Discussion > A Debating Motion- Sea level rise is a threat.
Well what a wonderful opening to the new year. I applaud all the players. Mr Alder's closing speech, in particular, was a triumph. "Meanwhile (when present) you pootled about in the academic undergrowth chasing numbers of little importance." Marvelous!
James Evans
EM has previously explained that his tendency to borderline Aspergers/autism leads him to expect that 'scientific' arguments will necessarily be convincing.
Another side to this aspect of EM is his evident conviction that if somebody argues in human terms of what matters and what does not matter (rather than with simplistic mathematical formulas) this is 'arguing like a politician'. Somehow, EM sees this as equivalent to somebody pretending to be what they are not.
Martin A
And the rich irony there is that EM, himself, is arguing in human terms as to what matters and what does not matter.
Sea levels, global temperatures, polar ice extent, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, whatever natural disaster Earth may spring upon us will be no threat to civilisation. No, the real threat to civilisation is from the metaphorical jackals that are already feasting upon its innards before it has even begun to totter on its legs. The jackals have dressed themselves in fine clothes, given themselves fancy names and have trained us to hear their yipping as such sweet, sweet song – yet, like the Sirens of old, to follow that song is to be led onto the rocks of destruction. These jackals need to be identified, their true goals exposed and highlighted, and then they should be expelled like the crap they are.
Radical Rodent
As to effects, when Fukushima got wet it rendered 1200 square kilometres of Japan uninhabitable. We have nuclear power stations at Sizewell, Heysham and Dungerness vulnerable to a slow motion version of the same inundation. You do not move a nuclear power station as you would rebuild a house. At best, you lose a multi-billion pound investment.
Jan 1, 2015 at 12:10 PM Entropic man
How silly can you get? Fukushima's diesel generators were swamped by a 40 m tsunami, not by a one metre increase in sea level over decades.
If any of those nuclear power stations were still in use when the sea had supposedly risen three feet, sea walls around them would have been built quickly and cheaply long before that had happened.
Did it not occur to you that, if that is the worst case "threat to civilisation" you can come up with, you were on a hiding to nothing before you even started your debate?
Martin A
I am, of course, sorry to hear that EM claims a minor psychological disorder. And hope that he will not seek to use it to justify his poor standard of conduct in our recent discussions.
But, following his example, I should also make it known that I am a chronic sufferer from Entroporhinic Fortebiffophilia. I fear that it is an incurable condition.
The defence rests, m'lud.
PS: Should there be any other sufferers reading this blog, perhaps we can form an online support group?
Latimer Alder
Latimer Alder
I stand by what I said. HaroldW, Martin A, Radical Rodent and others got into the spirit of an enjoyable debate. You sat on the sidelines and made no useful contribution.
Entropic man
@entropic
Self-awareness really ain't one of your big plus points, is it?
There used to be an eco-warrior called Martin Lack who was totally devoid of it. He has rightly disappeared without trace. But are you he in drag?
Latimer Alder
What was EM doing at Stanstead airport?
Doesn't he know that flying(in an aeroplane)will bring on Thermageddon even faster?
Perhaps if people practised what they preached we would take more note of their witterings.
Roger Tolson
Entroporhinic Fortebiffophilia
... gets up your nose?
splitpin
EM is a Hypocrite just like Prince Chuckles
http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/2432656?currentPage=8
Breath of Freah Air
It will last my time. Like any decadent wealthy man in a dying culture I plan to enjoy it while it lasts.
You should watch "Masque of the Red Death", Quite a good allegory of our current situation.
Nov 29, 2014 at 7:29 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
Hypocricy indeed. :-)
I expect civilisation to collapse in due course, but the massed ranks of ostriches such as yourself make it impossible for me to do much to prevent it.
Since becoming an anchorite would have no effect I may as well have fun "while Rome burns".
Nov 29, 2014 at 9:12 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
Breath of Fresh Air
Entroporhinic Fortebiffophilia
I have just red my copy of Eating for Today and this is so easy even Timothy Peason could get it rite
'Philia' The love of.
'Biffo' Wot I will do to Molesworth2 if he doesn't stop it
'Forte' Out of tune. As in the skool pianoforte since Fotherington-Tommas was sick in it
Rhinic : A thik skin like a rinoserus
Entro ; A pile of feaces like in gastroentritiss.
So it is a luv of biffing somebode who is full of shit and with a thick skin making them sing out of tune.
And in context this seams absolutley rite. As any fule kno.
Best regards from St. Custards
N Molesworth, Skolar, 3B
"As to effects, when Fukushima got wet it rendered 1200 square kilometres of Japan uninhabitable. We have nuclear power stations at Sizewell, Heysham and Dungerness vulnerable to a slow motion version of the same inundation. You do not move a nuclear power station as you would rebuild a house. At best, you lose a multi-billion pound investment."
Jan 1, 2015 at 12:10 PM Entropic man
How silly can you get? Fukushima's diesel generators were swamped by a 40 m tsunami, not by a one metre increase in sea level over decades.If any of those nuclear power stations were still in use when the sea had supposedly risen three feet, sea walls around them would have been built quickly and cheaply long before that had happened.
Did it not occur to you that, if that is the worst case "threat to civilisation" you can come up with, you were on a hiding to nothing before you even started your debate?
Jan 2, 2015 at 11:44 AM | Registered CommenterMartin A
It's worse than worse than that. Entropic Man has previously stated that he is a supporter of nuclear power (perhaps reluctantly, I'm not sure). Now he appears to be arguing that alleged (model) sea level rise from fossil fuel use means that we shouldn't use nuclear power either. I'm beginning to smell a rat.
michael hart
I'm much obliged to Molesworth for his heroic attempt to explain my condition. But while in the right areas he has failed to hit the target.
Entroporhinic : - Of the nose (rhinus) of Entropic Man
Fortebiffophilia : A love/desire (philia) to Biff (as in Bash or Boff) strongly (forte)
So it is 'a Strong Desire to Biff Entropic Man on the nose'.
'Charlatan' indeed
Latimer Alder
I posted this link on unthreaded but it is relevant here too. It looks like Greenland may not make much of a contribution to sea-level rises this year, perhaps the reverse. So I would say Greenland should be discounted from EM's concerns for the next few years.
SandyS
Latimer, It is true that EM can be a little irritating from time to time. His inborn tendency in that direction has probably been made worse by a lifetime of speaking in front of a class of adolescents. He often addresses people who clearly have broader experience of life than him as if they were not-very-bright thirteen year olds.
However, I think all will agree with me that it's a price worth paying for the scientific insight and depth of knowledge that he brings to our discussions and the resulting enlightenment we benefit from.
Martin A
Tracing the origin of the '75 billion tons' annual erosion figure
A lot of things in climate/earth science are hard to track down to their original source. Sometimes it seems that things are regarded as established facts which are little more than somebody's guess, passed via a chain which is hard to retrace. The following is probably too tedious to read but it records my effort to trace the origin of the figure of 75 billion tons annual erosion. It seems as if I might be the first person to have traced this number to its source. If this is so, then it indicates a lack of what I would term "scholarship" by the various authors.
Wikipedia says, in its article on erosion; "Each year, about 75 billion tons of soil is eroded from the land—a rate that is about 13-40 times as fast as the natural rate of erosion."
The "75 billion tons" is attributed in the Wikipedia article on erosion to:
Soil-Erosion and Runoff Prevention by Plant Covers: A Review
Victor Hugo Durán Zuazo and Carmen RocIo Rodriguez Pleguezuel, available here.
They attribute the 75 billion tons figure to Pimentel D., Kounang N. (1998) Ecology and soil erosion in ecosystems. Ecosystems 1.416-426
A later paper by one of these authors (Pimentel) attributes the 75 billion tons to:
Myers, N.: 1993 (sic), Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management, Garden City, NY, Anchor/Doubleday.
(The date of publication given in my copy of this book is 1985.) "This extraordinary and vitally important book explains our place on this planet and the damage we are doing to ourselves..." (From the back cover of my copy - gives the general flavour of the book. It would have been an ideal Christmas present for Entropic Man as a fine specimen of Eco-Doom Porn.)
An illustration on page 41 is captioned "Annual soil loss: 75 billion tonnes" but without any discussion of how this figure was obtained. In "Sources and credits" (p 261) there is a line "...annual soil loss due to water erosion from Dusan Zachar Soil Erosion Elsevier (1982)". Myers evidently rounded the figure from Zachar (76.887213 billion) to the rounder-looking 75 billion.
Zachar's book can be downloaded in pdf form here
The last chapter of this book DISTRIBUTION OF EROSION has a section 'Global Assessment' which gives numbers. But obtained from yet another référence, quoted as:
Fournier F. (1960) Climat et Erosion: la Relation Entre l'Erosion du Sol par l'Eau et les Precipitations Atmosphériques. Presses Universitaires France, Paris (I have not seen Fournier's book.)
More acceptable data are given by Fournier (1960). On the basis of a detailed
theoretical analysis of silt flow, Fournier constructed lines on a map connecting
points at which equal volumes of material are transported by rivers (Fig. 193). By
means of planimetry he obtained values for the amounts of earth loosened and
transported by the rivers. (...)Absolute values for erosion losses (again according to Fournier) can be derived
for the various continents as follows:
(thousand tons)Europe (10,050,000 km2) 844,200
Australia (7,626,000 km2) 2,081,898
North and Central America (23,965,000 km2) 11,766,815
South America and the Antilles (18,140,000 km2) 11,599,600
Africa (29,800,000 km2) 21,664,500
Asia (44,100,000 km2) 26,930,000
Total 76,887,213
(thousand tonnes)
The Dusan Zachar book gives this value to eight significant figures without any discussion of the probable range of error in this estimate. (To me, quoting an estimate made by a manual graphical process to such ludicrous precision is ... ludicrous).
So that seems to be it
"Each year, about 75 billion tons (sic) of soil is eroded from the land" (Wikipedia).
Obtqined from
Soil-Erosion and Runoff Prevention by Plant Covers: A Review
Victor Hugo Durán Zuazo and Carmen RocIo Rodriguez Pleguezuelo (2009)
"Each year, about 75 billion tons (sic) of soil is eroded from the world's terrestrial ecosystems, most from agricultural land"
Obtained from:
Pimentel D., Kounang N. (1998) Ecology and soil erosion in ecosystems. Ecosystems 1.416-426 (1998) (75 billion tons)
Obtained from Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management (75 billion tonnes)
which referenced Dusan Zachar's book (76.887213 billion tonnes)
which quoted results derived from (manual) planimetry from Fournier's 1960 book.
Martin A
Martin A
That research is a a credit to your tenacity. I guess as the number is now nearly 60 years out of date it is useless for anything meaningful.
SandyS
SandyS - thank you.
It struck me too as strange that the number came from something published so long ago and, it seems, from the result of a single academic doing some sort of manual graphic integration ("planimetry") based on his assumptions about erosion rates in each region. If erosion is a genuine problem, then I'd have thought up to date estimates would have been available, based on observation and measurement, perhaps country by country.
To put it into perspective, the estimate was made at a time when the world population was less than half of what it is today, so patterns of agriculture and erosion will have changed significantly since then. Yet it was quoted without any sort of reservation by a paper ("peer reviewed") dated 2009.
On December 21, I sent a question to the National Oceanography Centre via their website:Hello, I want to find an authoritative estimate of the mass of mineral matter that moves from land into the ocean annually. Please tell me who I should contact for this information. Thank you. Martin A
An administrator replied promptly to say that the staff were on holiday but my question would be passed to an appropriate person when they returned on 5 January. I'll be interested to see what, if anything, they come up with.
Martin A
Martin A --
I second SandyS's sentiments. Great job of tracing that figure down. It's not clear whether all of that 75 billion tonnes (assuming that figure is correct and not horribly outdated) makes its way into the ocean. I would imagine some is left along the banks but the majority is deposited at deltas -- just a guess though.
Please do let us know if you hear from the professors about the matter.
HaroldW
It begs a lot of questions. If you ever get a reply, please post it.
diogenes
Martin, well done for looking into this - the accuracy of the figure in the Zachar book is indeed ludicrous.
I just googled "Colorado River sediment load" (it is probably the most studied river in the world so a good basis to extrapolate from) and the first reference was Millman & Meade, 1983, who estimate that:
the total suspended sediment from global catchments is 13.5 x 10^9 tons, and bedload and flood discharges may account for another 1-2 x 10^9 tons.
So including the bedload and flood discharge, Millman & Meade's figure is only a fifth of the 75 billion tonnes figure (ignoring the ton / tonnes issue). It is still a lot of mud and the displaced water has to go somewhere.
lapogus
Lapogus, the Milliman/Meade reference looks convincing. It represents an extensive (and impressive) collation of actual measurement data from major world rivers, rather than from theoretical modelling methods such as Fournier's.
Interesting that the paper opens by mentioning the discrepancy between their results and results such as Fournier's.
It explains that results obtained using methods such as Fournier's are significantly greater because they include the calculation of a large amount of eroded sediment that never reaches the ocean. That makes sense, as Fournier's work was evidently aimed at estimating the earth lost as a result of erosion, rather than the quantity of sediment reaching the ocean.
Milliman/Meade:
Method: Collation of measurement data major river by major river
Objective:Estimate sediment delivered to ocean
Fournier
Method: Theoretical model relating erosion to statistics of rainfall.
Objective: Estimate erosion of land irrespective of destination of material.
In view of these differences, I'd go for Milliman and Meade as the figure to use for estimating sea level rise due to erosion from the land entering the ocean.
I'll post any more relevant information that comes my way.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
[I infer from other publications that Fournier's book describes a formula for estimating the erosion from an area as:
annual erosion mass per km²
= coefficient × (total rainfall in the month with the most rainfall)² / (total annual rainfall for the area)
For a given annual rainfall, this formula has its maximum value if all the rain falls in just one month and its minimum value if the rain falls uniformly from month to month.
This makes sense, at least qualitatively. You would expect more erosion from a few weeks of heavy rain falling on dry soil than you would from a constant gentle rain falling year round, even with the same annual rainfall.]
Martin A
Martin, I think it also makes sense from the point of view of sediment load rising as a high power of water velocity. I can't find it now, but some years ago I saw an excellent pie-chart estimate of the sediment load/deposition of the worlds major river basins. Though they may have built some silt-trapping damns since then, the contribution of the Ganges/Brahmaputra contribution was staggeringly large when compared to all other rivers. Again, that makes sense when you think of snow melt and monsoon rains draining down off the Himalayas. Which is of course how Bangladesh came to exist, whatever the IPCC may choose to claim when talking about rising sea levels.
By contrast, others, such as the Amazon was very low. I also was given to understand that it was this ability to look at river flows, just as they enter the oceans, that allowed them to make such narrow error bars when estimating world erosion rates for such large areas of land. That is, for example, that the whole of the Amazon basin simply cannot discharge sediment to the oceans by any other means than by the water flow observed at the mouth of the river. I can see a certain logic in this argument.
michael hart
Since EM couldn't really support his argument and even ATTP doesn't think the case for catastrophic sea level rise has been made I think we can say that EM's motion has been lost.
"you pootled about in the academic undergrowth" sounds like a disappointing encounter between PhD virgins.
TinyCO2
@entropic
I know nothing of your motivations. I know what you wrote and I know what you did. But why you did them is a secret between you and your conscience.
Let's remind ourselves of our various actions throughout our little saga.
You proposed we have a debate. I readily agreed.
You proposed a motion to discuss. I readily agreed with the motion..put a few bounds on it to make it finite, but otherwise unchanged. I note that Professor Betts of the Met Office also suggested bounds.
You proposed a format of opening statements and follow up. I agreed. My opening statement to your motion 'This house regards sea level rise as a threat to civilisation' has been available for all to see since 14th December 6:39pm.
You then withdrew without making an opening statement, citing 'stress'.
A lively discussion ensued in your absence. On your return, you began to show different ways of calculating SLR, but conspicuously failed to address at all the substance of the motion you proposed...that SLR is a 'threat to civilisation'.
And having come up with only the rather pathetic examples of the impacts on civilisation that in 100 years we might lose Dungeness power station to SLR, you accuse me of being a charlatan!
Seems to me that I robustly took on the central tenet of your motion and won the debate hands-down. Meanwhile (when present) you pootled about in the academic undergrowth chasing numbers of little importance.
In more robust times, I suspect that I might be asking you to nominate seconds and to meet me at dawn on Putney Heath.
As it is, I will merely counsel you to be more careful in your choice of motion to debate. It was your motion on your terms. And especially to be very much more careful in your language wrt your co-debaters. You wouldn't want to be thought of as a bad loser, would you?