Willis Eschenbach turns on the charm for NOAA's coral watch crew

Wondering Willis Eschenbach is giving us all a lesson in how to win friends and influence people. The lesson came about because he was wondering why NOAA gave some rough estimates to the Guardian without asking his permission first. The numbers were about the global coral bleaching event that's on the cards. Willis wrote a courteous email to NOAA as follows (archived here):

Unstoppable meltdown in Antarctica - and at WUWT, with a doozy of chart

Anthony has taken another trip to Antarctica. This time he is complaining about an article in the Guardian, written by Suzanne Goldenberg. What Anthony seems to be complaining about is that the time scale of the projected total collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheets isn't in the headline, which reads:

Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn

So there is an indication of time - it's already started. Anthony's upset though. He reckons his deniers will only read the headline and get too scared to read any further. He's really scared that deniers won't read as far as the fourth sentence in the article, which is about the resulting four metre rise in sea level:

But the researchers said that even though such a rise could not be stopped, it is still several centuries off, and potentially up to 1,000 years away.

Abused by buried facts

Anthony thinks that if you have to read beyond 75 words of an 880 word article, then the next few words can be regarded as "buried".  He wrote:

Truly an abuse of the headline. Buried below the headline in the article, there is agreement with Revkin:

Anthony was referring to a five-year old article in DotEarth, which was about two papers published in Nature early in 2009. At the time (March 2009), Andy wrote about a paper in Nature, which modeled the West Antarctic ice sheets and reported that:

In this simulation, the ice sheet does collapse when waters beneath fringing ice shelves warm 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit or so, but the process at its fastest takes thousands of years. Over all, the pace of sea-level rise from the resulting ice loss doesn't go beyond about 1.5 feet per century.

Obviously as far as Anthony Watts is concerned, some models are good!

Collapses to the West and the East

What Suzanne Goldenberg was writing about in the Guardian today was a new paper by Eric Rignot and colleagues. This is the same Eric Rignot that Andy Revkin quoted five years ago (in Anthony's preferred 2009 article) writing:

Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory cautioned that the new findings were based on a single, fairly simple simulation and said that while the results matched well with the seabed evidence, they lacked the precision needed to know what will happen over short periods.

"This new study illustrates once more that the collapse of West Antarctica and parts of East Antarctica is not a myth." he said. "It happened many times before when the Earth was as warm as it is about to be. In terms of time scales, I do not think the results of this study are relevant to what will be happening in the next 100 years and beyond. The problem is far more complex. But this is a step forward."

Western Antarctica has already started to collapse, but it will take time

The long and short of it is that in denier land, it's an "abuse" to have a factual headline about new research findings:

Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn

That Guardian headline was mild compared to the NASA headline about the paper, which was:

West Antarctic glacier loss appears unstoppable

Anthony, for a change, not only included the title of the paper, which is:

Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011.

...he even copied and pasted the abstract. Though he didn't go as far as providing a link to it. (My paras & bold italics)

We measure the grounding line retreat of glaciers draining the Amundsen Sea Embayment of West Antarctica using Earth Remote Sensing (ERS-1/2) satellite radar interferometry from 1992 to 2011.

Pine Island Glacier retreated 31 km at its center, with most retreat in 2005–2009 when the glacier un-grounded from its ice plain.

Thwaites Glacier retreated 14 km along its fast-flow core and 1 to 9 km along the sides.

Haynes Glacier retreated 10 km along its flanks.

Smith/Kohler glaciers retreated the most, 35 km along its ice plain, and its ice shelf pinning points are vanishing.

These rapid retreats proceed along regions of retrograde bed elevation mapped at a high spatial resolution using a mass conservation technique (MC) that removes residual ambiguities from prior mappings. Upstream of the 2011 grounding line positions, we find no major bed obstacle that would prevent the glaciers from further retreat and draw down the entire basin.

Below is a map showing a couple of these glaciers. (Click to enlarge it.)

Source: Rignot13, Science

Anthony Watts doesn't usually go beyond newspapers and press releases. Scientific papers are a bit too deep for deniers. Anyway, he was comforted by Andy Revkin's 2009 headline, made especially for the scaredy cats like Anthony Watts and other science deniers:

Study: West Antarctic Melt a Slow Affair

Andy's latest headline on the subject was similarly aimed at calming the scaredy cats:

Consider Clashing Scientific and Societal Meanings of Collapse When Reading Antarctic Ice News

He's right of course. But deniers go way too far in the other direction.  They don't realise that only a couple of centuries from now, there could be a massive collapse causing a big rise in sea level. It might be later (I guess it might be sooner, too.)

Rabbet Run has the scary science

Eli Rabett has written about the study and what it means. It means that sometime in the next few centuries - maybe as soon as 200 years ahead (that is, it could be the children of your children's children who have to cope), the ice in West Antarctica could, over a matter of decades, cause a sudden large rise in sea level. Not something you would wish on your children or theirs.

Where are all the fake sceptic fact-checkers?

I don't know where all the fake sceptic fact-checkers have gone. They are quick off the mark if they see a similar mistake here, but a worse mistake at WUWT eludes them.  See if you can spot it.  Anthony wrote the following and put up a chart:

And there’s not any significant warming over the entire continent, as it is nearly flat as well (from 70S to the pole):

Source: WUWT

I think annual averages allow you to see the trend a bit better than monthly charts.

Data source: RSS

Did you see the main problem? Of course you got it. Anthony plotted a chart of the lower troposphere from the outer edge of Antarctica upwards to the equator. Antarctica is more like 70 south to 90 south. RSS doesn't show lower troposphere temperatures below 70S.

What happens near the surface is much more important

The other thing of course is that it's the temperature of the ocean that plays a very big role in melting the ice in West Antarctica. Probably much more so than the temperature of the lower troposphere.  There have been other papers about that. A reduction in snow cover can also speed up melting rather a lot.

From the WUWT comments

John Boles is optimistic and thinks the collapse will happen later rather than sooner, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:41 pm
It might be worse than we thought, well maybe in the distant future, our models suggest that it could happen perhaps in 1000 years.

Justthinkin doesn't do any thinking at all (or reading) and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:49 pm
So what’s the problem? She writes a piece full of BS,gets paid,and doesn’t give a hoot about what others say. Until you take away her paycheck,same old,same old. And scientific or un-scientific facts will not stop that. And just what the heck is “several centuries” or a thousand years? To me,several could be 20,000years from now.

Martin C is relieved that the seas may not rise quite four metres until after he's six feet under and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:51 pm
I think it’s great to see these extremely ‘alarmist’ headlines, followed by a bit less alarmist in the text. People will continue to see the ‘alarmism’ for what it is. And likely continued to get turned off by it. Especially when the same ‘journalists’ keep printing this crap. 

pablo an ex pat has been misled by Anthony, who recently made a big fool of himself, and doesn't realise how big Antarctica is (it's about twice the size of Australia ie around twice as big as contiguous USA), or that there are lots of mountains separating east and west, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:53 pm
So in two alarmist stories reported during the space of on one day on WUWT the Antarctic is getting colder and warmer all at the same time. It’s both gaining ice and it’s losing ice. And both these occurrences are issues that needs us to do something right now. What exactly ?

Ed P is not good at assessing relative risk but he values money, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:53 pm
Yellowstone could explode or meteors might wipe out most of humanity before the sea rises that much. All that is certain is that governments will steal your savings long before you need a boat. 

Jeff in Calgary doesn't have a clue what the new paper is about and yes, he's missing something:

May 12, 2014 at 3:22 pm
Isn’t this about a floating ice sheet? How is a floating ice sheet melting going to raise sea levels? Am I missing something? 

sadbutmadlad is sad and deluded and doesn't realise that climate is changing in the here and now, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 9:53 pm
The narrative works. Lie first, lie big. Just watching a BBC Breakfast item on the newspapers at 5:50am and they talked about not being able to do anything about global warming as its already here. No mention of the 1000 years, everything was couched in terms of immediacy. Even journalists don’t read the small print and are fooled by the article. Ultimate scaremongering

In all the 97 comments over 13 hours I didn't see one that picked up on Anthony's gaffe with his RSS temperature chart. There may have been one or two that discussed the science. The rest were pure unadulterated wails of denial.

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E. Rignot, J. Mouginot, M. Morlighem, H. Seroussi, B. Scheuchl. "Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011".. Geophysical Research Letters, 2014; DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060140

Rignot, E., S. Jacobs, J. Mouginot, and B. Scheuchl. "Ice-shelf melting around Antarctica." Science 341, no. 6143 (2013): 266-270. DOI: 10.1126/science.1235798

Peter Kuipers Munneke, Stefan R.m. Ligtenberg, Michiel R. Van Den Broeke, David G. Vaughan. "Firn air depletion as a precursor of Antarctic ice-shelf collapse". Journal of Glaciology, 2014; 60 (220): 205 DOI: 10.3189/2014JoG13J183

Huybrechts, Philippe. "Global change: West-side story of Antarctic ice." Nature 458, no. 7236 (2009): 295-296. doi:10.1038/458295a

Naish, Timothy, R. Powell, Richard Levy, G. Wilson, R. Scherer, Franco Talarico, L. Krissek et al. "Obliquity-paced Pliocene West Antarctic ice sheet oscillations." Nature 458, no. 7236 (2009): 322-328. doi:10.1038/nature07867

How much CO2 can the atmosphere take?

Or, more properly, how much CO2 in the atmosphere can we, as humans, tolerate?

The EU Commission has agreed new targets for reducing carbon emissions. The EU plan is described at the Guardian as:

• To cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels.  
• 27% of energy must come from renewable sources by 2030, which is described as a binding target as well as being described as "not yet clear whether the target will be binding at the level of member states". 
• No new legislation to regulate shale gas development.
• Reformation of the EU carbon trading scheme.

There is an article at the Guardian by Fiona Harvey and Ian Traynor that describes the EU's new targets in a bit more detail and provides some context.  For example, at one point they write: "Studies show that the EU's emissions are likely to be 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, making the targets easier to meet."

It's not a done deal yet.  It is still to be debated by member state governments, which I gather will be happening during March this year via the European Council, and the European Parliament. Given that some countries are forging ahead with emission reductions through renewable energy development and other means (eg energy efficiency), I gather that the emissions target and the renewables target are thought to be achievable.

The Cumulative Carbon Emissions Budget

The plan may be thought by some people to be ambitious, certainly compared to targets in other places, but is it enough?

Damian Carrington has an article at the Guardian about this from the point  of view of the cumulative carbon emissions budget.  He wrote:

For those focusing on climate change – the atmosphere right now is half full of carbon dioxide – the European commission's plan is clearly inadequate to meet the EU's own target of limiting global warming to 2C. For those focusing on the economy of the bloc today – EU citizen's pocket are half empty after a crushing recession – the deal was the most ambitious possible.

Damian put up the UK Guardians' version of this IPCC chart, which I've annotated. (Click for larger version.)

Adapted from Figure SPM.10: Global mean surface temperature increase as a function of cumulative total global CO2 emissions from various lines of evidence. Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers

To keep global temperatures at or below two degrees of warming (ie two degrees above temperatures of the beginning of the twentieth century), we need to limit the total amount of carbon emissions from all sources to around 1000 GtC or less.

Temperature rises linearly with emissions

The interesting thing is that there is a robust relationship between temperature and emissions.  The temperature response to carbon emissions has been shown to be linear up to around 2,000 PgC.    It doesn't matter over what time period or what the resulting CO2 concentration is.

That's an important point, so I'll repeat it.  Whether or not we emit the next 500 gigatonnes of carbon over a decade or over a century, the temperature will rise the same amount.  And it doesn't matter if atmospheric CO2 goes up by double or a bit less or a bit more.  The relationship we're talking about is between emissions and temperature not CO2 concentration and temperature.

That is why the focus is shifting away from concentrations of CO2 to carbon emissions.

This is explained quite clearly in a paper by H. Damon Matthews, Susan Solomon and Raymond Pierrehumbert.  To get some idea of how much temperature goes up for every 1,000 PgC emitted, the above paper shows the following:

• a very likely (5–95%) uncertainty range of 1–2.5°C of global temperature increase per 1000 PgC of cumulative carbon emitted
• the observational record showed a mean value of 1.5°C per 1000 PgC emitted, and a 5–95% range of 1 to 2.1°C/1000 PgC.

I doubt the 1.5°C observed rise factors in slower feedbacks. So I suggest adding a half a degree at least.  This is a moving target because we are still increasing the rate of growth of emissions.

The EU targets and those of all other countries need to be assessed in the light of how much they will add to cumulative emissions.  If we don't keep cumulative emissions to less than 1,000 gigatonnes (1,000 PgC) then temperatures will be likely to rise above 2°C.  Obviously there needs to be a cooperative international effort to limit cumulative emissions.  That's not to say that all countries have to have exactly the same route to reducing emissions.  It is to say that taken together, the whole world needs to keep cumulative emissions to less than 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon.

With cumulative emissions approaching 500 gigatonnes and carbon emissions currently at around 10 gigatonnes a year and rising, it doesn't leave a lot of time to switch away from burning fossil fuels, such as by switching to clean energy.  This involves a massive change in electricity generation for example.

Thing is, we need to leave some spare capacity for future emissions even after we make the major switch away from burning fossil fuels.  Remember, this is a cumulative budget.  Even when we cut annual emissions to around 10% of what they are at present, we'll still be adding at least ten gigatonnes a decade to cumulative emissions.  If we use up all the budget now, then future generations will be much more limited in their options.

The chart above shows how much time we have or not, depending on which emissions pathway we choose.  But really, in the short term (say, to 2050), unless we make radical cuts in emissions in the next few years, we're heading for more than two degrees of warming this century.  If you took the cumulative emissions by the end of 2014 to be 500 gigatonnes and assumed a 2% growth in emissions each year, then we'd have reached the 1,000 gigatonne target by 2050.  Even if we were to stabilise emissions at the current approx 10 gigatonnes a year, we'd fill the 1,000 gigatonne quota by 2070.  After that we'd have to stop all emissions immediately to stick to the budget  - which just won't happen.  So the sooner we start to reduce emissions the better.

Anthony Watts goes for a literal interpretation

Damian Carrington wrote: "the atmosphere right now is half full of carbon dioxide", linking to an article about the carbon budget as described above.  Anthony put on his literal hat (as he does) and responded with (archived here):

Maybe Damian doesn’t understand that whole “parts per million” thing, if he did, he’s certainly know that 398.58 is nowhere close to “half full”. The value of 500,000 parts per million is what would be considered “half-full”. He’s only off be a couple orders of magnitude.

And showed he doesn't follow hyperlinks, by adding:

Maybe he was thinking in terms of saturation of the CO2 effect in the atmosphere on temperature? In that case, we are closer to 90%, and additional CO2 won’t make much difference.

No, Anthony.  You are very wrong when you claim "additional CO2 won't make much difference".  You are also wrong about what Damian was thinking.  Damian was referring to the cumulative carbon emissions budget, as you'd have realised if you'd read the article to which he linked.

Anthony then puts up this chart, with no humour or satire tag, so he does intend for it to be taken seriously.  Which means that post of his was meant to trick his dumber readers.  He doesn't explain what the chart is meant to represent.  What it appears to be is a chart of a log relationship of CO2 and temperature. Since Anthony chose temperature on the Kelvin scale, I've highlighted and enlarged bits of it to show just the relevant temperatures as anomalies.  I chose the baseline temperature as that when CO2 was around 280 ppm, which is what CO2 concentration was before industrialisation.  The result is shown below - as an animation:

Anthony's chart shows that with a doubling of CO2 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm, temperatures would rise by about 2 degrees Kelvin (which is 2 degrees Celsius).  So he's in the ballpark of climate sensitivity.  However what he wrote shows that either he doesn't understand that or he's deliberately deceiving his readers - neither of which says much about Anthony Watts.  He wrote:

This graph showing CO2′s temperature response to supplement the one Doug Hoffman cites from IPCC AR4. here we see that we are indeed pretty close to saturation of the response.

"Close to saturation" is a relative concept.  There is plenty of room for temperatures to rise and cause untold damage.   (Note that Anthony's chart stops at 800 ppm.  Plus he's got the Y axis at a scale that makes reading associated temperatures difficult, and hard to determine if his chart resembles reality).

Thing is, of course, that we're heading for much more than a doubling of CO2.  If we were to continue to increase emissions by two per cent a year, then by 2040 we'd have doubled the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere assuming that half the extra emissions continued to be absorbed at the surface.  Sooner if the oceans reckoned they'd already absorbed more than they could handle.  By the early 2060s CO2 would be up to around 800 ppm.  And by 2100 we'd be over 1500 ppm.

In terms of the carbon budget, that would take cumulative emissions to almost 2800 gigatonnes, which is off the chart (of the top chart SPM.10) and getting into the territory of six degrees of warming by the end of the century.  Not a pleasant thought.

In the meantime, fasten your seatbelts.  It's going to be a rough ride over the next few years.

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Matthews, H. Damon, Susan Solomon, and Raymond Pierrehumbert. "Cumulative carbon as a policy framework for achieving climate stabilization." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 370, no. 1974 (2012): 4365-4379.

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From the WUWT comments

The comments are mostly of the "dumb denier" type, which isn't a surprise given Anthony's article is also of the "dumb denier" kind. (Archived here.)

Les Johnson didn't bother reading Damian Carrington's article or following the hyperlink but says what "he thinks" he meant, which was wrong.  Damian was referring to cumulative emissions not CO2 concentration:

January 22, 2014 at 11:01 am
I believe that by 1/2 full, he meant that we are 1/2 way to a ‘safe’ level of CO2. From pre-industrial levels of 260, that would mean we are at 390 (we are), and must go no further than 520.

Just a guess. But you would think a journalist would be able to communicate the concept better. Warmist wonder they have communication problems…

albertalad goes for conspiracy lingo and says:

January 22, 2014 at 11:20 am
Sadly it isn’t just this guy off his rocker – it is the EU mass insanity driving themselves into poverty led by an even crazier class of leaders without a gain of common sense between the entire lot. Genuine science has ceased to exist in the entirety of the EU – replaced by a self imposed dark ages eagerly followed by the masses.

climateismydj says dryly of Anthony's speculation:

January 22, 2014 at 11:26 am
Maybe if the author of this article followed the link under his highlighted Guardian article text, he’d find the answer staring him in the face. But then again, WUWT has journalism standards to uphold…

nutso fasst says:

January 22, 2014 at 11:38 am
Given the atomic weights of carbon and oxygen, isn’t the total carbon in the atmosphere actually closer to 0.015%?

I don't know if DirkH is trying to be clever or if he is being extra thick when he says:

January 22, 2014 at 11:59 am
He thought it’s 398 percent, not ppm. And 398 percent is about half full.
Quite a good one from the Guardian.

thebleedingobvious is right when he says CO2 isn't the same as carbon, but not right when he suggests that "alarmists" always use the wrong term.  As he rightly points out, CO2 is not the same as carbon.  However total carbon includes the carbon in CO2 (and CH4 and other molecules containing carbon).

January 22, 2014 at 1:03 pm
Carbon dioxide is not the same thing as carbon.
Why do alarmists use the wrong term?

Illiterati dbstealey says:

January 22, 2014 at 1:06 pm
thebleedingobvious says: “Why do alarmists use the wrong term?”
The answer is simple: because they are scientific illiterates, who are just repeating the standard talking points given to them.

Bruce Cobb is keen to get to six degrees of warming and says:

January 22, 2014 at 1:43 pm
Since the ideal CO2 level is probably somewhere around 1,000 ppm, at close to 400 ppm we still have about another 100 ppm to go before we’re at half full. But, close enough. Burning more coal could help us get there.

As does "So dumb" MarkW who says:

January 22, 2014 at 2:33 pm
A few million years ago, the atmosphere had almost ten times as muchCO2 in it compared to today’s atmosphere. The idea that the atmosphere is half full is something so dumb that only someone completely in thrall to his religion could believe it.

Brian Davis says:

January 22, 2014 at 3:04 pm
Anthony, do you have the source for the chart at the end of your post showing the temperature response to CO2?

REPLY: See link in the story -A

Anthony's "link in the story" is no help at all.  It doesn't provide any source of his chart either!


Critical reading is not one of Ron House's fortés - he says:

January 22, 2014 at 5:50 pm
There it says: “The world’s leading climate scientists have set out in detail for the first time how much more carbon dioxide humans can pour into the atmosphere without triggering dangerous levels of climate change – and concluded that more than half of that global allowance has been used up.”

That just makes the stupidity even more appalling than the ignorance: Half of a maximum addition to something is not in general the same as half of the total amount.