“You see, technically, chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change: Electrons change their energy levels. Molecules change their bonds. Elements combine and change into compounds. But that’s all of life, right? It’s the constant, it’s the cycle. It’s solution, dissolution. Just over and over and over. It is growth, then decay, then transformation. It is fascinating, really. ” — Walter White, Breaking Bad
Are the seas rising due to global warming?
The common narrative is that carbon dioxide traps heat that has been irradiated by the oceans, and this warms the oceans and melts the polar ice caps.
It takes a lot of energy to heat water. To heat 1 litre of water by 1˚C it would take 3300 litres of air that was 2˚C hotter, or 1 litre of air that was about 3300˚C hotter.
The ocean contains 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of water. To heat it by 1˚C, 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy are required.
In perspective, if we devoted all our coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, wind and solar power plants to just heating the ocean, it would take 32,000 years to heat the ocean by just this 1˚C.
If the ocean is being heated by ‘greenhouse warming’ of the atmosphere, how hot does the air have to get?
For every ton of water there is only a kilogram of air. Taking into account the relative heat capacities and absolute masses, we arrive at the figure of 4,000˚C.
And another problem is that air sits on top of water – how would hot air heat deep into the ocean? Even if the surface warmed, the warm water would just sit on top of the cold water.
So if the air doesn’t contain enough energy to heat the oceans or melt the ice caps, what does?
When the southern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun, we have more direct sunlight (longer, warmer days). When it is tilted away from the sun, we have less direct sunlight and less of it (shorter days). The direct result of this is that in summer it is hot and in winter it is cold. In winter the polar caps freeze over and in summer 60-70% of them melt (about ten million square kilometres). In summer the water is warmer and winter it is cooler (ask any surfer).
These changes are directly determined by the amount of sunlight that we get, and more importantly, the level and changes in solar activity. This is the reality of thermodynamics. We really don’t have that much to do with it.
About the Author
As is usually the Case with the Cape Charles Mirror, as opposed to insipid and infantile rags such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, which rags simply regurgitate the talking points their political masters hand them to regurgitate, here we are presented with a discussion on many levels which are being discussed nowhere else, and especially by this poseur Seth Borenstein of the AP who bills himself as a “science writer,” when it really should be “a writer of cosmic-class science fiction” with his wild, exaggerated and frankly quite hysterical claims in the AP article “We’re all in big trouble’: Climate panel sees a dire future”” by Seth Borenstein on September 25, 2019, where Seth spewed forth as follows, perhaps while a steady stream of yellow water was running down his leg because of how terrified his own apocalyptic writing made him, to wit:
NEW YORK (AP) — Earth is in more hot water than ever before, and so are we, an expert United Nations climate panel warned in a grim new report Wednesday.
Sea levels are rising at an ever-faster rate as ice and snow shrink, and oceans are getting more acidic and losing oxygen, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a report issued as world leaders met at the United Nations.
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So, as this article posits: are they really, Seth?
And since the political IPCC, according to their own propaganda, does not carry out original research, nor does it monitor climate or related phenomena itself, such as sea level rise, why should we rational people in America who are not panicking, and thus are still able to think clearly while rationally reviewing the scientific evidence on the subject readily available and accessible to anyone with a brain in their head and an interest in the subject believe a single word the IPCC says, about anything, given that the main purpose of the IPCC is to funnel money from “rich” countries like the US, to “poor” countries like corrupt Zimbabwe?
And more to the point, what exactly is the level that the sea should be at, given that for the last several thousand years at least, sea levels have been all over the board, sometimes rising, sometimes retreating to lower levels?
And this is not something we are guessing at, nor is it something you need anything more than a basic high school education to comprehend and understand.
Regardless of the political crap and hysteria-mongering pouring forth in copious amounts from this IPCC crowd, the standard reference for engineers and scientists and the layman, as well, is “CLIMATE, HISTORY AND THE MODERN WORLD,” Second Edition by H.H. Lamb, where the subject of sea-level rise is discussed in great detail, as in the following:
More is known now than when this book was first published about the exchanges that go on between the Arctic seas and the climate over wider areas and longer times (which we return to on p. 271).
The great increase of ice on the East Greenland Sea in the mid-1960s, and the low salinity water that accompanied it, migrated from there slowly to affect the western Atlantic in the years that followed and, after a long clockwise circuit over the western ocean, was carried back into the Iceland region after fourteen more years.
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While these are important details, one will find no mention of them in the IPCC reports, which are written by political lawyers, not scientists.
As to sea-level history, we have this to consider:
Archaeological finds in North America point to human beings living in ice-free areas of Alaska, north of the ice-sheets, during the last ice age and probably therefore roaming to and fro across the dry plain which then linked Alaska to Siberia.
This dry land existed because world sea level was lowered about 100 m by the loss of the water constituting the expanded glaciers and ice-sheets.
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One-hundred meters, of course, is 328.084 feet lower than what it is now, or was yesterday, anyway, and by way of comparison, the Statue of Liberty is 305 feet in height.
So, seriously, if we are to have a rational conversation about “sea level rise,” shouldn’t we at least have an idea as to where the sea level is supposed to be?
And how come the ocean doesn’t seem to know that information?
Could it possibly be that it doesn’t give a damn?
Paul Plante: Ditto.
The Pagan Left sees the environmental debate as a control issue and worships trees, carbon, frogs, golden calves and so forth as a distraction for penance of the ignorant masses. This is why all so-called scientists who agree with the socialists are paid by those socialists. The ignorant masses, who went to our sorry-ass public school system, stop believing in science and believe in everything.
Laws of Thermodynamics are not correlation.
To lay a base in here, I’m not sure this even rises beyond basic high school science to the level of thermodynamics.
It is high school science that the coefficient of thermal expansion of water = 0.00021 per degree C, so that for every degree C that we increase the temperature of one unit (any unit-volume measurement) of water, its volume (expressed in the same units) will increase by 0.000208 (cubic meters, gallons, whatever).
That number is relevant because we are dumping a lot of waste heat into rivers, lakes and the ocean, so that if nothing else changed, that heating alone would account for sea level rise due to the expanded water.
And from basic science, we know two basic and essential things: (1) that fresh water floats on top of salt water, and (2) warm fresh water floats on top of cold fresh water, which in turn because of density differences floats on top of the salt water of the ocean, so the heated and thus expanded fresh water entering the ocean from coastal rivers or nuke plant exhausts rides on top of the salt water, and does not readily mix, as we see from this NOAA informational paper entitled “Estuaries,” to wit:
The daily mixing of fresh water and saltwater in estuaries leads to variable and dynamic chemical conditions, especially salinity.
When fresh water and saltwater meet in an estuary, they do not always mix very readily.
Because fresh water flowing into the estuary is less salty and less dense than water from the ocean, it often floats on top of the heavier seawater.
The amount of mixing between fresh water and seawater depends on the direction and speed of the wind, the tidal range (the difference between the average low tide and the average high tide), the estuary’s shape, and the volume and flow rate of river water entering the estuary.
These factors are different in each estuary, and often change seasonally within the same estuary.
For example, a heavy spring rain, or a sustained shift in local winds, can drastically affect the salinity in different parts of an estuary (Sumich, 1996).
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With respect to NOAA, and heated water in the ocean, rivers and lakes of the United States of America, I addressed the following questions to the Climate Science Program Manager at NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory on 9/23/2019, as follows:
And when I was young, the big climate scare back then was that the sun’s gas tank was running low, and any day, it was, likely to be down to fumes, and then like a car that ran out of gas and stalled, the light of the sun was going to blink out and turn the earth into a ball of ice.
Thank God the sun was designed with saddletanks, is my thought.
Good old intelligent design!
By the way, do your satellitess how thermal plumes on the surface of the earth in any detail, like focusing in on Lake Ontario, the Missouri River and the lower Hudson River?
And do you look for, or can you see the plumes of nuclear cooling towers to determine how much water vapor at what temperature they are putting into the troposphere?
We did research based on real-world data provided us by the New York State Power Pool on cooling tower plumes creating their own climate which was affecting aviation, due to clouds and the sheer horsepower which actually bent the airframe of a plane which was trying to get measurements and got caught in the boundary zone between the atmosphere surrounding the plume and the plume, itself, and what we found, after doing a heat and mass balance, was that entrained water as well was being sent up into the upper atmosphere.
That was in 1975.
That research was subsequently suppressed because it was thought to scare the public and turn them away from nuclear, which of course is a political decision.
Staying away from the politics, do you consider that that would have any effect on the HEAT we are experiencing now, given that for CO2 to absorb IR, it first must have some IR to absorb?
I am curious as to how you might see that from an intellectual point of view!
Regards, Paul Plante
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I never got a response but was instead referred back to the BULL**** CONTRIVED SCIENCE of the IPCC, the International Prevaricators of a Climate Crisis, where no mention whatsoever is made of my questions or any answers to them, because to the IPCC, all of what is now going on with respect to pretty much everything is the sole fault of CO2, which takes us back to the science in “CLIMATE, HISTORY AND THE MODERN WORLD,” Second Edition by H.H. Lamb, to wit:
The full list of historical sources of weather reports and references to ‘parameteorological’ events, such as great floods, parched ground, shipwrecks and damage to coasts is a long one.
It includes medieval monastic chronicles such as those of the Venerable Bede at Durham in Saxon England and Matthew Paris at St Albans (20 miles north of London), the audited accounts of great estates and their farms, legal and government papers e.g. reporting harvest difficulties, hunger and cattle raids, epidemics of disease and so on — harbour records, bridge repairs and many others.
A few meteorologists and others of a historical turn of mind have published collections of these reports covering various parts of Europe, Iceland, eastern North America, Chile, China and Japan, some of which go back over many centuries.
A few published compilations of this sort appeared from the sixteenth century onwards in England and central Europe.
Famous later ones included Thomas Short’s A General Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, in Sundry Places and Different Times etc. (London, 1749), a huge collection by the French meteorologist F. Arago published by the Academy of Sciences in 1858, R. Hennig’s Katalog bemerkenswerter Witterungsereignisse von den dltesten Zeiten bis zum Jahre 1800 (Berlin, Royal Prussian Academy, 1904) and C. Easton’s Les hivers dans l’Europe occidentale (Leyden, 1928).
The latest in the series are the many-volumed work by C. Weickinn Quellentexte zur Witterungsgeschichte Europas von der Zeitwende bis zum Jahre 1850 (Berlin, 1958–63) and the most thoroughly researched and verified compilation by M.K.E. Gottschalk of North Sea storm floods and river floods in the Netherlands from early times to the year 1700, in three volumes, published 1971–5 (Assen, van Gorcum).
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Clearly the level of the oceans have never been constant, and not only have they not been constant, but there are extensive records and proxy data that make it clear that ocean levels both rise and fall, and it has doodley-squat to do with CO2.
As to mankind’s contribution, every city in America that draws up groundwater and then runs that water after it is used through a sewage treatment facility that discharges its effluent to a river or the ocean is altering the hydrologic cycle, and all that water, which is warm, also contributes to a rise in sea level which has nothing to do with CO2, either.