Thursday
Oct062011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Hansen at the Royal Society
Oct 6, 2011 Royal Society James Hansen is among the speakers at the Royal Society's "Warm Climates of the Past" event next week.
Oct 6, 2011 Royal Society
Reader Comments (68)
Telling us that things weren't actually warm?
I thought this was of interest.
"Session 3: 11.45 Jeff Kiehl, Towards a Solution to the Cold Pole Problem"
Is there actually a Cold Pole Problem?
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/doing-it-ourselves/
I posted on unthreaded, but more appropriate here (from WUWT):
“Hansen, an expert on the climate of both Earth and Venus, has a starker warning for us. In the face of continued political inaction to stop the climate threat, he decided to calculate what it would take for Earth’s climate to repeat what happened on our sister planet Venus – a runaway greenhouse effect that would boil away the oceans and destroy all life on the planet:
“I’ve come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and the tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty”. “
So, shale gas is going to increase Earth's CO2 from 0.04% to Venus's 96.5%. You have been warned!!
Hmmm, so the oceans won't buffer all that CO2 like they did in the past to result in all those limestone and chalk deposits. I don't think so.
I wonder if he travelled his usual first class, no doubt all paid for by someone else.
Oh my such hardships for these Climate "Scientists"
Is this the Dr. Hansen who predicted, 20 years ago, that New York would be underwater in 20 years?
RS website says tickets all sold out. Quite right - can't let the great unwashed in!
Will any BH denizens attend?
John
CinbadtheSailor Oct 6, 2011 at 5:41 PM
I wonder who is picking up Hansen's tab?
Very good. The topic is an important and interesting one, and I hope we may get a decent discussion out of it - I note that an audio-recording is promised. I hope Dr Hansen will give a temperate contribution, and not one of his 'death-trains' variety, but that may be to ask him to leave his campaigning hat off. If I were chairing the meeting, that is precisely what I would ask him to do. I might also raise the possibility of a similar meeting focusing on cold climates of the past since that would also be important and interesting.
So how did they get to be warmer without yumans to produce Devil Gas?
OT:
Flagship UK carbon capture project 'close to collapse'
Scottish Power expected to pull out of government-promoted scheme to build a £1bn prototype CCS plant at Longannet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/06/carbon-capture-project-longannet-collapse
Apparently the whole thing is uneconomic (I. know, what a shock!) and the Power company wanted to get their snout even deeper in the trough. The only surprise is that the Scottish Government, is apparently telling them where to shove it.
I followed the link to the Royal Society and was amused to find that they have an event on the 7th of October concerning "Alchemy and Patronage in Tudor England" - perhaps in years to come an even more apt event will be sponsored by the Royal Society to address "Climatology and Patronage in the 21st Century"! If you can't wait for that exposition here are the details of what is currently on offer .........the comparison between alchemy and climatology is almost perfect. Perhaps the person constructing the RS's programme of events has a well developed sense of irony?
Alchemy and Patronage in Tudor England
Starts: 1.00pm on 07 October 2011
Finishes: 2.00pm on 07 October 2011
Venue: The Royal Society, London
Dr Jenny Rampling, Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge
In early modern England, alchemical practitioners employed a range of strategies to win the trust and support of powerful, even royal, patrons: from the preservation of health with potent elixirs, to the resolution of England's bullion shortage through mass production of transmuted gold. Yet success relied on alchemists' ability to interpret the obscure writings of past adepts, and to reliably translate them into practical procedures within a coherent natural philosophical framework. This talk will trace some of the ideas and practices elaborated in alchemical patronage proposals addressed to Tudor monarchs and their councillors - ideas that would eventually be revisited, and reimagined, by seventeenth-century practitioners.
The lecture is free and all are welcome to attend, but advance booking is necessary.
Brian Cairns bakes aerosol into the fudge fabricated in a private kitchen, not subject to government sanitary inspections.
=============
Dear Dr Hansen. You work at NASA. The S stands for "Space". You know, that big area beyond all that nitrogen, oxygen and argon above you. Ask some of your planetary exploration colleagues about the relative distances from the sun between Venus and Earth. You can the calculate (using inverse square law) how much more sunshine falls on Venus. Hint. it's just shy of twice. So I'm still trying to work out how the two planets could possibly, even possibly, be comparable.
What a pratt.
Hansen's begging for a hundred million dollars to develop the aerosol fudge factor privately.
Or threatening.
===============
T'was about the planet Venus
NASA should have seen us
Hanson said we'll all be dead
but for an abacus between us
Apologies to Oscar Brand, I blame Josh's nautical doodlings ;-)
Twas at the Royal society
Hansen spoke his piety
on he went to pay his rent
but did not dint dubiety
I'll be here all week <lol>
Inside the Royal society
with Hansens over-anxiety
the cheque was signed for his opine
'Cos the science was propriety
alt:
On he went to seek his rent
And didn't dint leviety.
==============
The Presidential Nurse
Said sceptics are a curse
Keep it short and terse
Grim and getting worse.
With acknowledgments to Frosty above -
T'was about the planet Venus
NASA should have seen us
Hansen, Mann, Bradley & Schmidt
And just one bent stick between us.
The captain's name was Michael Mann,
A statistical ignoramus,
His weak r-squareds and PC ones
Were quite enough to shame us
The first mate's name was Gavin Schmidt
He had a mighty blog
And if you disagreed on it
He'd chuck you in his bog
Too bad I won't be there. There is a question I have always wated to ask Hansen:
"You have stated repeatedly that current temperatures are only a few tenths of a degree below the maximum in the previous interglacial. How many tenths of a degree would it requre, in your opinion, to bring hippopotami back to Yorkshire?"
And they are out to get our young too: http://royalsociety.org/events/being-green/
Will the RS stage manage hansen's show by heationg the place up to the point of hot?
The RS link at the top crashes my browser for some reason. I'd no idea it was so discerning...
We are elite and stunning
With infiltration cunning
All the nations wealth
At mercy of our stealth
Stupid politicians
Fall for our ambitions
Amazingly so thick
They fall for every trick
SimonJ; Roger Longstaff
My understanding of Hansen's use of 'Venus syndrome' is that Earth's climate generally moves around the bottom of a U-shaped sensitivity curve. But push it hard enough in either direction and the climate response becomes increasingly extreme. Deep paleoclimate Snowball Earth episodes confirm this.
Hansen argues that at the other end of the scale, sufficiently high CO2 levels are capable of increasing surface forcing to above 10W/m2, and the resulting hot climate state would be effectively uninhabitable.
I don't think he is saying that this will happen. Simply that it could. As a thought experiment bookend to Snowball Earth. But of course, unwise.
You have to remember that Hansen seems to be a classic literalistic boffin. He explores the current climate sensitivity hypothesis carefully to the end, without quite realising that talk of the Venus effect winds people up.
This doesn't mean that what he is saying about climate sensitivity is wrong.
BBD,
Hansen was wrong about New York flooding and he is wrong about Venus - the Venusian lapse rate is what you would expect it to be, given its mass, orbit and an atmosphere that is 2 orders of magnitude more massive than that of Earth.
BBD
Snowball Earth events (on Earth) have been questioned. Can't speak for Venus.
http://www.physorg.com/news93869405.html
Pharos
Agreed. I'm more of a slushball man myself as it fits the evidence better (your link). But people tend to talk about Snowball Earth and I didn't want to muddle things up unnecessarily. Anyway, it still seems that ice sheets covered most of the globe more than once.
Oh, I think I see the point. Why no thermageddon so far?
Because there's never been a high enough concentration of GHGs to cause one. And we're not going to burn all the fossil hydrocarbons and push climate into a unique hot state (nor does Hansen anywhere argue this).
Looking back, I said it better at Oct 6, 2011 at 10:05 PM .
I know everybody on BH is a big fan of Sir Paul Nurse like me. Here he is interviewed on the Pod Delusion start at 5:40 http://poddelusion.co.uk/blog/2011/10/06/episode-105-7th-october-2011/
"Warm Climates of the Past"?
I thought they got "rid of the medieval warm period"?
Hans & others from outside UK & USA
we mostly only hear from UK & USA side on climate issues on blogs i visit, is there a blog/etc which gives the rest of the world viewpoint?
thanks dougie
@tty
"You have stated repeatedly that current temperatures are only a few tenths of a degree below the maximum in the previous interglacial. How many tenths of a degree would it requre, in your opinion, to bring hippopotami back to Yorkshire?"
It is established fact that mult-tenth degrees alone are insufficient to tempt the noble river horse. You also need lots of mud.
"Mud, mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood
So follow me follow, down to the hollow
And there let me wallow in glorious mud
The fair hippopotama he aimed to entice
From her seat on that hilltop above ...."
Ah Jimmy Jimmy
Wit your funny parson hat
How do you get your work done
Gettin' all arrested like dat?
Andrew
I suspect that instead of a consensus there will be arguments at the conference between those who claim past hot periods were not really all that hot and those who admit they were but claim they were caused be factors that are not active now because if those factors were active in addition to all the CO2 we are putting out then global warming would be accelerating at an even greater rate than they claim it is doing today.
You have to admire a man who contributes so much hot air and airmiles to the cause.
With acknowledgments to Frosty above -
T'was on the pa-len-et Venus,
Bah gum you should have seen it,
The atmosphere was smoking hot
And Jim was wagging his, er, finger.
No doubt this will mainly be about the PETM which really gets climate scientists giddy like little school girls. So much so, that they ignore the other 500 million years which shows no CO2 temperature correlation at all.
BBD
"I don't think he is saying that this will happen. Simply that it could."
He sounds less equivocal than that to me:
"If we also burn the tar sands and the tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty"
Venus's atmosphere might have something to do with the conditions there, too, with a surface pressure of 93 bar...
Brownedoff - please stop it! This is supposed to be a serious science blog. But......
T'was on the planet Venus
Jim Hanson should have seen us
The figurehead was Zedsdeadbed
Playing with his ............
Your Grace, please snip this and all further purile poems!!
kim,
It’s your fault . . . . you started this poetical meme a long time ago. Great job.
And I must say that I love the poems here on this thread.
John
Hmmm. This could be a very short talk. Does he admit to any?
I assume Hansen will be discussing the reasons why global temperatures have fallen throughout the Cenozoic after peaking 50ma.
This figure (small pdf) is a reconstruction of deep ocean temperature derived from δ16O and δ18O ratios in shelly forams in seabed sediment cores (data from Zachos et al. 2001 full pdf; abstract analysis and figure J. Hansen, M. Sato).
Deep ocean temperatures are held to be equivalent to high latitude winter ocean surface waters as this is when and where they become dense enough to sink and become part of the deep ocean circulation.
Whatever you might think of Hansen, this is an interesting deep paleoclimate reconstruction, and an impressive collaborative effort.
I am puzzled as to why Dr Hansen wants to attend, or indeed was even invited to, this conference. I presume his position is that past climates are of little interest for people facing a dramatic transformation in climate, the likes of which humans have never seen. In which case, he may only be there to warn the participants not to make the mistake of assuming future warm spells will be like, say the MWP or other 'climate optima'. Oh no, good news is bad news when you are alarmed about warming. He knows he will get a sympathetic welcome from those in power at the Royal Society, and perhaps he has business with them during this visit with his appearance at this conference a mere gesture, perhaps to give him a more civilised platform after his recent arrest in Washington. I don't know. I am quite puzzled by it.
John Shade
Hansen is interested in paleoclimate change and what it suggests about the way the climate system works. There's every reason for him to attend.
John Shade - this might be why:
"Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change"
http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.0968v3 (last revised 20 Jul 2011)
Various other work here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/