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The Forum > Article Comments > The most amazing graph of 2015 > Comments

The most amazing graph of 2015 : Comments

By Chris Golis, published 4/6/2015

The environmental apocolyptic doomsayers have been proved wrong over almost 50 years.

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Ice melt.
Ice continues to melt on a massive global scale and shows every indication of increasing, now this makes no sense if the Global temperature had been flat lining for the last 18 years.
The Arctic
“Between 1979 and 1996 Arctic sea ice declined at around 36,000 sq km a year, on average. Since 1997, the rate of loss has accelerated to dramatically to 130,000 sq km per year.”

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/

Using the graph above starting in 1997 and tick off ice extent every five years it becomes very clear that ice loss is continuing apace.

There are three satellite systems, which have been designed to measure ice loss, they are ICESat ,GRACE and CryoSat-2.

While seasonal sea ice has around the Antarctic ice has increased slightly, ice loss from the land has accelerated.

“CryoSat-2 observations taken between November 2010 and September 2013 indicate annual ice sheet mass losses of 134 ± 27 gigatons in West Antarctica, 3 ± 36 gigatons in East Antarctica, and 23 ± 18 gigatons on the Antarctic Peninsula. The Amundsen Sea showed the largest signal of ice loss.”

“GRACE measurements indicated a significant ice loss in the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 2002 to 2005. Ice sheet mass decreased at 152 ± 80 cubic kilometers”

“GRACE data uncovered ice mass loss in Greenland of 248 ± 36 cubic kilometers per year, an amount equivalent to a global sea rise of 0.5 ± 0.1 millimeters per year”

Ok well how about glaciers of the 1000s we have data for, at least 95% of glaciers are in retreat.

It just not makes sense that ice loss is increasing during a period when global temperatures are not increasing.
Posted by warmair, Monday, 8 June 2015 8:14:18 PM
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Sea level rise.
Currently the level of sea level rise as measured by satellites is about 3.2 mm per year, now this is made up of ice melt from land, and thermal expansion. Less than half of this can be accounted for by ice melt the rest is due to thermal expansion, the problem is if the globe is not warming you can not have any thermal expansion of the sea, but the graph below clearly shows sea level rise has not stopped if anything it has accelerated.
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_decades.html

We also have direct evidence the oceans are getting warmer.

http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content2000m.png

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/jan/22/oceans-warming-so-fast-they-keep-breaking-scientists-charts

Weather records
Hot weather records exceed cold weather by a ratio of 3 to one the link below gives data for the US but this is also true on a global scale as well.
Again we see no slowing over the last 18 years rather we see the ratio increasing.

https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/1036/record-high-temperatures-far-outpace-record-lows-across-us

The only possible conclusion is the globe has been warming over the last 18 years and longer.

PS I wish to thank Hasbeen for giving me the drive to revisit this question.
Posted by warmair, Monday, 8 June 2015 8:20:24 PM
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Thinkabit,

Grain production per capita was indeed outstripping population growth if you go back as far as 1970. You have chosen your starting date for your average to include the enormous gains from the Green Revolution, which doubled and in some cases tripled grain production per hectare. This is why Paul Ehrlich and others writing in the 1960s were spectacularly wrong about famines in the 1970s. Try averaging since 1984. Scroll down to see the relevant graph in my first link (under "equations for population, soil, and food model"). There are plenty of similar graphs from other sources that show grain production per capita peaking in or near 1984. See also this table from US Dept. of Agriculture data

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CC0QFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.earth-policy.org%2Fdatacenter%2Fxls%2Fupdate72_11.xls&ei=ymN1VYWpFePamgW8rIHIAg&usg=AFQjCNFF_lNyPui0ffQFAwuBDHHSS8LDvg&bvm=bv.95039771,d.dG

and Fig. 3 in

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1128&context=nasapub

The average global citizen is still in a much better position now than in 1950 or 1960

http://fas.org/irp/cia/product/globaltrends2015/375781.gif
Posted by Divergence, Monday, 8 June 2015 8:43:32 PM
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Sorry, Thinkabit

I hit the wrong button and posted before I meant to. The last link in my previous post comes from this paper

http://fas.org/irp/cia/product/globaltrends2015/#link8a

When I looked at more recent data, total grain production did indeed begin rising again after 2000, but grain production per capita is even less than it was in 1971 (see the last link in my previous post). This doesn't mean that we couldn't decently feed everyone in the world. There is a lot of waste, and a lot of grain that is fit for human consumption is fed to animals. Biofuels don't help either. The problems with feeding everyone are mostly economic/political, but there certainly are countries that have outgrown the ability of the local agriculture to feed them.

The question is whether we could go on feeding our current population on a sustainable basis, let alone the 11 billion or so that the UN medium projection expects for the future. We are doing a lot of damage to our planetary life support systems (not just climate change), as well as using up renewable resources faster than they can be replenished. See this article from Nature that surveys the main issues.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html
open version: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

If everything is so rosy, why are real food prices on the UN FAO Food Price Index so high? In Hasbeen's terms, why haven't the sustained high prices led to more production?

http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/
Posted by Divergence, Monday, 8 June 2015 9:14:31 PM
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Thanks, Chris, I had some dealings with you in your venture capital days. Tombee, as a (now retired) economic policy adviser, I regularly advise that the future is always uncertain, that the outcomes will always surprise us, and that we prepare for it best not by, say, speculating on what climate changes might occur over 100 years or so and making that our policy focus, but by policies which increase our capacity to respond to whatever befalls - those which promote flexibility, innovation, enterprise, resilience, self-dependence etc rather than monolithic centrally-planned ones based on assumed knowledge of the future. Chris's (past?) field is one to encourage rather than, say, subsidising uncompetitive cars or driving up electricity prices by pursuing non-viable, intermittent sources of energy.
Posted by Faustino, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 1:09:27 PM
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