Friday, March 12, 2010

I'm puzzeled about growing ice and increased sea level

There are some new interesting blog posts that I have read during the last week. But when you put them together, I don't get the logic to make sense:
I will have to read these blogs again and look into the background material. But it is very strange that the AGW theory results in extended snow cover on the winter (i.e., on the northern hemisphere the snow cover will go further south) and on Antarctica the sea ice will extend. In the last blog in the list, it is said that global sea level will rise maybe 3 meters until 2105, i.e., faster rise than predicted by IPCC. This doesn't make sense to me.

Please note, the second blog is about sea ice which will not affect the sea level since the ice is already in the water. But if the sea ice extends it will be harder for the land ice to melt and perhaps it will even increase due to increase in snow fall?

Anyone who would care to enlighten me? ;)

Monday, March 1, 2010

The warming is much smaller than expected?

The question in my previous post "Where is all the warming?" seems to have a possible explanation. In a blog by Willis Eschenbach it was concluded:

While my results are far below the canonical IPCC values, they are not without precedent in the scientific literature. In CO2-induced global warming: a skeptic’s view of potential climate change, Sherwood Idso gives the results of eight “natural experiments”. These are measurements of changes in temperature and corresponding forcing in various areas of the earth’s surface. The results of his experiments was a sensitivity of 0.3°C per doubling. This is still larger than my result of 0.05°C per doubling, but is much smaller than the IPCC results.

This is a huge difference compared to what IPCC says. Thus the result implies that the extra forcing of 1.5W/m2 has essentially no effect on the climate. This also makes sense given that we have seen close to no measurable global warming.

But as always, you really have to be "skeptic" about this kind of new results that are considerably different compared to current knowledge about the climate. The energy must still be there somewhere, or is the 1.5W/m2 simply wrong?