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:

• Does record snowfall disprove global warming?
• Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
• Sealevelgate

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? ;)

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?

Where is all the warming?

If we look at what IPCC states there is approximately an 1.5 W/m2 more energy coming into the Earth than is going out. Looking at the climate widget in my blog you will see that the temperature anomaly for January 2010 is 0.72C, which is record high. There have never been any measurements that have shown this high temperature on Earth! This seems logical, we have a huge inflow of energy and this warms the Earth and the atmosphere.

But when you start to look into actual surface measurements. There are many open questions and the uncertainties about the quality of the measurements are troublesome. There are a lot of people out there doing sanity checks of the temperature data and for every day that passes by, new errors are found. In another blog today I found "It is increasingly apparent that we do not even know how much the world has warmed in recent decades, let alone the reason(s) why. It seems to me we are back to square one."

How on earth are we able to have a fruitful discussion about our climate? Do we know anything about the climate at all?

Even more on nuclear power for the future

It seems that not only Bill Gates thinks that it is a great idea with new nuclear power plats for the future in order to get clean and sustainable energy:
Dr. Patrick Moore talk nuclear energy

Thanks to the successful climate meeting in Copenhagen last December, we finally see people starting to discuss innovative possibilities for the future! It's great that the terrible CO2 discussion is coming to an end now that we know that changing the CO2 level a few PPM up-or-down had essentially no effect on the climate. Don't let us spend more time on the past, let us look forward!

Bill Gates doesn't like climate skeptics

This was a very interesting presentation: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html. I have never been a fan of Bill Gates. But this was a good presentation and in some way he actually manage make it a void question whatever and to what extent CO2 is causing global warming. The solution is of course simple, make the alternative to burning fossil fuel so cheap that there is no point in creating CO2 for power.

By the end of the presentation he managed to make fun of climate skeptics. Ok, I can live with that :-)

Climate science is funny?

As a follow-up on my previous blog, I should also state that following all climate blogs is not only interesting, but also sometimes funny. I share these two links from the Swedish blog sphere:

• John Christy on global warming: http://labbibia.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/professor-christy-slaktar-global-warming-i-intervju/
• The daily show makes fun of climate skeptics: http://uppsalainitiativet.blogspot.com/2010/02/usas-framsta-komiker-driver-med.html

I hope you enjoy these videos as much as I did :-)

Climate science is very interesting!

On one all blogs that I'm following it said some time ago "Pass the popcorn, this might be very interesting". And of course, climate science is very interesting! I have been so extremely busy the last couple of months that I haven't had time to update my own blog.

I think I'm reading about 20 to 30 climate blogs every day. It's both AGW and non-AGW blogs. With all these "gates" that has followed the climategate scandal I can with confidence say that I have never found anything more entertaining since they started to show Dallas on Swedish television back in 1981.

So, please pass the popcorn...this is a good show going on!