Why should the longer-term view including ice-sheet disintegration be included? It is really in order to consider the longer-term effects over the next few hundred years, and consequences for future generations, rather than just your lifetime.

You ask; “how do you propose to provide energy for the world while drastically cutting emissions?” – and I would infer this point suggests you believe in resignation; that nothing can be done. Obviously there are ways to provide energy while cutting emissions; it’s called renewable energy.

EU President says environmentalists want to command human behavior. Hearing the president of the EU frame the context of “global warming” in this context is most welcome. It inspires comment. He is both right and wrong. He is quite correct in his observation that the dark green movement has been and is exploiting global warming and climate change to seize power and run modern society back to some stone age fantasyland. He is utterly wrong to equate this with the notion that there is no problem with fossil CO2. There is a big problem only its not bearing down on us at the slow pace of changing glaciers, it is much near than that.

While many international leaders debate or work toward emission reduction strategies and carbon capture and storage the real problem is not tomorrows CO2 but yesterdays CO2. Nor is the central problem the role CO2 has in Global Warming.

We must turn our attention to the 1000+ gigatonne carbon bomb, two centuries of accumulating CO2, still mostly in the air as it takes centuries for airborne CO2 to equilibrate with the rest of the planet. Reports call the alarm of ocean acidification, adding acid flames to the raging fires of fossil CO2. What’s missing is mention of the best, only, means to fight ocean acidification and CO2 in the air.

Just 500 gigatonnes of yesterdays CO2 has reached the oceans where Revelle’s Rule tells us 80% of CO2 ends up. The first carbon bomb will be exploding in the ocean for more than a century even if we stop the emission of new CO2 today. No amount alternative energies, recycling, bicycling, or “clean coal” will tend to the first carbon bomb. Sure lets reduce the size of the second bomb but first things first. Here’s how.

ONLY ocean replenishment and restoration can enlist, as allies, the most powerful force of nature – the ocean plants, the bloomin’ plankton. But high and rising CO2 in the air is not only responsible for ocean acidification worse it has fed green plants on land making them greener, bushier, and living longer making them “good ground cover.”

Ground cover improvements have reduced the amount of dust blowing in the winds by 1/3 in just a few decades. For the oceans dust in the wind brings vital mineral micro-nutrients that terrestrial Yin (dust) is just as important as rain, the Yang, blowing from sea to land nurturing plant life. Since earth and ocean satellites went aloft 30 years ago we’ve measured decimation of ocean plants, 10% are gone from the Southern Ocean, 17% from the N. Atlantic, 26% from the N. Pacific, and 50% from the tropical seas. Just yesterday, a few decades past, ocean pastures grew more verdant consuming 4-5 billion tonnes more CO2 each year than today.

Today, as stewards of our blue planet, we must replenish ocean micro-nutrients to restore the verdant ocean pastures. If we bring the ocean plankton blooms back to levels seen only 30 years ago those plants will annually convert billions of tonnes of CO2 into ocean life instead of acid ocean death. Those verdant restored ocean pastures will deliver 7 times the CO2 reductions called for by the Kyoto Protocol.

To begin, and we must without delay, the work requires only tens of millions of dollars, to succeed in a matter of a decade requires only a few billion dollars. In the bargain the restored oceans will feed everything from tiny krill to the great whales and everything and everybody in between – fish, seabirds, penguins, seals and us.

Replenish and restore the oceans without delay.

Tom-why exactly is Hansen’s “long term sensitivity” estimate better than Annan’s short term estimate for policy purposes (or Chylek and Lohmann’s for that matter)? Your accusing Chip of believing in “do nothingism” implies you think something can be done-well, how do you propose to provide energy for the world while drastically cutting emissions? If you are so worried about Ocean pH, perhaps you should poor truck loads of Heartburn medicine into it? Feel good solutions feel good, but they don’t work at all.

This is true, as long as you take 1998 (a major El Nino year) as the starting year for your analysis. Looked at over other time frames…. not so much.

At MasterResource, we address a variety of topics and a variety of scope. My article was covering the recent publication of basically an opinion article about the strength of the feedbacks from water vapor under increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. I pointed out that there are other folks (scientists working on the same issue) who hold different opinions than Dessler and Sherwood. Has the final determination of the climate sensitivity been made? No. Is it one number that holds over a variety of scales? Probably not. The problem with trying to assess very long-term behavior (multiple centuries to millennia) is that humans will probably subject the earth and its climate to all sorts of things during that time period, and so the “natural” evolution that has occurred in the past at these timescales may not be a good predictor of future behavior (ignoring the fact that we aren’t starting from an ice age). I think that our immediate concerns are on what we may expect in the coming decades to perhaps a century—I haven’t much of a clue as to what our technologies will be even at the far end of that period, so I can’t really speculate on how our climate may respond to them. Perhaps we have different opinions from one another as to the timing and size of the “big picture” and where our concerns should lie. But, in my articles that I write for MasterResource, I describe my take on various aspects of my version of the “big picture.” I am sure you do the same thing on your blogspace.

-Chip

- As noted, its all seems that you are ignoring that, even if short-term sensitivity is low, that we run a very good chance of having two doublings.

Why speak narrowly on solely “estimates of the strength of the water vapor feedback and on-going research into these estimates” to a lay group that is interested in the big picture? Why not provide a bigger picture?

- Such a bigger picture would also include the ongoing rapid ocean acidification, which will only increase as we continue to pump up CO2 levels.

- So: “As to where the answer lies, the devil is in the details, and in this instance he is hard at work, as the processes involved are exceedingly complex—difficult to not only to fully understand, but even to adequately measure” – we don’t really know where we’re headed. BUT, just as for ocean pH, “let’s hope things adapt (as they have in the past)” (ignoring that past adaptation to ocean pH was on the scale of very long periods, and not a few decades/centuries).

Maybe you can help me to better understand, in the face of all this uncertainty, that you consider the ramping up of our global limate experiment to be the “conservative” thing to do? Or are you encouraging wishful thinking and do-nothingism simply out of resignation?