Climate expert fears for London

[Ivan Seeking]

The Guardian quotes Sir David King as saying levels of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide are at their highest for 55m years - when there was no ice on Earth.

He said ice was melting faster and, if the trend continued, floods could wipe out London, New York and New Orleans.

Sir David has previously called for flood defences to be fortified.

His latest warning came at the launch of a scientific expedition to Cape Farewell in the Arctic, which is aimed at raising student awareness of climate change.

The expedition will also examine ocean currents, in particular the Gulf Stream, which may be affected by excess fresh water from melting ice. [continued]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3893389.stm

 

[Andre]

Sure enough, I'm not letting you down.

First of all http://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/CUCL/staff/dak.html is not a climate expert and second his statements are loaded with errors and make believes.

Sir David said the sea would rise six or seven metres if the Greenland ice cap melted and a further 110 metres if Antarctica melted.

No, the ice on Antarctica is equivalent to 78 meters sea rise, without isostatic reajustment and assuming that the coastlines remain the same, looking at the present sea surface area.

Moreover the average temp of Antarctica is -37 degrees with max temp in summer well below freezing. If that would warm with a couple of degrees, the result would be increasing snowfall and more ice accumulation and hence sea level lowering. At present the Amundsen weather station on the Southpole dead centre is indicating a slight cooling trend.

So it's only to "offer scary scenarios" with very little reality checks.

He said ice fields on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania were now expected to melt within the next three to four decades, despite having existed for hundreds of thousands of years.

No, the Kilimanjaro glaciers are evaporating (sublimating), not melting, due to increased aridity. The local temperature in Afrika has been very stable the past few decades. Nobody seems to find it curious that the Kilimanjaro glaciers date back from the end of the ice age some 11,000 years ago. During the ice age they did not exist. Normal?

But the stereotype alarm has rung once more for a ghost problem. It's politics, not science.

 

[Andre]

Time for some countering.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/gat2003-600x370.gif is the perceived global temperature jump in the last part of the former century, a.k.a the infamous hockeystick.

Why is the feature not working?

And [PLAIN]http://www.usefulinfo.co.uk/images/natural_factors.gif is the temperature trend in the last seven years.

GHCN:Global Surface Temperature anomalies (weather stations)
Christy & Spencer: analysis of satellite measured lower atmosphere temperature anomalies.
SOI: Southern Oscillation Index
PDO: Pacific Decadal Oscillation
sunspot counts
All from January 1997 to June 2004.

So what do we see? the global surface temperature trend in the last seven years is just about 0,00, give or take a few decimals. whereas it appeared to have risen 0,4 degrees between 1980 and 2000 or a trend of 2 degrees per century.

Now what would have caused this strange behavior?

The answers gives me enough reason to predict that the global temp will be within 0,5 degrees from now in the next 50 years.

 

[Andre]

Actually I got the dataset of the average global temperature deviation of that second graph and I have to adjust the 0,00 estimation of the current global warming trend. It is 0,0002 degrees celsius per year or 0,02 degrees per century. The trendline unit is in months

http://home.wanadoo.nl/bijkerk/trend.jpg

That's plain verifiable data. No sentimental rethorics.

 

[shonagon53]

Please see my post about rebuilding London and New York on Greenland.