Friday, June 2, 2023

Anthropocene Working Group Logo: 15,000 years of CO2 emission rates and organic vs. glacial sediment: Kurt Cuffey replies!

Kurt Cuffey 3:56 PM (38 minutes ago) to me Hi Drew, I'm happy to answer questions, though you should keep in mind that my 26-year-old Greenland work has been superseded by more-recent studies, especially for the Holocene (the last 11,000 years), and in particular by the studies that combine records from a half-dozen ice cores in central and northern Greenland. These studies were lead by the Copenhagen glaciology group, and you can find them on Google Scholar. Bo Vinther was one of the main authors. I read quickly through the "carbonbrief" article to which you linked, and it seems accurate to me. If you read that carefully, it should answer the main questions you have. Having said that, my direct responses RE my study published in 1997 (and its predecessor in 1995): 1. Those studies were primarily designed to examine the glacial to Holocene transition (20--10 kyr ago), and they are *not* the best way to address the issue of recent warming and its millennial context. They captured the start of the current warming but were not designed or capable of resolving it well. And even if they did, it's just for one location in central Greenland. Using one location is a valid approach if examining very long-timescale changes (e.g., the 20--10 kyr transition) but not at all a good idea for decadal-scale changes. The noise at the short timescale requires that you average a group of sites spanning a region. "Noise" means both failures of the proxy record to record climatic temperature accurately, and real climatological / meteorological variability that arises strongly from atmospheric dynamical patterns. 2. In the context of (1), the questions you raise about how accumulation and isotope calibrations are treated in different studies is irrelevant to your concern. Those are minor issues. 3. The entire approach of comparing recent observed warming to past variability *for the purpose of inferring mechanism* is fundamentally a weak argument because the timescale is too short to reconstruct past variability well or, more importantly, to reconstruct the climate forcings well. This argument will become stronger as warming proceeds. 4. Following from (3), the reason we know the recent warming is due to changes of the atmospheric greenhouse is that we can measure the effects on the radiative balance of the planet and compare it to uptake of energy by the planet (primarily manifest as ocean warming) and to other forcings such as solar intensity. Here's an analogy: you are sitting in your house on a cold evening. You pull a thick blanket over yourself and start to feel warmer. Why do you feel warmer? Was it the blanket trapping heat (yes, at least in part, it must be)? Was it your furnace working harder? Was it a sunbeam coming through a window? There are only a limited number of options, and you can know about the role of all of them. In this case, greenhouse gases are the blanket. The sun is your furnace, etc. 5. Following from (4), the evidence is overwhelming that most of the warming of Earth since 1980 has been caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases and the feedbacks associated with warming. The warming from 1850 to 1950, however, contains a "natural variability" signal in addition to an anthropogenic signal, and this natural component can be regarded as the "end of the Little Ice Age," and it was partly solar and partly volcanic. It is unlikely that we will ever be able to give a confident and fairly precise statement about how much of this earlier warming was anthropogenic vs. natural (most of the warming occurred between 1910 and 1950, as I recall), but there are strong arguments that it was at least half anthropogenic. The problem is we will never be able to head backward in time and launch some satellites to get the measurements needed. Best wishes, Kurt Cuffey ................................................................................................................... Kurt M. Cuffey Professor, Department of Geography, University of California

 

 https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/21245/Waters_CN2016%20aad2622.full.pdf?sequence=2

 In this sediment core from west Greenland (69°03'N,
49°54'W), glacier retreat due to climate warming has resulted in an
abrupt stratigraphic transition from proglacial sediments to nonglacial
organic matter, effectively demarcating the onset of the Anthropocen

 

  In Greenlandice, d15 N values during the Late Pleistocene glaci-
ation show a gradual marked decline to a pre-
industrial Holocene norm [mean, 9.7 per mil ()
in the GISP2 (Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2) ice
core; (55)]; they decline again and more rapidly
starting at ~1850 CE, with the greatest decline
occurring between 1950 and 1980 CE (Fig. 3A)

 The increase over the last 60 years is 100 times faster than previous natural increases. In fact, on the geologic time scale, the increase from the end of the last ice age to the present looks virtually instantaneous.

 Warming temperatures are expanding the troposphere. The troposphere (seen here in orange) is the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere and where nearly all weather occurs. Over the last 40 years, the boundary between the troposphere and the neighboring stratosphere (pink) has risen as a result of climate change.

 80 meters rising of troposphere or "IR murkiness" (Raymond Pierrehumbert) is all that is needed to increase Earth's temperature by 2 degrees Celsius.

https://www.snexplores.org/article/climate-change-rising-height-earth-troposphere-lower-atmosphere

 

 https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/2219/

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/scientists-extend-and-straighten-iconic-climate-hockey-stick/ 

 

 

 

 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zac_WBIQnwE

Hi Professor Cuffey: I greatly appreciate your feedback on the policy conundrum. I have always favored a broad interdisciplinary approach to my research, despite myself having some successes in policy changes also. I'm sure you're aware of the argument that complexity itself is the problem and since people tend to be highly specialized in their knowledge (whether they're a mechanic or a pianist or a chef, etc.) it's easy for us to get emotional over our views based on, as you state, "ignorance." My reaction was to take a deep dive into philosophy of science, leading me to focus on a topic called "noncommutativity" and how this relates to entropy in terms of quantum biology. Already it sounds too esoteric but I think Sir Roger Penrose and his colleague Professor Basil J. Hiley both have an excellent larger view on the meaning of science, in terms of gravitational entropy. Penrose has mentioned global warming in this context.
I'm not trying to belittle all the fantastic research that science does and I certainly hope that some kind of policy success can develop. My state of Minnesota just passed recently, this past week, a new Climate policy law. I haven't looked at the details but I'm sure it's a great step. I'm personally burned out on doing policy work. haha. Actually most of my "policy" work was just as a concerned citizen and volunteer activist. 50% of people aged 55 to 65 in the U.S. have zero savings for retirement according to the US Census Bureau, so clearly our "policy" issues include economic inequality. I call this "imperial implosion." In other countries environmental activists are frequently targeted for ... well you can guess - it's not good, just as we had "cointelpro" in the U.S. Obviously there's powerful forces when dealing with oil and the large contractors that rely on government spending on oil-based technologies, etc.
So your mention of hydrogen and nuclear - and land change policies - I wish I could focus on those issues solely in terms of solving "climate change" since as you say it's very serious issue. I think that our applied technology is part of a larger trend in science that entangles these issues with say military spending, which is actually much greater than people realize. When we take into account veteran health costs and debt spending on the military - it's way over the actual annual "defense" budget. There was one figure I saw that actually 50% of physics research is through some kind of military spending.
I'd like to think we can have a "green" military, especially considering its CO2 emissions, but when we consider the U.S. has some 750 military bases in over 100 other countries we have to realize that it's not just about "spreading democracy" or "stopping communism," etc. There is a focus on protecting an elite profit system, as Smedley Butler exposed in his highly honored career in the Marines; his book, "War Is a Racket" and his activism. M.I.T. Historian of Science Professor David F. Noble wrote many books exposing how the patent-based research system focuses on profit over "efficiency" in terms of technology policy - greatly affecting labor rights and land changes policy, etc.
Of course each country has some kind of military policy, even if it is relying on the "protection" - of being a "client-state" etc. Professor R. Craig Ferguson in anthropology has a new recent book published on how humans didn't really have war that long in our modern biological culture as a species. It's really only with the development of hierarchical cultures from farming that stores up grains to hoard wealth did then warfare really also develop, as his book argues. So considering that farming is when we also began emitting CO2 despite the smoke from fires having the aerosol masking effect, along with humans having exponential population growth, the overall policy trend by "holocene" humans is quite clear.
Hopefully a "rational" approach using a "command and control" military-style (like WWII) redirection of the economy may be possible in terms of "capturing" CO2 in various ways while offsetting CO2-equivalent emissions. The Horn of Africa report of the 22 million people facing a food crisis due to global warming drought over the past dry five "rainy" seasons - with the U.N. pleading for more food aid funding - is a good example of what will definitely be accelerating quickly. Fortunately the Horn of Africa finally did get rain in the past cycle but with El Nino kicking in, I'm sure that will continue to be a big problem. North Africa is also already in a severe crisis, as even southern Spain is facing drought, etc.
The U.S. "food for peace" policy previously did use food aid as a tool to make other countries dependent on the U.S. "client-state" system with Cargill being considered the largest private corporation, focused on storing grains. In terms of corporate profits the Saudi oil corporation is by far the biggest though, and that is what constitutes the U.S. Petrodollar system that Kissinger set up based on U.S. weapons exports to the Saudi regime, etc.
So the century window to develop effective global warming policy seems reasonable especially in terms of "deep time" of the climate but with Arctic Amplification and the ocean heat (already 250 zettajoules) causing melting of ice from underneath, along with the ESAS pressurized methane that is beginning to emit, as per PNAS Julia Steinbach, "abrupt eruption as highly likely" 2021 - it seems that our "natural air conditioner" with the albedo effect has more like a decade window, as Jennifer MacKinnon of SCRIPPS recently warned, and Peter Wadhams also has been warning. Raymond Pierrehumbert has warned against any "albedo modification" as just a distraction away from the cause, the CO2 emissions themselves, due to the 10,000 year cycle of CO2 in the biosphere.
James E. Hansen has now been emphasizing the Aerosol Masking Effect as being more prominent, considering Daniel Rosenfeld's research showing aerosol masking to be twice as bad as previously thought. The IPCC ar6 argues that reducing methane emissions will offset aerosol masking yet the positive feedback of methane out of the arctic will be difficult to reduce. When we look at the actual policies of big oil and "natural gas" it is actually to keep planning more "development." Of course legally the Attorney Generals could revoke corporate charters, thereby challenging the constitutionality of "legal personhood" of corporations "protected" by the Bill of Rights (and in turn the corporate controlled closed body World Trade Organization). This does not seem likely considering the immense power of big oil that transcends nationstate policies.
I did actually lead a campaign for a divestment of University of Minnesota from Total Oil for its use of slave labor in Burma. That was in 1998 and I thanked the Treasurer, an African-American lady who got the policy through the Regents. She told me she would focus on divesting from tobacco next. Unfortunately the University went through her personal voice mail, email, files, etc. and drudged up some past history as an excuse to fire her. She filed a civil rights lawsuit that the judge threw out. The University did divest their $1.5 million holdings in Total Oil and passed the divestment resolution but obviously that's a drop in the bucket.
I just mention that as one example of how difficult it is to get policy changes through - I had to cry in public to get the well-paid administrators to take me seriously. haha. I also debated the student senate and did other protests, but I mainly did coalition building, showing a great John Pilger documentary, Inside the Land of Fear, while passing out research information, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7Pduy6heI
thanks for your time and consideration,
drew hempel



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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