Bishop Hill Lawson vs Hoskins
Feb 13, 2014 Climate: Surface Climate: WG2 GWPF Nigel Lawson was on the Today programme this morning, up against Brian Hoskins of the Grantham Institute.
Hoskins was reasonably circumspect about the link between global warming and the recent floods. However, some of his peripheral insinuations were seriously dodgy - sea level rise (trend began before global warming), Arctic sea ice (claimed that last year's minimum hadn't been seen for a very, very, long time; and what about the Antarctic?), insinuations that we can detect a changing climate here in the UK.
Good that Lawson got in a pop at renewables.
Here's the audio.
Bishop Hill
Re the Arctic sea ice, Doug McNeall points out that when he said "in the summer" he may not have meant last summer, but something more like "in summers". This is a reasonable interpretation.
Reader Comments (84)
Doug Elliot
Can I suggest :- experiment.
a quater fill a tumbler with good gin. Add 5 ice cubes. top up with proper tonic to the very top. Leave until the ice melts you should find that the glass does not over flow. Enjoy science can be fun !
Doug Elliot
You are correct. When floating ice melts the water occupies the same volume as the displaced volume of the ice. Melt or refreeze Arctic or Antarctic sea ice and there will be no change in sea level.
What raises the sea level is melting of ice on land. Ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, plus glaciers contribute about 500 cubic kilometres per year to ocean volume. At 360 cubic kilometres per mm, that would be a sea level rise of 1.4 mm/yr.
The rest of the 3.2mm/yr comes mostly from thermal expansion due to all that "missing heat".
Sea level has been rising at a fairly constant rate of 2 - 3 mm per annun for several centuries. Even the IPCC confirms that rate in their reports.
Despite this, in 2001 the government Chief Scientific Advisor, using the Third Assessment Report, claimed sea level would rise 6 m (18 ft) in 100 years, the sky would fall in and the world would end. (Okay, I made up the last two...)
So according to those predictions, since 2001 sea level should have risen 78 cm or over 2.5 ft. It hasn't. Its risen somewhere in the range 2.6 - 3.9 cm or 1 - 1.5 inches.
At the same rate of rise, as coped with by the world for the last few hundred years, we can expect sea level to rise quite naturally about 20 - 30 cm, or 8 to 12 inches over the next 100 years or so. So over the next 100 years we might need to a add a brick or three to the freeboard on flood defences. Hardly a disaster.
Once again, global warming nutters freely interchange the natural background change with the climate catastrophe predictions, the conflation allowing them to tell a lie indirectly. Time and again they get away with the "...and its made worse by sea level rise..." implying man is causing it and without ever either (a) specifying whether they are referring to natural or man-made effects and (b) what the magnitude of the sea level rise really is. When they conflate like this is the time to jump all over their arguments.
EM "The rest of the 3.2mm/yr comes mostly from thermal expansion due to all that "missing heat"."
It must have been "missing" for centuries then, as sealevel has been rising at a steady rate for a long time. You cannot blame the "missing heat" for sea level rise when there has been no change in the rate of sea level in the latter half of the 20th century compared to previously.
Here's a little test calculation for you - calculate the average rate of sea level rise required to fill the English Channel between England and France since the last glaciation ended and the land bridge was cutoff to the continent....
Second part of test is to compare average rate of sea level rise from previous calculation to modern rate and then successfully argue for a detectable man-made component in the latter....
Doug Elliott: "Free floating ice should not have any effect on seal level as it melts in my book."
I have to disagree with you. When the seal is basking atop the ice, it will be above the sea surface. After the ice melts, the seal will be at or below the surface, hence lower.
;-)
Thinking scientist
Sea level rose 120 m from its glacial level 22000 years ago into the Holocene for the same reasons discussed, ice melt and thermal expansion.
It reached equilibrium around 8000 years ago. That Is 8.6mm/year, 860mm century.
Since 1870 sea level has risen 225 mm, at an average of 1.6 mm/year.
The current rate is 3.2 mm/year dating from the early 1990s. Most scientists would regard a doubling in rate as an acceleration. The precedent of the Holocene indicates that it is quite possible to reach rise rates three times faster than at present, making the IPCCs worse case 1m/century quite credible.
The recent expansion is due to AGW disrupting the equilibrium and pushing us towards Pliocene conditions. If it gets that far the new equilibrium will be 4C warmer and the sea level 20m higher.
Relax. As a sceptic you regard this as nonsense so you have nothing to worry about.
If you don't mind, I will continue to be concerned.
HaroldW, I suspect measuring how level a seal is would be quite challenging. Do you have experience?
Harold W
Ouch! :-)
EM, I accept the oceans are expanding from thermal expansion, but can you tell me what the rise in temperature of the oceans up to any depth of your choosing has been in degrees C (or K) over any period of your choice? You see I'm not understanding how the thermal expansion is taking place without a noticeable increase in temperature of the oceans. But I'm probably not understanding the physics properly. Or I'm wrong about the heat not being measurable in the oceans.
As an aside, this is what happens when scientists believe a hypothesis and not the observations. If the heat isn't in the system, and it can't be found, nor is there any reasonable explanation as to why it can't be found, the most likely reason is that as a result of the second law of thermodynamics the heat has escaped into outer space. Not that it's hiding in the deep oceans stroking a white cat waiting to come out of the ocean in one human destroying deadly pulse of unrestrained energy.
EM: NASA Clearly state "The current phase of accelerated sea level rise appears to have begun in the mid/late 19th century to early 20th century, based on coastal sediments from a number of localities".
So the modern period of accelerated rate you refer to commenced way before putative AGW and coincides with the end of the LIA.
The answer to the land bridge problem is connection cut about 9,000 years ago, English Channel depth between Dover-Calais about 45 m so average rate of sea level rise from those figures would be about 5 mm/year.
PS what's the error bar on the tide gauge and satellite data EM? And how long a continuous time series do you need to get a trend from tide gauge data EM?
steveta_uk -
No direct experience with seals, I'm afraid. However, some have called me barking -- does that count?
P.S. Apologies for being flipp(er)ant.
"Most scientists would regard a doubling in rate as an acceleration." If it was accelerating there would be a continuous change in rate, so that, say year on year, the sea level rise would increase, this isn't happening so it is not accelerating.
thinkingscientist
I think you are using accelerated in a confusing way. As I understand it the rate of sea-level rise has been at a steady rate, albeit with fluctuations for some time starting before the period of supposed human influence? Therefore a better term would be "at a higher rate" or "at an increased rate". Accelerated implies to the casual reader that the rate of change is increasing which I don't think is the case.
FWIW: If you go and read the comments in the DT's report of Lawson/Hoskins there is a wonderfully indignant troll with the handle of Ghost Whistler. I've been having fun just winding it up. Best hour's play I've had in a long time.
So far this week I have heard from the alarmists that
the world is still warming but the heat is hidden in the ocean depths.
the world is still warming but the heat is in the ocean depths and we can measure it
the world is not warming but the extra heat allows more water vapour to be held in the atmosphere
the world is warming and the heat is hidden in the oceans but also dramatically increases the energy in the atmosphere
I wonder which one is true and why they didnt tell us earlier
Harry Passfield
How do you get access to the comments. I used to be able to view them but now I cannot ?
The planet has been gradually warming since the Little Ice Age which had its temperature minimum around 1750.
The alleged GHG warming was from 1975 to 1998 which appeared additive to the existing warming. All warming has ceased since then, including the longer term warming from the LIA. I think that is an important point which I don't think has been discussed anywhere.
As far as I can tell, the temperature has recovered from where it was before the LIA.
I think objective people considering these observations would conclude that warming from the LIA is now complete. The recent blip in temperatures must have been due to other natural events, perhaps several warming cycles peaking simultaneously by chance.
Since none of these observations is unprecedented or extreme in any way, I see no justification for introducing the obsession with GHG emissions. There is justification for ruling out that effect since none of the accompanying factors, humidity increase, hot spots, relentless rise in temperature has been observed.
Ross Lea: To access the comments in the DT you need to register and logon to the DT and then be registered and logon to Disqus - which you should see at the end of the article (you can read comments even if not logged on).
This is the paradox.
Global Warming advocates only ever propose solutions for the control of Global Warming, (overheating), by reducing CO2 emissions. However at present the climate appears to be changing, (as it continues to do naturally), to a colder phase, probably because of reducing solar activity in the current cycle 24 and onwards and the resulting changes of ocean circulation patterns.
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming advocates fail to explain how reduction of man-made atmospheric CO2 can ever help to control Climate Change towards a cooling world.
Having made so many dire predictions of the impending adverse climate catastrophes from overheating, Global Warming / Climate Change advocates fail to accept that a climate change towards a cooler climate is more likely to lead to more intense adverse weather, simply because the energy differential between the tropics and the poles is increased.
And the evidence of these weather extremes is there this winter 2014 in front of the world with massive cold in North America, with excessive storms in the UK and immense cold in Siberia etc. This is not an effect of man-made CO2 emissions but is much more likely to do with the greater amplification of the Northern jet stream that is coming to be similar conditions as another Little Ice Age.
It taxes the imagination to conclude that the obvious cooling is a symptom of increased warming due to CO2 emissions.
There seems to be a lot of confusion here about sea level rise, which doesn't surprise me really.
Just for the record, sea level rise is not determined just by Greenland plus Antarctica ice melt and thermosteric expansion. There are several other large factors involved, the two most serious of which are variation of retained water mass over land areas and changing land elevation largely because of glacial rebound.
Secondly, it is just not true to say that sea-level rise has been constant. You can put a straight line through any data over any period, but it is not necessarily meaningful. Long-term tide gauge records going back to about 1700 reveal spectral (frequency) characteristics which are of more than passing interest. The lowest frequency or "secular" trend in MSL is approximately quadratic, and hence it is legitimate to say - with suitable qualification - that sea level rise has been accelerating for the last 300 years. However, this acceleration began long before CO2 became a suspect in planetary heating.
Of even more interest is that there is a dominant and remarkably consistent quasi 60-year cycle in MSL data, first picked up by Jevrejeva 2008, but confirmed in numerous follow-up papers. This is effectively superposed onto the approximately quadratic secular trajectory, along with higher frequency ENSO and volcanic events,
Modern measurements of MSL, using satellite altimetry date back to around 1992. More recently these have been supported by GRACE gravitational field measurements, which has permitted a more secure estimate of the mass addition component. MSL data from TOPEX and JASON are reconcilable with tide guage data (although the former shows some drift), and so we have in effect a continuous record of MSL data going back to 1700 and calibrated against modern satellite measurements.
The modern MSL dataset (post-1992) shows a peak in its first derivative somewhere around 2001 to 2003. This is very important, and moreover is entirely compatible in magnitude and phasing with previous peaks every 60 years or so going back to 1700.
So beware of any unqualified statements regarding sea-level. All of the following statements can be true depending on what periods you wish to pick.
Sea level is rising.
The rate of sea-level rise is accelerating (e.g. secular trend post 1700).
The rate of sea-level rise is decelerating (e.g. post 1992).
Do people like Brian Hoskins not realise that he is now quite clearly, losing points against non-scientists by making rather tenuous links, between just about everything and climate change. He was made to look an absolute fool in that exchange.
Entirely O/T, but if anyone would like to endure of a concentrated dose of bien pensant tosh on the subject of Global Warming, the Telegraph's token lefty, the fragrant Mary Riddell, wades in here (link below), spouting nonsense in a way that makes the words 'ignorant' and 'cretinous', to say nothing of 'thick', seem wholly inadequate. This, folks, is the true view of the snooty liberal elite.
You will need a strong stomach.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/maryriddell/100258932/climate-change-believers-have-sold-britain-down-the-river/
Messanger:
I noticed. Can't quite decide if this was deliberate subversion of Riddell's inanities or just another example of modern media sloppiness. Not that it changes Riddell's core cretinous.
@HaroldW, @steveta_uk:
I found a man dripping wet beside a wide river once, having nearly drowned trying to wade across it.
When I asked him why he thought he water was sufficiently shallow, he pointed out across the water, and replied:
"Well, it only comes halfway up that duck"
As usual, best to look at the data.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/global-mean-sea-level-time-series-seasonal-signals-removed
Note the high rate of change from 22000BP to 8000bp, then the equilibrium.
Note the increasing slope from 1870 to the present and the consistent 3.2mm/year since the 1990s.
Note that the graph of recent rise quotes the average as 3.2mm/year +/- 0.4. You can link to further discussion of measurement uncertainty elsewhere on the site.
Help, I'm drowning in damp puns. Someone has water on the brain. :-)
As usual, time to look at the data.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/global-mean-sea-level-time-series-seasonal-signals-removed
Note on the Holocene graph the rapid rise to 8000BP , at about three times the current rate, and the relative stability thereafter.
Note on the 1870 onwards graph the steepening slope as the 20th century progresses.That is acceleration.
On the Colorado graph note the steady 3.2mm/year with confidence limits of +/- 0.4.
You can find further discussion of uncertainties elsewhere on the same site.
That is why you fail.
As 3.7.4 Assessment of Evidence for Accelerations in Sea Level Rise was raised, it is worth having a look, it has an interesting concluding sentence:-
Zed and responses removed.
I would like my comment back please!
The AGW faithful cycle through their faith-based talking points one after the other in an endless rotation. As the claim of the day fails, simply move on to a prior failed claim and re-assert it as if it haad never been promoted and failed before. So we get endless iterations of Arctic ice, slr, missing heat, the pause, the non-pause, the winds speeding up, the winds slowing down, storms picking up, storms dropping off, etc. ad nauseum. I find the believer mental ability to find these nuggets fresh and exciting each and every time without reflection on their previous outcome to be fascinating.
Hoskins talks of "a change in regional climate that we can expect", while it seems that the expectations for this particular region have gone the reverse since 2007 with a trend of cooler wetter summers and colder drier winters.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/actualmonthly/
And if we look at when annual precipitation for England & Wales was over 1000mm, against annual Central England Temperature, the majority of the very wet years range between average to very cold:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/tcet.dat
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/download.html
John Marshall:
Er, sorry but no. The sediment loading of the sea floor causes the sea floor to sag too. This creates a sink as the sediment comes in, creating the great sedimentary basins of the world, where we go exploring for oil and gas.
It is sort of true that sediment "fills in" but this is offset by the sea floor sinking under the mass. The net effect is often described by sedimentologists as "accommodation space", whereby sediment could fill in an area, causing the land to extend eventually, or whether the seafloor is sinking more quickly (from eg sediment loading, plate tectonic movements and also isostatic rebound from loading eg ice sheets), in which case we could get river valleys being inundated (eg SW wales such as Milford Haven).
But in general, no the river sediments are not "filling up" the oceans.