetuates the "thermal expansion as the cause of most sea level rise myth" (TEM) or at least alludes to it (see graphs @ 15:00 to 15:46 in the video).

      That they had IPCC SLC influence, which has never failed to underestimate SLC, is a bad sign (IPCC is better at temperature and GHG percentage projections).

      There must be some reason the IPCC sea level rise projections have all been wrong underestimates.

      It is a function of psychology of "the law of when."

      Delete
  4. Yep, I listened to it all and thought you'd like to give us a heads' up. It's interesting. I'm nowhere near as up on the science of sea level change as you, but from reading your blog I've learned and can spot these differences now. Thanks for continuing to educate, Dredd.

    Tom

    ReplyDelete