Climate Change: It's Rate Of Change


I've posted about this before, it's the rate of change in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere not the level, that matters.  If the CO2 increases slowly, the planet is able to make an adjustment, but when it accelerates it can't.

Skeptical Science makes the same point but with graphics.

For 1 million years life on earth has adapted itself to going into and out of ice ages over approximately 100,000-year cycles. We come out of ice ages in about 10,000 years, with CO2 rising 100 ppm in that time. That is a rate of increase of about 0.01 ppm/year. If we use this as a typical rate to which nature has adapted, and has done so already for at least 10 cycles, then we can determine how much faster than this we are now moving. The idea is that if we limit CO2 rise to this rate, we expect nature will adapt; the further away we move from this base rate the more difficulty nature will have adapting.
Even before the age of big oil and coal, we were already pushing nature more than 10 times the base rate. The rapid industrialization sparked by WWII marked a rapid increase near 1950 that has continued, unabated, yielding a rate now more than 100 times the base rate.
This is comparable to the effect of running into a parked car, and if left unchecked, we may soon be running into a brick wall.

CO2 rate of increase vs year
 

Climate change deniers without the math or science background have trouble with this concept.  They need to understand this.  It's like the difference between finding something out over time versus in seconds.  Compare what your reaction might be if you've known for sometime that your significant other was leaving you versus finding out a few minutes ago when you thought everything was fine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alaska Crushes Record For Hottest December

Image
Alaska crushes record for hottest December as Arctic sea ice hits record low In its hottest December ever recorded, Alaska was a stunning 15.7°F above the 20th century average. And the year ended with Arctic sea ice hitting an all-time record low. While the East Coast had a cool December and New Year’s week, Alaska baked. Last Tuesday, Anchorage hit 48°F , warmer than southern cities from Atlanta and Jacksonville to Houston and New Orleans. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported this week that Alaska averaged 19.4°F for the month, topping the previous record (1985) by a whopping 2.1°F. “That’s really quite astonishing,” said Rick Thoman, the National Weather Service’s climate sciences and services manager for the Alaska region. As he explained to the Anchorage Daily News , “Usually you’re breaking those by a tenth of a degree or two-tenths of a degree.” The Arctic as a whole was so warm in December that Arctic sea ice set a new end-of-year record lo
Read more

The World My Grandchildren Will Inherit

Image
I went to a presentation at the University of Washington by Professor Raftery of the Statistics and Sociology Departments of a recent paper of his and colleagues (Alec Zimmer, Dargan M.W. Frierson, Richard Startz, and Peiran Liu) in the Journal Nature, entitled Less than 2 °C warming by 2100 unlikely   (link behind a paywall) . Their paper is a response to a need to provide a statistical forecast for global temperatures.  What the IPCC has previously provided are "scenarios" based on "expert" thinking.  Raftery has previously developed statistical methods for estimating world-wide migration patterns that has been adopted by the United Nations.  At the presentation he presented a statistical model for forecasting global temperatures. Their result is a 90% interval forecast of 2 to 4.9 degrees Centigrade with a median of 3.2 degrees. Their backtesting strongly supported the median.  He also  said " that the data suggested that future improvements in ca
Read more