Hi Jennifer,
Attached is a recent speech from Greg Bourne in which he said:
"We now know, for example, that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to disappear within 40 years due to the warming of the planet.
If these rivers dry up during the irrigation season, then the rice production which currently feeds over one third of humanity collapses and the world goes into net food deficit."
Is he being over-dramatic? Perhaps you would like to mention it in your blog.
Regards Anon.
Attached: download speech by Greg Bourne (CEO of WWF) by clicking anywhere here.
Fluxes of heat are done by calculating the temperature at various depths in the soil which gets you a surface temperature - Ian suggest you have a Google on Land Surface Schemes.
But of course these guys are comparing models against observations in many experiments so I think it's unlikely you have a "whoops - we didn't think of that" hole in the science. And the ocean expansion from warming is in line with expectations?
I suggest we need to find out more what the models actually do. And as Stoat's article says - there's a dearth of information on how GCMs and AOGCMs work outside the specialised literature.
I had already looked at that site, Phil, but it is interesting to note that the interaction of oceans with their part of the Earth's crust doesn't appear to have been taken into account either.
This accounts for 70% of the planets surface and it seems obvious that an increase in the temperature of the oceans must also produce an increase in the temperature of the landmass forming the ocean floor.
And this means the total mass to be heated by global warming is greater than the mass being used in the models. The implications of this, if for example, the mass of earth's crust left out of the model was 25% of the mass of water and air, then the model would overstate the extent of warming by 20%.
And given that the average depth of oceans are from 4,000 to 5,000 metres, and the density of the rock is approx. 3 times that of water then the average thickness of crust involved would only need to be 330 to 416 metres to produce that outcome.
As I have already said, I would welcome more informed input.
Hey hey hey - just a minute.
"the failure to properly deal with terrestrial warming" - say who? "Same stunt with ocean acidity models" and we don't know what's in them nor the transit times properly?? Ian takes on the world's physicists and oceanographers with his envelope and biro.
So on one hand we have a heat flux that travels very slowly through rocks - then on the other hand we're very worried about it.
How powerful is the sun/atmosphere interaction - well gets a tad cool in the Simpson desert on those clear nights. But not as cold as on the Moon !
Do we not know that ocean sea surface temperature anomalies are major disruptors of global weather e.g. El Nino.
Then I'd do some reading on what we know about the models. They do seem to represent those feedbacks and fluxes.
Tell me what you find in http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-coupled-ao-gcms-work.html
And report back.
This is what I have always suspected, Richard. There could be some very serious fudging of the Global Warming Models due to the failure to properly deal with terrestrial warming. It is exactly the same stunt used in the ocean acidity models where acidity is assumed to be only present in the top 100 metres (2% - 2.5%) of the oceans.
It obviously takes a lot more heat to raise the temperature of a solid than it does for the same volume of water or air. But the models appear to have assumed that all the oceans and atmosphere will warm but this supposedly 'global warming' will not include much land at all.
This is justified on the basis that landmass does not circulate heat with anywhere near the efficiency of liquid or gas. But clearly, if an average of a range of air and water temperatures can increase by 1 to 5 degrees over a century, as IPCC scenarios have suggested, then surely a body of landmass must also be able to do the same.
And that warming of landmass must continue over an undefined period until the warming influence from the surface, net of albedo, meets the same temperature rising from the Earth's core.
We know that heat doesn't circulate well in a solid but it is certainly conducted better than in a liquid or gas. So it would seem, to this admittedly non-geologist, that the mass of rock that will be subject to the influence of global warming, in the long term, will be the mass of rock that is above the depth at which the temperature from the core equals the average temperature at the surface.
This obviously varies quite a bit around the world but it would seem that the volumes involved are still quite significant. The key questions would seem to be;
1 how much of the ocean and atmospheric warming will be absorbed by how much landmass over what period?
I await constructive input with interest.
In regards to Ian's comments warming has been observed in bore hole temperatures down to hundreds of meters. However the rate of heat moving around is quite slow, takes a long time to move much heat in and out of the system, unlike water and air which have the big effect on the biospgere and us. In GCMs I believe soil temperature is tracked down to about 7-10m (a depth beyond which the annual temperature cycle is difficult to detect) but as to the boundary conditions imposed, I am not sure if +10m is set to an infinate sink or to the average annual temperature therefor loosing a bit of the heat flux. Tricky stuff, partial differential equations etc.
Drought in Somalia !
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4801820.stm
Phil, I couldn't care less how you spell Connelley's name or mine either. It just amuses me that he takes time off to complain about such trivia - part of his nitpicking attitude generally I guess.
Cripes you don't let up when you've got a bloke on the ropes do you.
OK. Global CLimate Models have a land surface scheme which represents the global land surface with its variety of vegetation and land use - includes albedo, surafce roughness and stomatal resistance. They will also run some sort of water balance. If you use Google Scholar and type in "land surface schema and parameterizaion" you get a truckload on the subject. Heavy shite for those of us with only Pentium II processors.
Yes on the soil warming - check this "brief" description of how GCMs work by William Connolley (did I spell his name right or Ian will get up me) aka Stoat
http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-coupled-ao-gcms-work.html
I'll examine you after you have read it. Actually its quite readable.
So tell me this, Phil. If the atmoshere and oceans all increase in temperature by 2 degrees then surely the amount of albedo must decline by the same amount as the temperature of landmass increases as well?
Albedo clearly varies with latitude, altitude and season in response to site specific factors affecting average air and water temperature. So it must also vary in response to a global average change. And the interesting question would then be, "how deep does this warming take place"? And, "what volume of solid matter is being warmed and how much of that heat will transfer from atmosphere and oceans"?
From my understanding, no such landmass warming has been factored into GW theory so all warming is assumed to take place in air and water, not solid matter. Is this correct?
I almost failed the Army Cadet CUO course for delivering a presentation on Drop Bears. The only thing that got me through was that I dig a first rate Latrine. Been shoveling it ever since.