Block’s Indicator of Sustainable Growth

by Ray Block

The stealing of a large volume of emails from the Hadley Centre in England by reportedly Russian hackers has been seen by climate sceptics as proof that the climate scientists are involved in a left wing conspiracy.

Scientists are their own worst enemies. Constantly going back to their predictive models, subjecting them to peer review time and time again, and then challenging them all over again. It’s a chaotic process, but that’s the way it has always been.

The climate sceptics start from a different perspective to the scientists. It’s one of almost religious belief and commitment. Whether this comes of preoccupation with intelligent design; or possibly maverick scientists who want to avoid consensus peer reviews and want to be seen as   independent of the pack; and there are other sceptics with their own political agenda.

To be preoccupied with an apparent reduction in climate over the last decade, when you need to measure climate change on a 50 or even 100 year span to see the long run impact, is a bit silly, but that’s climate sceptics for you.

The daily release of the newsletter Science Daily is quite revealing of the climate scientists at work.  A few of the headlines from recent issues.

*Nov 23 2009 The ice sheet in Antarctica is losing about 190 billion metric tons a year, based on data from 2002 to 2009, according to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin. This was reported by the journal Nature Geoscience.  The rate of ice sheet loss is accelerating, increasing to 220 billion metric tons a year since 2006.

*Nov 19 2009 The journal Nature (Nov 19) report findings from oceanographers at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth  Observatory. They say the  oceans ability to maintain their role in regulating climate by absorbing more than a quarter of CO2 from burning fossil fuels  is at risk. Now, the oceans are struggling to keep up with rising emissions.

The researchers estimate that the oceans last year took up a record 2.3 billion metric tons of CO2 from human-made carbon. But with overall emissions growing rapidly, the proportion of emissions absorbed by the oceans since 2000 may have declined by as much as 10 per cent.

*Nov 13 2009 Professor Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol  in the UK reports that satellite observations and a state- of- the- art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate.

The ice sheet loss over the eight years to 2008 is estimated at 1,500 gigatons. That is equal to 1.5 trillion tons, and over the most recent two years to 2008, the loss was as high  as  273 billion tons.

* Nov17 2009 Researchers involved in the Global Carbon Project report a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel beteen 2000 and 2008, as reported in the journal Nature Geoscience (Nov 17) Over the last 50 years, the average fraction of global CO2 emissions that remained in the atmosphere each year was around 43 per cent, the rest as absorbed by the forests and oceans.

*October 10 2009 Rising sea levels are increasing the risk of flooding along the  south coast of England.  As reported in the journal, Continental Shelf Research, coastal engineering expert, Professor Robert Nicholls of the University of Southampton has produced a single data set of south coast sea levels across the years. The data shows that both average sea levels and extreme sea levels have been rising at a similar rate through the 20th Century. The rate of rise is in the range 1.2 to 2.2 mm per year.

*Oct 9 2009 UCLA scientists report in the online edition of the journal Science (Oct that the last time CO2 levels were this high was at least 15 million tons. This was at a time when global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than  they are today, and the sea level was approximately 75 to120 feet higher than today.

*October 6 2009 Despite a slight recovery in summer Arctic sea ice in 2009 from record setting low years in 2007 and 2008, the sea ice extent remains significantly below previous years and remains on a trend leading toward ice-free Arctic summers, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre. The past five years have seen the five lowest Arctic sea ice extents ever recorded.

Draw your own conclusions, but it is hard to believe that so many scientists are involved in a conspiracy to fake records.

*Nov 23 2009 Nature Geoscience report that scientists at the University of Texas at Austin said that Antarctica’a ice loss since 2006 may be as high as 220 billion tons a year. This compares with ice loss for the 2oo2 to 2005 period averaging 144 billion tons a year.

*Nov 13 2009