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The real cost of non-hydro renewable energy: http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenberger-and-ted-nordhaus/no-solar-way-around-it/
Not how the costs escalate once the proportion of electricity preovided by renewables increases above a small proportion. the clear message is they cannot make much of a contribution.
Is the public right to fear nuclear power is vulnerable to human error, natural disasters, and terrorism?
Is nuclear power immune to Murphy’s Law?
Fifty six years of civll nuclear power demonstrates nuclear is about the safest way to generate electricity: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-source-in-forbes.html
But you already knew that didn’t you? So you are just scaremongering, aren’t you? Which is what doomsayers and scaremongers do, isn’t it?
People who are a doomsayer for one thing, are likely to be a doomsayer, for whatever else is the popular thing to be a doomsayer about at the time, right?
Ha Ha, what a crock !
According to Peter “Nukey” Lang it’s safer to live next door to a nuclear power plant than next door to a coal-fired power plant because the former didn’t get any coal miners killed.
I’ve lived within sight of two, worked closer, and occasionally visited them in leisure time. My biggest problem was they weren’t very pretty, but I’ve seen uglier apartment blocks.
“Is nuclear power immune to Murphy’s Law”
Is the quest for perfect safety records just a con job to try and get us to squander trillions on bird and bat slaughtering wind turbines that will also require backup power plants that will not be perfectly safe either?
Peter Lang | June 8, 2013 at 7:27 am |
It ain’t the 56 past years (counting 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukishima and about 900 other incidents that didn’t really make headlines); it’s the 56,000 years of future storage of waste that’ll have to be taken on as a burden by generations that will get zero benefit from the inheritance that you’re leaving out of your figures.. Well, yeah, you’re also leaving out any but the sunny-day path from your calculations, on the nuclear side while the solar side’s sunny day path is left curiously unremarked on.
Though Max_OK is mistaken.
Coal is statistically much, much worse to live beside than nuclear, along any step of the distribution channel, and in almost all ways as regards health or safety.
sunshinehours1 | June 8, 2013 at 2:54 pm |
Birds and bats killed by all causes, I don’t have the statistics handy, however IIRC, any building the same surface area as a wind turbine has at least as high avian mortality, and urban domestic cats (an entirely useless artifact) slaughter more than a hundred times as many avians as all man made structures combined. (See, that’d be an appropriate use of ‘man made’.)
So, until you’ve bagged a windfarm’s weight in cats let loose by nitwits, your argument sounds suspiciously contrived.
Spay and neuter your pets, and keep them indoors.
Bart, housecats don’t kill Eagles or Hawks or Falcons or Condors.
But morons do try and divert attention from the mass slaughter caused by wind turbines that need backup power stations for when the wind doesn’t blow.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm
So why the widespread misconception that labels wind turbines “bird-o-matics”? It all starts with California, raptors and the thousands of old turbines that make up the Altamont Pass wind farm..
The American Bird Conservancy supports wind power with the caveat that bird-friendly placement and design be primary factors in construction [source 1=”ABC” language=”:”][/source]. The Wisconsin Bird Initiative states that wind turbines have a “low impact” on avian mortality compared to window glass and communication towers [source 1=”WBCI” language=”:”][/source]. And in 2006, the Audubon Society gave its figurative seal of approval to the American Wind Energy Association. The president of the national organization is quoted by Renewable Energy World as stating, “When you look at a wind turbine, you can find the bird carcasses and count them. With a coal-fired power plant, you can’t count the carcasses, but it’s going to kill a lot more birds” [source 1=”REW” language=”:”][/source].
Further, you misrepresent or misunderstand the capacity credit problem. There are national grids with up to 70% wind power, and from 10%-24%+ in ten US state grids. The capacity credit varies from 20% to 75% for wind farms; adding wind capacity means retiring 20%-75% of the new wind power in terms of demand delivery systems without losing reliability, and with 100% savings in cost of fuel. Cogeneration of electricity with energy-intensive products like fertilizer or aluminum could improve that range by 20% in most areas.
We have a very different definition of moron.
BartR demonstrates his ignorance and arrogance:
All wrong and demonstrates he hasn’t a clue what ‘capacity credit’ means nor anything else he yaps about.
We can presume that any statement he makes about any subject is based on similar ignorance and arrogance.
Yep!
Peter Lang | June 9, 2013 at 8:57 pm |
Educate us.
What do you think these terms mean?
What figures do you think attach to them?
Max_OK,
Peter Lang may well not be the most effective of advocates for nuclear power but he is right on the question of relative safety levels. No source of energy is risk free. Gas can cause explosions. Hydro power can cause flooding. Even solar panels have the potential to electrocute the unwary.
Conventional power stations do emit much more radioactivity, and much higher particulate matter, than would be allowed in nuclear stations. So, yes on the basis of available scientific evidence I would choose to live next to a nuclear power station rather than a conventional one.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
BartR,
You cannot be educated because you don’t want to know. If you did, you’d do the research. You’d follow the links I posted for mwgrant, for example.
You could also study this summary http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-source-in-forbes.html which shows that nuclear power is about the safest way to generate electricity, on a full life cycle basis, everything included and then, if you wanted to dig deeper, you could go to the links to the authoritative studies that back it up.
If you were interested in educating yourself you’d actually try to learn, instead of making your incessantly flaming comments.
A teacher can teach but cannot learn for the student.
Peter Lang | June 9, 2013 at 10:10 pm |
Nonresponsive and patronizing.. is that how you think teaching is done?
No wonder you have such a dim view of education.
To simplify: what is your specific issue with how I use the term “capacity credit problem”?
Show us how I have ‘no idea’ what the term means from how I use it.
Or, you can’t, and you’re still just blowing smoke.
sunshinehours1
The wind turbine folly is even sillier than you wrote.
The “capacity factor” of wind turbines is limited to a maximum of around 25%, which means that 75+% of the time they are not producing energy.
During these periods the electrical power demand must be covered by stand-by plants (usually natural gas fired).
[Note: This fact of life is usually overlooked or swept under the rug by proponents of wind power.]
Combined cycle gas/steam turbine power plants achieve thermal efficiencies of up to 60% when running continuously.
As wiki tells us (and is generally known):
The difference between (continuous) base load and (intermittent) peak load efficiency is arguably around 20%.
This means that 20% more natural gas is required over the 75% of the time the plant is operating as a standby plant than if it were running continuously.
[Note: This fact of life is also usually overlooked or swept under the rug by proponents of wind power.]
A 100 MW gas-fired plant operating continuously (8000 hours/year) generates
100 * 8000 = 800,000 MWh
of electrical power. It consumes 7000 cubic feet (or 200 cubic meters) of natural gas per MWh generated, so this equals
200 * 800,000 = 160 million cubic meters of natural gas.
A 100 MW plant operating as a standby plant for 75% of the time would require 20% more gas per MWh generated. So the natural gas used during standby operation is
200 * .75 * 1.2 * 800,000 = 144 million cubic meters of natural gas.
So the net annual savings from replacing 100MW natural gas power with wind turbines is 16 million cubic meters or only one-tenth of the amount used for generating the power from natural gas in the first place – and this at a great premium capital investment.
Truly an exercise in futility
Max
It’s not fair- Northern Europe doesn’t get much sunlight:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.solarknoxville.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Solar-Resource-Map-US_Germany-660×499.png&imgrefurl=http://www.solarknoxville.org/how-to-go-solar/step-3/&h=499&w=660&sz=375&tbnid=N3vwqeGrE040NM:&tbnh=88&tbnw=116&zoom=1&usg=__pwC53QUdQGClq72IMkhp5IIl1Fg=&docid=ou9f-fBEL2MjMM&sa=X&ei=NQ2zUd3OOOOIiAKQ1oGABA&ved=0CDgQ9QEwAw&dur=1087
http://www.solarknoxville.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Solar-Resource-Map-US_Germany-660×499.png
Most Germany get about 1/2 as much solar energy as most of US.
And it’s not as if most of US gets a lot of sunlight.
“According to maps put out by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, virtually the entirety of the continental United States gets more sun than even the sunniest part of Germany. In fact, NREL senior scientist Sarah Kurtz said via email, “Germany’s solar resource is akin to Alaska’s,” the U.S. state with by far the lowest annual average of direct solar energy.”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/07/fox_news_expert_on_solar_energy_germany_gets_a_lot_more_sun_than_we_do_video.html
So why isn’t say, Australia to solar capital of the world?
My theory is people who generally receive more sunlight are smarter.
Albert Einstein received his sunlight exposure in northern Europe.
George W. Bush, in Texas.
Just sayin’.
Bart R
And Obama in Hawaii.
[Typo corrections:]
If those most concerned about CAGW want to reduce fossil fuel use, nuclear power will have to supply a large proportion of total energy in the future.
I suggest this is a fundamental point that the CAGW alarmists, doomsayers, ‘Progressives’, anti nukes and ideological Left need to recognise and embrace. Thye need to become well informed, enthusiastic advocates. They should be out educating their comrades, instead of incessantly arguing for their economically irrational policies (like carbon pricing and mandating and subsidising renewable energy) – policies that will not succeed.
Well, then, if promoters of nuclear power had any business sense, they would embrace CAGW, rather than poo pooing it.
It’s ludicrous to insist CAGW will never be a problem and then claim nuclear power will prevent the problem.
Max_OK,
It wont matter how long you participate on CE. You will never understand what is relevant for effective policy. You twist, distort and make silly statements like above. Your yearning to be “creative” is great, but no use if you don’t understand what is important and relevant.
Peter, read what you just wrote. I’ll quote you:
“If those most concerned about CAGW want to reduce fossil fuel use, nuclear power will have to supply a large proportion of total energy in the future.
I suggest this is a fundamental point that the CAGW alarmists, doomsayers, ‘Progressives’, anti nukes and ideological Left need to recognise and embrace.”
_____
Peter, you foolishly insult people who could help you promote the nuclear power you so strongly advocate.
You are hurting rather than helping the nuclear power industry.
It would be an understatement to say you do not have a mind for business.
Max, Good observation. The move from fossil fuels is a done deal. Conventional high-grade fuels such as crude oil are depleting in every major geological region, from the north sea to Mexico. On many of these places, natural gas is is extracted along with the oil so that is declining as well.
What you are mainly seeing is political positioning by the potential successors to an oil economy. The battle right now is between lower-grade fossil fuels, fracked natural gas, and nuclear power. Since these each have pluses and minuses, the debate amongst the proponents is fierce.
Nuclear proponents are particularly egregious in not wanting to acknowledge AGW because it would position alternative and renewable energy solutions in a better light than their chief fossil fuel competition. In this case the enemy of their enemy is no friend.
Watch them attack me for pointing out this fact.
“Well, then, if promoters of nuclear power had any business sense, they would embrace CAGW, rather than poo pooing it.
It’s ludicrous to insist CAGW will never be a problem and then claim nuclear power will prevent the problem”
That was a good zinger Max_OK
OK, I’m bated. I’l repeat it again for the millionth time.
I am for least cost energy (i.e not nuclear unless it is the least cost option.) Got that bit yet?
As long as the warmists advocate policies that will raise the cost of energy, like carbon pricing and mandating and subsidising renewable energy, there will be no real progress on cutting GHG emissions.
Fossil fuels are the least cost energy at the moment, but the reason for that is the opposition to nuclear power by the so called ‘Progressives’ for the past 50 years.
Therefore, if the warmists are genuinely concerned about cutting global GHG emissions (which I doubt is their real motive), they need to reverse their message on nuclear power so the costs can be brought down.
It is irrational to prohibit nuclear power on safety grounds given that it is the safest way to generate electricity.
Only the so called ‘Progressives’ could use such an irrational argument. The same loonies that are the doomsayers about what ever is the most recent popular issue to be a doosmsayer about.
Peter, you write “If those most concerned about CAGW want to reduce fossil fuel use, nuclear power will have to supply a large proportion of total energy in the future.”
I suggest that this is a red herring. I know that what I am going to write is an oversimpliifcation of a very complex issue, but I think it is, nonetheless, useful. We need to convince the warmists that CAGW is a hoax, and return to the idea that the way to grow the world economy is to use the cheapest energy that is available.
Hi Jim,
Thanks for that. I strongly agree with you on this bit:
I don’t know to what extent AGW is a threat or a benefit. As far as I am concerned I think the jury is out, and will remain out for a very long time.
What I think is important is that the religion of CAGW is a serious threat to economic growth, especially in the OECD countries, because the doomsayers have influence – as is evident from the mass of ‘green tape’ strangling the western world, the EU ETS, the Australian carbon tax and ETS and the fact Obama wants to implement one too. I take the risk of implementing ‘green’, damaging policies very seriously. That is why I am striving to promote policies that would give economic growth and also allow the CAGW alarmists to solve their claimed issue of GHG emissions (although I don’t for one minute believe that is the main agenda of most of the CAGW alarmists).
Peter Lang said on June 8, 2013 at 7:21 am
“Hi Jim,
Thanks for that. I strongly agree with you on this bit:
the way to grow the world economy is to use the cheapest energy that is available.
______
Nah ! The way do grow the world economy is to increase productivity.
+ 1,000 Peter,
I am a liberal Democrat and I am an avid supporter of nuclear power. I have convinced most of my liberal friends in the US as well. I have even convinced my German friends to embrace nuclear power.
It’s pretty easy because the facts are on our side.
I think it helps to take the discussion away from politics. Support of nuclear power ,IME, is less of a left/right position than some assume.
Hot Off The Press
An article titled “Are Investors saying no to nukes”
The article says:
“ In the long-running debate over energy policy, there remains an assumption that businesses and investors prefer the stability of nuclear power over the intermittent vagaries of solar or wind power.
That may be changing, and utility investors need to consider that.”
Read more at
http://beta.fool.com/danafblankenhorn/2013/06/08/are-investors-saying-no-to-nukes/36584/
“I think it helps to take the discussion away from politics. Support of nuclear power ,IME, is less of a left/right position than some assume.”
Quick, name a conservative politician who has voted to stall development of nuclear power. Name one conservative activist group that has filed law suit after law suit to stop development of nuclear power. Name one prominent conservative who has supported the gordian know of regulations that has prevented the building of a single nuclear power plant in the U.S. (or an oil refinery), in decades.
Progressives/liberals/Democrats did exactly the same thing with nuclear power in the U.S. that they have been trying to do with oil and coal through CAGW. Create a climate of hysteria so they can legislate, regulate, and litigate it out of existence. Complete with an assist from the useful progressive idiots in Hollywood. The China Syndrome made An Inconvenient Truth look like a calm PBS documentary.
Not a left/right issue? It has been one of the most successful propaganda campaigns, and intrusions into the economy, by the left in the history of the nation.
Web, I’m not sure I understand how it is in the nuclear power industry’s best interest to downplay the global warming problem when nuclear power is a solution to the problem.
Advocates like Peter Lang may pine for the old days when big bucks were being spent on nuclear power. The following quote is from Forbes: Nuclear Follies, February 11, 1985.
“The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale. The utility industry has already invested $125 billion in nuclear power … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money has been well spent.”
And yet here we are 25 years later, with new plants being built in the US. Please don’t use out of date quotes to try to justify anything. Opinions, unlike scientific facts, are fads that float in and out of fashion.
There are cases to be made for almost every kind of energy, but they must be made based on today’s conditions. Personally, I find the case for nuclear far the most compelling compared to every other form of generation. However, the case for “nega-watts” cannot be ignored either.
Max_OK,
Yet again a progressive selectively quotes from an article, without providing for a link. So who were the “managers whose managerial incompetence combined with progressive obstruction of nuclear power brought construction to a halt?
http://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-reference-nuclear.html
The author cites 5 examples. 4 of which are directly caused by government.
1. The federal government and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission…
2. The equipment manufacturers….
3. The contractors and subcontractors, the designers, and engineers and construction managers who, insulated by their own cost-plus contracts, had little incentive to question the cost-effectiveness of the NRC’s dictates
4. The utility executives, who believed that no matter what happened to cost and construction schedules, the rate commissions would somehow provide the revenues to bail them out.
5. And the state regulatory commissions themselves….
This paragraph gives the gist of the article:
“What is so heartbreaking is that if things had been different–if the times were not what they were, if the regulators had been more responsible, if the utility managements and nuclear contractors had been more competent, and, of course, if the antinuclear obstructionists had not been so imaginative and successful–none of it need have happened.”
The author was hard on management of certain utilities, but unlike our dear comrade who cites him, recognized WHY those managers became so lazy and complacent. To an extent, some companies building nuclear power plants were the Lehman Brothers of their day. There was a utility scheme set up whereby they believed they were going to make a profit regardless of cost. (see Cook’s 3rd and 34th points). The contractors and sub-contractors had the same mindset. Profit is guaranteed by the utility regulatory scheme, so costs are not an issue. (If you think the same problems don’t occur with other types of power plants, come visit the People’s Republic of Illinois.)
Regulation and environmental law suits killed the development of coal. In a free market, where one company engages in poor management tactics and its products costs more than the income it will produce, that company fails. There were and are other companies who can takes its place.
The author noted some nuclear power generators that were successful managers later in the same article, and in fact wrote another article published the same magazine lauding one.
http://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/best-duke-power-successfully-owns-and.html
The China Syndrome came out in 1979, the same year as the Three Mile Island accident. Neither Duke Power nor any other company has attempted to build a nuclear power plant since. Regardless of their management capability.
> Yet again a progressive […]
Yet again, GaryM honors lawyers’ best practices.
Tricky situation putting AGW into a favorable light, because it gives greater credibility to alternative and renewable energy technologies. Look at how much Lang’s Peter shrieks when any of this is mentioned.
WHT,
Perhaps you missed this comment: http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/08/open-thread-weekend-21/#comment-330764
Or more likely you are intentionally misrepresenting, as is usual. You’ve proven on many occasions you are intellectually dishonest. If you don’t know what that means, try this: http://judithcurry.com/2013/04/20/10-signs-of-intellectual-honesty/
Peter Lang | June 9, 2013 at 10:18 pm |
I don’t think you’ve quite understood the point of http://judithcurry.com/2013/04/20/10-signs-of-intellectual-honesty/ judging by how much you see specks in everyone else’s eyes while missing the beam in your own.
Should we go through the lists item by item and compare your performance vs any ten other denizens?
Well, no.
Why no?
Because such a list is pretty much useless applied to others.
Exercises of this type only work well as tools of self-reflection.
Which.. I see no sign of in you.
Pray you never see yourself as others see you.
Here we go again. BartR adopts his usual tactics to deviate off into what he’d like to argue about. That’s another example of intellectual dishonesty, something he could get a PhD in (under Professor Lewandowski)!
Peter Lang | June 9, 2013 at 10:37 pm |
Less than 3 full minutes from posting to reply.
That’s some fabulous self-reflection going on there.
Must be that Speed Zen I’ve been hearing so much about.
After some reflection, the best bet is to have Peter Lang attack anything and everything you say. So in honor of having great optimism in renewable and alternative fuels and the the technology that goes along with it, I finished up this post today on characterizing Lithium Ion battery electrical behavior.
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/06/characterization-of-battery-charging.html
Cheers
We have the data for global temperature in May 2013 from both satellite sets; UAH and RSS. Both show that the current “pause” in global temperatures is continuing. I know all about the fact that global temperatures are currently around the highest temperatures since around 1850, and that if you force a linear fit to such temperatures from recent years, the slope of the graph is still positive. These two observations do not address the real issue. I would point out that it is axiomatic that if there is a warming phase followed by a cooling phase, the cooling phase ALWAYS starts at the maximum of the warming phase. So the fact that we are currently at some sort of recent maximum, and that the slope of the graph over recent years is still positive, is not incompatible with the idea that a cooling phase COULD have started.
Sooner of later, if CAGW is to be eventually supported by the empirical data, global temperatures must start to rise at a rate that is compatible with the concept of CAGW; that is a rate of several degress per century. The question that none of the warmists will address is, “How long do we have to wait for global temperatures to start rising at a rate compatible with CAGW, before we conclude that this is never going to happen?”
By “current pause” you mean what period?
By “a rate compatible with CAGW” you mean what?
Max_OK, you write “By “current pause” you mean what period?
By “a rate compatible with CAGW” you mean what?”
By “current phase”, I mean the period from when CAGW is supposed to have started until the present.
By “a rate compatible with CAGW”, I mean a rate of several degrees C per century. I you read what I originally wrote, you will find precisely that.
Jim, you said “current pause,” I asked you what period you mean, then in your reply you switched to talking about “current phase.” My question is when do you think the current pause began ( i.e., the year, even the month if you wish)?
Max_OK you write “My question is when do you think the current pause began ( i.e., the year, even the month if you wish)?”
And my answer to you is whatever date, year month etc. you choose to claim that CAGW started.
OK, Jim, I see you are trying to be as silly as you can possibly be, so I’m not going to try to out-silly you.
Please forgive me Max, I was being stupid, as you have observed. I was, for some unexplained reason, addressing the wrong question. Let me try and address the right question.
The “current pause”, is a period when there has been no statistically significant rise in global temperature. It depends which data set you use as to when the pause started. But more than that, it depends what happens in the future. If, and I agree it is a big if, but if global temperatures actually fall in the future, then the pause can be extended at both ends. Periods which are not at present in the period when there has been no rise in temperature, could become part of the pause.
So all we can do in trying to define when the pause started, is to look at the actual empirical data, and update it as necessary, when we know what has happened over the next months and years.
Jim
“By “current phase”, I mean the period from when CAGW is supposed to have started until the present.”
By “a rate compatible with CAGW”, I mean a rate of several degrees C per century. I you read what I originally wrote, you will find precisely that.
1. A “rate” of several degrees per century.
Lets review the ACTUAL projections
“The multi-model mean SAT warming and associated uncertainty ranges for 2090 to 2099 relative to 1980 to 1999 are B1: +1.8°C (1.1°C to 2.9°C), B2: +2.4°C (1.4°C to 3.8°C), A1B: +2.8°C (1.7°C to 4.4°C), A1T: 2.4°C (1.4°C to 3.8°C), A2: +3.4°C (2.0°C to 5.4°C) and A1FI: +4.0°C (2.4°C to 6.4°C).”
First off there are scenarios. The scenarios are the biggest unknown.
The scenarios address the question of how many GHGs will be put in the atmosphere. That question isnt one we can answer with science because it will depend on human choice.
B1 Scenario: 1.8 C ( no CAGW)
B2 2.4 C (no CAGW)
A1B 2.8C (no CAGW)
A1T 2.4C (no CAGW)
A2 3.4C (no CAGW)
A1F1 4C ( several degrees.. just barely)
I’m taking you “several” to mean what it ordinarily means.
a couple means 2
few mean 3
several means 4 or more.
What you see by looking at the actual projections is that we only get to to CAGW by your definition ( several degrees per century ) under 1 scenario. A1F1. So, you need to reframe your question. CAGW is something that has not started. It is something that might happen IF we follow a certain emissions path.
“CAGW is something that has not started. It is something that might happen IF we follow a certain emissions path.”
That sounds like something Gavin Schmidt would say. I think he says warming has been modest and we have been able to adapt so far. Too bad the rest of the CAGW mob refuses to accept the “science” in that regard.
Steven, you write “CAGW is something that has not started. ”
I agree. How long do we have to wait for it to start, before we conclude that it is never going to start?
But I also think you have misinterpreted what I have written. We could have a rate of 6 C per century, if the slope of the temperature/time graph as of now was at a rate of 6 C per century.
Further, I am never interested in projections. I am only interested in what has actually been measured.
jim the curremt rate of warming is around 1.5 per century
what on earth are you talking about.
nobody projects 6 C as a foregone conclusion.
and projections are all you can do about the future
From Wiki:
So in other words Jim Jones and Jim Hansen have more in common than a first name. And Hansen’s doomsday cult has about a million times more members.
I like it.
+1
Prophesying climate catastrophe, attempting to bring about economic catastrophe. That’s why I’ve been against these folks since the ’90’s, even though I’m open minded about the effect of GHG’s on climate, and can see other real risks in an exponentially increasing pCO2.
It’s interesting that all these people push “global warming”, with an off-hand wave to ocean acidification, but don’t pick up on the very real possibilities of ecosystem catastrophes. I suppose it’s because they don’t understand complex systems. Or maybe “eco-catastrophe” is too liable to bring to mind the possibility of economic catastrophe their policies risk causing.
““How long do we have to wait for global temperatures to start rising at a rate compatible with CAGW, before we conclude that this is never going to happen?”
You need to remove the word never from your lexicon. Plus you might consider rephrasing your question because it’s not exactly clear what you are asking and it presupposes CAGW, which is not recognized by science.
The oceans are warming, so you got nothing.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-observations-for-tropical-tropospheric-temperature/
EPIC FAIL: 73 Climate Models vs. Observations for Tropical Tropospheric Temperature
June 4th, 2013 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Courtesy of John Christy, a comparison between 73 CMIP5 models (archived at the KNMI Climate Explorer website) and observations for the tropical bulk tropospheric temperature (aka “MT”) since 1979 (click for large version):
You’d think “’nuff said” would apply here but apparently not. To climate model sycophants: De Nile is more than just a river in Egypt!
Thanks, David. Some of us have learned it is easier to see De Nile in you than in me. om
Springyboy, Let us look at this data objectively. Spencer is presenting tropical data. Along the equator, the ocean is more than 80% of the cross-sectional earth’s area. It is commonly accepted that 1/2 of the excess thermal forcing is absorbed by the ocean without leading to a measurable rise in temperatures.
Let us assume that the ECS is 3C for doubling of CO2.
In 1980, the CO2 level was about 335 PPM, in 2010 it was 390 PPM. Then we can say that the transient climate response in the ocean’s SST along the equator is approximately
dT = 1/2 * 3C * ln(390/335) / ln(2) = 0.33 C
This value compares to a temperature increase of between 0.2 to 0.25 C from Spencer’s data. Since the running-average satellite data only goes back to about 1980, the difference is one of ~0.1C over this time period.
This would push the ECS down from 3C to 2C, assuming that some natural fluctuation is not temporarily suppressing temperatures by 0.1C from the current values.
In contrast, if you look at Muller & Curry’s BEST data [1], which operates over a much longer time period, and which directly evaluates ECS as it is over land, one gets 3C for a value. This value is less susceptible to 0.1C fluctuations.
[1] R. Muller, J. Curry, D. Groom, B. Jacobsen, S. Perlmutter, R. Rohde, A. Rosenfeld, C. Wickham, and J. Wurtele, “A New Estimate of the Earth’s Land Surface Temperature History,” presented at the AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, 2011, vol. 1, p. 01.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could argue with Spencer and Christy about it instead of argue it with a nobody like me?
I guess we have to stay within our own paygrades, huh?
;-)
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 8, 2013 at 9:33 am | Reply
“This would push the ECS down from 3C to 2C, assuming that some natural fluctuation is not temporarily suppressing temperatures by 0.1C from the current values.”
ECS wouldn’t be 3C to begin with if some natural fluctuation was temporarily raising temperatures above the average of the past couple centuries.
As easily as I can find a fatal flaw in your argument I’m afraid you’re really below my paygrade so say nothing being below Spencer and Christy’s.
Thanks for playing nonetheless!
Credible critical comments were directed to RoyBoy and his assertion of a fail, but no response so far:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means/#comment-82536
Land trends are twice the global trends in that period and this should not be ignored by Spencer et al. These have risen 0.9 degrees in that period, so you can imagine what that looks like on the Spencer “fail” graph.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/data/crutem4vgl/from:1978/trend/plot/best/from:1978/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1978/trend
The global warming has been slower in the ocean than the models had suggested, but that doesn’t mean it is slower everywhere.
JimD, the differences in the estimated rates of both land and ocean warming due to CO2 equivalent “forcing” indicates there is a model “fail” the point of the post. You could carry it further by comparing NH and SH projections with observation or simply add the Stephens’ et al. Energy budget paper to your favorites, the Stevens and Bjorn critic of the K&T energy budget or any of a growing number of papers and posters critical of the over estimation of CO2 equivalent “forcing” response aka “sensitivity” as transient or “equilibrium” versions. The whole object of models is to learn where they fail and why, not to assume that they replace reality.
captd, and you can also just ignore the last 30 years of regional warming when planning for the future. That would be a poor choice, in my opinion. I don’t think policymakers would be particularly interested in Stephens’ opinions on the detailed numbers in the K-T diagram, however, even if they agree better with the models.
JimD, “captd, and you can also just ignore the last 30 years of regional warming when planning for the future.”
Ignoring and assuming are not my style. Assuming a trend is sustainable is just as bad as ignoring the trend exists. There are plenty of little alarm bells that should be ringing in the ears of the high sensitivity faithful and watching them rationalize why they should “believe” model projects is a psychology experiment not physics.
captd, well the trend is increasing, not staying constant. I took the previous 30 years (1948-1978) and there was hardly any trend in these datasets. Then in the last 35 years it is suddenly 0.28 C per decade. Will it get higher still? Should we not be even more concerned with an increasing trend over the next 30 years.
Jim D, “Then in the last 35 years it is suddenly 0.28 C per decade. Will it get higher still? Should we not be even more concerned with an increasing trend over the next 30 years.”
That depends on the delta Q part of the sensitivity equation.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-yCVnY6nXIiQ/UZmVEhGt-oI/AAAAAAAAIJs/EozQSkgn614/s817/IPWP%2520spliced%2520with%2520cru4%2520shifted%2520anomaly%2520from%25200ad.png
That 0.28 C per decade includes some very noisy data. When you match the smoothing of that data and use the less noisy regions that represent the greatest heat capacity, there is a different perceptive.
Assuming LIA that recovery stopped circa 1950 doesn’t look all that valid to me.
Regional warming in latter half of twentieth century has been beneficial. Given that all good things must come to an end it’s probably not a good idea to plan on it continuing.
In fact there hasn’t been any northern hemisphere land-only warming for the past 10 years. So what regional warming are you talking about ignoring?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vnh/from:2003/mean:6/plot/crutem4vnh/from:2003/trend
DS, if you take a 30-year trend, it looks completely different from your line which I left there. The NH land is definitely much warmer than in 1980.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vnh/from:1980/trend/plot/crutem4vnh/from:2003/trend
Jim D | June 8, 2013 at 2:41 pm |
“DS, if you take a 30-year trend, it looks completely different from your line which I left there. The NH land is definitely much warmer than in 1980”
Yes, but the trend varied considerably during that time. It’s been flat for the past 10 years. According to your logic that’s what we should plan for. Sort of a like a goldfish only uses the past 30 seconds of its life to plan for what to expect in the future.
The past 30 years of NH land temperatures have been influenced by a cyclically rising temperature in the Atlantic ocean called the AMDO which has a 60 year cycle time. You’re looking at only half of it. The warm half. Myself and a great many others are saying hold your horses cowboy we need to see what happens on the cold side of the AMDO before we run off half-cocked (literally) planning for a forever continuation of the warm side.
Jim D, You are picking a favorable starting point without looking for reasonable explanations.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-RQ9_1aaBjRk/UbOAY-qVmsI/AAAAAAAAIfU/ti4lTawJzyk/s969/NH%2520RSS%2520with%2520Volcanic%2520Forcing.png
The Northern Hemisphere “sensitivity” is not the same as the Southern Hemisphere to all types of forcings. There are major differences that have to be considered. That darn asymmetry issue.
DS, I could equally say you are planning for July by looking at the trend over one week in March. The long-term behavior is there to see.
captd, would you prefer me to start in 1850 or what? I could show you a warming trend since then too. Have you ever complained that 1998 was a bad starting point when the pause people use it? If not, you are being hypocritical here.
Currently the “skeptics” are favoring 17 years, but I think that only comes from their fascination with the cicada cycle of this length.
Jim D, “Have you ever complained that 1998 was a bad starting point when the pause people use it?”
Depends on the reason for the selection. Picking the maximum trend when I mention “sustainable” trend, would kinda inspire me to comment.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Yjmd-6e_xtc/UbOfytm-trI/AAAAAAAAIfw/jsNfKDa0OC4/s817/giss%2520360%2520ols.png
There are more complete ways of comparing trends in non-stationary time series with pseudo-cyclic behavior even just BSing on a blog.
Jim D | June 8, 2013 at 5:14 pm |
“Currently the “skeptics” are favoring 17 years, but I think that only comes from their fascination with the cicada cycle of this length.”
Yeah well you thought wrong. Again. As usual.
The 17 years comes from Ben Santer. You might recognize the name. If not, google it, genius.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/09/12/santer-on-timescales-of-temperature-trends/
Some error bars on both the model and satellite record trends wouldn’t go amiss. It would also be useful to put the climate sensitivity of each model to see if it’s really true that higher climate sensitivity means larger hotspot.
The albedo theory makes a lot of sense. Well at least in that we know by basic physics that albedo (emissivity) is the major factor in the radiative thermal equilibrium equation (Stefan-Botlzmann Law).
One only has to walk outside on a partly cloudy day so see the effect of albedo on warming. The problem for climate models is that albedo is clouds and they can’t model clouds properly yet.
Not sure if albedo effect on temperature has anything to do with IR trapping though. But those wedded to greenhouse IR absorbing gases need something to cling to until the physics experiment is done showing there is no thermodynamic effect.
So does the greenhouse albedo theory say the earth is cooler with more clouds because it reflects more sunlight or warmer with more clouds because is reflects more OLR back or do clouds act like Maxwell’s demon letting the sun in at the same time as blocking the OLR????
Sun, North Atlantic tectonics and SST synchronisation
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/STNA.htm
are of no interest to climate science.
An oldie, but a goodie!
More people have been killed in Ted Kennedy’s car than by commercial nuclear power operations in the U.S.
Well, it might be funny to some right-wing crackpot nuke energy suck-up. But that’s a shrinking demographic.
+1
This week the BBC posted an article by Andreas Schleicher the OECD’s special adviser on education “Fukushima schools re-build after disaster.” It was linked from the Environment page with the line “Post-nuclear family”
Scrolling down, the ‘fact-box’ did eventually manage to recount the facts: Over 300,000 buildings destroyed and over 15,000 people killed by the Earthquake and Tsunami. But you could be forgiven for thinking that Schleicher believed they were killed by the power station. The last credible report I read, said that zero deaths had occurred due to radiation.
More people have been killed in Ted Kennedy’s car than have been killed by nuclear warheads on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. That doesn’t make ICBMs safer. Not really. Not probabilistically.
You see the number of people that can potentially be killed in Ted Kennedy’s car is a very low number compared to the number of people who can potentially be killed by an ICBM.
It’s like that with nuclear power plants. 96% of nuclear waste in the US is in water cooled containment. If there’s a breach (likely from sabotage, terrorism, or act of war) and the coolant escapes the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods catch fire within hours and everything downwind becomes uninhabitable for hundreds of years. The actual nuclear furnace, like what caused the problems at 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima is far more difficult to compromise and contain far less fuel than cooling ponds outside the reactor containment. So a cooling pond meltdown is scores of times worse than a reactor meltdown and far more vulnerable to malicious intent. Tens upon tens of thousands of square kilometers downwind of a cooling pond meltdown could be lost. Chernobyl on the other hand just ruined less than 10,000 km^2 in most estimates.
Brainwashed and rinsed.
Why should we expect anything different when people believe a trace gas practically 100% hole in the atmosphere and with practically zilch heat capacity makes a thermal blanket around the Earth and can raise temperature of the whole Earth several degrees..?
No one’s mentioned bananas yet..
Stand outside naked in freezing weather for a while and then tell me how little heat capacity air has.
Duh. Heat capacity of air may be small compared to water but nonetheless air temperature is very important to living things.
Topic: Greenhouse effect considered as albedo change
A paradigm shift in one’s thinking can occur if one realizes that greenhouse gases work by changing the effective albedo. It is non-intuitive because the mechanism doesn’t operate in the visible spectrum. Nevertheless by increasing downwelling longwave radiation on a surface the end result is more entrainment of shortwave radiation i.e. the surface is effectively darkened.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/grnhse.html#c5
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/albedo.html
Fixed blockquote…
Topic: Greenhouse effect considered as albedo change
A paradigm shift in one’s thinking can occur if one realizes that greenhouse gases work by changing the effective albedo. It is non-intuitive because the mechanism doesn’t operate in the visible spectrum. Nevertheless by increasing downwelling longwave radiation on a surface the end result is more entrainment of shortwave radiation i.e. the surface is effectively darkened.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/grnhse.html#c5
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/albedo.html
That’s not really all that interesting in and of itself. What’s interesting is the fact that if something already has an albedo of zero then the greenhouse effect cannot lower it any further. The ocean at high noon on a clear day in the tropics has an albedo that is practically zero. Therefore greenhouse warming can have no significant effect in that situation.
Given the above situation (high noon, tropics, clear sky) is where the lion’s share of solar energy enters the earth system the greenhouse effect, on a global average basis, is considerably lessened.
I’ve been saying for a long time now that the greenhouse effect is really only significant and a matter of concern over dry land particularly in the higher latitudes when the land in question is dry by way of being frozen for some part of the year with an exceedingly high albedo from snow cover.
Fortunately for people who live and work in those higher latitudes milder winters are a welcome thing. There’s really nothing not to like about CO2 greenhouse warming!
David Springer | June 8, 2013 at 9:03 am |
What’s the highest latitude you’ve ever lived at?
What’s the harshest winter you’ve ever faced?
You know nothing about permafrost, ice roads, invasive species of pests, loss of habitat of native species, the impact of more variable frost-free dates and growing season changes. You’re handwaving in total ignorance about places you’ve never lived, and people who neither know you nor want to.
Bart R | June 8, 2013 at 1:40 pm | Reply
“What’s the highest latitude you’ve ever lived at?”
42 north. Grew up 55 miles southeast of Buffalo.
“What’s the harshest winter you’ve ever faced?”
Compared to? -10F not unusual at. Makes your nostrils freeze together when you breath. Twenty below zero is unusual but it happens.
“You know nothing about permafrost, ice roads, invasive species of pests, loss of habitat of native species, the impact of more variable frost-free dates and growing season changes.”
True but the number of people who live where there’s ice roads and permafrost is vanishingly small. The good of the many must outweigh the good of the few. [shrugs]
“You’re handwaving in total ignorance about places you’ve never lived, and people who neither know you nor want to.”
Let’s be clear I was talking about where a lot of people live not where Innuits and polar bears live.
These boys are at 45N. And they want more global warming. I believe they’re sincere as they pretty much echo friends and family of mine at 42N.
Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u03QcymdCtg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJUFTm6cJXM
> Grew up 55 miles southeast of Buffalo.
Only Chuck Norris could have lived under harshest conditions.
Chuck Norris doesn’t live under harsh climates. Chuck Norris creates harsh climates that live under Chuck Norris.
Write that down.
David Springer | June 9, 2013 at 10:27 am |
Great. Yet another ‘alternative climate theory’. Blame it on Chuck Norris.
David Springer | June 8, 2013 at 3:41 pm |
Except they ain’t gonna get what they want, if they want ‘milder’ winters to mean beneficial winters.
Winter droughts that don’t build snow pack, leaving the downriver lands dry in spring and summer and destroy crops may be ‘mild’ in terms of precipitation, and they might even benefit some few.. but the needs of the many outweigh those few, no? Need for food outweighs the inconvenience of a bit of high mountain snow, I’d imagine.
And warm winters don’t always result in drought; far from it. If you grew up near Buffalo as I did, then you know the lake effect is amplified by winter heat, and can result in being utterly buried in snow many times more than usual. In parts of Quebec and Labrador, I’ve heard of 60′ drifts marching over some outlying towns and small cities due the ‘mild’ winter warmth. UNT isn’t a uniform hourly or daily change, but one that averages ‘milder’ over the course of a month or a season. The poor saps living through it won’t be thanking the people who caused the sudden plunges and unpredictable rapid spikes.
Sure, there might be a third as many cold records set, but there’ll still be cold records set. The weather system isn’t just warmed by the energy in it, it’s also structured by and driven by that energy. The more energy, the more extreme the structures and the more powerful the drives.
What a strangely pronoiac world we would have to have if the accidental random outcome of the neglect and selfishness of tyrants somehow always led to benefits trickled down on everyone as of the rain and snow turned golden and showered on all those people downwind of you.
55 miles SE of Buffalo in the Allegheny mountains is beyond the reach of most lake effect snow. Once in a while but it’s on the fringe.
And warmer winters result in less snow. I grew up about 10 miles away from the ski resorts in Ellicottville . I knew people who were employed there. The local economy there is highly dependent on it. The slopes are bare in mild winters because there isn’t enough sub-freezing weather even at 42N to keep it from melting away. I’m not sure about Buffalo. No one I know goes there if they can avoid it. The airport is the usual destination and it’s in-and-out as quickly as possible.
David Springer | June 9, 2013 at 6:11 am |
No one admits to being from Buffalo, no matter how much Commander Tom they watched as a child.. but saying Buffalo to impress people with one’s expertise on winter conditions when not even from inside the snowbelt, your only knowledge of winter from Holiday Valley, that’s some resume padding.
Yes, there are idiosyncratic conditions like some marginal slopes not getting much snow in ‘milder’ winters; it doesn’t mean a hemisphere of higher normalized monthly trends in temperature reflects what locals would all call milder winter very day. Often dumps of lake effect snow of 3′ or more in Buffalo would come as if out of the blue, with no warning and on the heels of a warm spell, and the next day clear again. If you removed one or two snow days from the calendar, the winter precipitation would rank as ‘mild’. Further north, or nearer Minnesota, the really cold winters have the least snow.
Your version of winter sounds more like it comes from Hollywood than from someone who’s ever experienced the real thing.
Unnatural normalized hemispheric trends at the monthly scale have nothing to do with human comfort or misery due climate kinetics at the daily local scale.
https://twitter.com/AvoidComments/status/342679786969251840
Isn’t that pretty much a restatement of
If you can’t take the heat stay out of the kitchen.
??
Unmoderated or in this case lightly moderated electronic bullentin boards are notorious flame pits if the topic is at all controversial. Religion, politics, and sports are all controversial almost by definition. This is politics. It’s about government. No one would really give a flip about climate science if the prediction was improving weather for the next thousand years and the hence governments couldn’t use it as a handy excuse to expand their empire.
No it’s redefining the game. It’s a vague yearning for the old days when readers could not talk back. Read your bible, watch your walter cronkite, and ask no questions. Or submit a letter and maybe we will edit and publish it. Listen to experts. No questions, unless they are submitted in proper form. etc etc.
The problem is that technology has destroyed their old methods. You can screw the record label and do your own damn release. You can screw the MSM and talk about Bill’s blow jobs. You can bust the hockey stick and publish your own damn science. And of course the technology and culture it produced loves a good flame war. Its way more entertaining than listening to walter.
So its less like staying out of the kitchen if you cant stand the heat. Its more like taking your ball and running home.. except it’s not the only ball.
> Its more like taking your ball and running home.. except it’s not the only ball.
And this is another appeal to pride, on top of the usual Yes But Luther meme.
Just take any op-ed about something you have no interest. Read the comments. You’ll see you don’t need to read the comments.
Of course, if you do comment yourself, reading the comments can serve a function. Notwithstanding the guilty pleasures it provides. But this ain’t something you need to do.
In any case, a comment that says “Don’t read the comment” should be at the very least funny.
think willard is right, going to trial run it
“Just take any op-ed about something you have no interest. Read the comments. You’ll see you don’t need to read the comments.”
Of course you dont need to read the comments. you need to breathe, drink, eat and shit. So, you dont need to go to school. you dont need to like hockey, you dont need do much of anything. err, duh.
But just for fun, lets do the experiment.
Lets pick an op ed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chelsea-clinton/what-i-saw-and-learned-in_b_3380394.html
hmm. While I didnt “need” to read the comments, I certainly
A) enjoyed it
B) saw quickly what the other side had to say in an issue I care absolutely nothing about.
C) decided to continue not caring about this.. in short no dog in this
fight move on.
In some cases the comments are WAY better than the original post.
Lets take this one
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/orlando-shaw-father-22-children-14-women_n_3397397.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
I liked this quote
“”You can’t knock no man for loving women.”
And was hoping to see if anybody went after the double negatives.
Comments that were better than the article ( marginalia rulz)
No man in history fathered more kids than Mongol leader Genghis Khan !
That’s one small snip for man, *krrzzch* one giant relief for mankind *krrch*
No, see, when a man pulls out, any little buddies that may have escaped get caught up in the vacuum created when he pulls out, and they get flung out of the lady parts like when you break the window of an airplane.
Yeah. That’s it…
Lets go upscale
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/the-internship-not-the-movie.html?hp&_r=0
Opps, comments are way better than the piece. I had no idea.
And of course if one reads WUWT, the comments ( when I make them) are always better than the piece. ar ar ar…
lolwot,
we can always lure you back in by making outrageous comments about you. .. never seen that one done before
> Opps, comments are way better than the piece. I had no idea.
There were 46 comments this morning. Easier to enjoy.
Of course the best counter example to willard is one the best blogs on climate science: Neven’s ASI. It’s all about the form. The bi weekly post about the state of the ice is really a wonderful invitation to discuss and the comments are often more informative than the post. Although the posts are always good.
It should also be noted that from time to time people try various tactics.
1. Assigning people to go to certain blogs and counter the nonsense.
2. walking away from commenting altogether as posts with debates
in the comments boost engagement numbers.
> I certainly A) enjoyed it
That’s what matters, in the end.
If you don’t, you don’t need to.
Personally willard I think you enjoyed being the bully. and you were most excellent at it, and then upon reflection thought that it wasnt too classy.
which made t hard to tell others to remain classy.
that’s just a theory. there are lots of theories. the selective politeness was a clue. hehe embrace the evil willard.
> Isn’t that pretty much a restatement of “If you can’t take the heat stay out of the kitchen.” ??
No, since the latter amounts to an appeal to pride.
willard (@nevaudit) | June 8, 2013 at 10:21 am |
Reading _my_ comments is always worthwhile. Or so I expect.
I never read what I’ve written. Sometimes, I don’t even think about it while I wwrite it.
Some comments, I do read. Usually I skip every other word, or replace some syllables with ‘ni’ or ‘ohm’. Unless they’re funny enough already.
Speaking of: http://blog.al.com/breaking/2013/06/views_disputing_cause_of_globa.html
Can someone explain to me where all the money spent on Spencer and Christy’s satellite program went?
UAH and RSS outputs are wildly out of synch with each other, and with surface records. There’s no plausible way the satellites are working properly and delivering data such outputs could be founded on. There’s too little transparency, and how many millions of US$ went into producing something we can’t trust, can’t use, and that stands in the way of what we do need?
I’m not asserting criminality or gross incompetency and neglect. I’m simply asking if anyone else has any other explanation?
> Reading [Bart R’s] comments is always worthwhile. Or so I expect.
Yes, and oftentimes they’s funny too.
But nobody needs to read comment threads.
It’s facultative.
Nobody’s making you read them.
Etcetera.
willard (@nevaudit) | June 8, 2013 at 2:21 pm |
Ah.
I see the problem here.
You’ve never invested in an app to pre-filter comment threads and weed out the dross for you, encapsulating it by predictive algorithms into summaries.
My favorite are those apps that color code comment subthreads and assign them to categories such as ‘blue meanies’, ‘pink baiting’, ‘red menace’, ‘yellow slander’, etc.
Sadly, they’re fictional. But they still make more sense than reading whole threads on blogs.
Bart R,
Our own learning algorithms are enough to skim, but I’m quite sure an extension could be done along these lines.
Here’s one for you:
https://twitter.com/AvoidComments/status/343404561819656193
willard (@nevaudit) | June 8, 2013 at 7:04 pm |
I rather count on the money I put into my own clothes.
Though of course finding money in others’ clothes makes many a pickpocket’s day.
Retrieving a gem of real value in the folds of a complete stranger’s garments? Well, there can be a double dividend there, depending on why one’s hands were so placed.
Hmm, pride would involve making a judgement about the relative importance of comments versus the post. The “comments can teach me nothing” can be as prideful as “the comments are necessary.” The key issue is contempt. Absent contempt it’s hard to diagnose pride as a cause, but it’s easy to hit folks with the pride bully club.
> pride would involve making a judgement about the relative importance
Yet another untruth.
All that is needed is the idea that one must own the comments in some way, and that if you go home, that’s because you can’t play.
Simples.
“Yet another untruth.
All that is needed is the idea that one must own the comments in some way, and that if you go home, that’s because you can’t play.”
Hardly. Pride is the love of one’s own excellence. You might take your ball and go home for a variety of reasons.
A) you cant play ( us saying that would make us proud)
B) you dont want to play
C) you think the game is unfair
D) you think these games are unwinnable and have better things to do
Now, if I said you are taking your ball and going home because you cant play as well as others can, then the charge of pride might attach. But it doesnt attach necessarily. Assuming otherwise is most uncharitable.
You’re best as a bully. get back to it. and you’re really classy when you do the double negative thingy.. more of that, pretty please with sugar on it.. do the bully again..
See you can play. Look, when the kid who is easy to beat takes his ball home, nobody is pissed. it’s only when the good player leaves that people get pissed. It’s your excellence at bullying that people miss.
Gee Willard – The winning move is to participate, read the comments, begin to make sense of it, give it your best, and maybe we will come out the other side unscathed. This is democracy unfettered. Bask in it!
A democracy is a voting mechanism, jim2. This is a comment thread. A democracy is not a comment thread.
A comment thread is a collection of talking points and conversations. In both cases, there are no winning moves. All the winning you can get is in your head.
I assume you are describing your own approach, Willard.
Willard. Democracy: 5
: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy
You are a bit rigid in your thinking, no?
jim2,
Thank you for inquiring into my understanding. Let me try to simplify what I mean:
Nothing prevents you from writing comments, except perhaps the blog curator. And that includes fallacies like Yes, but Democracy. Nothing forces you to read them, even Bart R’s, which I do read myself. You can replace “you” with almost anyone.
Freedom to comment on the Internet is good. Freedom from reading Internet comments is better.
And freedom from government tyranny is best.
I thought Toqueville teached libertarians that a democracy was a tyranny by the majority.
In any case, best of luck in Sierre Leone.
The phrase “tyranny of the majority” was coined by John Adams in 1788. It’s why the US is a constitutional republic instead of a democracy. The republic predates Tocqueville’s popularization of the phrase by 60 years. The concept itself dates back thousands of years and was known as ochlocracy in ancient Greece which translates to “mob rule” and in ancient Rome the Latin “mobile vulgus” which translates to “the fickle crowd”.
As always, write that down.
Only Chuck Norris can afford not to cite his sources, Big Dave:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
Please tell jim2 to write down that your beloved country ain’t a democracy.
You are right about that Willard – and I think, as did the Founding Fathers, that the States’ legislature’s should elect the Senators.
jim2,
Let’s recap:
– A democracy is the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges.
– USA is not a democracy.
– The Founding Fathers were right.
Please tell me what to infer from that.
Strike the apostrophe in legislatures.
willard (@nevaudit) | June 9, 2013 at 8:25 pm |
jim2,
Let’s recap:
– A democracy is the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges.
* jim2: This was in reference to the Climate Etc. blog.
– USA is not a democracy.
* jim2: Check. The USA is not a democracy, but instead a Republic.
– The Founding Fathers were right.
* jim2: They were right in many things and we in the US have veered very far off their enlightened vision.
Please tell me what to infer from that.
* jim3: Infer whatever you like.
Is the Global Warming Hoax over yet? I’m tired of waiting.
Andrew
I was involved in a private online poll last week that asked “Do You Believe In Global Warming?” The presenter of the poll was surprised that the “No’s” out numbered the “Yes’s”. Naivete?
Andrew
A poll where the dummies outnumbered the smarties?
Max_OK,
Or a poll where most people got the answer right? ;)
Andrew
Nah, people who don’t believe in global warming don’t believe in instruments and shouldn’t be allowed to drive cars. Of course I know some people who believe in instruments and shouldn’t be allowed to drive cars.
“people who don’t believe in global warming don’t believe in instruments”
That’s a weird conclusion to draw.
Andrew
Max_OK | June 8, 2013 at 9:42 am | Reply
“A poll where the dummies outnumbered the smarties?”
The poll was conducted in Oklahoma, so yeah, that’s a given.
Baddie, instrumentally-based records indicate global warming. So if you don’t believe the globe has been warming, you don’t believe instruments. Some people go by the way they feel rather than rely on instruments, as in “Officer you may have clocked me at 80mph but I feel I was going only 65 mph.”
“instrumentally-based records indicate global warming”
Only of you have a priori belief in global warming. Otherwise they just indicate local temperature.
Andrew
>> Or a poll where most people got the answer right?
Unless cases of schizophrenia, as the poll asked about personal beliefs, 100% got it right, Bad Andrew.
(h/t R. Smullyan)
Max_OK
The “instruments” tell us it has been warming globally (at least up to around 2001).
But they do not tell us WHY it has been warming.
Max_CH
Max_CH, of course instruments don’t tell you why the globe has been warming, science tells us. But believing science is not easy for the close minded.
As for your belief the globe was warming “up to around 2001,” the year 2001 isn’t your best pick for a starting year if you are trying to find a pause in the warming.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2001/to:2013/plot/uah/from:2001/to:2013/trend
“From 2000” is an even worse pause pick.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2000/to:2013/plot/uah/from:2000/to:2013/trend
“From 2002” is your best pick for a pause.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2002/to:2013/plot/uah/from:2002/to:2013/trend
If you will allow me to pick a recent “no pause in warming” period, I like starting with 2008. Global temperature rose over the last 5 years (2008-2013).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2008/to:2013/plot/uah/from:2008/to:2013/tre
In my previous post, my last link should be:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2000/to:2013/plot/uah/from:2000/to:2013/trend
Bad Andrew | June 8, 2013 at 9:54 am |
Ah. Good open thread topic.
Consider the source: Yay or Nay?
“What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out.” — Bertrand Russell
The logic of global warming alarmists is about like averaging temperatures taken twice a day in a relatively few discreet areas around the world and kill a Jew a day until the average starts dropping.
Wagathon
How about a “witch” a day (as was done to mitigate the lousy climate in the Little Ice Age)?
Max
Carbon dioxide is a harmless gas that helps feed the starving.
“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
I don’t think anyone in the pro-mitigation camp has answered the following question truthfully: What are the costs of mitigating AGW now versus later (say have a stat-sig trend in GMT).
Why do the benefits of 1. extra time and thus observations on sensitivity, 2. extra time and thus more R&D, perhaps breakthrough tech not outweigh these costs?
Finally, why are these baby measures (billion here, billion there) at all helpful to us in solving the issue?
It’s hard to do. For example, what would be the cost of making it illegal — only in America — to raise cattle
A rough rule of thumb is 1 C warming per 100 ppm added, so it is not so much when as how much mitigation in the long run.
Ever heard of logarithms?
According to Otto at al it would be +2°C for +400ppm at the moment.
It is a rough estimate that works surprisingly well for the first few hundred ppm added, which applies to the realistic range. It is equivalent to sensitivity of 2 C per doubling at first, growing to 3 C per doubling by 400 ppm added.
Jim D
Using the IPCC AR4 model predicted mean 2xCO2 ECS of 3C:
First 100 ppmv (from 394 to 494 ppmv) adds ~1.0C
Next 100 ppmv (from 494 to 594 ppmv) adds ~0.8C
Next 100 ppmv (from 594 to 694 ppmv) adds ~0.7C
Next 100 ppmv (from 694 to 794 ppmv) adds ~0.6C
So from 394 ppmv to 794 ppmv adds ~3.1C (not 4C)
And if we use the latest estimates for 2xCO2 ECS (around half the earlier AR4 value of IPCC), we end up with warming of half this amount or 1.6C for doubling CO2.
That’s the big discussion going on right now, so let’s see how it plays out.
Max
manacker, I was counting from 280 ppm, so at 3 C per doubling
280-380 gives 1.3 C at equilibrium
380-480 gives 1.0 C
480-580 gives 0.8 C
580-680 gives 0.7 C
The 1 C per 100 ppm line starts parallel to the 2 C per doubling line, crosses the 3 C per doubling line at 650 ppm and the 4C line at 1000 ppm. So it stays within the range of uncertainty through 1000 ppm. This is why I call it a rule of thumb. It is good for people like congressmen who can’t handle logarithms so easily in their mind.
Manacker,
And whether it is +3.1 C or +1.6 C, the real question is “so what?” Would 1.6 C or 3.1 C or whatever be good or bad? How do we know? What do we know about the impacts/consequences of +1.6 C or +3.1 C?
Remember that the increase is on top of a long term declining trend which has sudden, rapid declines along the way. So, we also need to take into consideration the risk mitigation effect of our GHG emissions. All this needs to be taking into account in assessing the probabilities and consequences of our GHG emissions. I am not persuaded there is any justification whatsoever for spending money on GHG mitigation policies – unless they server other benefits that are economically rational in their own right. Examples of policies that would be economically beneficial in their own right are:
– cheaper energy
– electrification for all those people who don’t have it
– reduced toxic pollution
– reduced black carbon
– increased energy security and energy independence
– reduced shipping and transport
– reduced fuel fossil fuel consumption in transporting fossil fuels
– etc.
Jim D
Let me point out to you that it is absurd to start your “warming” at some hypothetical “pre-industrial” date around 1750.
The climate then was apparently cooler than today. If we take CET as a proxy for 1750 to 1850 (around 0.1C increase) and HadCRUT for the warming after 1850 (around 0.7C) we end up with 0.8C warming from 1750 to today.
We do not know what caused this warming (too many uncertainties about natural forcing and variability, and hence the impact of humans).
We do know, however, that there have not been any adverse effects on humans of this warming (we are doing just fine at today’s temperature and climate), so it is silly to include hypothetical past warming in the anthropogenic warming estimate.
Doing so just makes you look a bit silly, Jim.
Max
Peter Lang
Agree with everything you wrote.
We don’t know
a) how much “man-made” warming we could see by 2100 (when we are all dead, anyway)
b) how much natural warming or cooling will occur until 2100
c) whether any future warming will be beneficial for humanity or not
IOW, the “unknowns” (uncertainties) are greater than the “knowns”.
And (as Donald Rumsfeld and Nassim Taleb both caution): it will be the “unknown unknowns” that make all our projections null and void.
Max
Jim D
Unless you purposely want to frighten those “congressmen”, give them a number that is around half your number (based on latest ECS estimates), and start it today (not back in 1750, before there even was a US Congress).
This would be roughly 1C warming from today to 2100 (CO2 increases to 640 ppmv)
Max
manacker, I chose to begin at 280 ppm because the formula fits better when I do that, and it puts past warming into the same perspective as future warming.
…also by starting later, you lose what is in the pipeline already. Remember this is the equilibrium value it estimates.
Jim D
You can’t fool me, Jim.
I know why you started the warming in 1750 instead of today.
Simply so the number comes out higher, and thus a bit scarier.
But it is silly, for the reasons I already pointed out to you.
Max
An early release paper at BAMS about a workshop on multidecadal (natural) variability, should be inteesting to lukewarmers.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00015.1
I’ll just copy the concluding remarks here, some heartwarming honesty, but there’s plenty more gems in the paper
“Most climate change meetings have tended to focus on the forced, thermodynamically induced variability of the climate system, as represented by the upper left box in Fig. 1. In contrast, this meeting featured scientists who think outside of that box. The climate response to external forcing—especially on regional scales—is strongly influenced by dynamical processes in both the ocean and the atmosphere. Moreover, the existence of strong natural multidecadal to centennial variability makes the detection of anthropogenic climate change a challenge. The presentations at the workshop dealt with the full range of processes that contribute to forced and free (also referred to as unforced or internal) multidecadal climate variability . This broader framing of climate change science is required for quantifying the societal risks of future climate change, and for properly assessing the extent to which today’s weather, specifically the statistics of extreme weather events, is changing in response to human-induced climate change. Bringing together a critical mass of climate researchers with these broader scientific interests was intellectually stimulating and it served to catalyze a number of research collaborations that may bear fruit in the future.”
The paper is a summary of this workshop, again you can click on each link to get some interesting work on natural variability. If you have a spare couple of hours then I think you’ll get something out of looking through these reports.
http://www.tims.ntu.edu.tw/workshop/Default/program.php?WID=137
enjoy!
HR, there seems to be a lot of interesting material here. It will be interesting to see what Judith and the more technically and scientifically proficient posters here make of it.
Well, after a second attempt, the first just disappeared, I got a reason for the censorship – gravity is a taboo word on WUWT.
Here’s what I posted, on topic, as it is a look at all the ways that global warming has failed all tests, and, I offer the Greenhouse Effect is created out of fake fisics. Perhaps it depends on the mod, one of my previous posts didn’t appear so I took out slayers references and reposted, to find both versions appear after a time.
Simon C-S says:
June 7, 2013 at 9:34 am
Sheer Gold & Frankincense. Doubt very much though that Roy Spencer will do his experiment, nor Anthony repeating his but correctly (i.e. directly measuring the temperature of the filament, not the shell).
Thank you!
We can see from the replies that resistance to the logic here is strong.. I particularly liked Gary’s reply to you which summed that up:
“No you don’t. Otherwise you’d demand they do Dr. Spencer’s experiment and prove their theories. Why do you think they haven’t done it?”
When it is up to Dr Spencer to do his own experiment and prove it against all of industry which has never seen such an effect…
This inversion, getting it backwards, is a last ditch attempt to deflect from the fact that all Dr Spencer has produced is a thought built on empirically debunked concepts – what is so annoying is the support for his concepts become irrational because he won’t do his own experiment and instead of getting annoyed with him they get annoyed with those pointing out his concept fail. Poor Virginia ..
Thank you for also confirming that AGW and GHE are inextricably linked, as some seem to be in denial that they are. Without the conjectured GHE, there would be no thought of AGW.
Ah, well this is what I found to be fascinating, and finally the only conclusion was that it was deliberately created out of faking fisics. When all put together, when the world created from their fisics basics is built as a model, they end up not only living in a world without direct heat from their AGW Sun by giving the property of longwave infrared to visible light and excising the actual longwave infrared from the Sun, but without the Water Cycle, so without rain in their Carbon Cycle, but less obviously in a world without sound – because just as they have no heat from the Sun in their world they have no actual atmosphere. Their AGW Earth goes straight from the surface to empty space because they have changed the basic properties of gases.
Much as they have made their electromagnetic radiation from the Sun without individual properties, so without processes from the differences, in their meme “all electromagnetic radiation is the same and all create heat on being absorbed”, so they have taken out all the characteristics from their gases, reducing them to amorphous hard dots of massless nothing from the description of the imaginary, in real physics, “ideal gas”. Their gases don’t have volume, attraction, weight etc. and so of course not subject to gr*v*t* because they are “hard dots of massless nothing zipping at great speeds through empty space under their own molecular momentum thoroughly mixing in elastic collisions, bouncing off each other, and can’t be unmixed” – this is how they get their “carbon dioxide is thoroughly mixed”. Here too they have to bring in a imaginary invisible barrier to keep them from spontaneously diffusing to outer space .., their imaginary “container” against which these imaginary gases bounce off the sides creating “pressure” and so on.
But Greenhouse Effect begins with the deliberate science fraud of giving the -18°C figure from traditional physics to “absence of their AGW defined greenhouse gases” alone, when this figure actually refers to the real Earth without any atmosphere at all, the comparison of course with the real Moon in traditional physics.
The real Earth’s atmosphere being the physical volume with weight under grvty which is practically all nitrogen and oxygen – is the real thermal blanket around the Earth preventing the extremes of cold as found on the Moon, and also the first step in being the cooling mechanism preventing the extremes of heat as found on the Moon.
Because they are real gases they expand and condense with heat and so become lighter or heavier than air, becoming lighter they create areas of low pressure and rise taking away heat from the surface where they give up their heat and becoming colder again condense and so heavier than air areas of high pressure sink – called heat transfer by convection in the real physics and of course how we get our real winds which are convection currents – from which the real physics mnemonics, hot air rises cold air sinks and winds flow from high to low.
Because their AGW gases are ideal and not real they do not have any of the properties of real gases which have these processes which give convection, their fake fisics gas teaching have the memes “oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide are ideal gases” and are “non-condensable” and “gases are not bouyant in air”. So not only are they able to exclude the part real gases play in the process of cooling around the real Earth, their “greenhouse gases warm” only, they don’t notice they are missing. As they don’t notice they are missing rain in their carbon cycle, because they have also taken out the cooling process we get from the Water Cycle which AGW have excised completely in their basic GHE science fraud, exactly as they have excised the direct longwave infrared wavelength of heat from the Sun.
In the real world greenhouses both warm and cool, which was why originally our atmosphere was likened to a greenhouse, in the AGW world greenhouses only warm.
The basic science fraud of AGW’s The Greenhouse Effect is created by twisting real physics which says:
The temperature of the Earth:
– with the whole atmosphere in place is 15°C.
– without any atmosphere at all is -18°C. [Moon -23°C]
– minus water but with the rest of atmsophere in place is 67°C.
AGW has taken out the whole of the Water Cycle which cools the Earth as its high heat capacity means it absorbs a great deal of heat before changing phase, before evaporating as water vapour as it expands (water vapour takes up 1000 times more room then the same molecules as liquid water) and so lighter than air rises and takes that heat away from the surface to condense back into liquid water or ice in the colder heights and come back to Earth as cooling rain. (Bringing all the carbon dioxide around it back to the surface as carbonic acid, all natural unpolluted rain is carbonic acid, pH around 5.6-8.) An even greater cooling effect than the bulk atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen in its heat transfer by convection and from the cold winds created from this, convection currents, as hot air rises and cold air sinks – water brings down the temp from 67°C to 15°C. That whole process is missing.
And, the Greenhouse Effect has attributed to the trace carbon dioxide the blanket insulating effect which rightly belongs to whole bulk of the mainly nitrogen and oxygen heavy voluminous real gas which plays a real part in us avoiding the extreme cold the Moon reaches with no atmosphere to stop the rapid heat loss.
In the real world all these gases are greenhouse gases, because in the real world the greenhouse is the whole atmosphere comprising of real gases which both warm, by stopping heat escaping too rapidly as on the Moon and cool, by convection taking heat away as they expand and rise and thus bringing down cold as they condense and sink. Even without water the bulk nitrogen and oxygen cool the Earth by convection preventing the extremes reached on the Moon.
So without water, think deserts, we would still have a very hot world from the blanket effect of our bulk nitrogen and oxygen atmosphere trapping heat preventing extremes of cold, but even without water these also cool the Earth preventing the extremes of heat reached on the Moon without them.
So, by sleight of hand to create their AGW Greenhouse Effect Illusion they first of all give the temperature of -18°C to absence only of their AGW version of greenhouse gases, not to all our gases comprising our greenhouse atmosphere, but only to those “absorbing ir”, mainly water and carbon dioxide – this is clear science fraud.
They then claim that with “their AGW defined greenhouse gases” the Earth is warmed 33°C from the “-18°C it would be by their absence”.
That 33°C is an illusion, it doesn’t exist, there is no physical process to get it from the properties and processes of our real world gases.
It is an illusion created by sleight of hand fiddling with the basic properties and processes of our real gases built on the deliberate science fraud base of misattribution of the -18°C figure from real physics.
Clever? Yes, very clever, it was obviously someone who knew and understood real physics very well indeed who was able to make such subtle changes through all the component parts and build in distractions to deceive the mind by tricking the eyes and ears.
But, like all magicians’ tricks, the illusion is only as good as the ability to maintain it. Who began introducing it into the general education system, I don’t know, it certainly has Fabian ideology markers, their idea of “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and getting their changes into place over time by infiltrating all areas of society to introduce their world view, every political party and local government and of course, here, the general education system, to slip in their view ‘unnoticed’ playing the long game. They began by creating the LSE, but here particularly in education, if it was them, they began by getting control of the teacher training of non-specialists at infant and junior level, so now we have PhD’s teaching gas law who don’t know the difference between ideal gas and real gases. Which is where I came in.., and ardent AGW teaching at university level telling me that carbon dioxide would sponstaneously diffuse into the atmosphere under its own molecular momentum and shocked to the core when I told him that carbon dioxide would separate out of air and sink..
The real world examples that used to be taught, essential knowledge in mine working and brewing beer.., are not mentioned, just like there is no mention of rain in their carbon cycle – and here in our exhanges re Spencer’s experiment and my previous example of glass and film for windows which maximise entry of visible light while minimising longwave infrared from the Sun to keep rooms cool, they are simply not led to real world examples because these contradict their memes- so they’re not used to thinking in terms of how these basic physics claims of the AGW Greenhouse Effect extrapolate into empirical observation.
If they could do that they would see how absurd their fisics. But it is all of their basic physics. This takes in every field of science, that’s why it’s so clever an illusion because it has created confusion in every part which needs then to be dissected by bringing in knowledge from the variety of science fields.
And of course further confusion, because while some educated in the last decades have gone on to specialise in real applied science as still taught traditionally and so can see from their own discipline where AGW’s Greenhouse Effect contradicts real world in practice, the Spencer argument, they often take other aspects of the GHE claim to be real world and not faked because they have had no reason to question these other memes they received through general education.
I wish I could find it again, a paper I read when I first began questioning the GHE claims about carbon dioxide, a scientist determined to proved AGW fisics right in its claim that gases didn’t separate out and who had been pointed to real world separation of methane in mines contradicting this.
[Spontaneously meaning without work being done] Methane is lighter than air, standard relative weight of gases in traditional science, as is water vapour, and carbon dioxide one and a half times heavier than air, which means methane will always spontaneously separate out from air rising, and in mines the ceiling prevents this from going further and so it will form a layer at the ceiling, the other gases heavier will layer further down.
Methane in mines is a very great hazard, highly combustible, and its property of being lighter than air has been well known in mining for centuries. Until very recent times when mechanical extraction and electric light brought in, the way that miners both tested for and removed methane was to enter covered in wet towels holding a lighted candle on a long pole.
This scientist found himself a mine and his group set up an experiment to prove methane didn’t separate out of air but would thoroughly mix by ideal gas diffusion. They introduced methane into the mine and found that it separated out at the celing as they had been told from traditional physics that it would. They were shocked. They had never been taught that gases had properties.
What they did next shows there were capable of thinking like scientists, but they were thinking through their paradigm so trying to find reasons why the methane wasn’t thoroughly mixing, not able to change their thinking by looking at it from a different point of view. This is how great leaps of understanding happen in science, the eureka moments, but these come without a different view known, here the scientists blanked off looking at it from a different point of view they had been given, and which they themselves had just proved.
So they first decided that methane might initially separate out, though their own physics said otherwise, but that it would take time to do this, though their own physics said otherwise, and concluded that an extraneous source of methane was entering the mine and contaminating their results by layering at the ceiling not giving the methane time to diffuse. They did a very thorough search of the mine and could find no extraneous input. So they concluded finally that they had somehow missed this.
So, I’m not at all surprised that the onus to prove the Spencer thought experiment is deflected away from him..
It must come as an awful shock to the system to find that all one believed about the natural world around us isn’t physically possible, and an even bigger shock to find that one’s beliefs have been based on a physics deliberately faked in a huge science scam, when one daily uses these faked fisics to think about the world. My elementary science education about gases included the real world examples of mines which were an important industry to us then.., it was an obvious real world example of the properties and process of gases in action, to be ignorant of which was a danger, some of us went on to brewing our own beer..
I came to this knowing the alternative real physics view, but it still took a while to work out how they had changed this, and even so it was very difficult to separate fact from fiction when this took me into areas I wasn’t familiar with, so my warning to bear in mind real world applications.
The AGW Greenhouse Effect swap giving visible light from the Sun the properties of longwave infrared heat from the Sun in order to create their “backradiation from greenhouse gases” takes a lot of explanation to show all the connecting parts and easy to lose the thread in the complexity, but bearing in mind that in the real world we have industries which make things that work in coming up with solutions such as special glass and film for windows because these scientists know that we do get our great heat direct from the Sun by the invisible longwave infrared and that visible light does not heat matter, will help keep on track.
Gosh, I’ve just posted a note to Simon to tell him my reply is here:
and I’ve been censored again:
Myrrh says:
June 8, 2013 at 9:02 am
[snip – off topic slayers junkscience]
So I’ve just posted this:
You’ve stolen my post directed to Simon. You won’t post where he can read my reply. Don’t pretend you have the high moral ground in your continued claims that you don’t censor views here. I am giving information from real world real physics. If you disagree have the balls to argue with me.
You’re no different from Skeptical Science and the rest of that mob.
Myrrh,
Why don’t YOU do the experiment, and provide us with a step-by-step explanation right hetre, including pictures of your lab set-up?
You are criticizing others for your own lack of empirical action. At least they did something — while you are just pontificating.
Oh, hello Smokey! Was it you who censored my posts, even those which got through before?
What is it with you people? How does it get to this logic fail? Spencer has made a though experiment which in all its parts is never observed in real life, not in any industry specialising in heat transfer by radiation, convection or conduction. He has already been falsified.
You can pretend all you like that isn’t the case, but then you have to resort to censoring those who actually do have empirical proof in their day to day work, as Dr Latour.
You’re not different from the S[k]S mob and its ilk, you have a pet theory for which you can provide no empirical evidence and you refuse to provide it by doing the experiment yourselves.
And you use ad homs and other distractions, like putting the onus on industry and applied science which has already falsified it, to prove it isn’t false??
You’re the ones claiming Spencer is right – you do the experiment to show that all applied scientists for the last hundred years in countless industries are wrong.
It is a sleight of hand fake fisics meme, the “net” does not appear in the 2nd Law. It is read that heat always flows from hotter to colder includes the word spontaneous, i.e., without work being done to change that.
Just as water always flows downhill.
That’s simply an observed in applied science fact.
You are saying something different, you do the experiment.
WUWT mod writes: “You are criticizing others for your own lack of empirical action. At least they did something — while you are just pontificating.”
oh the irony
lolwot | June 8, 2013 at 1:52 pm |
Myrrh’s too wrong for even WUWT?
I can’t argue that irony is the wrong term, but it does seem to beggar the poor little much-abused word’s capacity to describe the situation.
That, plus the surprise at WUWT giving fairly good advice to Myrrh.
And Smokey – what is with Anthony? The arguments in my posts have nothing to do with the slayers, I was giving another reason, on topic, of why global warming is an epic fail in that it has failed all the tests – its physics don’t make sense.
What I post on gases is what I discovered for myself when exploring the reasoning for AGW GHE claims about carbon dioxide – I wanted to know why they said it was “well mixed and doesn’t separate out and accumulates” when I knew from traditional physics that it was heavier than air so always sinks in air, because, it has mass. Because it has mass it is subject to GRAVITY. Gosh, are you freakin’ yet?? grrraaavvviiitttty….
An ardent AGW who was also a PhD in physics teaching gases at university, setting exams in the education system, was taking me through it. That’s how I discovered that they had taken out all the properties and process of real gases and turned them into what in traditional phyisics is called “ideal” gas, a imaginary gas with no mass so not subject to gravity, so no weight, no attraction, no volume.
AGW’s GHE is built on a imaginary world surrounded by “empty space populated by ideal gas massless hard dots of nothing moving at great speeds through this empty space bouncing off each other and the walls of the container in elastic collisions” – that is not the real gas atmosphere we have around us.
My arguments are against this ideal gas concept, and so far I haven’t seen anyone else making it…
My arguments against this show the real properties and processes of gases and I take my inspiration here from bog standard meteorology! What has Anthony got against that?
My “backradiation” argument is again one I haven’t seen anyone else make – I show it is a sleight of hand illusion in the AGW Greenhouse Effect energy budget of KT97 and ilk, created by taking out the direct heat from the Sun ..
And that I know Anthony knows, because when the NASA page I was quoting from giving traditional science was being changed and a new AGW page created, he suggested a website I could capture the old page. This is the time I discovered that changes were being made to traditional science teaching.
Anyway, still applies, if Anthony thinks Spencer is right then let him do the thought experiment for real. The ad hom of calling traditional science as empirically understood in industry, “junk science”, is no proof that Spencer is correct..
But that’s not my argument anyway, I only touch on it in passing.
I like my arguments better..
The irony I was thinking of was in the response.
Imagine if a climate skeptic had posted a comment at realclimate complaining that GISTEMP was flawed because they didn’t calculate XYZ and that comment was subsequently deleted (a waste of time really) and the skeptic asked why and someone at RC replied:
“You are criticizing others for your own lack of empirical action. At least they did something — while you are just pontificating.”
Ie, do the work yourself instead of just complaining it isn’t being done properly.
Myrrrhhh is all rhetoric and no actual analysis.
That said, I do find the topic of a generic planetary atmosphere under the influence of gravity fascinating. That’s the stuff that spurred much of Carl Sagan’s early academic interest.
The gist of the problem is that a quiescent atmosphere has to obey the ideal gas law PV=nRT, which is a deceptively simple-looking but non-linear relationship of 3 independent variables. Then when you add altitude to the mix, you don’t necessarily make it any easier. Trying to eliminate one of the variables to get something that appears universal is deceptively frustrating. Using adiabatic, entropy, and latent heat arguments, one can get families of solutions that differ markedly.
Gravity and mass and force conservation laws are a few of the constraints that one can add to the set to see if any simplifications can be made. I don’t treat it as anything more than a puzzle at the moment, but one can get numbers that are tantalizing close to an average planetary lapse rate. This requires one very crucial simplification that assumes that pressure decreases much faster than the enclosing volume increases with linear altitude increase.
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-homework-problem-to-end-all.html
Here’s my topic: framing useful discussion.
Recently, the question was posed, clumsily and uselessly, what are we debating?
And no wonder it’s a question, with so much obfuscation, ill-wording, misreading, and ambiguity.
Some descry the term ‘Climate Change’, and some apologists merely broaden it to include all changes in any climates whatsoever to deresolve the framework of the discourse, or because they sincerely have a sordid fascination with obscurata.
But apologists for what? To me, they’re apologists for tyranny, since lucrative CO2E emission could not happen on such a scale as it does without some tyrannically taking what is not theirs, as free riders. This might be from the tyranny of a neglectful government failing its duties to uphold a fair Market. It might be the tyranny of a culpable government of corrupt influence-peddlers selling subsidies to the financiers of their political careers. It might be the tyranny of socialists befuddled by the false ‘cheap energy’ arguments of weasel-mouthed self-described economists, sold on a bill of goods that is simply not true. Who can say, and who cares? None of them recognizes the rights of those whose air they trespass on without consent or compensation. It’s all tyranny in one form or another.
See, ‘anthropogenic’ is a useless term in framing the discourse. Either it is too broad, as not all humans are the cause of the large scale lucrative emissions in question, but only the tyrants, or it is too narrow, since including feedbacks that are not themselves directly ascribable to human action is often necessary.
So in such phrases as ‘anthropogenic’ global warming or anthropogenic climate change or anthropogenic carbon emissions, why not call it accurately, precisely what it narrowly is: tyrannical global warming, tyrannical climate change, from tyrannical carbon emissions.
Likewise, the word ‘unnatural’ when we mean anthropogenic plus feedbacks is more appropriate.
Also, there are certain people who quibble uselessly about the word ‘global’. Well, ‘land only’ isn’t global. Regional isn’t global. Averages aren’t ‘global’. The mathematics of grouping together numbers of interest into forms that are comparable is not called ‘globalization’ technically, but ‘normalization’. We should call these numbers ‘normalized’ with regards the context, so we can debate and discuss them unambiguously.
Likewise, ‘temperature’ and ‘warming’ are idiotic. Only half of the effects of GHGs — or far less — can be measured in heat, and changes in heat vary widely depending on the heat capacity of media — upper atmosphere vs. lower, lower vs water, water vs. different solid surfaces such as ice, soil, biomass or rock, etc. What’s of interest is often not thermal but any trend that changes due unnatural effects: frequency of extreme events, blocking patterns, ice volume and on and on. I recommend replacing ‘warming’ or ‘temperature’ with ‘trendology’.
And we aren’t really interested in ‘change’ per se either. We mean to discuss the kinetics, or movement arcs of climate due inputs, not simply the fact of its change.
In short, never say AGW or climate change again; instead say either Unnatural Normalized Trendology or Unnatural Climate Kinetics due forcings.
Bart R – what we are debating is the ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING SCARE created by people who have produced no evidence of any such critter existing and who continually change what they call it to avoid debate that they have never produced any proof of such a critter existing.
Myrrh | June 8, 2013 at 3:27 pm |
What do you mean ‘we’?
I thought WUWT made it clear you don’t speak for them.. and I’m certainly not debating what you say until it more closely resembles rational thought with basis in reality.
How do you support a preference for ‘anthropogenic’ over ‘tyrannic’ or ‘unnatural’ (as appropriate to the context), ‘global’ over ‘normalized’ (as appropriate to the scale of region and time), or ‘warming’ over ‘trendology’ whether hot or cold or variable or extreme or ice volume or height of solar tide or frequency of events or so forth? And I’m sorry if you’re scared, but that’s a nervous condition that really can’t be helped; certainly no one has set out to scare you so far as I know. Maybe you had a childhood trauma that predisposes you to fear and worry, but it isn’t really relevant.
And this ‘no proof’ thing you say.. you’re not really familiar with how proof works, from what I’ve seen in your writing, so we’ll just all have to accept that there will never be a proof that satisfies someone who can’t grasp what proof is.
And so, no, I’m not debating AGW any more, as I don’t find inaccurate terminology leads to accurate outcomes. I’ll be glad to talk to you about UNT, TNT, and UCK.
By “we” I actually do mean all of us. That is what got us all into this. That is still what we are all debating however many times the goal posts are moved however many times the subject is deflected by suggesting that is not what we are debating and however many times those who are too damn scared to face the fact that this is what we are debating present strawman arguments to deflect from this including telling lies..
I thought WUWT made it clear you don’t speak for them..
That is really nasty. Where did they say that? Go fetch.
I have never claimed I speak for them so they have never had any reason to say what you claim they said.
You can no more fetch that than you can fetch empirical proof of AGW, which is why you now don’t want to discuss it.
Who are you speaking for..? Are you getting paid for it?
Anthropogenic Global Warming
Was built on faked physics. That’s a fact.
i like it when u call it fisics
What’s unnatural about CO2 emmissions?
True, natural CO2 emissions from volcanoes are responsible for several warm periods in paleoclimate, but this one is unnatural in its relative speed compared to anything known before. However it has a lot of similarity in how it gets geological carbon into the air.
John Carpenter | June 8, 2013 at 5:35 pm |
A fair question.
Simply put, UNT would be any normalized trendology where a signal that corresponds to tyrannical causes and/or their feedbacks can be found.
That would be all that would be necessary to distinguish UNT from NT or TNT.
Of course, an economist would also distinguish between lucrative or not lucrative. A man plucks a wild raspberry from a cane growing wild at the side of a path and eats it, no one has suffered economic harm or gained economic benefit. A man steals a truckload of raspberries from a grocery store and the grocers’s economy suffers a loss.
Ok, how are human made CO2 emissions unnatural? Just because the rate at which we have produced them makes them unnatural? Humans are somehow removed from nature? Just because humans became industrious we became unnatural?… Removed and separated from nature? Why then do we not consider other species that change the environment unnatural, for instance termite colonies. They are huge structures built by insects that emit a lot of methane. Those are unnatural also? Just because we can alter the environment on a larger scale, that renders it unnatural?
Previous comment was directed to Jim D.
Bart, you are over my head with what you are explaining.
John Carpenter, I was partly agreeing. It is very similar to several warming episodes seen in paleoclimate, and the warming is for similar reasons. Nothing new under the sun, as they say.
John Carpenter
The problem is that we really do not know how much CO2 is emitted from the Earth’s crust annually into the oceans and atmosphere.
In his book Heaven and Earth geologist Ian Plimer suggested that these emissions could surpass human emissions from fossil fuels.
This statement came under attack immediately. It was pointed out that the estimated total CO2 emissions from known terrestrial and submarine volcanoes(Gerlach) is much smaller than that emitted by humans (less than 2%).
However, the problem is that we do not really know how much CO2 is entering the ocean via underwater volcanoes, seamounts and submarine fissures in the Earth’ crust.
From the Consulting Geologist
http://carbon-budget.geologist-1011.net/
If this estimate is correct (a big “IF”), then the total CO2 emissions from all volcanoes, sea mounts and fissures would be around 2.5 times that emitted by humans (9.5 GtCpa)
So Plimer could be right, after all. (After all, he is a geologist, right?)
Max
Perhaps I would classify anthropogenic climate change as one type, others being heliogenic, volcanogenic, geogenic (geologic weathering), tectogenic (continental drift), meteorogenic (asteroid), orbitogenic, etc.
John Carpenter | June 8, 2013 at 6:15 pm |
Yes, I get that.
I’m trying to inject into the discourse the sort of precision of language that appeals to those who genuinely study the nuance of technical meaning for deeper understanding, as well as to defeat the fog of those apologists who exploit ambiguity in language to do mischief.
Natural vs. Unnatural is an easy distinction: is a key focus of the topic something directly or indirectly ascribable to human activity (in particular tyrannic activity), or suspect of being such? Then it’s Unnatural.
Thus http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2 is Unnatural.
And http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn is natural.
See? Simple.
John Carpenter
Humans are, indeed, “natural”, and hence a part of “Nature”.
The fossil fuels now being consumed were created by Nature at a time when atmospheric CO2 was much higher than today.
This CO2 is now being returned to the atmosphere where it came from initially.
In the process, the access to a reliable supply of low-cost energy based on fossil fuels has enabled mankind to increase its wealth, quality of life and life expectancy way beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Those nations that have not yet gone through this transition, will undoubtedly do so (as China and India, for example, are proving).
It’s “natural” for humans to want to improve their quality of life.
So there is nothing “unnatural” about the process that is going on today.
Based on estimates by WEC (2010) we had used up around 15% of all the recoverable fossil fuels that were ever on our planet by 2008 (when the study was made).
This got us from an estimated “pre-industrial” 280 ppmv CO2 to the 2008 level of 385 ppmv.
Which means that the remainder (85%) will get us to:
385 + (385 – 280) * (0.85 / 0.15) = 980 ppmv
when they have all been 100% used up, some day in the far distant future.
(So that must have been the “natural” CO2 level at the time when all these fossil fuels were created – possibly higher, because the estimate does not include fossil fuels that will never be “recoverable”, but are still down there somewhere.)
Ain’t “nature” grand?
Max
Bart,
But why the term unnatural? I get how you are making the distinction between man made or not, so why not just say man made? Perhaps I am quibbling, but mankind and the activities and byproducts associated with mankind are just as natural as say an algae bloom and the byproducts of it that impact the local sea environment. Just because we contribute to CO2 emissions by burning fossil fuel, why it has to be considered unnatural? Because it would not happen if we were not here? Would the planet be more natural without human habitation? If humans had less impact on the environment because there were fewer of us, does that qualify as being a natural population? Has the planet developed an unnatural human population? Is it unnatural for populations of certain organisms to become very large? I’m not arguing that this is a good thing, rather, how is it considered unnatural… nature does these things quite regularly.
Perhaps what would be “unnatural” would be if we controlled climate change by deliberate actions. What we are doing now is natural and we have only just noticed that we can change the climate trajectory by policy. Similar things could be said about the ozone hole and CFC policies.
Interesting answer Jim D, however I would still consider humans deliberately influencing the environment as a natural phenomenon. Humans have evolved to influence their local environment to improve and make the environment more habitable for them. It is the evolution of mankind, which would be just as natural as any other species evolving to either adapt to or change their local environment in beneficial ways that promote species reproduction and continuation.
John Carpenter, yes it is not black and white. Beavers adapt their environment to suit themselves too, so it might be considered an extension of that.
John Carpenter | June 8, 2013 at 7:04 pm |
As I explain, anthropogenic or man made won’t cut it.
The ambiguity of whether a feedback from an anthropogenic thing is itself anthropogenic leads to needless quibble.
Once the tyrant’s hand sets the machine in motion, that careless or reckless, negligently selfish or foolishly gullible hand is the author of all that follows by the machine’s progress.
You don’t say in a 100 car pileup caused by a drunk driver that it’s 99% due to sober drivers.
manacker | June 8, 2013 at 6:55 pm |
John Carpenter | June 8, 2013 at 7:20 pm |
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/natural
You two jokers can continue to define ‘natural’ vs ‘unnatural’ any way that amuses you. The rest of us get to use the actual meaning in its first sense:
Definition of natural
adjective
1 existing in or derived from nature; not made or caused by humankind..
See, I emphasized the part where you’re out of touch with the rest of the English-speaking world.
Ok Bart, you had to go to the dictionary… I thought you could handle the conversation… to get out your comfort zone of redefining words and ideas… I mean, isn’t that precisely what you are attempting to do here? Do I need to go to the dictionary and pick out AGW and give you the definition to say ‘you can amuse your self anyway you want Bart, but here is the accepted definition of AGW’. Really, don’t you consider the definition of natural a bit hubristic from a non human viewpoint? Have we not placed ourselves above nature with this definition? Come Bart, this is a far more interesting, out of the box thinking than economic gibberish of tyrannically taken free markets. Should we really be displacing ourselves from nature in a way where we begin to think we are more powerful than nature itself. Doesn’t this reek of godlike hubris?
John Carpenter | June 8, 2013 at 8:07 pm |
I have no problem with the definition of AGW. If you can find it in a dictionary, more power to you. Fill your boots.
But no, I’m not trying to redefine any terms at all. AGW is simply not the right framework to debate anything meaningfully due to being inaccurate, imprecise, and not the interesting focus of the topic. I’m trying to use meaningful terms with precision and accuracy, because too many just don’t, making rubbish of any attempt to speak sensibly.
Just imagine how ludicrous you appear, if it takes _me_ to bring sense to what you say.
John Carpenter | June 8, 2013 at 8:07 pm |
On a side note, you fail on your sophistry about man setting itself above nature.
Godlike hubris is patronizing me about how to handle my wordplay.
Bart R
Your dissertation on “tyranny” is interesting in a psychoanalytical sort of way, but it really has nothing to do with what everyone (excluding you) is debating here.
It is quite simply the validity of the CAGW premise, as outlined in detail by IPCC in its AR4 report.
“Skeptics” (or “deniers” in the parlance of some) are rationally skeptical that this premise as outlined is, in fact, valid, as they claim that it has not been corroborated by “empirical scientific evidence” (from actual physical observations or reproducible experimentation).
“Believers” in this premise as outlined by IPCC (called “warmers” by some) believe that the model studies suffice as evidence for the premise.
That is the ongoing debate here, Bart.
Max
“Warmers” also believe physics suffices.
manacker | June 8, 2013 at 7:30 pm |
Wow is that a pointmissingly spinny attempt to reassert a false and useless framework. You know, repeating a Big Lie doesn’t make it true. Even here.
Apologists for tyranny under the guise of skepticism and the deniers they have inspired to denialism are neither here-nor-there in the real ongoing debate. They can keep up, or be hold fast to obsolete, inaccurate and useless terms and be left behind.
So do rational skeptics, Jim.
Max
Bart R, I can only partially agree with your tyranny nomenclature. Initially fossil fuels were an aid to society and no one knew what they did to climate, so the tyranny only starts when they know what they are doing. This realization is only just dawning on some, and they have coccooned themselves in the denialist bubble to justify their continuation on that path. Tyranny would apply to a deliberate action where they either pretend not to know their effect on the future or don’t care.
Jim D | June 8, 2013 at 7:52 pm |
Tyranny, knowing or out of ignorance, remains tyranny. Deliberate or through ongoing negligence it remains tyranny. Only the tyrant’s action ought interest us, unless in addition to stemming it we also seek suit of tort for recovery of damages.
If it is a decision made democratically, consented, compensated, or entirely within the unabrogating rights of others or ourselves, then who is to object, and on what basis?
The tyrant’s share is the excess, by coincidence of economic outcomes, I suspect. Were we to recover from tyrants at a Market price just compensation for their trespass, we’d likely find the level of CO2 in the atmosphere dropping below 1955 levels.
And if not, if the world still faces influence of excessive Unnatural Climate Kinetic Forcing after the sanity of privatization restores balance to the Market, if there is danger of Unnatural Normalized Trend-linked Catastrophe, then that will be a matter to debate on that day. By then, the vulnerable will have been compensated for their risks and costs. By then, the resilience of Capitalism will have sustainably balanced the increased expenses of the world under Unnatural Climate Kinetics by Forcing.
What is tyrannical is Bart trying to obfuscate the definition of AGW into some ‘new speak’ that in no way enlightens intelligence of the topic but instead just reframes the discussion toward CO2 taxation. Barts’ tyrannical efforts to twist language to his position of power would be humorous for the fact that he is dead serious. Oh the wicked webs we weave.
You’ve heard the one about if you have enough monkeys, and enough typewriters, and you’ll get the complete works of Shakespeare?
Three monkeys, three typewriters, and you can get better writing on politics and economics than Bart’s.
GaryM | June 8, 2013 at 8:18 pm |
We can call that the ‘GaryM Method’. I’d wondered if that was the source of GaryM’s comments, but hadn’t wanted to say.
John Carpenter | June 8, 2013 at 8:18 pm |
You’ve got it backwards. I’m not redefining AGW.
I’m moving on from it.
You’re free to cling to that boat-anchor as long as you can tread water. Just don’t burden the rest of us with it.
And before Bart corrects me, the quote is; Oh what a tangled web we weave…. Bart knows the rest.
Given that it is much more expensive to remove CO2 from the atmosphere than to put it in, because there is nothing to sell, I am not sure how you would incentivize any method that could lower CO2 levels to 1955 values even with funds obtained by taxing the fossil carbon burned. I agree with taxing fossil carbon to disincentivize it and pay for climate-change adaptation and resilience projects, alternative energy and energy efficiency and storage technology, but I am not sure that massive-scale sequestration can work.
Jim D | June 8, 2013 at 8:27 pm |
For example:
http://citizensclimatelobby.org/
Just fix the level of the fee at the price that maximizes dividends, ie the Law of Supply and Demand.
“You’re free to cling to that boat-anchor as long as you can tread water. Just don’t burden the rest of us with it.”
LOL… ok Bart, I’ll be sure not to burden you with AGW any longer. But how am I supposed to remember UNT, NT and TNT? I mean, now I have to come back to this thread?… along with everyone else?… to remember what it all means? Is everyone on board with this idea?
I’m just kidding ya Bart.
Jim D
Agree with you that (massive) sequestration is not the answer.
This is primarily so because it is a fully “non value added” enterprise.
The second reason is that it is extremely costly for an imperceptible theoretical impact on our climate.
The third reason is that we do not know what the unintended negative consequences would be.
A true loser, in every sense.
Max
JD says
Given that it is much more expensive to remove CO2 from the atmosphere than to put it in
Gaia here no charge last months meme cancelled.
http://bluemoon.ucsd.edu/co2_400/mlo_one_month.png
While the GHE is a theory that many people believe is correct (that certain gases slow the lapse rate of escaping heat energy and thereby allow the atmosphere to be warmer than it other would be; AGW implies CAGW. A lot of money and time was spent to prove AGW and CAGW will causes noticeable temperature rise because of positive feedbacks. These positive feedbacks have been show to not exists based on observations. AGW and CAGW projections have been falsified clearly as all the models are now outside the 100% confidence interval (or damn near close to 100%).
AGW and CAGW try to twist GHE into something else, something which is not true.
Interesting stats showing that readership on climate skeptic blogs is declining across the board:
http://variable-variability.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/readership-of-all-major-sceptic-blogs-going-down.html
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 8, 2013 at 8:23 pm |
Data too poor to draw many of the conclusions being mentioned.
Generally, once an opinion is firmly fixed, refreshing it from the wellspring falls off.
The damage of old lies lasts until it is taken to the grave, and often many generations thereafter.
It is mainly because there hasn’t been another Climategate since 2009. That’s an interesting spike.
I think Motl showed a deep decline in readership because he actually gets into very deep physics discussions. This is not good for the crowd that wants their science on a Coast2Coast AM level of discourse.
Climate Audit shows why you need to keep adding fresh-meat posts, otherwise the readers all move to WUWT, where 2 new posts a day is the average. You really need to feed the beast and even that may not be enough to keep the denialist natives from getting restless.
Climategate is going the way of Billygate.
What is happening to the level of interest in:
CLIMATE CHANGE
CARBON CAPTURE
CARBON CREDITS
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY
BIOFUELS
GEOTHERMAL
HYDROELECTRIC
NATURAL GAS
NUCLEAR
SOLAR
WIND
COAL
OIL
How has the level of interest in these subjects changed over the four years? To find out, click on the topic and scroll down to the ‘Activity Timeline‘ chart: http://climatechange.carboncapturereport.org/cgi-bin/topic?
Interest in Climate Change, Carbon Credits, Alternative energy all look to be dying.
Peter, what you are seeing is a fading interest in East Anglia’s e-mail hacking and global warming deniers running out of things to lie about.
As for nuclear power, there’s not much interest in it to fade.
Max_OK
Believe you got that one wrong, Okie.
The general public is not concerned about climate change at all.
Skepticism to the “consensus party line” runs pretty high.
Close to 70% of respondents in a US poll believed that climate scientists fudged the data.
For most folks it is a non-issue.
I’d chalk this up to common sense rather than stupidity.
Max
Max_CH, if you look at the graph in the capture report you will see activity was greatest back when the denier/skeptics were lying about climate gate. The subsequent decline in activity means they got tired of lying about climate gate and couldn’t find anything new to lie about.
Here is one thing that may eclipse all others:
“AFP – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that the US justice system was suffering from a “calamitous collapse in the rule of law”, as Washington reeled from the sensational exposure of vast spy agency surveillance programmes.
Speaking in an interview with AFP at Ecuador’s London embassy, where he has been holed up for almost a year, the founder of the whistleblowing website accused the US government of trying to “launder” its activities with regard to the far-reaching electronic spying effort revealed on Thursday.
“The US administration has the phone records of everyone in the United States and is receiving them daily from carriers to the National Security Agency under secret agreements. That’s what’s come out,” said the 41-year-old Australian.”
http://www.france24.com/en/20130608-assange-us-rule-law-suffering-calamitous-collapse
Jim2,
I saw an excellent documentary on the US security last night. i was mighty impressed. Mr and Mrs Smith* seem to have everything well under control. I’d have total faith in their ability to handle any threat
* Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
“The National Security Agency’s collection of phone data from all of Verizon’s U.S. customers is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says a former NSA official who estimates the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by U.S. citizens.
William Binney, an award-winning mathematician and noted NSA whistleblower, says the collection dates back to when the super-secret agency began domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“I believe they’ve been collecting data about all domestic calls since October 2001,” said Mr. Binney, who worked at NSA for more than 30 years. “That’s more than a billion calls a day.”
He called his figures “back of the envelope” estimates, adding that they include emails as well as telephone calls.
Mr. Binney, who left the agency in October 2001, said the data were collected under a highly classified NSA program code-named “Stellar Wind,” which was part of the warrantless domestic wiretapping effort — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — launched on orders from President George W. Bush.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/7/the-national-security-agencys-collection-of-phone-/
Why does it surprise anyone that the models are wrong, when they are not based on valid physics?
(1) The Second Law of Thermodynamics must apply to a “system” in the strict sense of the word as used by physicists.
(2) If a system has anything more than a single component, then all components must form an interdependent set. (See Wikipedia “system”)
(3) Radiation from a small cool region in the atmosphere to a warmer region of the surface is a complete system, and any reverse flow of energy, (which could happen much later and be by non-radiative processes or radiative ones, or a mixture) is not an interdependent component. You cannot consider the two components as belonging to the one system.
(4) Hence the Second Law applies to the radiation from cold to hot, and so it cannot transfer any thermal energy.
(5) Now the IPCC authors claim that the Sun could only heat the Earth’s surface to about 255K, and so they looked for a reason which would explain the extra 33 degrees.
(6) But they completely overlooked the fact that gravity causes a temperature gradient to evolve spontaneously at the molecular level, quite independently of any upward convection or prior warming of the surface or cooling near the tropopause.
(7) Because they overlooked the gravity effect (which is virtually a direct corollary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics – as explained in my paper) they made the biggest mistake that “science” has ever seen, and they assumed back radiation could violate the Second Law.
D Cotton | June 8, 2013 at 11:08 pm | Why does it surprise anyone that the models are wrong, when they are not based on valid physics?
The modellers do not know that the physics they are using is invalid, or do and use it anyway.
(1) The Second Law of Thermodynamics must apply to a “system” in the strict sense of the word as used by physicists.
It must apply to everything as it is a Law of Nature:
http://physics.tutorvista.com/thermodynamics/second-law-of-thermodynamics.html
“Second Law of Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is basically a phenomenological science based on certain laws of nature which are always obeyed and never seem to be violated. These are four basic laws of thermodynamics:”
It is a Law of Nature regardless how it is then incorporated into any definition of system.
As water always flows downhill. The spontaneous is read, implicit, heat always flows from hotter to colder, just as water always flows downhill. It is never seen to be violated. It is never seen to be violated in nature. It takes work to change that.
That law has been deliberately violated in the system of models by the creation of something never seen, of heat flowing from colder to hotter in their claim of “backradiation from the Earth’s upwelling heat by [their defined] greenhouse gases in the atmosphere making the Earth warmer still”.
This is from their ideas, as encapsulated in their fake fisics memes, that “everything radiates heat even ice cubes” and “photons radiate in all directions”, so “colder objects radiate their heat in all directions and this includes radiating to hotter objects so colder objects will be further heating hotter object”.
This is the basic standard model of AGW’s The Greenhouse Effect and violates the 2nd Law.
But more importantly, it violates a Law of Nature on which the 2nd Law is built.
It is a Law of Nature that heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder just as it is a Law of Nature that water always flows downhill.
The “spontaneously” is always implied even when not stated. That is what makes it a Law of Nature. It is never seen to be violated in Nature.
It is from this Law of Nature that physics on heat transfer was understood and the 2nd Law formulated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
“Clausius statement”
“The German scientist Rudolf Clausius laid the foundation for the second law of thermodynamics in 1850 by examining the relation between heat transfer and work.[9] His formulation of the second law, which was published in German in 1854, is known as the Clausius statement:
“Heat cannot spontaneously flow from cold regions to hot regions without external work being performed on the system, which is evident from ordinary experience of refrigeration, for example. In a refrigerator, heat flows from cold to hot, but only when forced by an external agent, the refrigeration system.”
The AGW Greenhouse Effect is built on their ideas, as encapsulated in their fake fisics memes, that “everything radiates heat even ice cubes” and “photons radiate in all directions”, so “colder objects radiate their heat in all directions and this includes radiating to hotter objects thereby heating them further”.
Sometimes, from some, when it is pointed out that the 2nd Law is violated by the claims of the AGW’s Greenhouse Effect in their models, they produce their own version of the 2nd Law which includes the word “net”.
The “net” is a violation of the 2nd Law as it is given as their justification for breaking the “always” in the 2nd Law by their claims that “heat also flows from colder to hotter” as in their standard model ideas.
They claim here that it comes from “Statistical Mathematics” but is yet another example of the AGWScienceFiction’s rebuttal memes from their meme producing department, deliberately serving to obfuscate further and with the intention of further bolstering the spread of the memes in their standard ideas which includes the violation of the 2nd Law in their fake fisics “heat also flows from colder to hotter”.
Their explanation for the inclusion of this fake fisics addition to the 2nd Law of the word “net” is that “the AGW fisics claim of “heat also flows from colder to hotter” doesn’t violate the 2nd Law because the “net” always comes out as heat flow from hotter to colder”.
Another example of the sleights of hand produced by the meme producing department simply to confuse the unwary by making it sound as if it is ‘all very scientific’ by saying “unless you understand the cutting edge science of Statistical Mathematics you can’t understand it”.
Firstly, and most obviously, this inclusion of the word “net” then shows that their “backradiation from greenhouse gases in the colder atmosphere” do not further heat the hotter Earth.
When this is pointed out to them is where they then bring in the fake fisics meme that their version of greenhouse gases act as a “blanket delaying/trapping heat loss from the Earth”.
But secondly, they have no explanation for the mechanism which changes their heat flows from “colder to hotter and hotter to colder” to get to their “net heat flow from hotter to colder”. I asked. No answer forthcoming.
Because this argument is less well known, about the “net” claim, is perhaps why the AGWSF meme producing department hasn’t come up with yet another fake fisics “mechanics” rebuttal meme.. Which would anyway break down into gibberish as it does in their claim that “there is an invisible barrier like the glass of a greenhouse at TOA (top of atmosphere) which prevents longwave infrared from the Sun from entering” – this invisible barrier of course unknown to real world science where it has never been observed…
Like their never observed in real world science “container around the Earth against which their massless ideal gas molecules bounce in elastic collisions”.
They confuse here initially by calling these imaginary in real physics “ideal gas” pre Van der Waals, which is still used as a rough beginning in gas calculations to which all the missing properties and processes are then re-introduced, such as volume, by the names of real gases as carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen. This is science fraud, carbon dioxide and other real gases are not ideal gas, they are not massless hard dots of nothing not subject to gravity.
Whichever way they try to explain their Greenhouse Effect’s violation of the 2nd Law, they end up with gobbledegook.
So, the AGWScienceFiction’s meme department has altered the wording of the 2nd Law by the introduction of the the word “net”, which is a science fraud. There is no such word in the orginal 2nd Law as the second law specifically prohibits heat flow from colder to hotter.
I can’t follow quite follow your next points about ‘colder to hotter regions’, but your points:
(5) Now the IPCC authors claim that the Sun could only heat the Earth’s surface to about 255K, and so they looked for a reason which would explain the extra 33 degrees.
Ah interesting, so they don’t refer to any previous understanding in science, like the ones I usually see, the out of context Arrhenius and Fourier and so on, but say it is something that they instigated investigation of?
(6) But they completely overlooked the fact that gravity causes a temperature gradient to evolve spontaneously at the molecular level, quite independently of any upward convection or prior warming of the surface or cooling near the tropopause.
(7) Because they overlooked the gravity effect (which is virtually a direct corollary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics – as explained in my paper) they made the biggest mistake that “science” has ever seen, and they assumed back radiation could violate the Second Law.
They don’t have gravity – it’s a taboo word on WUWT, but Willis can be very amusing in his rants against it, such a way with words.
They don’t have gravity because they don’t have real gases with mass so have nothing for gravity’s pull to work on, which is what what gives real gas molecules weight relative to each other. So carbon dioxide one and a half times heavier than air and water and methane lighter than air.
Their ideal gas masquerading as real gases have no properties and processes of real gases, they have no volume, no attraction, no weight.
They have no way of understanding gravity because their gases have no mass and no volume which real gases do and so no way of understanding that real gases expand and condense making them lighter or heavier under gravity as their individual volumes expand or condense.
As for example, the same number of molecules in liquid water take up 1000 times more room as water vapour, which means their individual weight under gravity is spread over a greater area which is what gives us our areas of low pressure, that area weighing down on us less than the 14lb/sq inch because now lighter with less molecules weighing down on us.
When water vapour, and the other real gases of nitrogen and oxygen etc., expand when heated, which is heat transfer by convection, and rise into the colder heights releasing their heat they are now colder so their individual volumes condense and take up less room, their combined weight is now in a smaller area and so that area increases in weight, called high pressure areas because heavier. This is how we get our winds which are convection currents, hot air rises cold air sinks and winds flow from high to low.
The error made here in arguments from real science against their AGW ideas as I see it, is that they can’t understand them because they don’t have real science concepts because they don’t have real science real gas molecules. They don’t have gravity.
They don’t know this is why they think gravity is some new fangled idea or nothing to do with their arguments about AGW, they have built up an almost irrational fear against any who even mention gravity. They can’t get gravity out of their concept of ideal gases (which are not subject to gravity because they are an artificial contruct of a massless hard dot of nothing).
Their fake fisics memes here are “oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide are not condensible” and “gases are not bouyant in air”. Of course their fake fisics gases aren’t, they have no volume to expand and condense, creating areas of low and high pressure, and so no air for their ideal gases to be bouyant in… They have no heavy volumious real gas atmosphere, a heavy fluid ocean of gas around us, they have only empty space populated by their imaginary ideal gas which they fraudulently name after real gases.
They have an unknown to real world up to date traditional physics invisible “container” around their “empty space atmosphere” against which their gases bounce so somehow, you most likely know their arguments better than I here, giving them their “pressure” and “lapse rates”.
What their unknown to real physics invisible container is really doing.., is keeping their not subject to gravity fake ideal gas molecules from continuing their journey out of Solar system as they travel at great speeds under their own molecular momentum through their empty space atmosphere to outer space and the ends of the universe..
Heat is movement – jiggling in liquids and solids, movement via flight in gasses – of atoms and molecules. Photons are not heat. They are radiation. There is a difference. Photons CAN move from a colder to a hotter body. But the hotter body will shoot more photons into the colder body than the colder to the hotter – and Viola! the second law is obeyed anyway. You are fighting a lost battle here.
Actually Jim, kinetic energy can also be transferred from a single colder molecule to a single hotter molecule in a single collision. It just can’t happen overall to the average of Avogadro’s number of molecules. So the distinction between radiation and heat doesn’t really matter, but your conclusion is correct.
Good point Harold.
But of course, thermo only applies to bulk matter.
Radiation is waves/photons which are packets of particles – non-thermal photons are not hot – visible light is not hot, near infrared is not hot. The AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect claims that !it is longwave infrared heat which is upwelling from the Earth’s surface which is backradiated to the surface” which is claiming radiant heat from a colder atmosphere is being radiated back to the warmer Earth –
this violates the 2nd Law, this violates the Law of Nature which always shows heat flows from hotter to colder and it is never observed to flow from colder to hotter. It does not happen.
There is no backradiation of heat from colder to hotter.
The “net” which you have created doesn’t exist. It is a sleight of hand meme to confuse people, it breaks the Law of Nature.
Myrrh – How do you explain the color black? It absorbs all photons. That is why it’s black. The visible photons that are absorbed carry energy. What do you think happens to that energy? I say, it is converted to heat. What do you say happens to it?
jim2 | June 9, 2013 at 11:43 am | Myrrh – How do you explain the color black? It absorbs all photons. That is why it’s black. The visible photons that are absorbed carry energy. What do you think happens to that energy? I say, it is converted to heat. What do you say happens to it?
Black also absorbs radiant heat, the matter which is black is heated.
Visible light photons cannot move the molecules of matter into vibration, which is heat. Visible light works on the electronic transition level which is too small to move the whole molecule.
The problem here is that you have all been totally brainwashed in the education system to not have any sense of scale in this because you have been told “all electromagnetic energy is the same and all creates heat on being absorbed”.
In photosynthesis visible light converts to chemical energy, not heat. In sight visible light converts to electrical energy in stimulating nerve impulses, not heat. Both these show your AGWScienceFiction fake fisics meme is a science fraud.
Through this fraud you have been brainwashed to not be able to tell the difference between heat and light radiant energies from the Sun – your fake fisics Greenhouse Effect energy budget teaches you that visible light is heat. This is just so stupid it is beyond belief. But this brainwashing has been going on for a long time.
I’ve explained why the longwave infrared direct radiant heat from the Sun we feel as heat because we can physically tell it is heat on our skin, because we can physically tell it is heating us up as it is absorbed by the water in us, has been excised from your Greenhouse Effect Illusion energy budget. In order to promote the fake fisics of “backradiation from greenhouse gases”. In order to use whatever real world measurements we get from the Sun of longwave infrared and pretend these are from “backradiation from the atmosphere”. In order to do that they have given the properties of HEAT to LIGHT. So you won’t notice it is missing.
They have given to non-thermal visible all the amount of actual longwave infrared which is the Sun’s thermal energy, the Sun’s actual heat in transfer by radiation which is in the thermal wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, longwave infrared, and lied to you that visible light is what you feel as heat. Lied to you that visible light heats the Earth’s surface of land and water. Lied to you.
It has been such an effective and well planned brainwashing through the education system that this fake fisics is taught at university level and is now in encylopaedias – you will not be able to understand the enormity of what I am saying here unless you make some damn effort to follow what I am saying.
Traditional up to date physics teaches that the Heat we feel from the Sun is the invisible longwave infrared, which is called thermal because it is the electromagnetic wavelengths of heat.
Traditional up to date physics teaches that even the shortwaves of the invisible infrared are not thermal, they are not hot, we cannot feel them as heat; they do not physically warm us up because they do not move the whole molecules of our matter into vibration. They are too small to do this.
Visible light is even smaller, it does not have the power to move the whole molecules of our matter into vibration, which is what it takes to heat up matter.
Visible light works on the tiny electronic transition level, on the level of electrons.
In the sky the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen absorb visible light and bounce it back out again – this is how we get our blue sky, because blue visible is even tinier so more energetic than the longer visible wavelengths it gets bounced around more..
Water does not even let visible light in to its electrons, it transmits visible light through unchanged. That is why water is a transparent medium for visible light, there would be no life in the ocean if water absorbed visible..
Visible light from the Sun cannot heat the land and water at the equator which is heated intensely from which we get our huge equator to poles wind system and our dramatic weather – it takes real powerful heat from the Sun which is longwave infrared to heat the Earth to get this.
The brainwashing, and the absurdities of the fisics, can only be seen by those who have up to date real physics as still taught traditionally.
If you can understand this, then you will see how utterly idiotic it is to say there is an “invisible barrier like the glass of a greenhouse at the TOA preventing longwave infrared from the Sun entering”, it is unknown in real physics, and even more absurd the other brainwashing version, “the Sun produces insignificant amounts of longwave infrared”, you’re saying the great massive millions of degrees STAR which is our Sun is not giving off any heat!
You can’t see there is any problem here because you have been brainwashed into believing that visible light from the Sun heats matter.
So you don’t notice the actual real wavelength of heat, longwave infrared, is missing.
These are magicians’ tricks to befuddle your minds by tricking your eyes and ears, by giving properties of one thing to another, and word play and taking laws out of context, and, by continual repetition of the fake fisics memes. So you take them as if they are real science, because you have no reason not to. Because our highest science bodies are pushing the same fake fisics.
But there are still real scientists in the world who are taught traditionally, who know that the great heat we get direct from the Sun is the wavelengths of longwave infrared and know that visible light does not heat matter – these are real scientists who have designed glass and film for windows to maximise the entry of visible light from the Sun and minimise the entry of longwave infrared from the Sun – in order to keep rooms cool, to save on air conditioning costs in hot countries.
Please, do us all a favour, think about that.
That’s how you can see how absurd your fake fisics – in your AGW fisics these people are constructing glass and film for windows to maximise heating of the room from visible light!
Real world traditional science empirically proves your AGW fisics is fake, it falsifies your fake fisics meme of “shortwave in longwave out”..
If it doesn’t make you angry that you’ve been conned then you’re not human..
It takes a lot of powerful energy to move our molecules of matter into vibration which is heat, rub your hands together, that is mechanical energy moving the molecules of your skin into vibration, heating them up. Visible light cannot do this. It takes the powerful bigger wavelengths of radiant heat from the Sun to do this, which is longwave infrared, aka thermal infrared.
Shortwaves from the Sun are not hot, they are not thermal, we cannot feel them as heat, they do not have the great power of radiant heat to heat us up, they do not have the great power of radiant heat from the Sun to heat up the land and water at the equator without which we would have no great winds and dramatic weather.
YOU HAVE NO HEAT AT ALL FROM THE SUN IN THE WORLD CREATED BY THE AGW GREENHOUSE EFFECT ILLUSION.
Because you have taken out the actual electromagnetic wavelengths of Heat from the Sun.
And the short wavelengths of Light from the Sun cannot heat matter.
You can stay in that pretend impossible fisics world as long as you like.., but you can also step through the looking glass back into the real world with real science applications all around you. Where real scientists still know the difference and can create windows to keep rooms cool by maximising visible light and minimising longwave infrared from the Sun.
Up to you.
Myrrh – I have in my possession a Crooks radiometer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer
It works via vane heated by radiation. I can drive the radiometer with my green LED laser. My green laser does not output infrared light, since then it would be an infrared laser.
How do you explain the fact that my green laser can drive the radiometer.
Shining the light on the black side:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QwL5uP2E50
When I shine my green laser on the white side, the vanes don’t spin.
Explain that.
jim2, I am with you on your argument. The problem is that Myrrhh is one of those Aussie larrikins that is trying to prank everyone within reach. I treat it like performance art to show that they can mock authority.
Myrrh | June 9, 2013 at 4:24 pm |
In that long post, you still didn’t explain what happens to visible light photons when they are absorbed on a black surface.
1. Do you believe they are not absorbed? (If the aren’t absorbed, the surface wouldn’t look black, so you have some ‘splainin’ to do.
2. If you believe they are absorbed, what happened to them? (If you are thinking they are re-emitted, they are not, cause the surface wouldn’t be black anymore.)
So you see, it isn’t that I’ve been brainwashed in school, it’s merely that I believe my eyes in this case.
Not much more I can say to people who only need brainwashing rebuttal memes mentioning black and white colour and lasers which are artificial constructs enhancing light, it used to be cars sitting in the Sun and magnifying glasses…, to completely lose the ability to grasp sense the absurdity in the million degree hot burning Sun giving off no heat and rooms heated by windows produced to cool them..
The AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect Energy Budget of KT97 and ilk makes the claim that “no longwave infrared from the Sun gets through TOA and that it is shortwaves from the Sun mainly visible which accounts for all the solar constant, near infrared 1% of this”.
This AGW GHE claims there is “an invisible barrier around the Earth preventing the entry of direct longwave infrared from the Sun”.
This invisible barrier is never shown to exist by AGW apologists and is unknown in modern up to date traditional physics which knows empirically that the great heat we feel from the millions of degree burning Sun is the invisible longwave infrared which is the Sun’s thermal energy, heat energy, transferred by electromagnetic radiation.
That’s why in real physics longwave infrared is called thermal, it is the electromagnetic wavelengths of heat. The shorter wavelengths of infrared are not called thermal because they are not the electromagnetic wavelengths of heat, they are not hot, we cannot feel them as hot because they do not heat us up. These are classed in with visible light as reflective and not thermal because visible light is not thermal, it is not hot, we cannot feel it as hot, it does not heat us up.
Real physics simply calls these two completely different energies heat and light, the massive millions of degrees hot Star which is our Sun produces both in great abundance.
There is a second version of why longwave infrared from the Sun which is the electromagetic wavelength of heat “doesn’t get through TOA”, that “the Sun produces insignificant amounts of longwave infrared”.
The people who say this (Pekka says it is the AGW version while the original “invisible barrier” is from CAGW), claim the millions of degree Sun produces insignificant heat. They can’t see the absurdity of this because they have been brainwashed into believing that visible light from the Sun is what heats the Earth’s surface.
These people estimate the Sun’s heat from “planck” based on the thin 300 mile atmosphere of visible light around the Sun – so they have calculated that the millions of degree hot Sun is only 6,000°C.
They can’t see how absurd this is, because they have been brainwashed into believing that visible light from the Sun heats the Earth and no thermal infrared which is longwave infrared from the Sun plays any part in this.
I can’t unscramble minds that have been brainwashed so they are unable to think clearly, that has to be the individual’s effort, I can only provide real world physics and examples and point out the absurdities as they extrapolate from the fake fisics of AGW.
The rest is up to you.
Myrrh:
Whilst I agree with your criticism of the “consensus” viewpoint and how they ignore the gravity effect, I do not agree that pressure, density, expansion and contraction provide an answer as to how energy moves down against the thermal gradient. My response is in Sections 4 to 8 of my paper “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures” (in the PROM menu at PSI) which shows why the Clausius statement of the Second Law does not apply in a vertical plane in a gravitational field. If you wish to limit your understanding of the Second Law to 19th century physics, that is your prerogative. Note however that physicists use the following statement of the Second Law as found here …
“An isolated system, if not already in its state of thermodynamic equilibrium, spontaneously evolves towards it. Thermodynamic equilibrium has the greatest entropy amongst the states accessible to the system.”
There is no mention in the above statement of Second Law that says heat only transfers from hot to cold. Physicists have good reason for stating the law in this carefully worded manner. If heat only transferred from hot to cold, then the movements of heat against the temperature gradient, down into the depths of planetary atmospheres like that in Uranus, where temperatures increase to thousands of degrees, cannot be explained.
D Cotton | June 10, 2013 at 5:22 am | Myrrh:
Whilst I agree with your criticism of the “consensus” viewpoint and how they ignore the gravity effect, I do not agree that pressure, density, expansion and contraction provide an answer as to how energy moves down against the thermal gradient. My response is in Sections 4 to 8 of my paper “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures” (in the PROM menu at PSI) which shows why the Clausius statement of the Second Law does not apply in a vertical plane in a gravitational field. If you wish to limit your understanding of the Second Law to 19th century physics, that is your prerogative. Note however that physicists use the following statement of the Second Law as found here …
I’m sorry, I really don’t understand what you are saying by linking to the 2nd Law – it says exactly what I’ve said it says, it’s all about the irreversibility of heat flow, it is the Clausius’ statement, this is what your page says:
“The second law refers to a wide variety of processes, reversible and irreversible. Its main import is to tell about irreversibility. In an irreversible process of transfer of matter and energy between two systems, the sum of the entropies of the two systems is greater finally than initially. In the trivial case in which the two systems have equal intensive variables, the sum of the entropies does not change. Apart from this trivial case, all natural processes are irreversible, though reversible processes are a convenient theoretical fiction.
“The prime example of irreversibility is in the transfer of heat by conduction or radiation. It was known long before the discovery of the notion of entropy that when two bodies initially of different temperatures come into thermal connection, then heat always flows from the hotter body to the colder one.”
from another wiki page on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Clausius
“Clausius’ most famous statement of the second law of thermodynamics was published in German in 1854,[6] and in English in 1856.[7]
“Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.”
Heat flow is always from hotter to colder, it is always that, it cannot change unless work is done to alter that direction.
Just as water always flows downhill, it takes work to change that direction.
This is the 2nd Law built on the Law of Nature. It is not ever seen otherwise. The law is never observed to be broken.
It is not ever seen otherwise in nature nor in any industry working with heat transfer by conduction and radiation. That was how the second law came into being, understanding from nature and industry.
That phrase is intrinsic to the 2nd Law. You cannot change it, you cannot take it out..
This is my complaint about the AGW GHE memes, that they change the law to suit their purposes, but in doing so they destroy the law, they violate it. Their reasoning on the violated law they produce cannot be said to be from the 2nd Law.
What they do, is to put in “net” into the intrinsic 2nd Law phrase, so they can pretend that greenhouse gases back radiate heat from the colder atmosphere to the warmer Earth. Claiming that “heat also flows from colder to hotter” is violating the 2nd Law. It is never seen. It is impossible.
So I don’t understand why you say it is not in the 2nd Law, it is intrinsic to it, you cannot change that, whatever it is you’ve done here, and I don’t understand it, you are presenting something different from the 2nd Law, and I should be grateful if you would put it concisely so I can follow your reasoning in reading your paper.
As I’ve said before.., this subject is confused because a lot of the memes from AGW’s fake fisics get into arguments from those arguing from a more traditional physics viewpoint as I have noticed countless times before.., these memes are ubiquitous now as they have been in education system for a number of decades and are taken “as read basic physics” by those not specialised in them.
What I note first as I began to read is this:
“But, quite apart from radiation, heat is also transferred from the surface to the atmosphere by nonradiative processes. Then nitrogen and oxygen molecules play the main role of insulating the surface, whilst water vapour and carbon dioxide help to radiate energy out of the atmosphere, and thus have an overall cooling effect, as we shall see in later sections.
“It is indeed correct to say that radiation from the atmosphere does slow the component of surface cooling which is itself by radiation. But, at the same time, the presence of all air molecules just above the surface will also have a somewhat greater effect slowing the cooling of the surface.
Molecules of a gas move around freely between impacts with others, and energy is transferred into these molecules as they collide with the surface. So ordinary nitrogen and oxygen molecules also have an insulating role, and the closer the temperatures get between the surface and these air molecules, the more they will slow the cooling process. They are the real blanket, for the very reason that they do not radiate much at typical temperatures found in the troposphere. Instead, it is water vapour and other radiating molecules like carbon dioxide which radiate energy out of the atmosphere and thus act like holes in the blanket, as you may read in an article The Greenhouse Gas Blanket that Fails to Warm the World [3] to which the author contributed.”
It appears from this that you are basing your argument on the fake fisics meme from AGW that “nitrogen, oxygen are ideal gases” in their claim that these are “non-condensable, water vapour isn’t”, and this is how they get their “bouncing off the container” descriptions, as you have here:
“Molecules of a gas move around freely between impacts with others, and energy is transferred into these molecules as they collide with the surface.”
In the real world molecules of gas are real gas not the artificial construct “ideal gas”, there is no free movement for them under gravity.
Ideal gas does not exist.
Ideal gas has no mass, therefore nothing for gravity to work on so they have no weight which gravity gives them, they are not subject to gravity and so do not separate out by weight ; they have no volume, therefore nothing to individually expand and condense; they have no attraction, because ideal gas has only elastic collisions.
This ideal gas cannot be called by the names of real gases such as nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, which have all these properties.
The AGWScienceFiction fisics has exchanged real gases for ideal in their fantasy world.
The AGWScienceFictions fakenitrogen, fakeoxygen, fakecarbondioxide, are “massless hard dots of nothing travelling at great speeds through empty space under their own molecular momentum miles apart from each other, bumping off the sides of the container and each other in elastic collisions so thoroughly mixing.” – real gas nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide are not this.
Our real world gases have volume, there is not empty space between them.
Our real gases are impeded by the volume of the other real gases surrounding them.
That’s how we get sound. We do not get sound in empty space of the AGW ideal gas scenario..
Our real gas atmosphere is a heavy fluid, gases and liquids are fluids, a heavy ocean of real gas with individual volumes which expand when heated and condense when cooled.
This makes them lighter or heavier than air and those lighter will rise and those heavier will sink.
Gravity’s force, its pulling power, acts on the mass of the individual gases and it is reduced the further away from the surface the gas which means there is less condensing pressure on the individual molecule, from gravity’s pull to the surface and from the weight of the other gases around it squashing it. Real gases under pressure condense, as the pressure lessens they expand.
So, there are two ways for real gases to expand and condense, pressure from gravity’s pull and the weight of the individual volumes of gases around them, and heating and cooling.
Both are in constant play in our real gas fluid atmosphere.
As a base all the real gases expand in volume the further they are away from the surface and condense the closer they are to the surface under the gravity.
This is the basic scenario of the lapse rate in which temperature decreases in known degrees per feet away from the surface, because the real gases have individual volumes which expand under gravity.
As they expand they take up more room – be careful here, you will not often see it said like that, but said “they get further away from each other” which gives the wrong impression of what is physically happening, implying there is empty space between them..
I’ll leave you to work out what that is in terms of lapse rate of real gas nitrogen and oxygen under gravity, but bear in mind, AGWSF plays word games, such as in its use of “absorbed”, here “volume” is referring to the individual volumes of the the gases, so is implied in references to “volumes of air” – this is not “volumes of ideal gas…”. The volumes of air is the volumes of individual real gas molecules.
As I gave the example of water, in liquid form the number of water molecules in a given volume will take up 1000 times more space as water vapour.
As water vapour expands its volume increases taking up much more space and so the weight of the individual molecules of water are spread over a greater area, this is what gives us our low pressure areas.
Low pressure areas are simply that, expanded gases of air and water weighing less heavily on us because their weight is spread over a greater area.
So conversely, high pressure areas are where the gases are condensed so taking up less space so more of them in the same space, the combined weight now pressing down more heavily on us.
AGWScienceFicition fisics does not have this. They do not have any atmosphere at all, they have replaced all this with empty space for their radiation claims.
So they have no heat transfer by convection, which is heated gases of air and water expanding and so becoming lighter than air rising taking away that heat from the surface. Where in the colder heights they will cool and condense and so now heavier than air will sink.
This is how we get our winds and weather in the Real World, so the AGW GHE has no winds or weather, no climate..
Hot air rises cold air sinks. Winds flow from high to low.
This is basic, bog standard, real world meteorology.
Winds are convection currents, as hot air rises and flows to cold, cold heavy high pressure areas of air sink beneath flowing into the low pressure areas of hot gases.
This is how we get our great equator to poles wind system – if we didn’t have the spin of the Earth giving the Coriolis Effect, the volumes of heated air would rise and flow to poles where they cool and sink and would flow directly back to the equator.
So, not only does our bulk nitrogen and oxygen atmosphere of real gases act a blanket because real gases with individual volume under gravity, but they also play their part in convecting heat away from the surface as does water.
Water in evaporation and with its high heat capacity taking away heat from the surface to the colder heights where it releases its heat and condenses back to liquid water and ice, coming down in cold precipitation, which, is also taking out all the carbon dioxide around it because it and carbon dioxide are attracted to each other forming carbonic acid – all natural unpolluted rain has a pH of 5.6-8 from its carbonic acid content.
This is where AGWSF has created its first sleight of hand in taking out the natural real gas cooling of our atmosphere by all gases, which means that they have changed the meaning of “greenhouse”, which real world greenhouses both warm and cool, and have given the thermal blanket effect of the whole atmosphere under gravity to the trace gas which they fraudulently call carbon dioxide..
There is no AGW Greenhouse Effect of “33°C warming by their version of greenhouse gases from the -18°C”, because that figure is from real physics and it refers to the Earth without any of its real gas atmosphere. The comparison is with the Moon. Which has no atmosphere. All the Venus arguments are a distraction from this..
Here, you can see what they’ve done in their science fraud by the real world physics of our real gas atmosphere:
Temperature of the Earth without any atmosphere at all: -18°C.
(Compare with the Moon’s -23°C.)
Temperature of the Earth without water, think deserts, but with the rest of the real gas atmosphere in place which is practically 100% nitrogen and oxygen: 67°C.
That’s what you call a thermal blanket!
From -18°C to 67°C from the bulk of our real gas atmosphere which is nitrogen and oxygen weighing a stone per square inch under gravity, a ton on our shoulders.
This is the difference between the Moon without an atmosphere and our Earth with its thermal blanket of nitrogen and oxygen, we avoid the extreme swings into cold of the Moon.
But note, our great nitrogen and oxygen real greenhouse gases are also preventing us going into the extremes of heat of the Moon.
Because they also take heat away from the surface of the Earth by convection.
“When sunlight hits the moon’s surface, the temperature can reach 253 degrees F (123 C).”
The convective power of heat transfer by oxygen and nitrogen brings that down to 67°C on our Earth.
Now, this is just with the heat capacity of nitrogen and oxygen, when we add water back into our real gas atmosphere with water’s really big heat capacity, that 67°C is further reduced – to our goldilocks 15°C.
So, bearing all this in mind, here’s what you ought to be comparing with, the Moon: http://www.space.com/18175-moon-temperature.html
Now, I’m sure you can see where their sleights of hand have created the illusion that there is “33°C warming” by their greenhouse gases, there is no mechanism for that..
They have misattributed the -18°C and have taken out the whole real gas atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen to create that illusion.
Maybe a little bit off -topic but as science and two of my other interests of politics and economics, are so mixed up on the AGW issue , maybe not a lot off -topic.
Can anyone explain to me why Bitcoins are considered to be worth anything? I know there is a labor content involved in making them, and I know they are designed to be of finite number but, unlike commodities such as rare metals, they don’t have any use intrinsic use value. There has to be a point to human labor for it to confer value. No use value means no value at all.
So are they just worth something temporarily because people erroneously think they are worth something?
http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
They have value because the action of trading them for other things of value is by consensus valid, with protocols in place to ensure stability. There are many parallels with similar outcomes.
Tempterrain
That’s a very good question that has had me scratching my head. I suspect the truth is in your last paragraph and at that point you start to think of tulip mania as being a historic equivalent
tonyb
Bitcoins. You could ask the same question about the fiat money we all use today.
I think the usual answer to the question of why various fiat currencies are worth anything is that they accepted as payment of taxes by governments. That’s not enough for those who would argue that currencies should be backed in terms of the value of a particular commodity but it is something.
With so-called cyber currencies like the Bitcoin there looks to be nothing at all. I can’t see the difference between them and some arbitary paper currency that anyone could issue. But maybe I’m wrong and those buyers and sellers of Bitcoins, who oviously think otherwise, are right. I’m not wanting to be argumentative about this, I’d just like to know the answer.
Bitcoins have value because people are willing to accept them as having value. Coins originally began as a means of trading precious metals, something with intrinsic value, as a means of conducting commerce. The figures stamped on the coins started out nas evidence of the authenticity/purity of the metal. Later they came to represent the authority of the government issuing them.
What we think of as currency, paper bills, later were issued, and not just by governments. Starting out as promissory notes, private banks later issued bank notes. Essentially a promise to redeem the note for the existing coins made of precious metals.
Later, governments issued currency and eventually forbade the issuance of competing currency by private banks. But until roughly the 1970, U.S. currency, like most, was backed by a promise to pay the value of the currency in gold. You can still find gold notes and silver notes, and if you do, keep them.
But the U.S. left the gold standard in 1971, so the dollar really is a fiat currency now.
Bitcoins look like a fiat currency with no governmental backing. They have value as long as people think they have value.
GaryM
there are a lot of barter schemes which rely on the ‘system’ prevailing long enough for your work to be exchanged for other goods.
In nearby Totnes they have taken it a stage further by issuing the ‘Totnes pound.’
http://www.totnespound.org/
It relies on the shopkeepers remaining willing to take the ‘currency’ and in this respect it is a local version of Bitcoins as both are sustained by hope and trust. You suspect that once the floor starts collapsing of the currency that everyone will leap for the exit
tonyb
Yes I can understand why Gold has a value. I can understand why the US $ has a value even though it is no longer on the Gold standard. I can understand why the Totnes pound has a value. That scheme relies on the trust of the public that Totnes shopkeepers will redeem it for £1 presumably.
A cyber currency could work similarly if the organisers guaranteed it against something tangible but they don’t with the Bitcoin. It just floats freely.
So I’m saying the Emperor has no clothes. The Bitcoin is only thought to be worth something because of a misperception; but, that misperception could last for quite a long time though.
https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod/status/343505007800369152
Earth, too!
Excellent post on the PDO by Willis at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/08/decadal-oscillations-of-the-pacific-kind/
Web > The move from fossil fuels is a done deal.
Only in the blinkered eyes and wishes of big-government ideologists.
Germany is busy building lots of coal fired to generate electricity – they had Poland turn down the offer of plugging german wind power generated into polish grid system, Poland said no thanks, we’re not screwing up our grid trying to compensate for the intermittent surges..
Those who know about such things say that the generators from coal or gas or whatever have to kept on continual stand by to compensate for these things which means that it doesn’t reduce electricity generation by them when introducing wind or solar power, it just makes it even more expensive.
“I am not here as a serf or vassal. I am not begging my lords for mercy. I’m a born free American woman, wife, mother, and citizen. And I’m telling my government that you’ve forgotten your place. It’s not your responsibility to look out for my well-being and to monitor my speech. It’s not your right to assert an agenda. Your post, the post that you occupy, exists to preserve American liberty. You’ve sworn to perform that duty. And you have faltered.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/born-free_733945.html
Serf Jim2,
Do as you are told and don’t talk back to your superiors. The government will decide what is good for you. You are too dumb to know. Leave it to the Government. We know best.
Oh, by the way, pay five bushels of barley as penalty for your insolence.
The Government
Peter Lang
As a serf turned sailor is told: “don’t try to p*** up a rope”.
It’s not your responsibility to look out for my well-being and to monitor my speech.
The good lady may well think that but, in a democracy, the extent of governmental responsibility isn’t for her to define.
…as resistance to climate alarmism is now appearing in the mainstream media, many of the arguments advanced by the online skeptics are providing the intellectual basis for the political, economic and scientific objections to climate orthodoxy. That trend will grow, and although climate skepticism will eventually edge climate alarmism toward the political fringe in the mainstream media, the future for scepticism is, as for all infowar campaigns, on the internet.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/how-to-run-a-really-bad-infowar-campaign/
Check out the spook heat map.
“The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.
The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.
The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, “What type of coverage do we have on country X” in “near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure.””
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining
AGU conference Live, Now: http://chapman.agu.org/climatescience/live-web-session-schedule/
Interesting new publishing process being tried in Life Sciences journals to help remove researchers bias and allow publication of negative results.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/jun/05/trust-in-science-study-pre-registration
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:191/mean:193/last:204/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:101/mean:103/last:90/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:5/mean:7/last:90/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2006/to:2009/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:5/mean:7/from:2008/offset:0.7/detrend:-0.08
Is this what really happened in 2007?
Did a single (or close clustering group or pair by coincidence) of events place aerosols above the tropopause, effectively hiding the GHE?
If so, the likeliest candidate for this even would be 2007 volcanic eruption, likely near the equator, with a plume above 10 km.
The likeliest outcome, barring subsequent like events would be, based on past performance, the UNT resuming for temperature within the latter half of the decade after the event. So, by 2017, UNT for annual global temperatures will look as if this graph continued with the false line 0.7C higher than actual.
http://www.arl.noaa.gov/documents/JournalPDFs/Free&LanzanteJournalofClimate.pdf and http://www.ipgp.fr/~kaminski/web_doudoud/ConvPenet.pdf for context.
And.. does http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/4657/2007/acpd-7-4657-2007.pdf identify the culprit?
Or is http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijo/2012/786295/ better at identifying the culprits?
Lidar doesn’t lie.
No takers?
BartR, If you want to figure out if aerosols are causing something you might want to look at that “broken” satellite data.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-jrTxz1f8tgo/UZ09R2frNUI/AAAAAAAAIPc/VsPjKMZ92PE/s912/Global%2520Oceans%2520and%2520Atmosphere.png
See you can look at global oceans
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-jrTxz1f8tgo/UZ09R2frNUI/AAAAAAAAIPc/VsPjKMZ92PE/s912/Global%2520Oceans%2520and%2520Atmosphere.png
The tropical oceans,
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-J4ZVxXtUMLM/UZ0_GHGPdBI/AAAAAAAAIQE/YOZtoSXA8B4/s987/Soext%2520Oceans%2520and%2520Atmosphere.png
The southern extratropics
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1BwHVXI_7L8/UZ0_Bgv_hTI/AAAAAAAAIP4/A3bQmUs0uyU/s983/noext%2520Oceans%2520and%2520Atmosphere.png
Even the northern extratropics.
Since the stratosphere is invert in those, up is warming – down is cooling for easy comparison. I believe, tropospheric warming with stratospheric cooling is the CO2 “signature”. El Chichion and Pinatubo would be good references for volcanic aerosols. According to those, the stratosphere appears to have stabilized somewhat around 1995 when Pinatubo wore off. Since then, tropical ozone depletion and sudden stratospheric warming events (that would be the opposite of what CO2 should do) have been the go to excuses. There have been a few that suspect NH ocean heat content recovery from volcanic effects that seem to impact the NH greater than the SH may have reduced the meridional heat imbalance resulting is a climate “regime” shift. One of those bifurcation thingies which seems to have impacts on NH SSW event intensity. There are also rumors of a more westerly shift in the ENSO which has been shifting westerly pretty much since its discovery. That westerly shift brings the Tibetan Plateau and the Mongolia tripole portion of the NAO into play as Tsonis et al suspected when they noticed the climate “shift” circa 1998 with the Super El Nino.
captdallas 0.8 or less | June 10, 2013 at 10:39 pm |
So, no takers then.
BartR, Yeah you are probably right,
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-VOLcyn1soEg/UbcBM0xUWiI/AAAAAAAAIiE/mq_TP11m1Yg/s973/noext%25201995%2520break.png
A change in the rate and intensity of NH stratospheric warming events prior to a shift in the AMO/NAO is too obvious, it has to be something more exotic and anthropogenically caused. /sar
an observation for Bart R and any number of others at various times…
Bart R comments:
“…it’s the 56,000 years of future storage of waste that’ll have to be taken on as a burden by generations that will get zero benefit from the inheritance that you’re leaving out of your figures.. Well, yeah, you’re also leaving out any but the sunny-day path from your calculations, on the nuclear side while the solar side’s sunny day path is left curiously unremarked on.”
Why is it that that many commenter say nuclear waste has to be safe-guarded for 10’s of thousands of years due to the long half-lives of some of the radionuclides, but those same folks ignore PV wastes containing stable isotopes of cadmium, lead, selenium, …, that are indeed hazardous and have ‘infinite’ half-lives?
So does the following revision of your statement work for you?:
“…it’s the infinite years of future storage of [PV]waste that’ll have to be taken on as a burden by generations that will get zero benefit.”
Probably not; it shouldn’t. Without context that statement, like your original statement, really is not very useful, is it? Until there are open, in-depth, rational life-cycle comparisons readily available all this blog-talk is just that–talk. You points about a burden to future generations and its costs is valid, but it has to apply to all alternative approaches. To do anything less introduces biases and plays on fears.
———-
In a related note, it is an interesting exercise to start digging around for information on hazardous waste streams for the different technologies and in particular annual inventory reports by sector…just scratching the surface, but so far no low hanging fruit. I found some interesting titles that are now gone or are behind paywalls. Of courseone would hope for compilations from regulators, but don’t hold you’re breath.
Here are a couple of interesting paragraphs from an online story (http://www.environmentalleader.com/2013/02/12/solar-panel-makers-fail-to-report-waste/ ):
“The wire service[AP-mwg] compiled a list of 41 solar makers in California, including the top companies based on market data, as well as startups. Of those, only 17 reported waste, according to data supplied by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control in response to an AP records request.”
“State records show the 17 companies, which had 44 factories in the state, produced 46.5 million pounds of sludge and contaminated water from 2007 through the first half of 2011, the AP reported. The vast majority of the waste stayed within the state. However, more than 1.4 million pounds were transported to nine other states as far flung as Minnesota, Rhode Island and Arkansas.”
[Note this does not give a breakout of sludge and water; nor does it give concentrations; also there is no indication (one way or the other) on niceties such as stabilization,etc., although regs clearly mandate such. That is, we know from the online article that a lot was produced but can not put that in perspective–good or bad.]
The EPA has some reporting requirements and a database and I have found any thing there, though I have just started poking around. It is hard to imagine anything there given the apparent under-reporting in California. So it goes.
——
BTW anybody out there want to grapple with what a life is worth? now? 10 years in the the future? 100 years? 200 years?.
tl;dr
Let me help with a Reader’s Digest version. The comment
“…it’s the 56,000 years of future storage of waste that’ll have to be taken on as a burden by generations that will get zero benefit from the inheritance that you’re leaving out of your figures.. Well, yeah, you’re also leaving out any but the sunny-day path from your calculations, on the nuclear side while the solar side’s sunny day path is left curiously unremarked on.”
is a red herring.
Actually some valid points. I would sum it up by saying it is still hard to get something for nothing.
20th century mankind was blessed with the closest realization of “something from nothing” when it extracted these easy-pickings resources such as crude oil, surface phosphates, helium, etc.
We were just fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of slow geological processes that ended up producing high density energy reserves (in the case of crude oil) and thousands of years of sea-birds depositing guano on islands (phosphates).
Now it is our turn to actually do some work, yet it is not the easiest thing to accelerate the processes that took nature eons to complete. Kind of expected that we would end up leaving our own version of dung as a side-effect.
froggie | June 9, 2013 at 3:27 pm |
My bad. I keep forgetting everyone else reads the ‘l’ as ‘long’. I meant ‘ludicrous’.
Life cycle costing is a valid basis of comparison, but only if you compare like to like in like manners. You call red herring by assertion.
Your use of ‘infinite’ is baseless. Do you mean ‘indefinite’?
Do you mean by ‘PV waste’ only the PV waste of non-sunny-day life cycle paths? Photovoltaic wastes are in your Physics impossible to reuse or recycle securely without lethal danger or corrupt practices? I know it sounds ludicrous to ask, but there are those like Myrrh and Cotton who sincerely believe even more absurd things about the way the world works. In a well-incentivized system, absent malice or X-inefficiency, the best case for nuclear waste is tens of thousands of years of standing guard over unavoidably toxic dumps; the expected case for PV is no differrent from the expected case for eyeglasses.
Did you look into the case of sludge from the production of eyeglasses?
Bart R
“Your use of ‘infinite’ is baseless. Do you mean ‘indefinite’? ”
No Bart I do mean ‘infinite’. Stable isotopes do not decay–mathematically, e.g., in fate and transport analyses, they can be treated as radionuclides with zero decay constants, and hence infinite half-lives. Why have that complication? Well there are hazardous waste that do not hang around, e.g., many organics, although a variety of rate models may be required.
I call the comment a red herring because it misleads on the issue–the long-half lives of the radionuclides really do not discriminate them from the heavy metals in any material way–other than the fact that they DO eventually decay.
“Photovoltaic wastes are in your Physics impossible to reuse or recycle securely without lethal danger or corrupt practices?”
‘your Physics’? What kind of language is that son? Come on! Stop slinking around, stop mumbling. Nobody’s process engineering [i like that much better than ‘physics’] precludes the use of reuse or recycle. Certainly not mine. But here is a secret I’ll share with you–recycle requires processing and processing uses—oh forgive me–chemistry and engineering!!! And that produces waste streams–somehow you gotta bleed the crap out and that crap will be contaminated. Now this may eventually workout beautifully and be ueber competitive. To be sure, there are design opportunities at this still relatively initial stage, but the jury is out.
BTW, if heavy metal wastes can be managed thru good practice, can’t nuclear wastes be managed thru good practice, or is there something more evil about the nuclear robber barons? Stockholders are stockholders.
Now just to be real, real, real clear, let me repeat an earlier comment which you choose to ignore so you could continue unabated:
“Until there are open, in-depth, rational life-cycle comparisons readily available all this blog-talk is just that–talk. You[r] points about a burden to future generations and its costs is valid, but it has to apply to all alternative approaches. To do anything less introduces biases and plays on fears.” In risk, ‘in-depth’ means you address uncertainties.”
Own up to it Bart, you were sloppy and now are squealing like a poked pig because you were called on it. It no big deal. Here storage-time doesn’t mean a thing, so why not put the focus on things that do count? Wow, take a subtle position like that and you might gain creditability. So it goes.
“the expected case for PV is no differrent from the expected case for eyeglasses.”
Now THAT is an assertion.
mwgrant–temporarily aka froggie,
Excellent comment. Thank you.
If you, BartR or anyone else are interested in an excellent presentation to the Australian Academy of Sciences last week, I’d urge you to wathc this video of the presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXSpsx5u6ZU&list=PL9DfJTxCPaXKzBkMLLcnb5XM8mz5lx1Pr&index=8
It covers all the relevant political, and public perception issues as well as the current state of economic competitiveness and timeframes. it covers nuclear waste disposal. The presentation is pitched at the policy level not the geek level. it is balanced and cautious, but correct, IMO.
The presentation is by Dr Ziggy Switkowski, previously head of Ansto, then chairman of Telstra and now head of a university. He is very conscious of the politics. He is one of those rare high level thinkers. I urge those interested to watch the video of his 20 m in presentation plus questions.
Froggie,
BartR doesn’t want a rational discussion. He is only interested in stirring the pot and trying to cause an argument …. which invariably gets diverted into in a stupid argument about how his opponent should argue, or some other totally irrelevant argument that has nothing to do with climate or climate policies. It is pretty clear his motivation is ideological and has little to do with rational analysis of anything let alone climate or policy.
Yes. And there is a hell of a lot more toxic waste in both quantity and toxicity. Here is a comparison of some, but only some, of the relevant things that need to be compared on a properly comparable basis:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear-Wastes/Radioactive-Waste-Management/#.UbUPUKIcbSg
Unlike used nuclear fuel, the toxic chemical released by burning of fossil fuels and manufacture of renewable energy technologies are not safely stored and isolated from the environment. The ash is put in large dumps and the toxic materials are leached and carried away by ground water and surface water.
Hey, Peter.
Yeah, he is a contentious rascal. I’ve just gotten tire of the lived-lived hazard crap. ANd was curious about the reaction–it was informative. Thanks for the links, particularly newer ones. I just started poking today…just curious for a number of reasons.
Regards,
mwgrant
Mwgrant,
You may be interested in these links:
A simple summary of key results (see especially the two tables on p13):
External Costs Research results on socio-environmental damages due to electricity and transport
http://www.externe.info/externe_2006/externpr.pdf
Externalities of Energy; Methodology 2005 Update
http://maxima.ier.uni-stuttgart.de/brussels/methup05.pdf
NewExt
http://www.ier.uni-stuttgart.de/forschung/projektwebsites/newext/
This is part of the ExternE studies but the link is not current on their new web site.
The NEEDS analyses consider each technology:
http://www.needs-project.org/
Click on the ‘Project Reports’. Look at solar thermal for an example.
There are masses of valuable information on the ExternE sites. And they’ve done their best to coordinate the research to make the information properly comparable. It is a site well worth bookmarking for future use.
Morons like BartR, might even learn something, possibly but I am not holding my breath.
Peter Lang
Thanks yet again. BTW I have started trying to update some old DA code since I returned from my trip but it is part time and very slow. The lisp dialect is dated and tedious to learn over. I’ll let you know if it get anywhere (if you are interested).
regards
mwg
mwgrant
weird, this box is posting before I fini
;O)
mwgrant,
I am definitely interested. I gave up when you thought complying with new tax laws was more important than helping me to save the planet (and Australia from our despotic ‘Progressive’ ha! ha! government) :). We now have 97 days to go until we get rid of them (hopefully) but they will continue to do all they can to block progress and block repeal of the laws they have passed that ensure their ideology is embedded and difficult to unwind. They will keep control of the Senate for at least another 9 1/2 months and perhaps much longer.
Having said all this I’d be keen to try and progress what I started, but it’s too hard the way I was going about it. So your program and guidance could help to save the planet :)
[repost with corrected formatting]
Froggie, (mwgrant)
Yes. And there is a hell of a lot more toxic waste in both quantity and toxicity. Here is a comparison of some, but only some, of the relevant things that need to be compared on a properly comparable basis:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear-Wastes/Radioactive-Waste-Management/#.UbUPUKIcbSg
Unlike used nuclear fuel, the toxic chemical released by burning of fossil fuels and manufacture of renewable energy technologies are not safely stored and isolated from the environment. The ash is put in large dumps and the toxic materials are leached and carried away by ground water and surface water.
There are “open, in-depth, rational life-cycle comparisons”. And they’ve been around for decades. Here is one from 1989 by US DOE:
Energy system emissions and materiel requirements
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/purl.cover.jsp?purl=/860706-4YG3j9/
This is one of the most authoritative studies: http://www.externe.info/externe_d7/
Therefore, it is not that we don’t know or that we don’t have reputable “open, in-depth, rational life-cycle comparisons” because we’ve had them for decades. It is that the facts are wilfully misrepresented by people like BartR.
Start with ExternE: http://www.externe.info/externe_d7/
BartR doesn’t want a rational discussion. He is only interested in stirring the pot and trying to cause an argument …. which invariably gets diverted into in a stupid argument about how his opponent should argue, or some other totally irrelevant argument that has nothing to do with climate or climate policies. It is pretty clear his motivation is ideological and has little to do with rational analysis of anything let alone climate or policy.
Yes. And there is a hell of a lot more toxic waste in both quantity and toxicity. Here is a comparison of some, but only some, of the relevant things that need to be compared on a properly comparable basis:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear-Wastes/Radioactive-Waste-Management/#.UbUPUKIcbSg
Unlike used nuclear fuel, the toxic chemical released by burning of fossil fuels and manufacture of renewable energy technologies are not safely stored and isolated from the environment. The ash is put in large dumps and the toxic materials are leached and carried away by ground water and surface water.
There are “open, in-depth, rational life-cycle comparisons”. And they’ve been around for decades. Here is one from 1989 by US DOE:
Energy system emissions and materiel requirements
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/purl.cover.jsp?purl=/860706-4YG3j9/
This is one of the most authoritative studies: http://www.externe.info/externe_d7/
Therefore, it is not that we don’t know or that we don’t have reputable “open, in-depth, rational life-cycle comparisons” because we’ve had them for decades. It is that the facts are wilfully misrepresented by people like BartR.
Start with ExternE: http://www.externe.info/externe_d7/
Judith,
Please delete my repost and this comment. The conversation has proceeded on the original post and now to late for the corrected version. Sorry for my frequent mistakes with the formatting.
mwgrant | June 10, 2013 at 9:55 pm |
Your replies become longer, more intricate, further from your original claim in relevance, and more entwined withmultiplying fallacy and ad personam.
Perhaps it would refresh the discourse to restate your claim:
You argue, in essence, that PV wastes create a burden on future generations in some way comparable to nuclear wastes.
You have not yet argued that PV wastes are radioactive too (which technique has been applied in past to coal and oil, for example, by nuke-boosters who point out the net rads from coal burning emitted up the stacks compares to the net exposure of radiation from a well-run atomic reactor for comparable energy generated).
On the other hand, you have not accepted that the heavy metal waste stream of nuclear energy processing is enormous and irreducible. Uranium is a heavy metal. Heck, uranium is _the_ heavy metal. Thorium, radium, and all the heavy metals you mentioned in this thread are known waste products of every active uranium mill in the USA.
Your nuclear-waste-is-no-different-from-PV-waste argument is correct in that one way: where the same species are compared, nuclear waste is orders of magnitude, directly and necessarily, the worse heavy metal biochemical culprit than PV under all similar comparisons. Real-world to real world, sunny-day path to sunny-day path, worst-case to worst case, nuclear comes off unremittingly so much more damaging in the heavy metal sense than PV that it boggles the mind anyone would argue otherwise who knows the figures.
Compare lifetime PV energy produced to lifetime nuclear energy produced? PV, since you like the word ‘infinite’, has a practically infinite lifetime of electricity production from sunlight. Nuclear? That’d be on a decadal scale, then, wouldn’t it? Remind me, if you divide damage funtion by energy produced, when the damage function for PV waste is perhaps on one-thousandth that of nuclear waste simply in heavy metal chemical comparison already, and then the denominator for PV is infinite, while for nuclear is decadal, which one is the better deal?
Unless clean fusion is somehow perfected — we’re only 60 years away from that breakthrough, and we’ve been there for only 60 years — there is no nuclear energy stream that comes out ahead on the single species argument of heavy-metal vs. heavy metal chemically.
But PV is the only one of the two comparisons that is single-species. Nuclear has that radioactive species too. It’s a real thing, and there is no valid engineering or toxicology argument to be made diminishing the threat of the radiologic species, nor is there a way yet found that satisfactorily addresses to the prudent judgement of any body that has yet been found responsible enough to make such decisions that makes the radiological waste issue less burdensome than standing sentinel over the waste for tens of thousands of years.
Sure, heavy metals are a terrible thing. We have countless unrelated-to-PV examples of heavy metal poisoning that are truly monstrous in proportion and effect. But they are not relevant to PV.
Moreover, PV’s waste byproduct threat is immensely reducible by multiple technology innovations. Concentrated PV such as IBM microchannel CPV reduces the total PV surface area of collectors by over two orders of magnitude. Thin slice processing adds another order of magnitude reduction in mass needed for the same output. Multijunction PV triples energy produced with the same mass of PV. Hybrid thermal/PV doubles the energy produced. Cogeneration improves effective energy produced 20%. And the heavy metal wastes of PV.. well they wouldn’t apply to those types of PV that don’t use heavy metals, and there’s a whole cadre of PV in the development stream of this type.
So, again, you propose a red herring. You do not meet the burden of proof — which you attempt to shift — of your argument. Your argument is rife with straw man, personalization, slippery slope, and other fallacy.
And Peter Lang agrees with you, which almost certainly indicates you’re defending an indefensibly bad argument.
Bart R
I recommend you signup for a remedial class in reading comprehension.
mwgrant | June 11, 2013 at 11:38 am |
It appears you’ve missed the part where I said, “TL;DR”.
I’m not failing to comprehend what you write: I discard what you do write, and answer better comments you ought have written, if you meant to be a bit less ludicrous.
If you want me to represent what you _do_ write more accurately, then by all means write things that aren’t patently absurd.
Give it a shot. I half hope you can succeed.
Bart R replies
“It appears you’ve missed the part where I said, “TL;DR”.
I’m not failing to comprehend what you write: I discard what you do write, and answer better comments you ought have written, if you meant to be a bit less ludicrous.”
You do not have to write anything else. Your own words are quite informative as they stand.
Cheers
mwgrant–temporarily aka froggie | June 9, 2013 at 7:55 pm |
I repeat, too ludicrous.
Stable isotopes that don’t decay also don’t have lethality due decay. Unstable ones may. The products of most nuclear energy do. The housing does. The whole shebang might. And it might breach, leak, malfunction or collapse under tsunami or earthquake or mere incompetency.That’s an extra layer of danger to consider at every step in process engineering. That’s an exponential increase in complexity of ‘good practice’. Making light of that by grade school sophistry dressed up as a process engineering argument demeans any audience by the insult to intelligence inherent in its absurdity.
Heavy metals are a biochemical threat. Which includes some decay products or nuclear energy, by the way. But heavy metals aren’t always a radioactive threat, and especially not so in PV. You’re mixing peaches and cow patties, and show no comprehension of the significance of order of complexity to risk management in ‘good practice’.
Is there a process issue with handling stable heavy metals? Sure. Absolutely. And with PV, that issue is exactly the same in scale as handling waste from eyeglasses or cell phones, and a lot less than from for instance coal or tarsand, both by sunny day path and not. You think my assertion wrong? You asserted first. Burden of proof is yours. Show me your numbers. I will show you sufficient numbers of like type once I see what level of evidence you can bring to the table.
Pretending these chemical residues are the same as tens of thousands of years of deadly radiation is ethically contemptable. Pretending the lesser burden of these chemical residues is in any way equitable, when processed, refined, well-handled residues are easier to track and recycle than new ore is to mine by many orders of operations simply gets the equity backwards. We turn radioactive resources into useless waste. We turn nonradioactive resources into part of the recycling chain, or at worst into a much less costly disposal issue.
These are patent cases. It is not sloppy to omit them, except when dealing with absurd cases brought to muddy the waters.
Your supposition that life cycle analyses are inadequate bears little scrutiny. Which life cycle analyses do you mean, specifically? Or better, if you have a concern, produce your own life cycle comparison, get it peer reviewed and published, and tell the world how to do it right. However, my sense of your argument is that it is yet another case like that of Anthony Watts totally debunked crying wolf over UHI and the placement of weather stations.
Sure, there _are_ arguments for nuclear energy. It’s not a complete write-off as a technology. However, we’ve seen time and again calculations and presentations such as Peter Lang cites, and we’ve seen each time a Three Mile Island, and then again another round of careless and optimistic nuclear promotion and a Chernobyl, and then again another round of negligent and uncautious nuclear engagement and NINE Fukishimas. The Ukraine has spent on average 5% of its GDP addressing Chernobyl every year since it happened. What PV waste stream do you expect will produce that outcome?
Cut out the mere ad hom, insinuation, and rhetorical juvenalia. Say something true, relevant and useful. If you can without posing in front of a mirror and patting yourself on the back over how cunning you and Peter Lang are.
BartR calls some one else a “moron” as well as being continually insulting and obnoxious then, just a little while later, has the hide to give this unsolicited advice to mwgrant:
What a hypocrite!
BartR, Actually, mwgrant does have a valid point. Nuclear waste has a different status that it likely doesn’t deserve. The Yucca mountain 10,000 year limit was 15 rem, which killed the whole shebang. 100 rem is the industry standard and by most accounts very conservative to begin with. Japan pre Fukushima adopted very low regulatory limits which they had to revisit after the accident. That is not something that “comforts” the population. There are even indications that the degree of the accident was made worse by operators trying to stop needed venting with low risk which may have caused the over pressurization of containment, much higher risk.
Bart F
“Heavy metals are a biochemical threat. Which includes some decay products or nuclear energy, by the way. But heavy metals aren’t always a radioactive threat, and especially not so in PV. ”
Boy, is that heavy metal – decay verbiage of your is messed up. Just go to the RAIS site and read the Toxity Profiles for say Cadmium, Lead, Zinc, and say, selenium, a non-metal of interest. You will find discussions of both acute and chronic toxic effect and carcinogenicity.
BTW nobody said that the effects of heavy metal (and other non-radiactive hazardous materials) were manifest thru radiation you made that leap. I said:
“No Bart I do mean ‘infinite’. Stable isotopes do not decay–mathematically, e.g., in fate and transport analyses, they can be treated as radionuclides with zero decay constants, and hence infinite half-lives. Why have that complication? Well there are hazardous waste[s] that do not hang around, e.g., many organics, although a variety of rate models may be required.” You seemed so confident that I presumed you had some grasp of current practice in the trade. Sorry about that. I will remember next time and write more.
Please note:
From RAIS* I have unit inhalation risks of 0.0018, 0.0018, and 0.000012 units of 1/(µg/m 3) ] for cadmium food pathways, cadmium water pathways, and lead and compounds. These are USEPA, USEPA, and CALEPA. Now what do you think that means? The oral slope factor for lead is currently 0.0085 1/(mg/kg-day). The chronic and short term oral reference doses for zinc (and compounds) are 0.3 mg/kg-day. (IRIS and ATSDR, resp. The chronic oral reference dose for selenium (a PV non-metal) is 0.005 mg/kg-day.
* RAIS – Risk Assessment Imformation System
Note also:
I never supposed any particular life cycle analysis as inadequate–indeed my words are quite the opposite.
I have not advocated nuclear power, I have just (once again) indicated that
“Until there are open, in-depth, rational life-cycle comparisons readily available all this blog-talk is just that–talk. You[r] points about a burden to future generations and its costs is valid, but it has to apply to all alternative approaches. To do anything less introduces biases and plays on fears. ”
Isn’t it sweetly ironic that you complain about the language that you bring down on yourself?
Go study some more.
Peter Lang | June 9, 2013 at 10:00 pm |
Please point to the place on this page where I call anyone a moron.
Show me your count of insults I’ve made, and of whom I’ve insulted, on this page.
By all means, if you would, put it in context of, say, the insults of others to any and all, on this page.
And while counting grievances isn’t in the spirit of our host’s House Rules, it at least is better than making up grievances over things that never happened.
I get that by ‘obnoxious’ you mean ‘disagreeable’, and by ‘disagreeable’ you mean ‘does not agree with Peter Lang’, but that simply means you have as cockeyed a definition of obnoxious as you have way of looking at the world, and are only too pleased to turn your twisted definitions to your propagandized advantage. Almost as if your definitions and world view exist to serve propaganda only.
You’re putting words in my mouth and then calling me a hypocrit?
captdallas 0.8 or less | June 9, 2013 at 10:18 pm |
In a whole nation that sits atop major and multiple minor earthquake faults, the nation whose architects best understand building to earthquake standards, that invented the word tsunami, manages to build a major share of its nuclear infrastructure not just inadequately to cope with earthquake, but also within such close reach of the sea in densely populated areas that the entirely predictable occurence of a tsunami endangers multiple reactors and huge numbers of people.. and then they actively carry on a campaign of covering up the facts of what happened.. and you’re still arguing that this is poster boy evidence for reducing standards and exercising less caution?
Wow. Just.. wow.
Bart R, “and you’re still arguing that this is poster boy evidence for reducing standards and exercising less caution?
Wow. Just.. wow.”
A better way of saying it would be, let the people that know the job have more input in the regulations that should apply to the job. Having the EPA overrule the NRC is just plain stupid.
mwgrant | June 9, 2013 at 10:51 pm |
‘infinite’ bugs me, applied to the physical world.
The heat death of the Universe, the extinction of the Sun, stratification and subduction on geological scale, all of these introduce limiting physical factors that mean ‘infinite’ is simply technically wrong. Sure, you want to say something that shows a really, really, really long time scale, much longer than the lethal lifespan of radioactive decay of nuclear waste products.. but there are words that can be used more appropriately. One of them is ‘indefinite’.
The word you chose, and still defend by mere assertion, is simply in error.
Also, due the rates of sequestration of natural bioremediation, your argument doesn’t even characterize the situation correctly. We can see this in the rate of removal of the heavy metal, lead, from the human environment, in mere decades since the ban on leaded gasoline took effect. A scale of decades, not of tens of thousands of years.
In toxicology, and epidemiologic toxicology, the dose makes the poison.
What is the relative lethal dose of the average product of nuclear energy generation to the average product of PV energy generation?
The lethal dose of the average contaminated mothballed nuclear facility compared to the.. oh, wait.. PV doesn’t contaminate and become lethal.
Some of what you say about the waste products of fossil fuels? Absolutely true, and on such a scale that beggars the current nuclear industry.
And alternatives do not have a special grace protecting them and those who use them from the facts of biochemistry, either.
But it’s just biochemical process management, not biochemistry plus the vastly more complex problem of nuclear waste. Which problem of nuclear waste only accumulates given that the rate of disposal is so many orders of magnitude slower than the rate of creation of dangerous waste that the vanishingly tiny ratio of useful supply to burden leaves one to wonder at the squandering philosophy of anyone who would steal so much from their heirs to enjoy such fleeting luxury, when there are alternatives that would furnish them quite the same standard of energy without this theft from posterity.
You’re simply, patently, wrong.
You’ve come up with what could have been an interesting argument, mixing up the orders of magnitude and ignoring the real numbers, by using scare stories of heavy metals (which are scary things), and comparing unlike circumstances.
I think you’ve come up with this argument from an End-of-Days religious perspective. Many apocalyptic faiths see no problem with burdening posterity with their trash, as they foresee leaving ‘this world’ for a better one.
They use the word ‘infinite’, too.
Bart R has made a good point with regards to lead. Each country made an effort to remove lead drastically and they immediately started to reap the benefits.
WHT
No, he made some errors there too. Life is not so simple. Removing lead from vehicle emissions does not remove it from the environment. Also, emissions-based lead is but on source of lead in the environment. Consider superfund sites, RCRA sites, ongoing manufacturing/processing. Removal of lead from gasoline was good and knocked the pins out from under some exposure pathways, e.g., inhalation in cities. FYI here is a recent [2/2013] SciAm (ugh!) article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lead-exposure-on-the-rise
Also note that decreases in the air in impacted locales, e.g. urban areas, would be due to removing the source, and in the inital phase, washout and dry deposition, not natural bioremediation. As you see in the article there are many other sources. In addition the lead from the air just went into other media media and in some cases are readily available for uptake –one might consider, depending on locale/scenario fugitive dust (resuspension), pica, food (gardens). Of course lead from the tetra-ethyl days is not special and was/is mixed in with lead from many other sources and sorting that out would be a wasted effort. Nature is very persistent and lead, new and old is still a significant problem. This selective view of the lead problem is why I consider Bart ‘s view to be surficial and incomplete. Enough on that.
Bart R
1.) ‘infinite’ bugs me, applied to the physical world.
I can’t help you with what bugs you. You’ll have to work thru how math intersects the physical world on your own.
2.) The heat death of the Universe, the extinction … radioactive decay of nuclear waste products.. but there are words that can be used more appropriately.
Bizarre lateral arabesque.
2a.) One of them is ‘indefinite’.
I do not mean ‘indefinite’. I mean ‘infinite’–the mathematical concept. It works.
3.) The word you chose, and still defend by mere assertion, is simply in error.
No, the word I chose, ‘infinite’, is exactly what I meant and once again the math (1st order decay) works. The word you chose, ‘indefinite’, has a very different meaning in language, and a very different meaning in quantitative work.
4.) Also, due the rates of sequestration of natural bioremediation, your argument doesn’t even characterize the situation correctly. We can see this in the rate of removal of the heavy metal, lead, from the human environment, in mere decades since the ban on leaded gasoline took effect.
While I addressed that under a response to WH(U)T here is some more…
I am sure folks in the vicinity of the Tar Creek Site.e.g., Picher OK, will be thrilled to know the lead is gone or at least rapidly going away.. I am sure sure the folks in the Agriculture Street neighbor in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward will be thrilled to hear this. I think you can see where this is going…your statement is incomplete and misleading. There have been big reductions in the air lead concentrations since lead additives to gasoline was banned. Yes. But where did the lead go? Here is one recent clue from the Office of Science, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection:
In addition, historical uses of lead, particularly in gasoline and paint, still persist in the environment. Since the ban of lead in gasoline, lead emissions from traffic have decreased significantly, however lead in road dust can still be a problem. Although most studies have seen a decrease in lead content in road dust,7,8,9 it has also been found that rain does not necessarily wash off fine particles that are attached to asphalt, so lead emitted from leaded gasoline can still pose a public health risk.10
[p. 4 of “Investigation of release, fate and transport of lead from motor vehicle wheel weights”, Aucott and Caldarelli, NJDEP, June 2011]
There ain’t no magic. And by the way, washout and dry deposition, removal mechanisms for air emissions, are not considered bioremediation.
4a.) A scale of decades, not of tens of thousands of years.
Irrelevant to bioremediation, see 4.
5.) In toxicology, and epidemiologic[al] toxicology, the dose makes the poison. What is the relative lethal dose of the average product of nuclear energy generation to the average product of PV energy generation?
FYI–You do realize that a radiological dose and chemical dose are very different concepts don’t you? As you might imagine this has and continues to present difficulties. The usual approach is to tabulated and discuss their impacts of radionuclides and chemicals sparately.
5a.) The lethal dose of the average contaminated mothballed nuclear facility compared to the.. oh, wait.. PV doesn’t contaminate and become lethal.
‘lethal dose of the average contaminated mothballed nuclear facility’–Seriously, what do you mean by that term? I have never seen a term like that in years of nuclear facility performance assessment and chemical human health risk assessment. The language is muddled like you are getting ahead of yourself. That nit aside…
Now as a matter of fact PV technology does entail contamination when you consider the entire cycle, e.g., air emissions in milling/refining or materials. A rub, which you have nor I have mentioned, is that one PV material, cadmium, is a by product of zinc production. Hence, one has to be careful about when to allocate emissions to zinc or cadmium. Again thing just are not clean and simple. It has been noted that one might construe that using the cadmium in PV is better than disposal as a toxic waste from zinc production. That is an example of the sort of thing you get by looking at the entire production process–cradle to grave. There can be wins.
Finally I also have been scrupulous in my comments to not pick winners or losers among alternatives–you either read that into things yourself or perhaps are crossing wires in multiple discussions. I don’t care which. But I don’t want to hear anymore of that mis-direction/mis-attribution and will not respond to it. I hope that is clear, Once again I wrote:
<“Until there are open, in-depth, rational life-cycle comparisons readily available all this blog-talk is just that–talk. You[r] points about a burden to future generations and its costs is valid, but it has to apply to all alternative approaches. To do anything less introduces biases and plays on fears. ”
6.) Some of what you say about the waste products of fossil fuels? Absolutely true, and on such a scale that beggars the current nuclear industry.
Fine if you want to agree with it, but for the record it is another mis-attribution–I have not mentioned fossil fuels.
7.) And alternatives do not have a special grace protecting them and those who use them from the facts of biochemistry, either.
But it’s just biochemical process management, not biochemistry plus the vastly more complex problem of nuclear waste. Which problem of nuclear waste only accumulates given that the rate of disposal is so many orders of magnitude slower than the rate of creation of dangerous waste that the vanishingly tiny ratio of useful supply to burden leaves one to wonder at the squandering philosophy of anyone who would steal so much from their heirs to enjoy such fleeting luxury, when there are alternatives that would furnish them quite the same standard of energy without this theft from posterity.
Huh?
8.) You’re simply, patently, wrong.
In many instances, this is true. What specifics did you have in mind here? I got lost in the last paragraph.
9.) You’ve come up with what could have been an interesting argument, mixing up the orders of magnitude and ignoring the real numbers, by using scare stories of heavy metals (which are scary things), and comparing unlike circumstances.
I am sorry if I scared you. Also note that the comparisons are in you mind–not my words. (If this is still an issue re-read response 5a.)
10.) I think you’ve come up with this argument from an End-of-Days religious perspective. Many apocalyptic faiths see no problem with burdening posterity with their trash, as they foresee leaving ‘this world’ for a better one.
Well I have considered becoming a bokonist, but I really prefer big lies. I am not religious, so that cheapshot misses.
11.) They use the word ‘infinite’, too.
It is a good word. Has strength and isn’t wussy like ‘indefinite’. I mean, which scares you more, being crushed by infinite force or pounded by indefinite force?
ctrl-D
” I would sum it up by saying it is still hard to get something for nothing.
…
Now it is our turn to actually do some work, yet it is not the easiest thing to accelerate the processes that took nature eons to complete.”
Good soup to nuts.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance
I’d read that article. This guy went from a high school drop out security guard at NSA to the CIA “work[ing] on OT security.
Now he’s copied a bunch of secure documents and has flown to Hong Kong where he is staying in a “plush” suite.
He “began a training program to join the special forces,” which could just be an expanded PT program the Army has for those who want to apply for SF.
He’s 29, and joined the Army at 19, four years later the CIA “stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva.” He then works 4 years for contractors, before copying a lot of documents and heading for China, making $200,000 a year..
And this supposed IT security expert talks about a CIA covert operation to recruit a Swiss banker.
Even money this guy was still a low rent security guard or data management type at best, who had access to documents as a result of is work, and saw a chance to get famous, and make himself look like a hero.
Though his choice of a city run by the communist Chinese is interesting, and it would sure be fun to know who is paying his hotel bill.
Color me skeptical that this is anything other than Bradley Manning II.
> The guy went […]
With yet another ad hominem, GaryM follows on his honouring of the legal best practices.
It’s not such a strange rise . You think everybody in the NSA and CIA comes out of Yale?
“GaryM-
Even money this guy was still a low rent security guard or data management type at best”
~200,000K @29? even here in metro DC is not low-rent…maybe Forte Meade or Crystal City? If so shows you one more thing out of wack. Let’s see how do those multipliers work?
A) Manning did a dump which hurt people.
B) Snowden is a libertarian.
wow. this just got waaaay more interesting
Oh, Gawd, is this the cue for poesy?
========
To peer into it
The crystal ball of knowledge;
Color me cloudy.
==========
The $200,00 figure comes from the “leaker.” Who is now claiming he had authority to wiretap the president or anyone else.
“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even a president if I had a personal email,” Snowden said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video
In the video he says in his short time at the CIA, actually, working for contractors for the CIA, he was an infostructure analyst, systems engineer, systems administrator, “senior adviser to the CIA,” solutions consultant, and telecommunications info systems officer.
All with a GED, no college, after failing an (unspecified) Army training program for SF, and in a 3-4 year time period.
Oh, and in another article, the claimed knowledge of a covert operation to recruit through blackmail a Swiss banker. (How hard can that be?)
And his supposed motivation? To disclose the motives of those in the government running the program. Which I am sure he learned in his regular briefings with POTUS, Director of the CIA, and the National Security Adviser.
Please.
My bet is still on security guard with access to documents.
Obama, either by commission or omission, caused the IRS to use government power to achieve political ends against what might be called his political enemies. The danger in this huge database of telephone data is that there is nothing of any means stopping the government from using this extensive data in like manner. I would be for destroying the database and just sending militant Muslims back home.
What was that you were saying about the human factor?
weakest link, dont tell brandon
@steven Mosher
Shazam!!!
Make that double shazam!. Nobody commented in the fifty minutes since you posted?
total
wow that kid was a total surprise.
2:45 p.m. — 3:00 p.m. Doping the Atmosphere, and Other Metaphors That Stick: Taking a Page from the Madison Avenue Playbook
Bob Henson
Study shows Australians are wisest in OECD and Older Australians are wisest of all
“Sceptics put heat on climate change
CLIMATE change sceptics outnumber believers, according to an OECD study that shows how the debate has sharply divided Australians
The study into household attitudes towards the environment shows Australians are more sceptical than any of the other 10 nations examined, with the exception of The Netherlands.
It shows 45 per cent of Australians think environmental dangers are exaggerated and are reluctant to pay for government environmental policies.
In contrast, 42 per cent of Australians believe the environmental challenges are real and think the government should take action, which they are prepared to pay for even if the amount is not matched by other nations.
The OECD study identifies a third group of people who believe that environmental dangers are real, but thinks technological progress will resolve them. This group is about 10 per cent of the Australian population.
In Canada, Sweden and France, more than half the population is motivated by environmental concerns, while less than 40 per cent are sceptical.
The level of doubt about environmental threat increases in Australia with age, but more than 40 per cent of all age groups believe the environmental dangers are over-stated.
The study found that Australians’ scepticism about environmental threats overall was more closely tied to views on climate change than in any other country. It found that belief in the human contribution to climate change was strongly linked to whether people had a high level of trust in scientific experts.
The study found that the health of the economy was the most important issue in 10 of the 11 countries, with Israel, where international tension ranks first, the only exception.
The environment is second-ranked in Australia, listed as the most important issue by 17 per cent of the population, compared with 33 per cent for the economy.
Among environmental concerns, 23 per cent of Australians list the depletion of natural resources first, followed by 17 per cent for the environment and 16 per cent for the protection of endangered species.”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/sceptics-put-heat-on-climate-change/story-e6frg6xf-1226660995986
Well, we all knew that anyway, didn’t we? :)
We’re talking statistically, right? BTW where the modesty ranking fall?
mwgrant,
Yes, of course. There are a few exceptions, such as yourself, who are wise, despite not being Australian. :)
And, as is well known, Australian also rank highest on modesty ranking (i.e. most modest). That is because Australians are wisest, as the recent OECD study demonstrates so convincingly. :)
I may not be Australian, but thru the years I have watched ‘Crocodile Dundee’ several times!
Ah!. That explains where your wisdom comes from.
Oldest Australians are wisest of all. Ahhhh, that’s me – sixth generation Australian and aged 67 – I hope I’m “old” enough (LOL)
All that Anthony Watts’ experiment, and Roy Spencer’s yet-to-be-done experiment demonstrate is the well known fact that radiation from a cooler body can slow the rate of cooling by radiation from a warmer body. The frosted glass in AW’s experiment is far cooler than the filament, so the temperature gradient is steep between it and the filament. Back radiation makes a small change in that gradient and the glass (an intermediate point on the temperature plot) ends up a few degrees warmer, but the filament may not be warmer at all. So what! (I hadn’t read the experiment in detail when I wrote the initial comment. I laughed when I did read it, as it is so primitive, and the deductions made are just so incorrect.)
Not only do I know that radiative cooling is slowed, but I also know how it slows that component of cooling which is by radiation without its energy being converted to thermal energy, and I have explained this in many comments on many climate blogs. The last paragraph of Section 5 of my “Radiated Energy” paper published over a year ago in March 2012 reads …
“In fairness, there would be a slight slowing of the rate of cooling when the temperatures approach each other, because of the way in which the area between the Planck curves reduces. But this only applies to radiation, so evaporation and diffusion could easily compensate and it does not mean energy is added to the surface or the atmosphere.”
Could someone please help me with a WordPress issue.
About a month ago I stopped receiving notifications of replies to my comments on CE, but still get them from other Word Press sites? Why is that. Is there something I need to do to continue to get the notifications? [I am talking about the icon on the black WordPress ribbon; it goes orange if there is a reply to a comment and when you click on it you see all the replies, who made them, etc.]
Also, I haven’t received email notifications of the last few new CE posts.
Can anyone tell me how I can fix whatever is causing the problem?
I love it when progressives let their true instincts come through.
“North Carolina is joining a growing number of states exploring new fees for hybrid and electric car owners to help make up for revenue those drivers aren’t paying in gas taxes on their fuel-efficient vehicles.”
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/06/09/states-consider-fees-for-hybrids-to-recoup-loss-of-gasoline-taxes/
Shockingly, the green hybrid drivers are suddenly not so fond of taxation.
We’ve discussed this many times here at Climate Etc, but even more research related to each of our own misplaced overconfidence in the accuracy of our own knowledge:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-06-people-overly-confident-knowledge-errors.html
Indeed, to be a real skeptic, the first thing you should be skeptical about is the accuracy of what you think you know. That is the core value of true skepticism. Hence, all a skeptics “truths” they think they know for certain, are forever only provisional and never reach 100%.
R. Gates
Good point.
Tell it to the IPCC.
Max
R. Gates, I guess that is why so many engineers are skeptical of climate science.
Especially when there is an alternative explanation which
(a) is in accord with the laws of physics, and
(b) is supported by temperature data for Earth’s atmosphere, surface, crust, mantle and core, as well as all known data for other planets and satellite moons in our Solar system.
It’s not hard to understand if you have a solid grounding in physics.
R. Gates
“Rational skeptics” of the IPCC CAGW premise are rationally skeptical of the so-called “truths” and “certainties” inherent in this premise, rather than arguing for a skeptical “truth” or “certainty”, so your point is indeed well taken.
I believe our hostess has summarized it very succinctly, as well.
The “uncertainties” are just too great to postulate the CAGW premise, as outlined by IPCC in its AR4 report.
Max
The statement “Heat transfer depends on difference in temperatures” is indeed correct in a horizontal plane, and also for radiation in all directions. Heat transfer is always a one-way process. In the case of radiation, thermal energy is converted into electromagnetic energy as the source emits the radiation. Then, at the target, some or all of the radiation will resonate and be immediately re-emitted without its EM energy being converted to thermal energy. If the target were at zero (0) K then all the EM energy would be converted to thermal energy in the target with no re-emission because the target is at 0K. At higher temperatures that are cooler than the source, some of the EM energy is converted to thermal energy in the target, and so we have a heat transfer from hot to cold.
However, in a gravitational field, in a vertical plane, there is a state of thermodynamic equilibrium in which there is a temperature gradient but no heat flow either way, for the very reason that it is in thermodynamic equilibrium. If the equilibrium is disturbed, energy will flow in all accessible directions away from the source of new energy.
This explains how thermal energy can indeed flow up the temperature gradient towards the surface of a planet by non-radiative processes. Radiation cannot achieve this, and so it is not radiation which is heating the Venus surface, or the depths of the atmospheres of Uranus and other planets. And the process contributes to the energy build up at Earth’s surface which then supports the surface temperature.
That Ol’ Man River, he keeps on rolling, he keeps on rolling, along.
============
Even as of today, Principia Scientific International is still publishing an article “The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy” which refers to an article by Claes Johnson in which Claes quite incorrectly describes how thermal energy moves downwards in an atmosphere. I have added four comments pointing out the error, and written to Claes (copy John O’Sullivan) pointing out the error. The last of my comments on the PSI thread sums it up, and it’s worth repeating here …
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that thermodynamic equilibrium will evolve spontaneously. In a gravitational field this thermodynamic equilibrium (with greatest accessible entropy) is isentropic. Hence, disregarding chemical and phase changes, the total of the gravitational potential energy and kinetic energy in any small region (even a few pictograms of the atmosphere) will tend towards homogeneity at all altitudes in calm conditions. This can happen by diffusion (conduction between molecules) without any convection. Because PE varies, so will KE, and thus there will be an autonomous temperature gradient.
Thermal energy flows over a sloping temperature plane in a gravitational field in all accessible directions away from any source of new energy which disturbs thermodynamic equilibrium. That, in effect, is what the Second Law says will happen. This is how the base of the troposphere stays warm and supports the surface temperature.
In summary, PSI (and Claes Johnson) are right in saying what I say in my “Radiated Energy” paper of March 2012 about radiation from a cooler blackbody not transferring thermal energy to a warmer blackbody. But they are wrong in endorsing an article such as today’s, which cites what Claes Johnson has said about non-radiative heat transfers in planetary atmospheres.