Did You Know That a 4K Temperature Rise Would Melt All the Ice in Antarctica and Justify the End of Capitalism?

The state government of Arizona pays the advocate of these ideas to teach our children this pathetic propaganda.

The New York Times published an Opinion article by Benjamin Y. Fong, a faculty fellow at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University, entitled The Climate Crisis? It's Capitalism, Stupid.  He calls for the end of Capitalism because Capitalism will inevitably bring about a mass extinction of life on Earth.  He says the mass extinction of life will be caused by a continuation of our current political systems.  By 2100, even with the USA in the Paris Accord, we were well on the way to a 7.2⁰F temperature increase by 2100 according to Fong.  He claims that a 7.2⁰F increase in the temperature of the Earth has previously melted all of the ice at either pole and may do so again.  Consequently, socialism, even communism, has no need to justify itself, because they cannot be as bad as the death warrant stupid Capitalism guarantees us.

Let us examine stupid.  A 7.2⁰F temperature increase is a 4⁰C temperature increase.  Ice melts at 0⁰C.  The highest temperature ever recorded at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was -12.3⁰C.  The warmest month at the South Pole is January and the average highest daily temperature in that month is -26.0⁰C.  It will be a most interesting trick when a 4⁰C temperature increase melts all of the ice in Antarctica.  This would increase the warmest temperature ever recorded there to only -8.3⁰C and the warmest monthly average temperature to -22⁰C.  Yes, an average temperature increase of 4⁰C would probably be the result of a greater temperature increase at the poles than in the equatorial region, but there is plenty of margin at the South Pole to allow for that.

Before you kill Capitalism because you claim it will bring on a mass extinction of life, please show me that a continuation of our current political institutions will actually cause:

• an average temperature increase of 4⁰C
• a temperature increase at the South Pole of at least 12.3⁰C, or more realistically, an increase of 26⁰C
• that the melting of all the ice at the poles will bring on a mass extinction of life
• that an average temperature increase of 4⁰C, which must be much less in the equatorial regions in order to be 12.3⁰C or more at the South Pole and also more at the North Pole, will bring on the extinction of all life
• that my chance of surviving Communist or other authoritarian socialist societies, with their history of killing over 160 million people, is greater than my chance of surviving a mass extinction
• that a life under Communism is a life worth living

The burden of reasonable proof that Capitalism will inevitably doom us all does not go away simply because someone asserts that Capitalism will have dire consequences for the survival of living creatures on Earth.  So far, most living creatures are not doing badly under Capitalism, while specifically human beings are doing better than they ever have before because of Capitalism.  Capitalism has a history of improving the human condition, while Communism has a history of killing tens of millions of human beings and depriving those who manage to survive of their individual rights and making their survival much more marginal.

It is amazing what people with a political or religious agenda will claim for a 1.4% (4K/288K) increase in the average Earth temperature.  Or, consider the mass extinction that occurs in Denver every September when the temperature rises an average of 30⁰F (16.7⁰C) from the daily average low temperature to the daily average high temperature.  The stupid hat does not go on the Capitalist.  It belongs as anyone committed to reason knows on the head of those who embrace Communism and on those who embrace Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming.  These people seem to never learn the errors of their thinking, which must be the definition of stupid.  Intelligent people have some ability to identify their mistakes and to learn from them.  Intelligence does not guarantee that onw will not make mistakes in a complex world and universe, but it does require a constant concern that one's beliefs are consistent with reality.

It is apparent that intelligence is not a requirement for a faculty position in the Honors College at Arizona State University.  Unfortunately, it is no more required in many other universities either.  Conformity of belief to the Progressive Elitist beliefs in socialism and the essentially evil nature of man is much more important at most universities than is intelligence.

NASA Finally Agrees that Antarctic Ice has Long been Increasing

A NASA paper published in the Journal of Glaciology found that Antarctic ice has long been increasing in agreement with many other studies, but in disagreement with the UN IPCC report of 2013.  Its main conclusions are:

• The Antarctic ice sheet had net gains in ice of 112 billion tons per year from 1992 to 2001.
• Antarctic ice from 2003 to 2008 had a net gain of 82 billion tons per year.
• Extra snowfall in East Antarctica began about 10,000 years ago as the Earth warmed after the last Ice Age and this snowfall thickened the East Antarctic and the interior regions of the West Antarctic by 1.7 cm/year.  This accumulation over vast expanses more than offsets the melting of ice on the West Antarctic peninsula which gets so much publicity.
• The increased ice in Antarctica is now acting to reduce sea levels by 0.23 mm/year.

One of the more interesting observations on this data is that the global warming due to the end of the last Ice Age caused more snowfall in Antarctica, which serves to counterbalance the rise in sea level due to the thermal expansion of water in a warmer world.  This is one of many ways in which the Earth moderates climate changes.

The findings of this study were the result of more accurate measurements of the small thickening of the ice in most of Antarctica from satellite measurements, with the exception of the ice core investigations by others that indicated the increase in snowfall beginning 10,000 years ago.  It would not be surprising if the application of these satellite analysis methods to Greenland were to find that previous claims of large ice losses there were also wrong.  It is easy to observe large glaciers calving into the ocean while missing the slow increases of ice thickness over much larger areas.

The Disappearance of the Arctic Ice Coverage

We are hearing many claims that the arctic ice has melted, retreated to historic low coverage, and that this is due to global warming.  Actually the big drivers of arctic ice coverage are usually wind and sometimes precipitation.  The main reason for the present low arctic ice coverage is an August cyclone that broke up the arctic ice coverage.  See the NASA video of the cyclone winds here.


Meanwhile, and little remarked, the ice coverage in Antarctica is near a record high.  At Real Science it is noted that:

Day 256 Antarctic ice is the highest ever for the date, and the eighth highest daily reading ever recorded. All seven higher readings occurred during the third week of September, 2007 – the week of the previous Arctic record minimum.

 See the Day 256 Antarctic ice coverage data below:

There is no evidence here for the often claimed global warming.  Perhaps we can find some evidence by looking at sea level data.  Well, here is the NOAA sea level data, which you must remember is the result of the sea level and the level of the land.  Just as the sea level may actually rise or fall, so does the land at these various coastal areas.  If you adjust the world map to examine North America and Europe, you will see that mostly the sea level is rising in the 0 to 3 mm/yr range indicated by upward green arrows.  In these areas, the land is relatively static and this is indicative of the range in which the real sea level rise is to be found.  But, you will observe that the Mississippi delta is sinking, as is the Texas coast at a more moderate rate.  Similarly to the Texas coast sinking, there is sinking land in South Carolina and in the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay areas.  On the other hand, there is rising land on the Canadian and Alaskan Pacific coasts and in parts of the St. Lawrence River area.  In Europe, most of Norway, Sweden, and Finland have rising land.  There are a few areas in the Aegean Sea that are sinking, but most of Europe has a sea level rise in the 0 to 3 mm/year range.

So, even at the top of this range, 100 years of rising at 3 mm/year is 0.3 meters, which is at the bottom end of the range of the 2007 4th IPCC report prediction for the next 100 years.  The NOAA data actually looks more consistent with a rate of 0.15 meters over the next 100 years, but even that may be too high given the indications of an on-coming global cooling.  Given that through most of the last 10,000 years sea level has been rising, though land levels in many areas have also as the weight of glaciers was removed from the land, there is no looming catastrophe here.

Antarctic Visitors Told to Clean Boots Due to Global Warming Stress

This one is just funny and pathetic.  The once highly respected (in some circles) UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 claims that visitors to Antarctica must clean their boots to prevent contamination of the local environment because it is under stress due to global warming!  The reference given is about how to clean one's boots.  Now that is fine, but you would be expecting that the reference says something about the stress caused by global warming on Antarctica and how the boot cleaning relates to that.  It does not even mention global warming and Antarctica!

Clearly, the UN IPCC AR4 report was counting on the same thing that the Democrats in the U.S. Congress made a practice of counting on in 2009.  They created documents so long they figured no one would actually read them and in the case of the UN IPCC, check out the references.

Another Cosmic Ray Effect on the Climate

I have previously discussed the variability of cosmic radiation incident upon the Earth and its effect upon climate through the formation of sunlight-reflecting clouds here, here, here, here, and here.  Now there is a theory that the interaction of cosmic rays with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and their effect upon the ozone layer have completely controlled the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres since 1950.  Qing-Bin Lu, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, was studying the depletion of the Earth's ozone layer, which was known to be a result of CFCs and of cosmic ray radiation.  He has discovered that CO2 concentrations have no effect upon the Arctic and Antarctic surface temperatures.  He says the concentration of CFCs, which are greenhouse gases, decreased in about 2000 and global temperatures have fallen since then.

Lu claims that the warming from 1950 to 2000 became cooling in 2002 and the cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years.  He says from 1850 to 1950, global temperatures were nearly constant or rose by only 0.1C.

In previously published work, Lu demonstrated that an observed cyclic hole in the ozone layer provided proof of a new ozone depletion theory involving cosmic rays, which was developed by Lu and his former co-workers at Rutgers University and the Université de Sherbrooke. In the past, it was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth's ozone layer is depleted due to the sun's ultraviolet light-induced destruction of CFCs in the atmosphere.
The depletion theory says cosmic rays, rather than the sun's UV light, play the dominant role in breaking down ozone-depleting molecules and then ozone. In his study, published in Physical Review Letters, Lu analyzed reliable cosmic ray and ozone data in the period of 1980-2007, which cover two full 11-year solar cycles.

In his latest paper, Lu further proves the cosmic-ray-driven ozone depletion theory by showing a large number of data from laboratory and satellite observations. One reviewer wrote: "These are very strong facts and it appears that they have largely been ignored in the past when modelling the Antarctic ozone loss."

New observations of the effects of CFCs and cosmic rays on ozone loss and global warming/cooling could be important to the Earth and humans in the 21st century. "It certainly deserves close attention," Lu wrote in his paper, entitled Cosmic-Ray-Driven Electron-Induced Reactions of Halogenated Molecules Adsorbed on Ice Surfaces: Implications for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change.

The paper, published Dec. 3 in Physics Reports, is available online at: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2009.12.002.

My expectation is that Lu effect may be significant and may be particularly important in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, but the effect of cosmic rays on cloud nucleation and formation in the mid-latitudes and tropics is also important.  In both cases, the flux of cosmic rays on Earth is largely controlled by the solar wind and therefore by the solar cycle.  Of course the direct solar irradiance, which also changes with the solar cycle, is also important, as is the most important greenhouse gas, water vapor.  These are the dominant factors affecting the net energy input to the Earth, with ocean cycles playing an important role in the transfer of long-stored energy to or from the atmosphere as well.  Volcanoes, hot springs in the oceans, the interaction of the Sun's electromagnetic field with the Earth's, and the solar wind as a flux of incident particles itself, all play roles in the climate and its variations as well.  The magnitude of each of these factors on the climate is as yet not well enough understood.  One thing that is clear is that the effect of CO2 at present atmospheric concentrations or at those concentrations which are higher than at present, is a relatively unimportant effect upon climate change.

All-Time Low in Summer Antarctic Satellite Snow Melt Index

The summer of October 2008 through January 2009 saw an all-time record low Antarctic snow melt according to satellite microwave observations from 1980 to 2009.  The all-time high snowmelt was the summer of October 1992 to January 1993.  The snowmelt record was just published by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in Geophysical Research Letters.  The history is plotted below:

The pattern would be that this will be given little attention in the newspapers and televised media, where the upper melt rates in the periodic changes are given much more attention than the lower melt rates are given.

Global Warming Implies Warming and Cooling in the Same Place

Global warming alarmists have been focusing media attention for several years on some warming of the Antarctic peninsula and the ice shelves around it. This penisula juts northward toward the southern tip of South America, so it is strongly influenced by the local ocean currents. It represents a much smaller fraction of the land mass of Antarctica than the East Antarctica area where the ice mass has been increasing for many years. Computer modelers who claimed the earth was warming rapidly due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions were convinced that a cooling trend in the bulk of Antarctica was consistent with man-made global warming.

Patrick Michaels just wrote an article called Climate Scientists Blow Hot and Cold pointing out that a recent study of the temperature record in Antarctica by Eric Steig of the University of Washington used satellite observations to provide a means to track temperatures across wider areas of Antarctica than ever before. Most thermometer recording sites were on the coasts and very few were in the interior of the huge continent. The result is that relative to the temperatures of the 1950s and 1960s, there has been a slight warming of Antarctica as a whole, though almost all of it occurred in the early part of the time-frame from then to now. This indicates an earlier warming effect than has been claimed elsewhere for the man-made global warming by CO2 emissions proponents, which is puzzling.

Computer modelers have been delighted, however. Even though they claimed that a non-warming or a slightly cooling Antarctica was consistent with their global warming models, they are happier with a slight warming and are now claiming that that is consistent with their models.

Apparently all observed results are consistent with their models. If it warms for the next 10 years in Siberia, that is consistent. If it cools for the next 10 years in Siberia, that is consistent. If the higher altitude atmosphere warms, that is consistent. This is indeed a prediction that it should be warmer than the earth surface temperatures. But in fact, there has been no warming of these higher altitude air temperatures, let alone to higher temperatures than the earth's surface. But this gives the CO2 emissions global warmers no pause. It appears that there is no observation which will give them pause.

No matter what, man-made CO2 emissions are going to cause a disaster sometime in the future. So, stop exhaling now, so you will be morally pure and not responsible for this catastrophe! Then, there will be no need to force you to stop using coal or natural gas generated electricity or heating your home or business with gas, oil, or coal, using products manufactured with fossil fuel energy, or moving about in cars and trucks and planes.

Ocean Cooling with Expansion?

While visiting Robert Bidinotto's Blog, I found a note he had written on an account called The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat by Richard Harris of NPR. This article discusses the Argo buoy system finding that the oceans are not only not warming, but they are if anything cooling slightly. But, Harris goes on to note that in the last 4 years in which these measurements were made, the oceans also rose about 0.5 inches. It is said there that this is a lot. In general, the Global Warming alarmists have been cranking up the fear that there will be very great sea level increases due to man emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere. Certainly 0.5 inch is not a lot, except that those of this alarmist mindset have a tendency to project change at the rate measured over short times far into the future if it is consistent with catastrophe. Ofttimes, they will even assume positive feedbacks that amplify the rate of change in the future.

Wikipedia has an article called Sea Level Rise. There is a plot on the first page showing the rise in sea level since the last Glacial Maximum about 21,000 years ago. There has been a rise of sea level of about 125 meters since then. However, for the last 7,000 years, there has been little change in sea level, but there is a slightly positive slope to the data since then. Since about 1910, there has been a roughly linear increase in sea level of about 20 cm or a bit less than 8 inches, according to the first graph in the article, titled Recent Sea Level Rise. If you examine the fluctuations in that curve, you will see that in the mid-1980s to the early 1990s there is a sudden dip in sea level followed by a rapid increase. These changes were at least 3 cm, or about 1.2 inches. Still, the overall averaged curve before and after that time is approximately linear. With this perspective, a 0.5 inch change in 4 years is not a reason to throw industry and the automobile upon the scrapheap. They would love to tie humans down to propelling grind stones by walking in circles hour after hour and put horses back on our roads.

The NPR article mentions ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland as a possible reason for the sea level increase in the last 4 years, since there has been no thermal expansion of the ocean water due to increased temperature in that time. However, with most of Antarctica experiencing an increase in ice cap thickness, while only the western peninsula is losing ice, it is not clear that the Antarctica effect is very large or even a positive one. Greenland also has areas of receding glaciers and others with ice thickness increases. There has been recent growth of ice in western Greenland and in the interior regions, while there has been loss of ice near the sea on the eastern side. What is the net effect on the sea level?

There are other factors that affect sea level:

• Sediment washed into the seas
• Changes in the salinity of ocean water
• Changes in the amount of dissolved gases such as oxygen and carbon dioxide.
• Earth rotational variations or Chandler wobble
• El Nino/southern oscillation
• Tectonic plate movements
• Volcanic creation of new land masses in the ocean
• Earthquakes dropping land into the sea or opening new chasms undersea
• Atmospheric humidity
• Changes in water in lakes, rivers, soil, and minerals on land
  

These factors are not commonly going to be constant over any 4 year period of time. The Wikipedia article also notes that the TOPEX and JASON satellites making sea level measurements since 1992 have determined a 2.9 +- 0.4 mm sea level rise since 1992. This is an error of about 14% and the error over any four-year period is probably substantially larger. So, there is likely to be significant error in the 0.5 inch measurement.

It would be very interesting if a contributor to the sea level rise proved to be an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans. Since the CO2 in the atmosphere has increased in the last 4 years and the ocean temperature has not, the equilibrium in the exchange of CO2 molecules between the oceans and the atmosphere will be shifted due to the present higher concentration in the atmosphere. This means that the oceans will dissolve more carbon dioxide and that will increase the volume of the ocean waters. I do not know the size of this effect and whether it is a substantial part of a 0.5 inch rise in sea level, however. It would be interesting to learn something about the magnitude of this effect.

The Cooling Oceans and Unwarmed Atmosphere

When I brought up FireFox to check my e-mail this afternoon, I was greeted with a Yahoo video on the collapse of a part of the Wilkens Ice Shelf on the Western Peninsula of Antarctica of an ice area the size of Manhattan. It was said that at least one scientist said this is further proof of Global Warming. Well, there has long been a focus on this peninsular region of Antarctica due to loss of ice and, indeed, this part of Antarctica has lost ice for years. However, this area is a very small part of Antarctica and the vast majority of Antarctica has been increasing its ice mass for many years!

A couple of interesting commentaries have just surfaced which I would direct your attention to. In the first, Lorne Gunter wrote in the National Post in Canada, about the ocean temperature readings made in great proliferation by 3,000 Argo buoys since they were first deployed in 2003. They drift in the oceans at a depth of 2,000 meters and then about every 10 days they spend 6 hours rising to the surface, taking temperature data in each layer of the sea, and they broadcast their data to satellites, before sinking back to a 2000 meter depth. What have these ocean monitors found since 2003? There has been a slight cooling of the average ocean temperature! Given that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise, this is a bit of a problem for the Man-is-wrecking-the-Earth-with-greenhouse-gases crowd. Apparently, 80 to 90% of the global warming due to CO2 is supposed to be warming of the oceans, which are then supposed to heat the atmosphere. This article also notes that NASA has 8 weather satellites that take 300,000 temperature readings every day all over the earth, compared to a mere 7,000 measurements by Earth ground stations, [too often located near population centers.] The satellites over 30 years have found only a 0.14 degree Centigrade per decade temperature increase on average.

Christopher Pearson wrote an interview with Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia published in The Australian. Marohasy notes that referenced to 1998, the earths average temperature has since fallen and if you take 2002 as your reference point, the temperature has been about constant since then. Then she notes that the NASA Aqua satellite launched in 2002 has provided data on temperature, cloud cover, and water vapor which contradicts a key assumption of the global warming computer models. The models have all thought that increasing CO2 would produce warming, which would produce more water vapor, [and since 95% of all greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor,] this would lead to accelerated heating of the atmosphere. WRONG! The Aqua satellite data shows that the increase in water vapor leads to a counteracting cooling. Thus, in engineering terms, the assumed positive feedback is really a negative feedback. [This reduction of the CO2 greenhouse effect is presumably due to increased cloud cover with increased water vapor and the reflection of considerable radiation of the sun back into space by the clouds.]

[These brackets indicate my additional comments relative to the information in these articles.]

Thanks to Robert Tracinski who pointed these two articles out in his TIA Daily.

It will be fascinating to watch the process of many of the careless, and often immoral, scientists backing away from their errors and this emotional declaration that man is ruining the earth by using fuels that create CO2. The response of the politicians will be even more interesting and more important. They have so many plans to ride roughshod over the rights of the individual in the name of saving the planet and thereby some elite portion of the animal kingdom, which will largely not include the human part. Should cooling continue, we will hear that we must prepare for the coming Ice Age and that this will require fascist socialist control of all human activity by an international government! Scaremongers are very resourceful and they will not hesitate to convince the People to give up their rights as the only way to prevent one crisis or another. The fascist have long used the fears induced by crises, often made up, to mobilize the people in one common effort, while minimizing their tendency to use reason. This technique has been taught in fascist and socialist circles for more than 100 years and used by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, Lenin, FDR, Hitler, Kennedy (The Missile Gap, etc.), LBJ, and Clinton (Its the economy, stupid!, even as the economy was improving already from a much smaller dip than I Feel Your Pain Clinton made it out to be.)