Lies, Damned Lies, and Wiggly Lines

Visitors to this blog may wonder what my underlying motives and views are. I have only one motive; telling the truth. My views vary with time - anyone whose views on any subject don't vary, even a little with time, have a fixed mindset, which is not a good thing. My views change as I learn, and they change as I get a better viewpoint on the "bigger picture" . Anyone who tells you, or leads you to believe, that they know "pretty much all there is to know" on any subject whatever apart from the size of Algore's bank balance, is either a liar or an egotist, or both.

I chose to study the aspects of sea-level change some years ago. One reason was that I perceived that very few people, whether bloggers, their respondents, columnists or news reporters (whatever their title), know anything much at all on the subject. Many think it's pretty straightforward; just measuring the height of the sea at any one point, and plotting a few graphs and trends. How little they know.

Another reason was that I thought that even with a little knowledge, I might be able to shed a little light in an area of low understanding - which shows what little I knew. Sea level varies all around the globe; it varies from day to day, month to month, year to year, decadally and on longer time scales, and it varies from place to place. It varies for a variety of reasons; a change in the mass of water in the oceans, a change in the volume of that mass, with ocean basin volume due to tectonic movements, with temperature, wind strength, wind direction, barometric pressure and ocean currents, and even local gravity. If you think that changes in weather and climate are complex, but changes in sea level are not, think again.

Hurricane Sandy was a child of the ocean, and not of the atmosphere. Some climate scientists and climate modellers appear (and there's plenty of evidence to support my view) to think that the atmosphere controls the climate, and the climate modifies the oceans. How wrong they all are.

A seemingly trivial yet important fact is that the tides generated by the Moon, modified by the Sun, shift more water from place to place over a single tidal cycle of just over 12 hours than all the ocean currents combined do in a year. That tidal  shifting is an oscillation of course, but because the globe isn't covered completely in water, the continents and large islands "get in the way", and the tides modify currents at continental margins quite significantly, creating "eddies" which disrupt, spread, and even temporarily reverse the flow.

The oceans cover about 2/3 of the Earth's surface which gets most sunlight. The oceans also absorb more of the Sun's energy than does the land, and they absorb it to a far greater depth. The land surface warms and conducts to just a few centimetres depth during the daytime. The oceans absorbs visible light and short-wave infrared (about 50% of incident solar radiation, a fact known to few it seems), to a depth of tens of metres. The oceans have a heat capacity thousands of times that of the atmosphere. Physicist Lord Rutherford is reported to have said, in an argument about whether electrons orbited the relatively massive atomic nucleus, or vice versa, "When you've got a flea on an elephant, it's the flea that jumps". The oceans are the elephant, and the atmosphere is the flea.

Studying all aspects of the physics of the oceans is the key to understanding weather and climate. To ignore, marginalise or trivialise the role of the oceans is indeed to "ignore the elephant in the room". The oceans drive and control all the climate oscillations from ENSO to the AMO. Note that climate scientists and modellers study "atmospheric sciences". Draw your own conclusions from that - I already have.

Where is all this leading? Why my post title? I could show you 20 charts for tide gauges which show alarmingly high rates of sea-level rise, to prove something catastrophic is just over the horizon (apt metaphor?). I do not. I could show you 20 charts which show virtually no change for half-a-century, "nothing much is happening", yet I do not. I could show you 20 charts which show a fairly steady decrease over a century, to prove that "sea-level is not rising", and I do not. None of these collections would illustrate the truth, though many people would have you believe that their little collection does. Ignore them - their little collection of wiggly lines and "revealing" trends are only a "cherry-picked" and biased version of the truth; there's a very thin line between bias and lies.

Those of whatever persuasion who cherry-pick are guilty of misrepresentation at best, lying at worst. Those who cherry-pick should remember that their "evidence" may reveal more about them than their "hypothesis" does about the true situation. That their evidence may contain at least one "hidden message" which is visible to anyone who has a truly sceptical eye and a little knowledge, and which may be used to disprove their claims. Those who cherry-pick should remember that they may choke on the stones.

Un-Scientific American at it again

Have you noticed how many "warmist" blogs and websites have names or titles which are the exact opposite of the theme of what they post or publish? "Open Mind" is one that immediately springs to my mind, or "Skeptical Science" which  is totally un-sceptical of anything which supports the warmist disaster scenario. Another is one which used to live up to its name, but over the years has slipped away from that shining adjective "scientific" and fallen into regurgitating decidedly unscientific mumbo-jumbo, is Scientific American. Decades ago it was vibrant, exciting, informative and I subscribed to it, happy to find it lying inside my front door when I returned home from work. Now I wouldn't line my cat's litter-tray with pages torn from dog-eared copies thrown out from clinic waiting rooms. Here's a short but still rubbish-strewn article from the mighty-but-fallen SA.

Earth May Be Warming Even Faster Than Expected

Scientists have thought that if planetary warming could be kept below a 2-degree Celsius increase, perils such as catastrophic sea-level rise and searing heat waves could be avoided.

Scientists haven't thought anything of the kind; the "2-degree target" was thought up at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. That's well-known and attested. Would 1.9 degrees be liveable with but 2.1 degrees spell disaster?

Ongoing data, however, indicate that three global feedback mechanisms may be pushing Earth into a period of rapid climate change even before the 2-degree C "limit" is reached: Ice melting into the oceans, which warms surface seawater, leading to more melting; thawing of permafrost, which releases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, raising the air temperature and melting more permafrost; and glaciers breaking up and falling into the sea, which lessens the amount of sunlight reflected into space, thereby heating the atmosphere and further degrading glaciers.

"Ice melting into the oceans" absorbs heat from the seawater, cooling it. How could cold water at the melting point of ice warm the seawater which melted the ice, when that seawater must have been warmer than the ice to in order to melt it? The meltwater can't add heat to the sea, when the heat to create the meltwater came from the sea in the first place.

"glaciers breaking up and falling into the sea" - do they mean whole glaciers, or just the bits which have been falling into the sea (calving) as those bits of glaciers have been doing for thousands of years?

The feedbacks could ultimately alter weather by changing the jet stream's path, magnify insect infestations and spawn more and larger wildfires.

Indeed they could, but long-term alteration of the jet streams could equally well trigger the next ice-age. We're well overdue for that event already.

A Question of Scale (2)

The atmosphere is, as I have previously said, very large. It extends tens of kilometres above the Earth's surface, though because of rapidly decreasing density, half the total mass is contained in the first 5 km. Ocean volume is less, almost exactly half of the "normalised" (1 atmosphere pressure) atmosphere. A good illustration can be seen here, which shows the relative size of the Earth and spheres representing ocean and atmosphere.

However, while the atmosphere has a larger volume, it has a much smaller mass; the atmosphere is a mixture of gases, and the ocean is liquid water with small amounts of dissolved solids. Normal atmospheric pressure at the Earth's surface can balance a column of mercury (which is a very dense liquid metal) 760 mm high (just over 3/4 metre); this equates to a column of water 10.33 metres high. Another way to envisage this is to consider that the atmosphere exerts a pressure equal to the weight of the column of air above a given area. The pressure is 1.03325 kilograms per square centimetre; the height of a column of water weighing 1.033 kg, and therefore exerting the same pressure on 1 sq.cm is 1033 cm or 10.33 metres. The mass of the atmosphere is equivalent to a depth of just 10.33 metres of sea water. When the ocean area is taken into account (71% of the earth's surface), this equates to 14.5 metres depth of ocean.

When heat content or capacity is considered, the disparity is even larger. The specific heat (amount of heat needed to heat one gram of a substance one degree Celsius) of sea water is 3.93, the specific heat of dry air is 1.006.

So what does all this mean? It means that the heat capacity of the atmosphere is equivalent to just 14.5 x 1.006/3.93 or just 3.7 metres of ocean depth. The ocean's heat capacity is hundreds of times greater than that of the atmosphere. When he was explaining about the logic of lighter electrons orbiting the relatively massive atomic nucleus (rather than the opposite as had been claimed by some), Ernest Rutherford said “When you’ve got an elephant and a flea, you assume it’s the flea that jumps.”

When considering the internal driving factors in Earth's climate, the atmosphere is the flea, and the ocean the elephant.