In fact, as Dr. Alley reminds anyone who will listen, and as he recently told a Congressional committee, the estimate of 5 or 6 degrees is actually mildly optimistic. Computer programs used to forecast future climate show it as the most likely outcome from a doubling of carbon dioxide, but those programs also show substantial probabilities that the warming will be much greater.
The true worst case from doubled carbon dioxide is closer to 18 or 20 degrees of warming, Dr. Alley said — an addition of heat so radical that it would render the planet unrecognizable to its present-day inhabitants.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/
h/t to Marc Morano
This is just plain stupid.
I don’t think that is what the history of our planet tells us with higher levels of co2 in the past.
Maybe a typo and he really meant “decrees” as in the statements that they are making so that we will do what they tell us to?
This is what global warming does to your house anyway. so be afraid, be very afraid
http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/6398/snowywinter01.jpg
;O)
In the Yuletide tradition…
On the first day of warming, Jim Hansen said to me:
“and the heat will unbearable be”.
On the second day of warming, Jim Hansen said to me:
“drought you will see
and the heat will unbearable be”.
On the third day of warming, Jim Hansen said to me:
“seas levels rise
droughts you will see
and the heat will unbearable be”.
On the fourth day of warming, Jim Hansen said to me:
“polar caps will melt
seas levels rise
droughts you will see
and the heat will unbearable be.
On the fifth day of warming, Jim Hansen said to me
Carbon’s the key!
polar caps will melt
sea levels rise
droughts you will see
and the heat will unbearable be.
People, in times of global warming please make sure you close your car windows
http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/4921/snowywinter22crop.jpg
This frigging doctor has the morals of an Alley cat, boom boom.
I thought the upper limit of the uncertainty was ~6 C and the predicted value was 3 C…?
-Scott
So he’s saying that since CO2 made it 10-20 degrees colder, we should increase CO2 levels to make it 10-20 degrees warmer…..
got it
The article says he is from Penn State… which is the same cesspool where Mann floats, isn’t it?
Anyhow, this kind of absurdity is a nice Christmas present for those questioning these ‘expert’ AGW predictions.
The Earth has experienced as much as 4.5 doublings of CO2 in the past. (There is even an estimate of 5.5 doublings during Snowball Earth).
So, Alley’s math would predict temperatures at those times of well over 100C and even as much as 145C – more than enough to boil off the oceans and put us into the Venus runaway. What happened instead – even more icesheets than we have today
Obviously, Richard Alley has compromised mathematical abilities – like his miscalibration of the Greenland ice core isotope data showed (off by a factor of two) and like his 2009 Bjerknes lecture at the AGU “The Biggest Control Knob: CO2 in Earth Climate History” which had all the pro-AGWers literally swooning last year (the actual data he used which I also have does not exhibit anything like the correlation he commented on).
I don’t know how one could put together that lecture and then later say, 20.0C per doubling is possible. One must not have understood it at all.
I’m starting to wonder if students who have very poor math skills eventually migrate into climate science because they can get away with a lot of bad math in this field – in fact, it is encouraged. No matter what the data actually adds up to – it must equal 3.0C per doubling regardless – even cooling with higher CO2 levels means 3.0C (or 20.0C) per doubling is correct. That would explain much of the problems in this field.
He must have had some difficulty stomaching the calculations of the temperature from the GISP2 Ice Core proxies, as he is obviously mad…
Wait, what? Bill Illis, please educate me on the temp errors in the GISP2 calcs? Never heard of it. Off in which direction?
Thanks, Ed
etregembo, the do18 isotope data, when converted into temperature, needs to be calibrated for latitude, altitude and proximity to oceans. Richard Alley just used the global average formula which made the temperature changes more than twice as much as it should have been.
The do18 isotope numbers changed by the same amount in the Antarctic ice cores as in the Greenland ice cores. The temperature change in the Antarctic is quoted as -10C for the ice ages (twice the global temperature change which is the result of polar amplification which is seen in these numbers time and again). But Richard Alley quoted the Greenland temperature change as -20C, four times the global average temperature change.
Same do18 isotope change, roughly the same latititude, altitude changes would have been about the same over the period so the temperature change should have been the same. (Just noting there are other isotope data from the North Atlantic right next to Greenland which shows the global average temperature change of 5.0C, not Alley’s 20C).
His purpose in making the temperature change twice as much as it should have been was to make the Younger Dryas event seem more drastic than it really was.
Thanks Bill, good to know, I’d never heard that. Are they going to release new data and is it realistic to just divide the anomolies by 2.x? I had just assumed since the NH had more land, no circular ocean path, and shallow polar oceans than the SH that there was some mechanism which caused greater temp deltas in the NH (GISP2) than the rather isolated SH (Vostok). Doesn’t this make the current anomolies in the arctic circle rather unusual?