Just a Statement ...

Meh, the train hits the barrier and a few survivors crawl out, and hopefully make a note not to do it again.

 

simple. People are making bets. You agree to put $10,000 in escrow, 10½yrs later, you double your money when the loser loses. Can't get that kind of Interest in a savings account. It's easy to 'claim' catastrophe in a decade, & yet some of those people who make unsubstantiated, impossible to-prove-either-way catastrophe claims - still own beachfront property. But it's much easier to get all dramatic on a Blog rather than work for a representative or senator.

right, because we are so good at learning from history. I think Cain was the first one to tell his dad Adam, don't worry, we all learned our lesson ..... no more killing

.

 

Isn’t 11 part of the green new deal?

 

People tend to think in terms of 10s because it makes for easy math.
The sun however operates on it's own vibe...sometimes...maybe, and the number 11 seems to be more or less of a SWAG.

How the Sun's 11-Year Solar Cycle Works
-----------------
Phrase that pays:
Currently, the sun is in the midst of Cycle 24, and the star is swelling toward a maximum in 2013. An extremely long stretch of subdued activity in recent years puzzled astronomers, and many solar physicists are working on developing better forecasting models of the solar cycle.


And while the sun appears to be ramping up activity as it heads into the solar maximum, several new studies are predicting that after this peak, the sun's activity could see a significant drop in Cycle 25.


The findings of three new and separate studies that examined fading sunspots, a missing solar jet stream and the strength of the sun's magnetic field, show that even as the current sunspot cycle gears up, activity during the next 11-year cycle could be greatly reduced, or even eliminated.

------------------


When I was a kid, people were predicting many many dire outcomes "by the end of the century" something quite far off, and convenient for folks with 10 fingers.
My two favorites were the population bomb and oil being exhausted by.....2000, conspiring to leave the survivors of WW-III unable to produce enough food to feed themselves.

Emanuel's Law:
Never let a crisis go to waste.....

 

Every environmental crisis (that I can think of) is being debated in scientific literature. Evidence for and evidence against. Some are very clear in direction but less so in magnitude. Others are uncertain in both ways. Here are two recent examples:

IPCC is underselling climate change -- ScienceDaily

Alarmist by bad design: Strongly popularized unsubstantiated claims undermine credibility of conservation science

It's all happening in plain sight. Even if a curator for all this would be appropriate for PriusChat, neither I nor anyone else has fully stepped up to the task.

==
I find media retelling of these stories largely unsatisfactory This does not mean it should not happen. Indeed, without 'disasters' or 'hoaxes' being invoked, folks at large might know even less about very many things. One might claim that limited public self education (struggling to find a neutral way to describe it) paves the way for media drama. Retreading Shakespeare, the fault is in ourselves. Not in 'the stars' who write or speak from elevated positions.

From time to time I highlight what appear to be clear and reasonable media expositions. I miss many no doubt. It would be generally better for people to dip their toes into into 'primary sources' (personal opinion). But having suggested such things here since about 2004, I have pretty much made peace with the notion that it's not gonna happen. Much.

 

well said. and priuschat is a microcosm of the world, despite the nature of the vehicle.

 

Shaking down Shakespeare was some of my finest work in days

 

I looked at various metrics that are human visible and came up with sea level. Storms, droughts, and floods are 'weather' which comes and goes. But sea level is pretty hard to ignore:

• melt water from the glaciers and ice caps
• warming of the surface that expands the diameter
• 3/4ths of the earth's surface

I call sea level the earth's thermometer.

Bob Wilson

 

Pretty good thermometer.

I read once upon a time where the Earth's surface would be completely covered by 'big warder' if it were not an irregularly shaped somewhat squished at the top spheroid.

Kinda makes me wonder sometimes about the really good sippin whiskey that they make in flyover country.
The secret (some say) are the mineral rich water sources.

Lots of caves there.
Lots of fossils.

Things that make you go Hmmmmmmmm.

 

Climate change due to CO2 has been predicted probably going on 150 years now. The Greenhouse Effect calc (natural warming effect of the atmosphere) goes back to 1825 or so, and in the later 1800's decades it was realized CO2 from fossil fuels could lead to further warming. By 1896, Arrhenius - the so-called grandfather of climate change - who I don't think invented the idea, but he was the first vocal climate change activist and did the basic calcs, and gave a bunch of global warming speeches. He was mainly saying, wow I don't know what is best, he felt warming was probably better than cooling but he was not sure.

I'll tell you, I hobnob with a lot of scientists, most recently with aerospace types as recent years I have interest aircraft safety, and while they are not denialists, they are not alarmists. We have a certain (high) level of politicism in the USA. The recent amount of renewables growth and reduction of coal use in the USA is quite staggering, yet some feel the only solution is immediate ban of all fossil fues.

 

lesser of two evils may not work in this case

 

Absent a better explanation, I must discard that point as just the whiskey talkin'.

There is enough known water to raise sea level roughly only 200 feet. Considering the 'roughness' of the surface rock contours, I don't see any reasonable way to gravitationally redistribute all that water to cover all that rock. There would have to be something new, different than existing glacial erosion processes, to shave down the rock peaks.

 

I'm not so sure....
The surface area of the earth is guessible, and from this an approximation of the surface area of a similarly sized object can also be mathematically guessed at - even by scientists tethered by studies whose outcomes are influenced by bucks.

We also know a little bit about bathymetry, and a lawyer named Isaac.....so the volume of the ocean should also be approximatible.

Knocking around on the Googles, I stumbled on this:

510,100,000 square kilometers of surface area, and a total of 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers of water gives you a 2.717 kilometer column of water across the whole planet if it was billiard ball smooth, but the same basic shape.

I didn't check the math.
Mostly because I don't have to.

In honor of Nathaniel Bowditch.....I'll put it in terms that even a humble sailor like me can can understand....
The ocean is DEEP.
REALLY DEEP!
Especially if you're knocking holes in it with a 35 year old submarine built by the lowest bidder.

It's deeper than the land is tall.
Almost everywhere.

So...
If you're going to use sea level as a thermometer, then one wonders how much fluctuation in this "sea level" has occurred over time, and when...and why.
Presuming a fairly universally understood definition of "sea level."

THAT also...is observable.

 

Average height of continents above sea level is not the easiest number to find. It is in a graph here:

Highs and Lows: Topography and Isostasy

and without much resolution, about 500 meters. One same graph average depth of oceans about 3800 meters. That number is widely reported.

All water would submerge a perfectly spherical earth as stated above. However geoid bulges about 13 km at equator. This is a spinning planet and flexible enough to allow that. See more about bulges here:

Strange but True: Earth Is Not Round - Scientific American

Or search on "potsdam potato"

 

Measured (estimated) past sea level has varied from 'no ice' which is about 60 meters higher than current. During most recent glacial it was about 120 meters lower. That was accomplished by stacking up a lot of continental ice. These extremes and variations between tracked paleoproxies of temperature pretty well. Neither is known perfectly well, but paleoproxies and indirect evidence are what we have available.

==
Anticipated sea level over next hundred or few hundred years are controversial. Of course they are!

"scientists tethered by studies whose outcomes are influenced by bucks" @33. I'm not particularly fond of such assertions. Even if accompanied by "interest groups whose positions are controlled by fossil-fuel money". They (especially the former) imply that scientific data (along with its uncertainties) simply don't exist.

Of course they do! Some of them, along with engineering expertise, allow machines to fly in the sky and sail on and beneath seas.

 

If IPCC-assembled climate projections are accurate (and there are reasonable arguments against), then one can compare weak and strong controls on combustion CO2 release:

earther link

It resembles first post in this thread, but with colors instead of metaphors.

 

To some folks in the Eastern half of the U.S., that 2.717 km column might sound tall. But for those of us in the West half, and many other places around the planet, that column is rather short compared to the local surface roughness. A whole lotta peak shaving and other surface milling would be required to put it all under water. Despite the general lumpiness of the gravitational geoid, water surface level simply doesn't adjust to the very short range roughness of the rocks.

I'm remembering recent ice age variations spanning +200 to -400 feet from current level, very similar to the figures tochatihu lists.

 

River deep, mountain high...

-Tina Turner

 

We ain't got no cliffs out here!
Places like Virginia and Maryland shore are naturally sinking up to about approx 18-inches into the sea every 100-yrs, in addition to the background sea level rising over the last several hundred years, our land mass is falling due to the glaciers prior flexing of the Earth surface and pumping out of ground water....and that is the background trend *before* any worsening due to climate change is considered. Also naturally, the alarmists say all of this is immediate impact of climate chiange.

 

I believe if that time frame was 10 years, not 100, then people would be much more motivated to start taking action.