Oh dear - more things that can affect the climate

[Bill Merton]

You're claiming the data supports your argument. I'm asking for more details of what YOU are claiming, so that the data can be examined.

[Bill Merton]

Really, do you have figures to back up that claim?

[Bill Merton]

[Bill Merton]

Any idea when you'll have your analysis?

[Bill Merton]

Which one's that then?

[Java Jive]

Opinion stated as fact.

And again you are conflating accuracy of short-term predictions wiht accuracy of long-term trend predictions.

It is easier to make predictions about long-term average trend than it is to predict short-term variability. When you buy a house, you know that in the long-term it will go up in value, even though, if you are unwise or just unlucky, house prices might go down for a while immediately after you purchased.

The success or otherwise of climate modelling is not something that is judgeable over a decade or two. One needs sufficiently good data over a sufficiently long-period to know if a particular model is working well, and which out of many is working best.

Can I suggest that before you come up with any more of these myths, you read this:

[Java Jive]

Subduction zones fall, that's what the word means. It's where one plate collides with another and is forced beneath it to slide back into the earth's interior. Other things rise along subduction zones, but not the zone itself.

"Between 1870 and 2004, global average sea levels rose 195 mm (7.7 in)."

That's an average of 1.4 mm/yr. All the more recent estimates are somewhat higher ...

"From 1950 to 2009, measurements show an average annual rise in sea level of 1.7 ± 0.3 mm per year, with satellite data showing a rise of

3.3 ± 0.4 mm per year from 1993 to 2009,[6] a faster rate of increase than previously estimated."

So the increase is rather more significant than you admit, particularly the most recent figures.

More unsubstantiated denialism:

" The Argo program deploys floats that measure salinity and temperature throughout the surface layer of the ocean. Over 3,000 free-drifting floats have been deployed all over the ocean and each float is programmed to sink 2,000 meters down, drifting at that depth for about 10 days. The float then makes its way to the surface measuring temperature and salinity the whole time. Data is transmitted to a satellite once the float reaches the surface, so that scientists and the public have access to the state of the ocean within hours of the data collection. At a greater depth in the water, measurements are often made with a CTD instrument (CTD = conductivity, temperature, depth), where the instrument is placed in the ocean water from a ship or a platform. These instruments are used by the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS), where they have been tracking ocean measurements like temperature, salinity and oxygen concentrations for over 55 years."

That's journalism, not science, and is irrelevant here.

[The Natural Philosopher]

you can look it up and do the sums yourself

[Bill Merton]

You don't? That's fine

[dennis]

Read what I said. I agreed with you about the long term. All models get worse over longer times.

Well that's a stupid statement. Unless you know what the conditions are going to be in the future you can't know house prices ill rise in the longterm. As they say "past performance is no guarantee"

So you want us to go through hell with green measures without any evidence you are correct. You have just stated that everything in the last few decades is short term variation so why are we using that data to produce models that forecast impending doom?

Myth 21 isn't anything to do with what I said. The current GW has the rise in CO2 following the rise in temperature. But of course it all short term variation according to you so we may as well ignore the data for GW as it all only a few decades old and proves nothing at all according to your words.

PS stop top posting or you will go in the bin.

[dennis]

Tell that to those that dies from the tsunami. Don't tell me what happens as you obviously don't have a clue.

[Dave Liquorice]

other

Suggest you have google the subduction zone is the oceanic plate disappearing underneath a continental plate, it goes down. If you are refering to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, it was a bit of the continental plate that "unstuck" from the oceanic plate (that had dragged it down) and flipped back up. Very simplified...

[dennis]

A subduction zone is two plates as you described and one went up exactly as I said/ even more simplified for you.

[Java Jive]

Might be rather difficult, since the poor sods were unfortunate enough to die.

You (Dennis that is) really are an arrogant tosser aren't you? What qualifications in geology do you have to support this statement? Where is your link to supporting scientific literature? Who the f*k are you to tell someone who has, surprising though it may seem, actually studied some geology for real, that they don't have a clue?

As Dave has been able to find out (so why not you?????), my description of a subduction zone was entirely correct.

Actually, although what our know-nothing-but-claim-to-know-all wrote, "If a subduction zone rises", was certainly technically incorrect, and what I wrote was certainly technically correct, I think I might be prepared to compromise a little on this. If one was prepared to speak sufficiently loosely, quite a bit more loosely than I suspect any geologist would, subduction zones do cause other things to rise, even though the zone itself certainly does not - in this case, as is common, the upper plate was dragged down by friction with the lower some distance before breaking loose and springing back, but that shouldn't really be described as "a subduction zone rising".

[Java Jive]

I read exactly what you said. You stated the opinion "Where the models are least accurate and humans are even less accurate" as if it were a fact, whereas, in reality, the models are more likely to be correct on average over the long term than the short term, because the large swings of short term variability will be averaged out.

Instead of just accusing others of stupidity because you don't happen to like what they say, it would be more to the point to show me any post-war period of, say, 20 years, perhaps even 10 would be hard, where house-prices at the end were less than they were at the beginning. Go look. IANA estate agent, but I don't reckon you'll find a single one. When you've failed, be sure to come back and apologise for calling what I said stupid.

I have discussed only the veracity of the science, about which I'm very confident, and the veracity of the models, about which I'm more equivocal. I haven't mentioned anything political like 'green measures' at all. However, it is very revealing that you have done so, because it reveals your real motive for not wanting to accept what scientists are saying about global warming, and it's typical double-think. You don't like the what the politicians are doing with the results that scientists produce, so you blame the scientists.

If you have a problem with politicians, attack the politicians, leave the scientists to get on with their job. They'd sure as hell be able to get on with it a lot easier if it wasn't for people like you.

In the long term, it's in noone's interests to attack good science just because it's telling us something unpleasant. Everything in the world today that gives us an easier life is ultimately based on science. If science falls, ultimately so do we all - there is nothing left but superstition and magic. If you want that sort of life, go and gather with the new-age druids at Stonehenge, at the wrong time of year.

No, you're twisting what I've said. I said only that the apparent slow down in temperature rise of the last few years is almost certainly natural variation, and I stand by that. If in, say, 20 years' time, assuming I'm still around, there's still no overall increase in average temperature, I'd be amazed, but I'd have to accept it as a serious challenge to what we thought we understood about the climate (but I'll stick my neck out right now and say: it's not going to happen).

That's a value judgement, not an objective statement, from which I conclude that you are thinking of the politicians again. The politics, and economics, is secondary to the scientific issue.

And aga>

Exactly, so it was about something else you were challenging up thread, and repeats pretty much the same explanation as I gave you, though I like to think mine was perhaps rather easier for the layman to understand.

BEST's excellent fit of CO2 against temperature goes back over 200 years, that is not short term variation.

See if I care.

[The Other Mike]

I really couldn't give a rats arse if London flooded :)

It's ok, all responsibility for flood defences will be moved to the private sector. The free market will decide.

Only if you think that the Archimedes principle always applies to the land/ice and the sea. If the earth was a system with an accurately defined and constrined ocean volume then i'd say it would apply. But I have my doubts it behaves exactly like say a toilet cistern and a brick would.

Does anyone know with any degree of certainty the proportion of sea water that turns into clouds and then falls as rain and is soaked up by the land, and can remain on land for x number of years? Abstract more fresh water from deep sources and evaporate less from the sea and the level will rise.

No point in removing ships or sponges or fish either:)

We haven't accurately mapped the earths surface to 3mm accuracy, but presumably to get an accurate sea level rise we are somehow led to believe the ocean floor,

*all of it* is mapped at that accuracy? Raise the ocean floor by a few mm a year and the water above it has to go somewhere.

Tide tables are published to the nearest 0.1m, only under very benign conditions do you actually observe that level in practice. Slight bit of wind, or variation in air pressure and they can be way out. That's with a human sat at the side of the sea, with a mark 1 eyeball, not a heap of electronics hundreds or thousands of miles up in space firing off a microwave beam, measuring a point and and making a guess.

In one place, I could possibly see them do it with local observations, using a precise GPS derived altitude at the observation station. But to do this across the entire planet, from a satellite, to get an average sea height regardless of local pressure and wind conditions and then say the level is rising by a small single digit number of mm when they don't know the level of the base of the ocean?

It's bollocks.

[Roger Chapman]

Yopu don't seem to give a rats arse about science either.

There is no profit in flood defences and the free market has already decided that property at real risk of flooding is uninsurable and won't play ball unless the government sanctions a levy on the rest of us who aren't stupid enough to have bought a pig in a poke.

It doesn't matter whether the world is accurately mapped or not. If land sinks into the sea it has to displace either water or land lower than itself which will in turn displace sea water. There are no enormous voids for the land to disappear into.

That is a continuous cycle but your underlying assumption that there is much fresh water to extract from deep sources is wrong.

That should have suggested to you that the volume of water in transit in the rain cycle would have a similarly minimal effect on sea level.

Not at all. What is measured is the change in level. Raising the ocean floor in any area would indeed raise average sea level if it wasn't compensated by a corresponding fall elsewhere. But the one thing we can be sure of is that if the earth's surface rises somewhere there will be a corresponding reduction elsewhere.

Same thing applies to sea as land. Higher than expected sea level at one place means lower than expected elsewhere. NASA must have a work round for that otherwise they would be inundated with serious scientists calling foul.

You obviously think it is so why not present your credentials to NASA and explain to them just why it is all "bollocks".

[dennis]

It is a fact. Can you provide any proof it isn't?

That's why they have to keep changing them? To account for small term random variations that average out in the long term?

Where is the good science I am attacking?

You said it and now you don't like it, what a surprise.

If you had said that 20 years ago you would have it chopped. I see no reason why you wont in 20 years from now. But unlike you I will listen to proper science and not this unverifiable stuff being feed to idiots.

I know they have, I told you so earlier in the thread. You choose to ignore it and ignore the fact that it was evidence their model was wrong. BTW if you can tell sarcasm then I am wasting my time with you.

You think you can.

bye.

[Java Jive]

I have already explained that it isn't necessarily true, because long term predictions smooth out short term variability, and gave an everyday example of it.

I presume they see it as a process of continual refinement. You were complaining before about alarmist predictions, I don't see how you can expect the modelling to improve if they aren't allowed to change anything. As already explained, you can't have your cake and eat it.

I doubt that's why they're being changed. It's much more likely that they think they have better modelling of some part of the system or other.

Climate science.

No, that's the point, I didn't say what you are trying to claim. You asked me to account for the slowdown in warming over the last decade or so, and that is almost certainly natural variability, nothing less, nothing more, and AFAICR I said nothing less, and nothing more.

We'll see who's right. I can't edit out the above remark, as it will now last for as long as other people keep records of usenet. As I am absolutely certain that the situation won't arise, I foresee no difficulty for myself or, more importantly, for climate science, but in the event that it does, you'll find that I am capable of acknowledging being proved wrong, so either way, I can't really lose, and you can't really win.

Science is clearly beyond you, you just haven't got the OPEN MIND it ABSOLUTELY requires. Go and join the druids canting their meaningless mumbo-jumbo, or something similar, it's clearly all you're fit for.

You didn't need to, I already knew it.

No model is ever perfectly right, there is always room for improving it, but that doesn't make it fundamentally wrong either. You have an unrealistically black & white view of this, whereas actually the world is made up of colours and shades of grey.

I think you've been wasting your own and everyone else's time on this earth, TBH.

Nya nya nya. At least when you were trying to understand the science you were trying to have a reasonable discussion. It's now becoming clear that because you couldn't win it, you've now resorted to trading insults.

[Java Jive]

You might if you happened to be there when it happened, or if someone close to you was.

"In Great Britain, glaciation affected Scotland but not southern England, and the post-glacial rebound of northern Great Britain (up to

10 cm per century) is causing a corresponding downward movement of the southern half of the island (up to 5 cm per century). This will eventually lead to an increased risk of floods in southern England and south-western Ireland."

So that's 0.5mm/yr

"From 1950 to 2009, measurements show an average annual rise in sea level of 1.7 ± 0.3 mm per year, with satellite data showing a rise of

3.3 ± 0.4 mm per year from 1993 to 2009."

So isostasy contributes much less than sea level rise due to warming

I had thought that there are already questions about it's future usefulness, but I see no mention of that in the link above. On the contrary, they are suggesting it can be made to last until 2070.

Why shouldn't it behave like that? The same physical laws are at work.

Muddled thinking. For one thing, it is a feature of a warmer atmosphere that it holds MORE water vapour, not less. Secondly, if we suppose for a moment that there was actually less water in the atmosphere, then there would be less rain, so less river flow back down to the sea, and so the level would stay the same.

If the ocean floor was rising by a few mm a year then what is the mechanism? It's difficult to conceive of a mechanism other than sedimentation that would do this, but, as sedimentation involves particles changing position in the water that of itself cannot raise the sea level. Only sediments brought down by rivers could do that. No other mechanism would be even remotely likely.

The point of the electronic wizardry is that it is more accurate than the mark 1 eyeball.

But what you're missing is that they don't actually have to measure that 3.3mm in a single year. Suppose their equipment is accurate to the nearest centimetre or so, so we'll suppose their readings could be

+-5mm out at any one time. If the sea is rising at 3.3mm/yr, then over 3 years they will see a discernible difference developing, and after 6 they will have an unmistakable difference. They then divide the difference by the number of intervening years to get their figures. Seems perfectly doable to me, but then I'm not a climate denialist.

No, it's just good science. The bollocks are between your ears.