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Bob Bingham Blog page.

A series of opinion pieces on, mostly climate change and related subjects to do with New Zealand.

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Climate change 40 year lag.

30/3/2014

1 Comment

 
The IPCC will be releasing their second report this week and no doubt the news will be reporting on it. The IPCC are normally very cautious and only say what they can prove but the second report gives them some flexibility on forecasting the future and we may get a report closer to reality.

CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels has been rising at a steady level and now stands at 400 part per million, a level we have not seen for about three million years. However we do not have the weather and sea levels to go with 400 ppm as there is a long delay while the oceans, which absorb 90% of the new heat, take in the heat and let it out later.

This delay is estimated to be 40 years and so we are only having the weather in relation to the CO2 of 1970.


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We are adding CO2 to the atmosphere at the rate of 3 points per year with no sign of getting it under control and as you can see from the NASA graph from Sceptical Science we have a long way to go yet. This approximate delay only applies to the surface temperature while rising sea levels take longer to react.
 The last time the world had 400 ppm of sea level rise the sea level was 12 meters higher than today so that also has a long way to go.http://www.climateoutcome.kiwi.nz/

1 Comment
Bob Bristow
8/4/2014 02:14:25 pm

I agree and it is surprising that the science has become entangled with politics and religion. I am afraid we are going to see more and more extreme events. We really do need to wean ourselves off fossil fuel and restore the carbon budget.

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    Bob Bingham 

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