The conventional wisdom finally turns against Obama on the Middle East
(Paul)
It’s good to statements like the following from Ben Smith in Politico about President Obama’s Middle East adventures becoming the conventional wisdom:
Instead of becoming a heady triumph of his diplomatic skill and special insight, Obama’s peace process is viewed almost universally in Israel as a mistake-riddled fantasy. And far from becoming the transcendent figure in a centuries-old drama, Obama has become just another frustrated player on a hardened Mideast landscape.
The current state of play sums up the problem. Obama’s demand that the Israelis stop building settlements on the West Bank was met, at long last, by a temporary and partial freeze, but its brief renewal is now the subject of intensive negotiations.
Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders have refused American demands to hold peace talks with the Israelis before the freeze is extended. Talks with Arab states over gestures intended to build Israeli confidence — a key part of Obama’s early plan — have long since been scrapped.
The political peace process to which Obama committed so much energy is considered a failure so far. And in the world’s most pro-American state, the public and its leaders have lost any faith in Obama and — increasingly — even in the notion of a politically negotiated peace.
Even those who still believe in the process that Obama has championed view his conduct as a deeply unfunny comedy of errors.
Smith shows that Obama has managed to lose not just the confidence of the Israeli government but also that of the dovish Kadima opposition party led by Tzipi Livni:
Livni scrupulously avoids criticizing Obama’s conduct of the peace talks, but those around her are blunter. “If Obama wanted to be a transformational figure, he would never have led with the settlements,” said Eyal Arad, the architect of Livni’s campaign for prime minister. He argues — like most Israelis — that Obama inadvertently got talks hung up on a matter of irrelevant principle, rather than engaging the reality that some settlements can stay while others must go.
“The settlements were pushed by a bunch of left-wingers who were out of sync with the realities and were out of government too long,” he said. “The irony is that Obama went directly back to the place where George Bush the father left off.”
Nor, according to Smith, do the Palestinians have much respect for Obama at this point. This isn’t surprising. Obama raised their hopes by taking an aggressive anti-settlement posture. In the process, he lost the trust of the Israelis, which ensures his inability to deliver anything much to the Palestinians.
Obama’s two defining characteristics — inexperience and adherence to leftwing dogma — are a dangerous combination in almost any context. They certainly have no useful place in the Middle East, where they have combined to make Obama an object of ridicule on both sides of the Israeli political divide and among Israel’s adversaries.
Currency wars and conventional wisdom
Yesterday I received one of those "Q and A" e-mails that think tanks
use to promote their views from the Carnegie Endowment yesterday. The first
question was: "What is the danger that a currency war could break out?"
Obviously the premise of this question is that there
is no such war at present. But wait a minute. The IMF says that China is
manipulating its currency. That means that China is constantly buying dollars in the global currency markets in
order to keep the dollar’s value artificially high versus the Chinese yuan. It
further means that China is doing this in order to indirectly subsidize its
exports and to accumulate large dollar reserves. Nor is China the only player
of this game. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and even, upon occasion, Japan also
intervene in currency markets to be sure that their export industries remain
"competitive."
The intervention is always aimed at keeping the
value of those currencies versus the dollar somewhat lower than market forces
would dictate. In other words, these countries are all subsidizing their
exports into the U.S. market and into the markets of other countries like
Canada or Australia or Norway, for example, that have freely floating
currencies. This subsidization is a beggar-thy-neighbor policy that aims to create jobs at home by expropriating
those of the importing countries. It is a strike at the competing industries in
floating currency markets that would be competitive in the absence of the
currency manipulation.
Now what would you call this — a currency war
maybe? Well, according to Carnegie Encowment economist Uri Dadush, you’d be wrong if you did. Dadush says that while there is a
significant risk of a currency war breaking out, we’re not there yet.
Apparently that can only happen if the U.S. decides to play tit for tat.
An even better example was the story that I’m sure
many of you saw on the front page of yesterdays New York Times business section
titled, Few Jobs Seen in a Weaker Dollar. I was particularly
interested in this story because it had run originally in the International
Herald Tribune and had contained a quote from, well, me. Naturally when I saw
it again in the Times, I turned eagerly to the inside jump page to see my name
in print once again. So you also know
how disappointed I was to see that my name and quote had disappeared from the
Times edit of the story.
According to the Times version all economists share
the view that a weaker dollar — meaning no currency manipulation by China or
others — would have little if any affect
on either the U.S. trade deficit or U.S. job creation. So, whereas the Dadush was saying that we’re not yet in a currency war, the Times was saying
that maybe there is a war, but even if the currency manipulators stopped their
attack, the effect on the U.S. economy would be negligible. So, maybe we’re not
at war, but if we are, don’t worry about it. This is the conventional U.S.
economic wisdom as handed down by two pillars of the establishment.
The Times essentially said that exchange rates no
longer have much effect on trade flows because global companies produce in most
of the major markets into which they sell and do not change production
locations in response to currency shifts.
In the original Herald Tribune article, I noted that exchange rates are
prices and that to argue that prices don’t matter is to argue that capitalism
doesn’t matter. Obviously, the apostles of the conventional wisdom at the Times
thought my comment undercut the preferred story line too much and removed it.
Or maybe they just had to cut the length of the article and my comments just
inadvertently wound up on the cutting room floor. Who knows? But it doesn’t really matter, because the
story was so obviously incomplete to anyone at all familiar with global
production and marketing as to make one wonder if there are any editors left at
the Times.
Look, of course, global companies produce in a lot
of different markets. Toyota produces in Japan and in the U.S. for example. But
Toyota sells more cars in the U.S. than it produces in the U.S. and so do
Nissan, Mercedes Benz, and BMW. Apple produces some things in the U.S., but the
bulk of the products Apple sells in the U.S. are made in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and
China. If this were not the case, how would the United States have chronic
trade deficits of over $ 600 billion? Does the Times think that Toyota would not
move more of its production to the U.S. if the yen doubled in value versus the
dollar? If Toyota did move more production here, would that no create U.S.
jobs? What am I missing here?
The new wisdom of capitalism
In his column today, David Brooks exhorted readers to “doubt the wizardry of the economic surgeons and appreciate the old wisdom of common sense: simple regulations, low debt, high savings, hard work, few distortions.” Economist Karl Smith had a useful response:
Brooks describes the old wisdom. Yet, the part of it that is old is not wise and the part of it that is wise is not old.
Capitalism is sometimes described as the Art of Going into Debt. Usury laws once prevented the loaning of money for interest. This implied that all investment had to be financed with high personal savings. The breakdown of these laws and, with it the taking on of enormous debts, was instrumental in the formation of our entire economic system.
Similarly, no one doubts the hard work of the Amish. I think few would want their economy. Again, capital – and the ability to borrow it and trade it – not labor is the key to capitalism.
However, most importantly the doctrine of simple regulations and few distortions is in no way common sense. Every social organization from smallest family to the United Nations constantly wants to enact Byzantine regulations in an effort to control what they see as wayward progeny. The insight that these things do more harm than good is one of the overwhelming intellectual accomplishments of pointy-headed economics.
As a rule, I become extremely suspicious when politicians or pundits use the term “common sense.”
Counter-intuitive wisdom
In response to a recent Washington Post op-ed urging President Obama to voluntarily be a one-term president, Dave Weigel imagines some other counter-intuitive column ideas:
Obama Must Relocate the White House to the Heartland
The pitch: The president’s lost touch with voters and become part of the all-absorbing swamp that voters can’t stand. The solution: Move government operations to Iowa or Nebraska, preferably in sight of a state fairground and at least one Wal-Mart.
The lede: "Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was based in Chicago, not Washington, putting his advisers’ heads in the Midwest instead of in Washington. The trick to his political recovery—and ours—is figuring out how to do that permanently."
Conventional Wisdom Carries the Day
If you want to know why Republicans trounced the Democrats on Tuesday, read this piece by Glenn Greenwald. Skip the part about the on-air fight between Glenn and Lawrence O’Donnell over what O’Donnell said or didn’t say on Scarborough’s show. It’s both amusing and appalling, but the truly important stuff comes when Glenn takes on O’Donnell’s specific argument about why the Democrats lost so massively. O’Donnell perfectly articulates the conventional wisdom among inside-the-Beltway types; namely, that voters rejected Democrats because the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress were too liberal; too far to the left — that Tuesday’s election was a resounding rejection of progressive ideology; that the Democrats misread what the public wanted in 2008; that they tried to do too much; that Americans want less government, not more; that they want the government to get out of their faces and stop telling them how to live their lives and just let them make their own decisions.
O’Donnell — in standard cable TV form — basically had one simplistic point he repeated over and over: exit polls show that only a small minority of voters (a) self-identify as “liberal” and (b) agree that government should do more. There are so many obvious flaws in that “analysis.” To begin with, exit polls survey only those who vote; it excludes those who chose not to vote, including the massive number of Democrats and liberals who voted in 2006 and 2008 but stayed at home this time. The failure to inspire those citizens to vote is, beyond doubt, a major cause of the Democrats’ loss (see the first reason listed by CBS News for why the Democrats lost: ”The Democratic Base Stayed Home“). … O’Donnell’s fixation on those who voted, while ignoring those who chose not to vote, necessarily excludes a major factor in the Democrats’ loss.
But more important, voters don’t think the way that cable TV personalities think. Voters don’t run around basing their vote on this type of vapid sloganeering: who is a liberal? who is a conservative? who wants big government and who wants small government? It’s true that the word ”liberal” has been poisoned and it’s thus hardly surprising that few people embrace it as their political identity. But, as I documented during the segment and O’Donnell steadfastly ignored, large majorities support positions routinely identified as “liberal,” including the public option, greater restraints on Wall Street, preservation of Social Security and Medicare, etc. They can say they are not “liberal” but their specific views on substance prove otherwise.
But far more important still, what voters care about are not cable-news labels, but results. Democrats didn’t lose because voters think they’re too “liberal.” If that were true, how would one explain massive Democratic wins in 2006 and 2008, including by liberals in conservative districts (such as Alan Grayson); were American voters liberal in 2006 and 2008 only to manically switch to being conservative this year? Was Wisconsin super-liberal for the last 18 years when it thrice elected Russ Feingold to the Senate, and then suddenly turned hostile to liberals this year? Such an explanation is absurd.
The answer is that voters make choices based on their assessment of the outcomes from the political class. They revolted against the Republican Party in the prior two elections because they hated the Iraq War and GOP corruption (not because they thought the GOP was “too conservative”), and they revolted against Democrats this year because they have no jobs, are having their homes foreclosed by the millions, are suffering severe economic anxiety, and see no plan or promise for that to change (not because they think Democrats are “too liberal”).
People like Lawrence O’Donnell predictably don’t understand this because none of that is happening to them. In their world, what matters are facile, superficial political labels and trite, McGovern-era Beltway wisdom: Dems have to Move To the Center. But voters are rejecting Democrats because of their perceived policy failures, not because of cable news bumper stickers. …
People aren’t running around thinking: who is a liberal and who is a conservative? They’re running around thinking: we have no jobs and no economic security, and thus will punish those in power. …
People are suffering economically and Democrats have done little about that. Beyond that, they failed to inspire their own voters to go to the polls. Therefore, they lost. By basing their power in Congress on Blue Dog dependence — rather than advocating for the views of their own supporters and implementing those policies — they failed, and failed resoundingly. Building their party around a large number of muddled, GOP-replicating corporatists not only creates a tepid and failed political image, but far worse, it prevents actual policies from being implemented that benefit large number of ordinary Americans. Democrats repeatedly refrained from advocating for such policies in deference to their Blue Dogs, failed to do much to alleviate the economic suffering of ordinary Americans, and thus got crushed. Anyone who thinks that Democrats lost because they were “too liberal” — rather than because Americans are suffering so much economically — is wildly out of touch, i.e., is a multi-millionaire cable TV personality who has spent decades wallowing in trite D.C. chatter.
All emphasis is Glenn’s.
I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that conventional wisdom tends to carry the day, even in quarters where you do often thoughtful commentary:
In the end, I think O’Donnell clearly had the better side of the argument here. Greenwald couldn’t seem to accept the fact that without the Blue Dog Democrats, there would not have been any Democratic majority in Congress and thus no health care reform, no stimulus, no financial industry reform. Greenwald strikes me as the liberal version of something that you see on the right as well. It’s the same mentality that led people to support Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, for example, even though it was clear that there was no possibility that she could win the election. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is, it seems, a common mistake in politics regardless of one’s political beliefs.
This makes no sense at all. If the Blue Dogs were so essential to Democratic success, why did so many of them lose their jobs on Tuesday? Americans voted their empty pockets, drained bank accounts, and foreclosed homes on Tuesday. Did the Blue Dogs’ emasculation of health care reform, financial industry reform, and stimulus legislation persuade voters that the Democrats were creating jobs for unemployed American, or holding Wall Street accountable for wrecking the economy or helping them stay in their homes? Perhaps Democrats would have been better served NOT to have defined “the good” as “whatever those Blue Dogs want.” Honestly, I don’t get what Mataconis is on about here.
Words of Wisdom from Jim DeMint
Senator DeMint’s advice is sage and timely
American Thinker Blog
The Current Wisdom
By Patrick J. Michaels
The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.
More Good News About Sea Level Rise
In the last (and first) installment of The Current Wisdom, I looked at how projections of catastrophic sea level rise—some as high as 20 feet this century—are falling by the wayside as more real-world data comes in. In the last month, there’s been even more hot-off-the-press studies that a) continue to beat down the notion of disastrous inundations, and b) received no media attention whatsoever.
Last month, I featured a new analysis which showed that the calibration scheme for satellite gravity measurements was out of whack, leading to an overestimation loss of glacial ice from Greenland and Antarctica by about 50%.
This time around, there are two brand-new studies which further dampen the fears of rapid sea level rise spawned by a warming climate. The one estimates that about 25% of the current sea level rise has nothing whatsoever to do with “global warming” from any cause, but instead is contributed by our increasing removal of fossil groundwater to suit our growing water demands. And the second estimates that the total sea level rise contribution of one of Antarctica’s biggest outlet glaciers—one which has been called “the weak underbelly” of the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet—is most likely only going to be about 1/2 inch by the year 2100. Neither met the press, which is why you are reading about them here.
Last month we concluded that “things had better get cooking in a hurry if the real world is going to approach these popular estimates [3 to 20 feet of sea level rise by 2100]. And there are no signs that such a move is underway.” Now, there are even more signs that the massive sea level rise candle is flaming out as rapidly as cap-and-trade in an election year.
A team of scientists from the Netherlands, headed by the appropriately surnamed Yoshihide Wada, have been investigating the magnitude and trends of groundwater usage around the world. For millennia, humans “mined” water under the surface, but the volumes were globally inconsequential.
Wada et al. found many regions, including the Midwestern and Southwestern U.S., in which groundwater extraction exceeds groundwater replenishment. Around the world the world, Wada et al. found that the total excess was about 30 cubic miles per year in 1960, which rose to about 68 by the year 2000.
What on earth does this have to do with sea-level rise?
Remember that, outside of nuclear reactions, matter is never destroyed. Water taken out of the ground either runs off to a creek and makes it back to the ocean, or it evaporates. Because the total water vapor concentration in the atmosphere is constant (depending upon the average temperature of the water/atmosphere interface), the additional evaporation is available for precipitation, adding to that which runs off.
68 cubic miles of added water to the ocean each year amounts to about three-hundredths of an inch of sea level. Granted, this is a small amount, but (despite the scare headlines emanating from our greener friends), the annual rate of global sea level rise during the past 20 years has only been about 0.12 inches per year. So groundwater extraction accounts for about a quarter (.03/.12) of the current rate of sea level rise.
This is a rather large bite out of the apple of sea level rise, and it means that estimates of just how much sea level rise is being caused by ongoing global warming have to be slashed.
In a much-hyped paper appearing in Science magazine back in early 2007, Stefan Rahmstorf and colleagues (including NASA’s infamous Cassandra James Hansen, the Nouriel Roubini of climatology), proclaimed that sea level rise is occurring at a rate which was at the very high end of the projections from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—fuelling claims that the IPCC sea level rise projections from climate change were too conservative.
(Hansen is also the lonely champion of the notion that sea level will rise 20 feet in the next 89 years. Twenty years ago, he predicted that New York’s Westside Highway would be inundated by now.)[1]
If the Rahmstorf et al. analysis were updated through 2010 and the impact from groundwater depletion figured in, it would turn out that the observed rate of sea level rise from global warming would fall at or below the IPCC’s mid-range projection which ultimately results in about 15 inches of sea level rise by 2100. Such a finding of course would ignite very little hype—which is why you are reading it here.
Ah, but you say, don’t the global warming doomsayers tell us that the rate of sea level rise will accelerate rapidly as the climate warms and glaciers atop Greenland and Antarctica slip off into the seas, and so the total rise by the end of the century will be much above a value based on an extrapolation of the present?
The idea—graphically portrayed in Al Gore’s science fiction film—is that summer meltwater will flow down the, say, 10,000 feet required to get to the bottom of Greenland’s ice, and “lubricate” the flowing glaciers. (Of course, the reason glaciers flow to begin with is because the pressure is so great that the bottom water is liquid, but never mind that fact).
Last time, I noted a recent paper by Faezeh Nick and colleagues that basically pooh-poohed the idea that surface meltwater does this.
Offing the PIG
Another oft-repeated threat is that there are a plethora of glaciers in Antarctica that are grounded in the oceans, and that higher water temperatures will lead to melting from below that will ultimately “unground” them, floating them and causing rapid retreat.
Alarmist fingers are most often pointed at Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier (PIG), the leading candidate to unground and raise sea levels by up to 4.5 feet a relatively short amount of time. It was Terence Hughes (from University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, which—surprise—thrives on climate change) in the early 1980s that labeled the PIG as the “weak underbelly” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet for, in his view, having the biggest potential to contribute a lot of sea level rise in a short amount of time. Hughes’s belief has become popular of late as the rate of retreat of the PIG increased in the early 1990s.
In 2008, University of Colorado’s Tad Pfeffer and colleagues projected that the PIG (and the nearby Thwaites glacier) would add between 4.3 and 15.4 inches of sea level rise by 2100. In early 2010, the reliably alarmist New Scientist headlined “Major Antarctic Glacier ‘Past its Tipping Point’”, inaccurately quoting Oxford’s Richard Katz who actually said “the take-home message is that we should be concerned about tipping points in West Antarctica and we should do a lot more work to investigate” (translation: can I scare you into sending me more money?).
But throwing cold water in the PIG pen are the prolific polar researcher Ian Joughin and his colleagues. In a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, Joughin et al. reported their efforts to simulate the future behavior of PIG using a “basinscale glaciological model” that they verified against a large amount of satellite observations documenting the flow rate and thinning rate of the PIG. Once they were happy that their model depicted the observations correctly, they turned to look at what the future may hold in store.
What they found came as a bit of a surprise.
Instead of an accelerating retreat, it seems that the PIG’s still-tiny decline may remain constant. Joughin et al., write:
PIG’s dramatic retreat and speedup may not indicate a trend of continued acceleration, and speeds may stabilize at their current elevated levels as thinning continues.
This result ties into another investigation of recent PIG behavior that was published this summer. In that one, Jenkins et al. concluded that the geometry of the sea floor upon which the PIG rested is what allowed for a rapid retreat when warming first commenced. In other words, the PIG was predisposed to a rapid response—initially.
When Joughin et al. plug potential future climate change into their glaciological model of PIG, they found that the initial acceleration is not maintained for very long, and instead soon stabilizes. This has large implications. Instead of PIG contributing many inches of sea level this century, they found about a single inch—and that was the worst case. Joughin and colleagues best estimate is something closer to ½ inch.
Joughin et al. conclude:
While we have not modeled the other [nearby Antarctic] glaciers, PIG is the most rapidly changing and largest contributor to the current imbalance, indicating future model-derived upper bounds on 21st century sea level for the entire region are likely to fall well below the heuristically derived 11-to-39 cm upper bound [Pfeffer et al., 2008].
Hardly catastrophic.
Sooner or later, these facts may penetrate into public consciousness… but until then I hope you’ll continue to consult The Current Wisdom.
References:
Hughes, T. J., 1981, The Weak Underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice-Sheet. Journal of Glaciology, 27, 518–525.
Jenkins, A., et al., 2010. Observations Beneath Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica and Implications for its Retreat. Nature Geoscience, 3(7), 468–472, doi:10.1038/ngeo890.
Katz, R. F., and M. G. Worster, 2010. Stability of Ice-sheet Grounding Lines. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 466, 1597-1620.
Nick, F. M., et al., 2009. Large-scale Changes in Greenland Outlet Glacier DynamicsTtriggered at the Terminus. Nature Geoscience, DOI:10.1038, published on-line January 11, 2009.
Pfeffer, W. T., Harper, J. T., and S. O’Neel, 2008. Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-century Sea-level Rise. Science, 321, 1340-1343.
Rahmstorf, S., et al., 2007. Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections. Science, 316, 709.
Joughin, I., Smith, B. E., and D. M. Holland, 2010. Sensitivity of 21st Century Sea Level to Ocean-induced Thinning of Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica. Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L20502, doi:10.1029/2010GL044819.
Wada, Y., et al. 2010. Global Depletion of Groundwater Resources. Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L20402, doi:10.1029/2010GL044571.
[1] In 1988, author Robert Reiss asked Hansen, whose office is on Broadway, what greenhouse-effect changes would occur in the next twenty years. He said, among other things, “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.” Then he said, “There will be more police cars.” Why? “Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.”
The Current Wisdom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog
The Current Wisdom
By Patrick J. Michaels
The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.
More Good News About Sea Level Rise
In the last (and first) installment of The Current Wisdom, I looked at how projections of catastrophic sea level rise—some as high as 20 feet this century—are falling by the wayside as more real-world data comes in. In the last month, there’s been even more hot-off-the-press studies that a) continue to beat down the notion of disastrous inundations, and b) received no media attention whatsoever.
Last month, I featured a new analysis which showed that the calibration scheme for satellite gravity measurements was out of whack, leading to an overestimation loss of glacial ice from Greenland and Antarctica by about 50%.
This time around, there are two brand-new studies which further dampen the fears of rapid sea level rise spawned by a warming climate. The one estimates that about 25% of the current sea level rise has nothing whatsoever to do with “global warming” from any cause, but instead is contributed by our increasing removal of fossil groundwater to suit our growing water demands. And the second estimates that the total sea level rise contribution of one of Antarctica’s biggest outlet glaciers—one which has been called “the weak underbelly” of the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet—is most likely only going to be about 1/2 inch by the year 2100. Neither met the press, which is why you are reading about them here.
Last month we concluded that “things had better get cooking in a hurry if the real world is going to approach these popular estimates [3 to 20 feet of sea level rise by 2100]. And there are no signs that such a move is underway.” Now, there are even more signs that the massive sea level rise candle is flaming out as rapidly as cap-and-trade in an election year.
A team of scientists from the Netherlands, headed by the appropriately surnamed Yoshihide Wada, have been investigating the magnitude and trends of groundwater usage around the world. For millennia, humans “mined” water under the surface, but the volumes were globally inconsequential.
Wada et al. found many regions, including the Midwestern and Southwestern U.S., in which groundwater extraction exceeds groundwater replenishment. Around the world the world, Wada et al. found that the total excess was about 30 cubic miles per year in 1960, which rose to about 68 by the year 2000.
What on earth does this have to do with sea-level rise?
Remember that, outside of nuclear reactions, matter is never destroyed. Water taken out of the ground either runs off to a creek and makes it back to the ocean, or it evaporates. Because the total water vapor concentration in the atmosphere is constant (depending upon the average temperature of the water/atmosphere interface), the additional evaporation is available for precipitation, adding to that which runs off.
68 cubic miles of added water to the ocean each year amounts to about three-hundredths of an inch of sea level. Granted, this is a small amount, but (despite the scare headlines emanating from our greener friends), the annual rate of global sea level rise during the past 20 years has only been about 0.12 inches per year. So groundwater extraction accounts for about a quarter (.03/.12) of the current rate of sea level rise.
This is a rather large bite out of the apple of sea level rise, and it means that estimates of just how much sea level rise is being caused by ongoing global warming have to be slashed.
In a much-hyped paper appearing in Science magazine back in early 2007, Stefan Rahmstorf and colleagues (including NASA’s infamous Cassandra James Hansen, the Nouriel Roubini of climatology), proclaimed that sea level rise is occurring at a rate which was at the very high end of the projections from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—fuelling claims that the IPCC sea level rise projections from climate change were too conservative.
(Hansen is also the lonely champion of the notion that sea level will rise 20 feet in the next 89 years. Twenty years ago, he predicted that New York’s Westside Highway would be inundated by now.)[1]
If the Rahmstorf et al. analysis were updated through 2010 and the impact from groundwater depletion figured in, it would turn out that the observed rate of sea level rise from global warming would fall at or below the IPCC’s mid-range projection which ultimately results in about 15 inches of sea level rise by 2100. Such a finding of course would ignite very little hype—which is why you are reading it here.
Ah, but you say, don’t the global warming doomsayers tell us that the rate of sea level rise will accelerate rapidly as the climate warms and glaciers atop Greenland and Antarctica slip off into the seas, and so the total rise by the end of the century will be much above a value based on an extrapolation of the present?
The idea—graphically portrayed in Al Gore’s science fiction film—is that summer meltwater will flow down the, say, 10,000 feet required to get to the bottom of Greenland’s ice, and “lubricate” the flowing glaciers. (Of course, the reason glaciers flow to begin with is because the pressure is so great that the bottom water is liquid, but never mind that fact).
Last time, I noted a recent paper by Faezeh Nick and colleagues that basically pooh-poohed the idea that surface meltwater does this.
Offing the PIG
Another oft-repeated threat is that there are a plethora of glaciers in Antarctica that are grounded in the oceans, and that higher water temperatures will lead to melting from below that will ultimately “unground” them, floating them and causing rapid retreat.
Alarmist fingers are most often pointed at Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier (PIG), the leading candidate to unground and raise sea levels by up to 4.5 feet a relatively short amount of time. It was Terence Hughes (from University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, which—surprise—thrives on climate change) in the early 1980s that labeled the PIG as the “weak underbelly” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet for, in his view, having the biggest potential to contribute a lot of sea level rise in a short amount of time. Hughes’s belief has become popular of late as the rate of retreat of the PIG increased in the early 1990s.
In 2008, University of Colorado’s Tad Pfeffer and colleagues projected that the PIG (and the nearby Thwaites glacier) would add between 4.3 and 15.4 inches of sea level rise by 2100. In early 2010, the reliably alarmist New Scientist headlined “Major Antarctic Glacier ‘Past its Tipping Point’”, inaccurately quoting Oxford’s Richard Katz who actually said “the take-home message is that we should be concerned about tipping points in West Antarctica and we should do a lot more work to investigate” (translation: can I scare you into sending me more money?).
But throwing cold water in the PIG pen are the prolific polar researcher Ian Joughin and his colleagues. In a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, Joughin et al. reported their efforts to simulate the future behavior of PIG using a “basinscale glaciological model” that they verified against a large amount of satellite observations documenting the flow rate and thinning rate of the PIG. Once they were happy that their model depicted the observations correctly, they turned to look at what the future may hold in store.
What they found came as a bit of a surprise.
Instead of an accelerating retreat, it seems that the PIG’s still-tiny decline may remain constant. Joughin et al., write:
PIG’s dramatic retreat and speedup may not indicate a trend of continued acceleration, and speeds may stabilize at their current elevated levels as thinning continues.
This result ties into another investigation of recent PIG behavior that was published this summer. In that one, Jenkins et al. concluded that the geometry of the sea floor upon which the PIG rested is what allowed for a rapid retreat when warming first commenced. In other words, the PIG was predisposed to a rapid response—initially.
When Joughin et al. plug potential future climate change into their glaciological model of PIG, they found that the initial acceleration is not maintained for very long, and instead soon stabilizes. This has large implications. Instead of PIG contributing many inches of sea level this century, they found about a single inch—and that was the worst case. Joughin and colleagues best estimate is something closer to ½ inch.
Joughin et al. conclude:
While we have not modeled the other [nearby Antarctic] glaciers, PIG is the most rapidly changing and largest contributor to the current imbalance, indicating future model-derived upper bounds on 21st century sea level for the entire region are likely to fall well below the heuristically derived 11-to-39 cm upper bound [Pfeffer et al., 2008].
Hardly catastrophic.
Sooner or later, these facts may penetrate into public consciousness… but until then I hope you’ll continue to consult The Current Wisdom.
References:
Hughes, T. J., 1981, The Weak Underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice-Sheet. Journal of Glaciology, 27, 518–525.
Jenkins, A., et al., 2010. Observations Beneath Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica and Implications for its Retreat. Nature Geoscience, 3(7), 468–472, doi:10.1038/ngeo890.
Katz, R. F., and M. G. Worster, 2010. Stability of Ice-sheet Grounding Lines. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 466, 1597-1620.
Nick, F. M., et al., 2009. Large-scale Changes in Greenland Outlet Glacier DynamicsTtriggered at the Terminus. Nature Geoscience, DOI:10.1038, published on-line January 11, 2009.
Pfeffer, W. T., Harper, J. T., and S. O’Neel, 2008. Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-century Sea-level Rise. Science, 321, 1340-1343.
Rahmstorf, S., et al., 2007. Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections. Science, 316, 709.
Joughin, I., Smith, B. E., and D. M. Holland, 2010. Sensitivity of 21st Century Sea Level to Ocean-induced Thinning of Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica. Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L20502, doi:10.1029/2010GL044819.
Wada, Y., et al. 2010. Global Depletion of Groundwater Resources. Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L20402, doi:10.1029/2010GL044571.
[1] In 1988, author Robert Reiss asked Hansen, whose office is on Broadway, what greenhouse-effect changes would occur in the next twenty years. He said, among other things, “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.” Then he said, “There will be more police cars.” Why? “Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.”
The Current Wisdom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog
Wisdom from the California Civil Code
(Eugene Volokh)
I was just reminded about this item, which I blogged about in 2002, when this blog was but a month old, so I thought I’d repost it. It’s from the “Maxims of Jurisprudence” subdivision (they’ve been codified in California), Civil Code sec. 3546, and it is of course a presumption and not a categorical rule:
Things happen according to the ordinary course of nature and the ordinary habits of life.
Deep, man.
The Current Wisdom
By Patrick J. Michaels
NOTE: This is the first in a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.
The Iceman Goeth: Good News from Greenland and Antarctica
How many of us have heard that global sea level will be about a meter—more than three feet—higher in 2100 than it was in the year 2000? There are even scarier stories, circulated by NASA’s James E. Hansen, that the rise may approach 6 meters, altering shorelines and inundating major cities and millions of coastal inhabitants worldwide.
In fact, a major exhibition now at the prestigious Chicago Field Museum includes a 3-D model of Lower Manhattan under 16 feet of water—this despite the general warning from the James Titus, who has been EPA’s sea-level authority for decades:
Researchers and the media need to stop suggesting that Manhattan or even Miami will be lost to a rising sea. That’s not realistic; it promotes denial and panic, not a reasoned consideration of the future.
Figure 1. Model from a travelling climate change exhibit (currently installed at the Field Museum of natural history in Chicago) of Lower Manhattan showing what 5 meters (16 feet) of sea level rise will look like.
Titus was commenting upon his 2009 publication on sea-level rise in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
The number one rule of grabbing attention for global warming is to never let the facts stand in the way of a good horror story, so advice like Titus’s is usually ignored.
The catastrophic sea level rise proposition is built upon the idea that large parts of the ice fields that lay atop Greenland and Antarctica will rapidly melt and slip into the sea as temperatures there rise. Proponents of this idea claim that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its most recent (2007) Assessment Report, was far too conservative in its projections of future sea level rise—the mean value of which is a rise by the year 2100 of about 15 inches.
In fact, contrary to virtually all news coverage, the IPCC actually anticipates that Antarctica will gain ice mass (and lower sea level) as the climate warms, since the temperature there is too low to produce much melting even if it warms up several degrees, while the warmer air holds more moisture and therefore precipitates more snow. The IPCC projects Greenland to contribute a couple of inches of sea level rise as ice melts around its periphery.
Alarmist critics claim that the IPCC’s projections are based only on direct melt estimates rather than “dynamic” responses of the glaciers and ice fields to rising temperatures.
These include Al Gore’s favorite explanation—that melt water from the surface percolates down to the bottom of the glacier and lubricates its base, increasing flow and ultimately ice discharge. Alarmists like Gore and Hansen claim that Greenland and Antarctica’s glaciers will then “surge” into the sea, dumping an ever-increasing volume of ice and raising water levels worldwide.
The IPCC did not include this mechanism because it is very hypothetical and not well understood. Rather, new science argues that the IPCC’s minuscule projections of sea level rise from these two great ice masses are being confirmed.
About a year ago, several different research teams reported that while glaciers may surge from time to time and increase ice discharge rates, these surges are not long-lived and that basal lubrication is not a major factor in these surges. One research group, led by Faezeh Nick and colleagues reported that “our modeling does not support enhanced basal lubrication as the governing process for the observed changes.” Nick and colleagues go on to find that short-term rapid increases in discharge rates are not stable and that “extreme mass loss cannot be dynamically maintained in the long term” and ultimately concluding that “[o]ur results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland’s outlet glaciers are transient and should not be extrapolated into the future.”
But this is actually old news. The new news is that the commonly-reported (and commonly hyped) satellite estimates of mass loss from both Greenland and Antarctica were a result of improper calibration, overestimating ice loss by some 50%.
As with any new technology, it takes a while to get all the kinks worked out. In the case of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite-borne instrumentation, one of the major problems is interpreting just what exactly the satellites are measuring. When trying to ascertain mass changes (for instance, from ice loss) from changes in the earth’s gravity field, you first have to know how the actual land under the ice is vertically moving (in many places it is still slowly adjusting from the removal of the glacial ice load from the last ice age).
The latest research by a team led by Xiaoping Wu from Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory concludes that the adjustment models that were being used by previous researchers working with the GRACE data didn’t do that great of a job. Wu and colleagues enhanced the existing models by incorporating land movements from a network of GPS sensors, and employing more sophisticated statistics. What they found has been turning heads.
Using the GRACE measurements and the improved model, the new estimates of the rates of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica are only about half as much as the old ones.
Instead of Greenland losing ~230 gigatons of ice each year since 2002, the new estimate is 104 Gt/yr. And for Antarctica, the old estimate of ~150 Gt/yr has been modified to be about 87 Gt/yr.
How does this translate into sea level rise?
It takes about 37.4 gigatons of ice loss to raise the global sea level 0.1 millimeter—four hundredths of an inch. In other words, ice loss from Greenland is currently contributing just over one-fourth of a millimeter of sea level rise per year, or one one-hundreth of an inch. Antarctica’s contribution is just under one-fourth of a millimeter per year. So together, these two regions—which contain 99% of all the land ice on earth—are losing ice at a rate which leads to an annual sea level rise of one half of one millimeter per year. This is equivalent to a bit less than 2 hundredths of an inch per year. If this continues for the next 90 years, the total sea level rise contributed by Greenland and Antarctica by the year 2100 will amount to less than 2 inches.
Couple this with maybe 6-8 inches from the fact that the ocean rises with increasing temperature, temperatures and 2-3 inches from melting of other land-based ice, and you get a sum total of about one foot of additional rise by century’s end.
This is about 1/3rd of the 1 meter estimates and 1/20th of the 6 meter estimates.
Things had better get cooking in a hurry if the real world is going to approach these popular estimates. And there are no signs that such a move is underway.
So far, the 21st century has been pretty much of a downer for global warming alarmists. Not only has the earth been warming at a rate considerably less than the average rate projected by climate models, but now the sea level rise is suffering a similar fate.
Little wonder that political schemes purporting to save us from these projected (non)calamities are also similarly failing to take hold.
References:
Nick, F. M., et al., 2009. Large-scale changes in Greenland outlet glacier dynamics triggered at the terminus. Nature Geoscience, DOI:10.1038, published on-line January 11, 2009.
Titus, J.G., et al., 2009. State and Local Governments Plan for Development of Most Land Vulnerable to Rising Sea Level along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, Environmental Research Letters 4 044008. (doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/044008).
Wu, X., et al., 2010. Simultaneous estimation of global present-day water treansport and glacial isostatic adjustment. Nature Geoscience, published on-line August 15, 2010, doi: 10.1038/NGE0938.
The Current Wisdom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog
